Hubstaff is an employee time tracking app that offers every feature you could ever possibly want from your time tracking software. Naturally, you can use it to track employees’ hours. But you can also use it to see what apps and URLs employees visited while working, where they traveled while clocked in, and how often they were idle while billing time.
This makes it a great option for teams with employees working both on computers and in the field; it gives you detailed insights into what all of your employees are doing while on the clock. If your employees are watching YouTube videos instead of working, you’ll know. If they’re running errands during work hours, you’ll know.
However, Hubstaff’s list of features can also make it overcomplicated for teams with more basic time tracking needs. While it sounds nice to have a lot of options, it’s also completely overwhelming.
What types of businesses is Hubstaff best for?
Hubstaff is the right time tracking app for your team if you want to be able to see everything your employees do over the course of a workday. It should only be your choice if detailed activity monitoring is exactly what you’re looking for.
While the activity monitoring features in Hubstaff can be turned off, those are really what you’re paying for. Hubstaff is pricey when compared to the more basic clock-in clock-out apps you can use for straightforward employee time tracking.
Hubstaff shines for two use cases. The first is for teams of more tech-savvy knowledge workers. Whether your employees all work in-person or remotely, Hubstaff will let you track what they were doing while on the clock. Your team can log time to specific projects and tasks, and you can use the system to create invoices for your clients.
The second use case is when you have both computer-based and field workers. Hubstaff is one of the only time tracking apps on the market that offers monitoring features for both of those types of employees (computer activity and location). Most other apps specialize in one or the other types of monitoring.
If you don’t need Hubstaff’s computer monitoring features and are just looking for a GPS time clock app, Buddy Punch is a great, more affordable option to consider.
Free trial and pricing
Hubstaff offers a 14-day free trial of all of its plans. Though their homepage says no credit card is required, I did have to enter a credit card to proceed with my trial.
Luckily, I was able to remove my credit card easily enough after getting into the platform so I could ensure I wasn’t automatically billed once the trial period ended.
During the trial setup process, I was prompted to select the plan I wanted to try. I selected the “Starter” plan, Hubstaff’s lowest-cost option. However, once I was inside of the trial, I noticed that I had access to features I didn’t expect to have access to. Even though I had selected the “Starter” plan, Hubstaff dropped me into a trial of its “Team” plan.
This could cause issues with setting up the app if you don’t realize this has happened. You may set up features for your team that you won’t actually have access to at the price you can afford to pay after your trial ends. For that reason, I’ve compiled the table below showing what features you actually get on each of the plans.
Pricing
Note that all of Hubstaff’s plans have a two-seat minimum.
Plan Name | Pricing (Monthly) | Pricing (Annually) | Features Included |
|---|---|---|---|
Starter | $7/seat/month | $4.99/seat/month | – Time tracking – Timesheets – Screenshots – App/URL tracking – Activity monitoring – Invoices – Access controls – Up to 5 clients – Up to 500 tasks – 2FA |
Grow | $9/seat/month | $7.50/seat/month | – All above features – Idle time-outs – Unlimited clients – Up to 1,500 tasks – Project budgets – One integration – 3 scheduled reports |
Team | $12/seat/month | $10/seat/month | – All above features – Timesheet approvals – Achievement badges – Scheduling – PTO accruals and tracking – Overtime tracking – Automatic breaks – Expense tracking – Payroll – All reports – All integrations |
Enterprise | $25/seat/month | $25/seat/month | – All above features – Pay by ACH – Account provisioning – HIPAA compliance – SOC-2 Type II compliance – SSO – API |
In addition to its plans, Hubstaff also offers a number of add-ons that have additional costs. For example, to get access to its location features for geofencing and GPS tracking, you have to either subscribe to the Enterprise plan or be on the Team plan and pay for the Locations add-on that adds another $4/seat per month to your overall cost.
As you can see, while Hubstaff does offer lower-cost plans, it’s really pushing companies to be on the Team plan to get access to all of the features they need. It’s also pushing companies to be on an annual plan rather than paying month-to-month, with prices as much as $2/seat/month higher if you want to pay for the product monthly.
Looking for a more affordable option? Check out Buddy Punch. You can get basic time tracking as low as $4.49/user per month and GPS tracking, geofencing, and real-time GPS for as low as $7.99/user per month.
Customer support
Another interesting thing about Hubstaff’s pricing is that the plan you’re on also controls what type of support you can get from the company. On the “Starter” and “Grow” plans, you only have access to email support. The response time on the “Starter” plan is two days, and it’s one day on the “Grow” plan.
To get access to chat support, you have to be on the “Team” or “Enterprise” plans. “Enterprise” plan customers also get access to a dedicated account rep and concierge onboarding.
Setting up Hubstaff
Setting Hubstaff up is not a very intuitive process. Below, I’ll walk you through the steps I took and what issues I ran into trying to get the app up and running.
Adding employees
The first part of the setup happens before you’ve even entered your credit card details to start the trial. After creating your own username and password, you’re prompted to invite your employees.
The employees I added received invitations immediately. However, the employees who did accept weren’t able to do anything on the platform because I hadn’t yet set it up. At the same time, I wasn’t able to set much up in the system because employees didn’t show up in the system until they had accepted their invites.
This means it’s going to require some detailed planning to set Hubstaff up. I recommend gathering a small team to test the app during your trial and only adding them to the system. Then, when it’s time to roll it out to your entire team, you’re going to need to invite everyone and get them to accept their invites — but tell them not to use it until further notice.
It’s also worth noting that every employee must have their own unique email address to use Hubstaff. This makes it a poor option if you don’t assign company-issued email addresses to all of your employees. In that case, you’d have to use their personal email addresses, which may not be an option.
If your employees don’t have their own unique company email addresses, consider Buddy Punch as an alternative. It lets you create all of your employees using the same administrator email address.
Setting up policies and features
Once you’ve fully started your trial, you’re dropped onto Hubstaff’s dashboard. The bulk of it is either blank or just has example data because you’re not using it yet. All of the setup options are in a sidebar on the left of the screen.
While there are some videos that pop up initially and again when you click certain options, they’re not very detailed.
There’s also a “Get started” page that promises to walk you through your setup, but the order it recommends doing things feels unnatural. The first thing it wanted me to do was subscribe to a report, but with no employees in the system and no data being collected, that didn’t make a lot of sense as a first step.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to ignore that step and continue on to the other recommendations, so I just started clicking around to see if I could find the things I knew I needed to do.
Ultimately, I was able to find everything I needed to be able to do, but it required clicking into every single option on the left to find out what I could do there. Most of the setup options are housed under “Settings” where you can do things like control what types of monitoring will be applied to employees and set up your overtime policies.
Integrations
As far as integrations go, Hubstaff leaves a lot to be desired. First, you don’t get access to any integrations on the “Starter” plan, and you only get access to one on the “Grow” plan.
In terms of payroll integrations, Hubstaff’s options are extremely limited, offering only Deel and Gusto. It seems like it’s set up more for paying contractors than it is for paying full-time employees.
If you’re using it for full-time employees, you’ll likely have to download your time reports to upload them to your payroll provider or use its Zapier integration to connect the two systems.
Looking for a time tracking app that integrates with your payroll provider? Buddy Punch offers integrations with 20 popular payroll systems, as well as built-in payroll processing.
Hubstaff is stronger when it comes to its project management integrations, offering quite a few more options here for popular apps like Asana, Trello, GitHub, ClickUp, and Jira.
The employee experience
From the employee (non-admin) side of things, it wasn’t immediately clear how I was supposed to clock in when using the web app.
However, if you’re going to be using Hubstaff’s activity/location monitoring features, your employees will rarely use the web app. They’ll have to download the desktop app (available on Mac, PC, Linux, and Chromebooks) in order for you to track what they do on their computers and the mobile apps (available on iOS and Android) for you to track their locations.
The action I needed to take was much clearer on the mobile app, which opened directly to the timer after I logged in.
Features
In terms of Hubstaff’s major features, I found that they all do what they say they do and do it well. Below, I go through each of its key features and explain what you can do with them.
Screenshots
If your employees are using the desktop app, Hubstaff will take screenshots of their screens at specific intervals while they’re clocked in. You can set it to take one, two, or three screenshots every 10 minutes, but keep in mind that you may have a limit on the total number of screenshots you can collect for an employee each month depending on your plan.
You can apply your screenshot settings to everyone at your company or apply them on a per-employee basis. This is helpful in case you have specific employees you suspect are stealing time and only want to monitor what they’re doing and not everyone else.
If your employees may sometimes view protected data as part of their work, you can also turn on screenshot blurring which blurs out any text that appears on the screen in the screenshots that the app takes.
Finally, you have control over who is able to delete screenshots. You can set it so screenshots can never be deleted or designate specific employees who are able to delete screenshots from the system.
App and URL tracking
If employees are using the desktop app, you can set Hubstaff up to track only the apps employees are using, only the URLs they’re visiting, or both apps and URLs. This feature can also be applied to the company as a whole or turned on/off for individual employees.
If you’re on a plan that includes Hubstaff’s “Insights” feature or are paying for the Insights add-on, you can also classify specific apps and URLs into categories for different roles. For example, you might classify your social media manager’s time spent on Facebook as productive but make it unproductive for other roles.
Idle time detection
In settings for individual employees, you can select how much time needs to pass when an employee is idle before their timer stops. You can also prompt the system to discard idle time and not include it on timesheets. This is a good option for making sure you/your clients aren’t paying for time when employees aren’t working.
Location tracking
On the Team plan, you can add Hubstaff’s “Locations” add-on to enable real-time GPS tracking for your employees. It shows you where all of your employees are located on a map that updates every 60 seconds. You can also use the “show” and “hide” routes function to view exactly where they traveled that day.
Geofencing
Hubstaff’s Locations add-on also lets you create geofences based on an address and then set them to between 50 and 3,000 meters in diameter. You can then attach those geofences to specific employees and projects.
Hubstaff lets you specify what happens when an employee enters a geofence. You can start the timer automatically when an employee enters a geofence and stop it when they leave, or you can set it up to send them a reminder to start/stop the timer when entering/exiting the geofence.
You can also create rules for different employees or teams so the behavior is different for different people. You could have one group where the timer automatically starts, one where it doesn’t, one that gets reminders — any configuration you need.
It is worth calling out that Hubstaff’s geofences feature doesn’t have settings to prevent employees from clocking in and out when they’re not inside of the geofence, so if you’re struggling with employees clocking in/out before/after they’re on-site, Hubstaff won’t solve that problem for you.
If you want to be able to prevent employees from clocking in and out when outside of your geofences, check out Buddy Punch. It blocks employees from clocking in and out when they’re not on site.
Timesheets and reports
All clock-in and out data is compiled into timesheets for each employee. You can review employees’ timesheets one by one, or you can download a report showing all employees and their total hours for a specific timeframe. Further, you can run reports on time spent on specific tasks and projects and use those to create client invoices.
Hubstaff lets you control which team members’ timesheets must be approved before payroll and who is able to edit timesheets. If time is added manually, Hubstaff’s reports will show you how much time was manually added. And the reports also show how much of the time an employee is billing for was spent being idle.
Finally, Hubstaff does have settings that allow you to separate regular hours and overtime hours. However you can only create policies that identify overtime that occurred over the course of a week, so if you’re in an area where you have to calculate overtime by day, the system won’t work for you.
You can create custom overtime policies for different employees, which is helpful if you have some employees who are salaried and some who are hourly. When you have overtime policies in place, all admins, managers, and owners will receive an alert when an employee is an hour away from going into overtime.
Time off tracking
Hubstaff offers PTO tracking and accruals. You can control how employees earn PTO — a set amount annually, a percentage based on hours worked, or a percentage based on start date — and then apply those policies to employees as a group or on an individual basis.
You can also decide if negative balances are allowed, if balances can roll over year to year, if PTO requests need to be approved, and if new members should be added to the policy automatically.
Employee scheduling
Finally, Hubstaff has a built-in schedule maker that lets you build basic schedules for your employees. You can specify what hours each employee should work on which days, and you can create repeating shifts for employees who have the same schedules week after week.
But that’s basically it. There’s no way to assign employees to specific roles, to let employees add their availability, to assign them to specific locations, or to let them request shift trades or covers.
It’s probably a perfectly fine feature for teams consisting of only knowledge workers whose roles and locations don’t ever change, but other types of teams are likely better off looking for a more robust time tracking and scheduling app.
Review summary
Hubstaff is a feature-rich time tracking app that’s best suited for businesses that need detailed employee activity monitoring. It tracks hours, app and URL usage, idle time, and GPS locations, making it ideal for teams with both computer-based and field employees.
However, its extensive functionality can be overwhelming for companies with basic time tracking needs, and its pricing structure pushes users toward higher-tier plans for essential features. While it excels in tracking and reporting, its integrations, setup process, and scheduling tools have limitations.
If your priority is comprehensive employee monitoring, Hubstaff is a strong choice. But if you just need simple clock-in and clock-out tracking, many more affordable and user-friendly options exist.
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