The 7 Best Time Tracking Software for Remote Employees

Finding the right time-tracking software for remote employees depends on two things: how your employees work (at home or in the field), and how much of what they do during the workday that you want to track.

How your employees work is important because it dictates which features you’ll want to look for in a time tracker. If your employees work in the field (common in construction, the trades, and healthcare), you’ll want to look for features like GPS tracking, geofencing, and photo collection.

If your employees work from home on their computers, you’ll want to look for features like idle detection, automatic screenshots, and activity monitoring.

Secondly, deciding up front how much of their activity you want to track will be important. If time theft is a serious problem, you’ll want to choose an app with more aggressive time theft prevention features. Things like real-time GPS tracking and computer activity monitoring will ensure your employees are working when they’re on the clock.

To give you a variety of options to choose from, we’ve curated this list of the seven best time-tracking software for remote employees. Each app on this list has unique features and caters to specific types of remote workers, which will help you find the best option for your team in no time.

1. Buddy Punch – Best overall

Buddy Punch tops our list of the best time-tracking apps for remote workers because of its variety of features and focus on employee privacy. 

It has features to help you track employee hours and prevent time theft no matter where your employees work: in the field or from home.

And in terms of employee privacy, there’s a lot of flexibility. Employees are only tracked while they’re on the clock. You can make specific time-theft prevention features optional or required — or turn them off completely. And you can also turn them on only for specific employees you want to monitor more closely.

Let’s take a look at the different aspects of Buddy Punch that were built for remote teams.

Features for field workers

If you run a construction, field services, home healthcare, or other business where employees work outside of the main office, Buddy Punch has tons of features to keep your employees accountable:

  • GPS on punch: Log employees’ locations on their timesheets when they punch in and out of work. You can review this data at any time to make sure that employees are where they’re supposed to be when they clock in and out.
  • Geofencing: If you don’t want to have to review timecards to make sure employees clocked in and out while on the job site, you can set up geofences. These virtual barriers use the location data on your employees’ phones to verify that they’re on-site when clocking in and out. If they’re not, the app prevents the action.
  • Real-time GPS: For teams with employees who travel to different locations throughout the day, you can turn on real-time GPS tracking to view their locations on a map at any time and see exactly where they traveled over the course of a day on their timecards.
  • Photos on punch: If buddy punching — where employees clock in and out for each other — is a problem for your business, you can require employees to take a picture of themselves when clocking in and out. These photos can be reviewed on their timecards to make sure the right person punched for their time.
  • Facial recognition: If you want to take photos on punch a step further, you can enable facial recognition with Face ID. This requires employees to validate their identities with biometric authentication before they can access the Buddy Punch app to clock in/out.

Each of these features is completely optional. You can make them required for everyone, optional for everyone, or required only for specific teams or individual employees.

Generally, your employees will use their mobile phones — apps are available for both iOS and Android mobile devices — to clock in and out. However, if you have multiple employees working at one job site, you can also set up Buddy Punch on a tablet to create a time clock kiosk.

In terms of privacy, Buddy Punch only tracks employees’ locations while they’re on the clock — never when they’re not. And the app uses so little battery and data on your employees’ phones that you won’t have to worry about them complaining about having to use it.

Features for work-from-home employees

Buddy Punch makes tracking work hours easy for employees who work from home. Employees can simply log in to the Buddy Punch web app on their computers to clock in, clock out, see their PTO balance, request time off, review their timecards, or request edits to timesheets.

Buddy Punch has several features that help you track time for work-from-home employees:

  • Project tracking: If you want employees to track time to specific tasks or projects, you can create job codes in Buddy Punch and assign them to the employees who are working on them. This makes it easy to invoice your clients down to the exact minute.
  • IP address locking: If you want to make sure employees are in their home offices when they clock in and out, you can set up IP address locks that only allow employees to clock in and out when they’re connected to their home’s Wi-Fi.
  • Notifications: If you want to keep a close eye on attendance, you can set up notifications that alert you when an employee clocks in late, clocks out early, or misses a shift completely. You can also get a notification when an employee is nearing overtime.
  • Duration entry: If you have salaried employees who don’t need to clock in and out, you can use duration entry where they build their timesheets by simply entering the number of hours they worked each day.
  • PTO tracking and accruals: Buddy Punch can also be used to track accrued time off. Employees can see their PTO balances in the app at any time, and they can also request time off. Time off requests are approved by managers and automatically added to employees’ time cards.

The upside or downside of using Buddy Punch for work-from-home employees — depending on what features you’re looking for — is that it doesn’t have the more intrusive activity monitoring features of some of the other apps on this list. 

It won’t tell you what apps/websites employees are using while they work, and it doesn’t take screenshots of their screens randomly. So if you want an app that doesn’t make employees feel like they’re being micromanaged and monitored, Buddy Punch is a great choice. If you do want those other features, another app on this list will suit you better.

Other useful features

Buddy Punch is a complete workforce management app that will help you streamline the workflows for every aspect of your administrative work. In addition to time tracking, automated timesheets, PTO tracking, and its employee accountability features, you can use Buddy Punch to:

  • Build employee schedules: Buddy Punch’s drag-and-drop schedule builder makes it easier than ever to build schedules for your team. Create recurring shifts, assign employees to specific locations or departments, and accept shift trade and cover requests.
  • Run payroll: You can use Buddy Punch as your payroll system, export Excel and CSV reports to send to your existing payroll provider, or integrate with payroll software like QuickBooks, ADP, Gusto, Paychex, Workday, Rippling, and more to run payroll in seconds.
  • Delegate work: Give specific people manager permissions in Buddy Punch to delegate some of your admin work to them. You can assign team members to their managers, and then managers can do things like create schedules for their teams and approve timesheets and PTO requests.
  • Edit timecards: When employees forget to clock in or out, you can edit their timecards for them, or you can let them make edit requests that you or their manager can review and approve.
  • Remove breaks: If your employees get unpaid breaks, you can set Buddy Punch up to remove those breaks from their time data automatically so employees don’t have to worry about clocking out and back in for their breaks.
  • Detailed reports: Access all of your historical data at any time by viewing reports in Buddy Punch or downloading them as spreadsheets, CSVs, or PDFs. You’ll have reports for everything you need: hours, payroll, GPS, schedules, time card edits, and more.

But even this is just a small sampling of everything Buddy Punch can do. If you want to learn more, you can explore all of its features or take an interactive tour of the product.

Customer reviews

Buddy Punch has an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars on Capterra across more than 1,000 reviews. Here’s what a few of its remote work customers have to say about the platform:

“Buddy Punch makes employee time tracking very easy. Employees just need to be within a geofence (if one is set up) log in and punch in/out. They don’t have to jump through endless steps for something that should be straightforward. The user interface is also very user-friendly.”

“I like that you can require a photo and location for your employees when clocking in and can monitor them pretty easily. It is intuitive to set up. I also like that I can assign managers over certain employees so they can monitor their own departments and approve accordingly.”

“I can customize its features in a way that works for my situation! My employees can clock in and out from the free app on their phones, and I can limit that ability by IP address and location. I also like that it is so easy to accept or decline modifications if employees have forgotten to clock in or out.”

Pricing

Buddy Punch offers a free 14-day trial, no credit card required. Its base plan starts at $4.49 per user per month plus a $19 per month base fee — making it one of the most affordable apps on this list for its features.

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

2. Hubstaff – Most flexible

Hubstaff comes in at number two on our list because of its flexible functionality that makes it great for any type of employee monitoring you’re looking to do.

For field workers, Hubstaff offers features like GPS tracking and geofencing that let you make sure employees are on-site when they clock in and out. Like Buddy Punch, this works by using Hubstaff’s mobile app to check employee location data via their smartphones.

For work-from-home staff, Hubstaff has a variety of employee activity monitoring features: 

  • Activity tracking: See which apps and websites employees are viewing over the course of the day, and mark which apps and websites are productive or unproductive. Then, you can view reports showing employee productivity overall and per employee.
  • Automatic screenshots: Take screenshots of employees’ screens at random intervals across the day. This provides an additional layer of insight into whether employees are using the apps and websites they’re accessing for productive or unproductive work.
  • Idle detection: Identify times when employees are idle by monitoring keystrokes and mouse movements. This, combined with automatic screenshots, can help you determine when employees have left their workstations and are doing something other than working while billing for their time.
  • Performance awards: Hubstaff has built-in recognition tools that reward employees for being productive, with award badges for things like “efficiency pro,” “productivity champ,” and “time hero.”

Hubstaff has an overall rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars on Capterra across 1,491 reviews. Here’s what customers like about the platform:

“Using Hubstaff has been exceptionally easy across the board. It is an asset for our company to see project profitability, team member hours, and manage time off for a fully remote company. The customer service with Hubstaff is superb. Highly recommend the app!”

Pricing

Hubstaff’s base plan starts at $4.99 per seat per month with a two-seat minimum and includes limited versions of their app and URL tracking, screenshots, and activity levels features. For geofencing and GPS tracking, you’ll have to pay an additional $4 per seat per month for the Locations add-on.

3. Insightful – Best for automatic time tracking

Insightful is focused on time and productivity tracking for knowledge workers. In addition to some of the same features you find in Hubstaff — like app and URL tracking, automatic screenshots, and idle detection — Insightful offers a feature that populates employee timesheets automatically — no clocking in/out required.

The way it works is by mapping specific activities to specific tasks or projects. Initially, you’ll map these manually, but over time, the app learns which activities belong to which clients and tasks and will do the work of sorting your time for you.

Insightful also has features that help you use your productivity data to help employees rather than just punish them. It can help you identify employees who are burned out, as well as determine when employees are the most productive so you can adjust their schedules accordingly.

Insightful has an overall rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars on Capterra across 96 reviews. Here’s what customers like about the platform:

“Insightful has included all of the features that will not only assure an employer that they are only paying for time productively worked but also assure employees that they are not losing out on any of their hard-earned minutes. We have found Insightful to be the most accurate because of the ability to customize idle timeouts per how your employees work.”

Pricing

Customers get all of Insightful’s productivity monitoring features on its base plan, which starts at $6.40 per seat per month. To get access to its automatic time tracking feature, you’ll need to be on the Process Improvement plan, which starts at $12 per seat per month with a 50-user minimum.

4. Timely – Best for agencies

Timely is a combined time-tracking and project-management app with a lot of features that are helpful for agencies, consulting companies, and other client-facing online businesses. 

In addition to being able to automate your time tracking like Insightful via allocation of specific apps and websites to different tasks and projects, you can use it to:

  • Plan time for projects: Manage your team’s workload and plan ahead for upcoming projects to make sure that projects are completed on time and within budget.
  • Set billable rates: In addition to pay rates, you can set billable rates — the actual total cost of an hour of an employee’s time — for each person you employ. This lets you calculate the total cost of a project for more accurate estimates.
  • Create invoices: Bill your clients easily and accurately; Timely will automatically turn your time data into client invoices. You can also use its QuickBooks integration to collect payments on your invoices.
  • Connect to the other systems your team uses daily: Timely has native integrations with apps like Slack, Asana, Trello, Google Chrome, Figma, GitHub, Jira, and more.

With 702 reviews on Capterra and an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars, Timely is a well-liked time-tracking solution. Here’s what one customer has to say about it:

“The best thing about Timely is that it lets you focus on your work first, time capture second. Traditionally, you need to constantly keep on top of your time entries, or it will snowball into a big mess by the end of the week. Timely allows you to just get on with things and, perhaps at the end of the week, you just approve the timesheet that was pre-filled for you.”

Pricing

Timely’s pricing starts at $9 per user per month for a max of five users and 20 projects and includes automatic time tracking and billable hours. For access to its project planning features and integrations, you’ll need to be on the Premium plan, which starts at $16 per user per month.

5. TimeCamp – Best for web developers

TimeCamp’s employee monitoring software is perfect for companies that provide web development services. It includes time tracking, attendance tracking, employee performance, and integrations with popular developer tools like Azure DevOps, Github, Gitlab, and Jira.

It’s also one of the few time trackers that offers desktop apps — those are available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Additionally, if you want to self-host the app instead of using one of TimeCamp’s servers, you can do that too.

TimeCamp can track time for both your company’s employees and any freelancers you work with. You can track time to different projects and allocate hours to both billable and non-billable tasks. And burndown reports show how you’re tracking toward time and budget estimates.

TimeCamp has an overall rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars on Capterra across 598 reviews. Here’s what one customer loves about the platform:

“Timecamp is the cheapest time tracking software that I have worked with so far. It covered most of my needs with the free version itself. With the desktop application, we can track computer activities, websites, and application usage. This enables us to build trust with our customers.”

Pricing

TimeCamp has a free plan that includes time tracking for unlimited users, unlimited projects, and its desktop apps. For key features like billable time, team performance monitoring, and access to integrations, you’ll need to be on either the Premium ($4.99/user/month) or Ultimate ($7.99/user/month) plan. 

6. Time Doctor – Best for remote customer support teams

In Time Doctor, you’ll find similar remote employee monitoring features as the other tools on this list: see metrics on web and app usage, take screenshots across the day, and detect when employees are idle. It also has a silent employee monitoring tool so you can track productivity without your teams knowing about it.

Where Time Doctor stands out is with its integrations with popular customer service systems. You can integrate Time Doctor directly with apps like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Help Scout, Intercom, Jira, and Zoho Desk, making it ideal for a remote workforce of customer support or call center agents.

Time Doctor has an overall rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars across 529 reviews on Capterra. Here’s what customers like about the platform:

“Overall, Time Doctor is great for productivity, time tracking, and project management. It has the best leave-tracking features that send notifications if the person is still working on a task. It has a user-friendly interface with many different cool options such as remote employee time tracking, browsing history, breaks, and idle time reminders.”

Pricing

Time Doctor’s base plan starts at $5.90 per user per month and includes unlimited project and task management, its core time management features, and silent tracking. For access to its support integrations, you’ll need to be on the Standard plan ($11.70 per user per month).

7. Clockify – Best free time tracking tool

If you need to track your employees’ work time but don’t have any budget for a tool, Clockify could be a good solution. It doesn’t have any of the bells and whistles of the other tools on this list, but it does let you track time for your employees no matter where they work.

On the free plan, you’ll get access to:

  • Time tracking for unlimited users
  • Timesheets
  • Idle detection and reminders
  • Integrations with project management apps
  • Exportable reports
  • Billable rates

Clockify has an overall 4.7 out of 5-star rating on Capterra out of nearly 8,000 total reviews. Here’s what one user loves about the app’s free plan:

“My experience with Clockify over the past three years has been outstanding. It’s reliable, intuitive, and continues to improve with regular updates. The app is perfect for tracking time efficiently, whether for individual or team use, and the free features are remarkably generous.”

Pricing

Clockify’s free plan comes with all of the features you see above. If you need additional features, paid plans are also available, ranging from $3.99-$12.99 per user per month.

Choosing the best time-tracking software for remote employees

In closing, let’s review the unique aspects of the apps above to help you find the right option for your team.

If productivity monitoring is your biggest must-have, Hubstaff, Insightful, Timely, TimeCamp, and TimeDoctor all have the features you’re looking for:

  • Timely, TimeCamp, and Time Doctor each have integrations that make them ideal for different types of companies.
  • Hubstaff can be used for teams who work from home and who work in the field.
  • Insightful can be used by any type of company with primarily online workers and, along with Timely, offers automatic time tracking.

Clockify is a good option if you don’t have any budget, though you’ll only get access to a limited feature set and will pay more than you would for the other apps on this list if you need to upgrade to a paid plan later.

Finally, if what you’re looking for is a cost-friendly app with lots of features for tracking employees, exceptional customer support, and a privacy-first approach, you’ll want to go with Buddy Punch.