workmonitor.
Best for teams that bill for their time and want captured hours, live project margin and a payroll run that balances before it is exported.
- No timers to forget
- One engine for invoice and payroll
- Margin, live
VSTime tracking · For managers and finance
Toggl Track alternatives
The timesheet is already written. The invoice follows from it.
- Free for two seats
- No card
- Your Toggl Track export imports as-is
Updated October 3, 2026. Toggl Track details reviewed September 7, 2026 from public materials — check them against its own site before you decide.
workmonitor.
versusToggl TrackWhere WorkMonitor wins
- No timers to forgetHours are captured as the work happens, so the forgotten ones get billed too.
- One engine for invoice and payrollApproved hours bill and pay from the same rates, balanced to the cent.
- Margin, liveBudget burn updates as hours land — not when the invoice is drafted.
Where Toggl Track winsA manual timer people love, with no monitoring
The difference that matters
Timers record what people remember. WorkMonitor bills what they worked.
Hours captured as the work happens, not when someone remembers a timer — attributed to the project, priced on your rate cards and carried into invoices, with margin updating live.
The real product — not a screenshot. Click a tab.
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Northlight Studio · sample
Timesheets
Submitted hours against recorded hours
194.5hours awaiting approval across 5 timesheets
1 flagged1 approved
PERSONPERIODSUBMITTEDRECORDEDGAPSTATE
- AKAria K.24–30 Aug38.538.5—Submitted
- RPRavi P.24–30 Aug47.541.0+6.5SubmittedTimesheet Detective · Hours spike47.5 h is 1.2× the trailing norm of 39.0 h — 8.5 h above baseline. It flags, it never decides.ApproveReject
- JMJon M.24–30 Aug40.039.8+0.2Submitted
- SDSara D.24–30 Aug36.036.0—Submitted
- TVTravis V.17–23 Aug32.532.5—Submitted
- LMLena M.24–30 Aug39.539.5—Approved
5 awaiting a decision · corrections keep the original entry, so the sheet stays append-onlyApproving locks the week's entries
What it returns
What WorkMonitor returns on your own team
Your headcount and loaded cost, the subscription already subtracted.
$
Salary plus everything on top of it.
ESTIMATED ANNUAL RETURN
- Time recovered from idle and drift6% of paid time, back in the week$228,000
- WorkMonitor, 40 people at $10 a month−$4,800
Net, over a year
$223,200
Estimated net return $223,200 a year.
47.5×
the subscription, returned
1 mo
to pay it back
96
hours a week, across the team
Arithmetic on your figures at the calculator’s low-end assumption of 6% of paid time recovered — not a measurement of your team. Itemise it by region and add-on
A timer records what people remember. The invoice should carry what they worked.
workmonitor.vsTimer-based time tracking
6differences, worked through below
Hours that never get entered
With WorkMonitor
Captured as the work happens and attributed to the project, with idle split out rather than rounded in, so the sheet is drafted before anyone opens it.
Timer-based time tracking
Somebody forgets the timer or rebuilds the week on Friday from memory — and an hour nobody entered is an hour nobody bills.
From hours to invoice and payroll
With WorkMonitor
Approved hours seed the invoice and the payroll run directly, priced by one shared rate engine, so the two cannot disagree.
Timer-based time tracking
Export, reformat, paste into payroll or invoicing, then reconcile to find what got mangled on the way.
Project margin
With WorkMonitor
Budget burn and margin update as hours land, in hours and in money, so an over-running project shows while there is still time to act.
Timer-based time tracking
Discovered when the invoice is drafted, after the over-run has already been paid for.
Payroll errors
With WorkMonitor
A cent-exact pre-flight that has to balance before a run can be exported, with idle already split out of the hours it prices.
Timer-based time tracking
Spreadsheet arithmetic, found at audit as a recurring few pence — or a paid idle hour nobody caught.
Who signs off the money
With WorkMonitor
Multi-stage approval that refuses a self-approval rather than warning about it.
Timer-based time tracking
Whoever has the file, which is usually more people than anyone intended.
When a client disputes the bill
With WorkMonitor
A finalized invoice seeds a certificate the client checks themselves, without an account.
Timer-based time tracking
A line item and a total. The client accepts it or opens a thread about it.
The question we get asked
Our team is happy with a manual timer. What does automatic capture change for the business?
The hours you were never billing. A manual timer records what people remember to start, and the forgotten half-hours never reach an invoice. Captured time drafts the sheet from the work itself, so the review is a correction rather than a reconstruction — and the honest version is that a team billing nothing by the hour has little reason to move.
Projects — budget burn and margin, live
What a manager gets, in one platform
- Projects, clients, tasks & budgets (rate cards, burn)
The shortlist
The 5 Toggl Track alternatives managers shortlist
WorkMonitor first, because this is our page. The other Toggl Track competitors in their own words, each with its own head-to-head.
QuickBooks Time
Time tracking and scheduling inside the QuickBooks ecosystem, with clock-in, GPS and direct payroll handoff.
WorkMonitor vs QuickBooks TimeDeputy
Shift scheduling, rostering and time clock for hourly teams, with award interpretation and labour-cost forecasting.
WorkMonitor vs DeputyConnecteam
An all-in-one operations app for deskless teams: time clock, checklists, training and internal communication on mobile.
WorkMonitor vs ConnecteamHomebase
Scheduling, time clock, hiring and payroll for small hourly businesses — retail, hospitality and local services.
WorkMonitor vs Homebase
Switching
Your Toggl Track history comes across
Nobody switches tools if it means abandoning a year of history. The importer carries a mapper for Toggl Track exports, so the CSV you already have is the CSV we take — and it lands on the same ledger as everything captured after it.
What the importer reads from a Toggl Track export
emailuserstart datedate- date
durationduration (h)- minutes
project- project
task- task
descriptionnote- note
Durations arrive as a clock duration like 1:30:00 and are parsed into whole minutes. First matching header wins, so a renamed column still lands.
After the import
Where your Toggl Track history lands
Imported hours sit on the same ledger as everything captured after them, so last quarter’s cost and margin read the same way as next quarter’s. Corrections append with an author and a reason rather than overwriting, which is what lets you answer why a number changed long after anyone remembers.
Invoices — backed by recorded work
When Toggl Track is the better answer
You want a timer people genuinely enjoy using and no monitoring layer whatsoever. That is a legitimate position and we are not it.
If that is the deciding requirement, buy that instead.
Questions
Toggl Track alternatives: what managers ask
Answered about what WorkMonitor does, including where the answer is no.
- Can I import my Toggl Track data into WorkMonitor?
- Yes, without hand-mapping. The importer carries a Toggl mapper: it reads email or user for the person, start date or date for the day, and duration or duration (h) for the length, parsing clock durations like 1:30:00 into minutes, with project, task and description carried across.
- What is the best Toggl Track alternative for agencies that bill by the hour?
- One that stops relying on people remembering the timer. WorkMonitor captures the hours, attributes them to the client and project, and on Business prices them on rate cards into the invoice, with budget burn and margin updating as the work lands — so the agency bills what it worked rather than what it recalled.
- Does WorkMonitor still let people start a timer manually?
- Yes. Manual entry and correction both exist — corrections append with the author and the reason rather than overwriting, so the original number stays readable. The difference is that the sheet is already drafted when they open it.
- Does WorkMonitor monitor employees?
- It can, under a policy you set per team and per region, and it can also run with screenshots off entirely. If any monitoring layer at all is a dealbreaker for your team, a pure timer is the honest answer and this is not it.
- Can WorkMonitor track project budgets and margins?
- Yes — budget burn and margin update as hours land, with money budgets as well as hour budgets, so a project crossing its margin is visible while it is happening rather than at the invoice.
- How does WorkMonitor price a team moving off Toggl Track?
- Two seats are free, and from the third it is per seat per month with no minimums — Pro for capture and analytics, Business when you want rate cards, invoicing and the margin dashboard. The import is a preset, so the history comes across before the first paid month.
Ask AI
Ask anything about your team
Plain-language answers about your own workforce data, with the figures behind them. Pick a question to see how it reads.
Who's most at risk of burnout?
Pick a question above and WorkMonitor AI will answer from your team's real numbers.
Take these with you
The software is the easy part of a rollout
Here is what we would send a manager doing one for the first time: how to read a productivity number, what to say to a remote team before anything is installed, and a policy you can adopt as written.
Point it at one team for a week.
Create the account, put the agent on a handful of desks, and leave it alone. On Friday you read the week instead of reconstructing it: hours against their projects, focus and idle per person, and the timesheets already filled in.
Free for two seats. No card, and no sales call to sit through.