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7 Min. Read

5 Best Productivity Tracker Apps

5 Best Productivity Tracker Apps

These are the tools we love to improve productivity at all levels of the business. Each one will streamline your business in its own way. Read on to learn more!

Productivity apps come in many shapes and sizes. At its core, it all depends on what you want to measure and what makes you feel more productive.

Time tracking is the common favorite. This is because keeping your time management in check is key to productive work life. But maybe you want an effective productivity tracker that measures your task lists. Or a tracker that shows you the progress of your projects overall.

However you choose to measure your productivity, these desktop apps will help.

Thereā€™s a little something for everyone on this list so read on for our recommendations.

Hereā€™s What Weā€™ll Cover:

FreshBooks – Best All-in-One

Toggl Track – Best Productivity Tracker

ClickUp – Best Project Tracker

Hubstaff – Best Team Productivity Tracker

RescueTime – Best of the Best

Key Takeaways

FreshBooks – Best All-in-One

Best for: those who want an integrated suite of business tools, plus a reliable time tracker

Price: Included in all of our plans from $6 a month

Integrations: Shopify, Google Suite, Gusto, PayPal, Stripe and more

Our productivity tracker app takes the form of everyoneā€™s favorite: time tracking tools.

The FreshBooks time tracker comes with all of our accounting and project plans. You and your employees can track your working time at just the click of a button. Our Chrome extension, FreshBooks Chrome Timer, allows employees to start the timer quickly and easily. You can then measure the productivity of your entire team very easily.

We create weekly and monthly views of the tracked time. This is where you can monitor productivity in the best way. Youā€™ll be able to spot any inefficiencies in your workforce.

Beyond that, our suite of business tools creates a complete picture of your business as a whole. The core of our offer is accounting. Streamlined expense reports, invoicing and tax filing. We also have project management tools like client portals. Our time tracking app helps invoice billable time automatically.

For an all-in-one that saves you time as well as measuring it, FreshBooks might be for you!

Toggl Track – Best Productivity Tracker

Best for: time tracking for productivity purposes

Price: Free for up to 5 users. Premium plans start from $9 per user/month

Integrations: Over 100+ apps to integrate with. Asana, Google Calendar, Todoist, Salesforce, Slack and many more.

There are tons of wonderful time tracking apps on the market. Toggl Track is the best one for you for a productivity focus.

The intuitive tracker is easy to set up on all of your devices. The dashboard will give you a glimpse of your productivity overall in a beautifully designed way. In fact, this is probably the best-looking app on the list for desktop and mobile devices.

Toggl really leans into its position as a productivity tool. It now has a time management hub that gives you advice on how to improve. You can even take a quiz to discover your ideal work pattern and productivity style.

We recommend this for productivity purposes because it has a very low barrier to use. It has powerful automation and calendar integration. The reports are work completion focused.

ClickUp – Best Project Tracker

Best for: Overall productivity management including goal setting and task views

Price: Freemium. Pricing plans start from $9 per user per month

Integrations: Slack, Google Suite, Dropbox, Toggl and more

ClickUp is excellent if you want to track your productivity from a project level. It is a project management tool that makes your tasks easy to follow. Automatic to-do lists are created for you to follow. Milestones and goals are easy to track. You can even measure the workloads of all of your employees too. The visual reports help you to track everyoneā€™s efficiency.

ClickUp is highly flexible to how you choose to work. You can adapt the templates to your workflow, and customize them to the most intuitive flow for you.

Unfortunately, ClickUp doesnā€™t have a time tracker built in. But it does integrate with reliable time trackers like Toggl if you want that functionality too.

Hubstaff – Best Team Productivity Tracker

Best for: small business remote teams who want to track productivity together

Price: Free for one user. Team plans from $7 per month

Integrations: ClickUp, Jira, Slack, FreshBooks, Gusto, PayPal, TransferWise etc

Hubstaff is a fantastic solution for productivity tracking. Itā€™s the perfect blend between a project management app like ClickUp and a time tracking solution like Toggl. The meeting of the two approaches makes for a more complex view of your teamā€™s productivity.

Hubstaff allows you to set, allocate and track the progress of tasks. It includes a snapshot of how long you or your staff members are spending on a specific task. Thatā€™s what productivity is all about. Hubstaff can do it all!

The ability to access it from multiple devices ensures that you can track time from wherever your employees are. The integrations make it a powerful workplace app to have at your disposal.

RescueTime – Best of the Best

Best for: Undistracted work and gaining time management skills

Price: Freemium. $12 per month per user

Integrations: None

RescueTime started as a simple website blocker app. It would integrate with your browser and block certain websites from being accessible while you are working. Eliminating distractions is a key part of productivity as we all know.

Over the years it has evolved into an intuitive productivity helper. RescueTime is not only about working hard but achieving balance in your life.

It all starts with a simple quiz to learn your productivity goals. It will ask for your ideal work hours, the type of work you do and the size of your team. You can set your earliest work time and latest work time. You can set your days off. After learning your preferences, the system will support you in staying switched on and staying switched off.

What we like most about this personalized approach is that not everyone works the same way. You may be the type of person to check your emails on your days off. You can make that a setting in RescueTime so that you can still access email on your nominated days off. Itā€™s not a stringent system. It is flexible to your unique working style.

RescueTime creates focus alerts to keep you on track. It tracks the amount of time you spend working and time spent distracted. The reports are easy to use. Itā€™s the uber time tracker app for work-life balance.

The one con is that the basic plan, RescueTime Lite, is very limited. RescueTime is best enjoyed with the premium plan. You do have a 14-day trial to test it before committing.

Key Takeaways

Tracking productivity for yourself and your team is way easier with the software on your side. The one caveat is that the software needs to be used to be worth it. By that I mean, your employees need to click the button to start the time tracking. They need to download the app on all devices they work from. If the system isnā€™t used reliably, youā€™ll get skewed results.

For more productivity hacks, head to our resource hub!


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