The 9 Best Employee Tracking Apps (Location & Activity)

Employee tracking apps help business owners keep their employees accountable by tracking employee locations and/or computer activities.

Employee location tracking apps use GPS and geofencing technologies to help you validate that field employees are clocking in and out of work from the correct location (or to prevent them from clocking in/out before they’re at work or after they’ve left).

Employee activity tracking apps have features like idle detection, mouse tracking, and website/app monitoring that help you identify when employees who do most of their work on computers are spending time doing things other than work while they’re on the clock.

We’ve researched dozens of employee tracking apps to identify which are the best at helping businesses keep employees accountable, improve team productivity, and prevent time theft.

Illustrated image showing a list of the best employee tracking apps

The 9 best employee tracking apps

Here are the nine best employee tracking apps, including their key features, pricing, customer reviews, and which types of tracking and businesses they’re best for

Buddy Punch – Best for affordable employee location tracking
Hellotracks – Best GPS tracking for transportation companies
QuickBooks Time – Best for mileage tracking
Timeero – Best for employees working at rural locations
Jibble – Best free GPS tracking for small companies
Hubstaff – Best for combined location and activity tracking
Insightful – Best for activity tracking for knowledge workers
Time Doctor – Best employee monitoring for agencies
ActivTrak – Best free productivity tracking for small businesses

1. Buddy Punch

Best for affordable employee GPS tracking.

When we were running our previous business, we struggled with time theft in a few different ways: employees would clock in before they arrived at work, clock out after they left work, or clock in from the parking lot and then leave.

So when we built Buddy Punch, we set out to build features to help business owners prevent these types of time theft. In particular, we built three location-tracking features that would help business owners either prevent time theft entirely or easily identify when it’s occurring: GPS tracking, geofencing, and real-time GPS.

GPS tracking

With GPS tracking, you can capture your teams’ GPS coordinates whenever they clock in/out of work. That data is then added to each employee’s timesheet, which you can review to determine if the punch took place on the job site or away from it.

And as you can see in the screenshot above, you don’t have to turn GPS tracking on for all employees. Buddy Punch is incredibly flexible, so you can make GPS tracking required for all employees, required for only a selection of employees, or optional for all or a selection.

GPS tracking on punch is best for businesses where employees and supervisors work together at the same location.

Since supervisors would likely notice employees disappearing for long periods of time in the middle of the day, it helps prevent time theft in the moments where supervisors would be least likely to notice it — at the beginning and end of an employee’s shift.

Geofencing

A geofence is a digital border you can create around one or more job sites. It works together with the GPS data on employees’ mobile phones to identify when employees are at job sites and when they’re not.

Geofences can be used to prevent employees from clocking in or out when they’re not on site (when they’re outside of the specified geofence). If employees attempt to clock in/out when they’re outside of the geofence, they get an error notification in the Buddy Punch mobile app.

Image of preventing an employee from clocking in because they're not located within the geofence

Like GPS on punch, geofencing in Buddy Punch is flexible and can be made optional, required, or turned off for specific employees, specific departments/teams, or the entire company.

Geofencing works best when time theft is such a big problem that it’s difficult to monitor GPS punch data on an individual basis. Rather than having to check the GPS location data on individual timesheets, you can rest assured that employees didn’t clock in or out offsite because they simply can’t do so.

Real-time GPS

Buddy Punch’s final location-tracking feature is real-time GPS, which tracks employee locations the entire time they’re on the clock and provides you with:

GPS breadcrumbs that allow you to see an employee’s movements throughout the course of the workday.
An interactive map showing every clocked-in employee’s location and movements at any given moment of the day.

Real-time GPS is best used in two circumstances.

First, it’s a helpful feature if you believe employees are leaving work while on the clock. With real-time GPS, you will be able to tell if they’re leaving work to do other things while they’re still on the clock.

Second, real-time GPS is great for traveling employees like salespeople, plumbers, electricians, delivery drivers, truck drivers, and other types of logistics and service industry employees who travel from site to site over the course of a single day.

Like with GPS on punch and geofencing, real-time GPS can be enabled only for the team members you need it for. And Buddy Punch is also a privacy-first application, meaning it only tracks employees’ location when they’re on the clock and never when they’re clocked out.

Additional employee accountability features

Beyond location-tracking, Buddy Punch has a number of additional features that help business owners and administrators keep employees accountable:

Screenshot of IP address locking in Buddy Punch

IP Address Locking: Great for office workers, IP address locking only allows employees to clock in when the device they’re using to punch is using your office’s IP address or connected to your company’s Wi-Fi network.

Image of Buddy Punch's Photos on Punch feature

Photos on Punch: If buddy punching — when an employee clocks in/out for another employee — is a problem for your business, you can use Photos on Punch to require employees to take a picture of themselves when clocking in and out.

Screenshot of facial recognition in Buddy Punch

Facial Recognition: Another feature to prevent buddy punching is facial recognition, which uses Face ID to validate that the person clocking in is the correct employee.

Additional workforce management features

In addition to Buddy Punch’s time- and location-tracking capabilities, it’s also a complete workforce management app that lets you track employee time, calculate overtime, run payroll, create employee schedules, and manage PTO accruals:

Screenshot of some of Buddy Punch's payroll integrations

Payroll integrations: Buddy Punch integrates with most top payroll providers to automate your payroll processing, including QuickBooks, Paychex, and Workday.

Screenshot of an Excel spreadsheet report downloaded from Buddy Punch

Payroll reports: Buddy Punch calculates everything needed to run payroll automatically and lets you export it as an Excel or CSV file with just a few clicks.

Screenshot of PTO accrual rules in Buddy Punch

PTO accruals: Set up rules for how employee PTO is accrued, and Buddy Punch will automatically calculate available PTO hours for your entire company.

Screenshot of time-off tracking in Buddy Punch

Time off tracking: Employees can submit time-off requests in Buddy Punch, which are sent to their managers for approval.

Track hours by jobs, projects, or locations: Generate reports segmented by locations, positions, or departments — perfect for businesses that need to track hours spent on specific customer projects or client jobs.

Screenshot of Buddy Punch's employee scheduling tool

Employee scheduling: Create and distribute schedules for your team using Buddy Punch’s drag-and-drop employee scheduler.
Recurring shifts: Have Buddy Punch automatically repeat schedules to avoid having to recreate them from scratch every time a new work period comes around.

Screenshot of an employee making a shift request in Buddy Punch

Employee availability: Allow your employees to submit their availability to make it easy to see who’s available when while creating your schedules.

Screenshot of punch limiting in Buddy Punch

Punch limiting: Tie your employees’ ability to punch to their schedule, or set up rules to limit their punches to, for example, 15 minutes before or after a scheduled shift.

Want to learn more? Check out this comprehensive list of Buddy Punch’s features.

Customer reviews

Screenshot of Buddy Punch's rating on Capterra

At the time of writing this post, Buddy Punch has an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars across almost 1,000 user reviews. Here’s what some specific customers have to say about its location-tracking features:

“Buddy Punch provides us with concrete times when our team was present in stores. Not only does it help with time tracking, but it also helps with COVID-19 contact tracing and workplace incident investigations.” Read the full review.
“We have over 20 jobs going at one time All the guys can easily punch in and out on their phone. If they are in the field, they use GPS, and we know where they are — at the supply store, on the job site, etc. You can’t lose with this software.” Read the full review.
“The use of the mobile app allows employees to clock in at multiple locations but can also show GPS coordinates if you’re questioning an employee’s whereabouts at the time the punch was entered. Compared to other systems, this is a simple solution offering the same functionality but much easier to use!” Read the full review.

Pricing

Buddy Punch offers a free 14-day trial. Its base plan starts at $3.99 per user per month plus a $19 base fee, making it one of the most affordable employee location-tracking apps on this list.

Want to learn more about Buddy Punch? Start a free trial, watch a recorded demo, or request a personalized demo.

2. Hellotracks

Best employee GPS tracking app for transportation companies.

Hellotracks is specifically built for logistics, delivery, and transportation companies. It uses same-second GPS technology to capture employees’ routes across their entire shifts and log exactly when they arrive at and leave locations.

Hellotracks also comes with route scheduling and dispatching capabilities. You can create routes for your employees, ensure they’re optimized, and then send them to employees. Employees then use the Hellotracks app to guide them on their routes.

When an employee arrives at their destination, the dispatcher receives a notification, and another notification is sent when they leave the location. Hellotracks also logs the employee hours spent at specific locations.

Additionally, the app can collect signatures from customers when deliveries are completed, consolidating all of your data into a single platform.

As far as geofencing, Hellotracks has the most customizable options of all of the apps on this list. It lets you create any geofence shape you’d like — circles, squares, triangles, etc. — so you can be really specific about which areas employees can be in while billing time to your business.

Unique features

Same-second GPS tracking: Hellotracks pings your employees’ devices every 20 seconds, letting you see exactly where your fleet is located on a map at any moment.
Route scheduling and dispatching: Use a drag-and-drop tool to create routes and assign them to employees, then dispatch those routes to employees through the app.
Route optimization: Hellotracks’ technology automatically optimizes your routes for you so you can avoid backtracking and wasted time/hours.
Customizable geofencing: Create highly specific zones around your delivery areas or locations to make sure employees can’t log time when they’re outside of those areas.