10 Best Productivity Tracking Software Shortlist
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 20 tools reviewed.
With so many different productivity tracking software available, figuring out which is right for you is tough. You know you want a tool to track task and goal progress, promote better time management, and increase your employees' accountability and transparency per task, but you need to figure out which tool is best. In this article, I'll help you make your choice easy by sharing my insights on the best productivity tracking software for remote and hybrid teams.
What is Productivity Tracking Software?
Productivity tracking software is a tool that organizations use to measure several aspects of productivity, which are then combined into a total productivity percentage value for each employee. This software tracks different metrics, such as output, time spent per task, focused time versus idle time, and time spent on administrative tasks.
Productivity tracking software can help managers gain a more detailed view of how their employees are managing their work hours, allowing them to identify those who need more guidance to perform better. They can also help you reduce time wastage, enforce corporate policies, and gain better data-driven insights.
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Deel
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Rippling
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ClearCompany
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Overviews of the 10 Best Productivity Tracking Software
Here’s a brief description of each productivity tracking software that showcases each system’s best use case, their noteworthy features, and some pros & cons. I’ve also included screenshots to give you a snapshot of their user interface.
Monitask is a productivity tracking software that helps companies monitor and manage their employees' time and efforts. It offers features such as time tracking, online timesheets, computer monitoring, remote employee monitoring, and employee attendance tracking.
Why I picked Monitask: I chose Monitask because of its comprehensive activity monitoring and detailed productivity analysis features. Monitask's ability to track mouse clicks, keystrokes, and onscreen tasks, alongside its screenshot functionality, offers an in-depth view of employee activities throughout the workday. Additionally, Monitask's time-tracking capabilities ensure that every minute spent on work tasks is accounted for, providing accurate data for performance evaluations and project management
The platform also has a real-time dashboard and automatic report generation to simplify the process of monitoring employee performance and identifying areas for improvement. These features, combined with the ability to customize settings for different team members, make Monitask a versatile tool for enhancing productivity and optimizing business processes.
Monitask Standout Features and Integrations
Features include automatic time tracking, proof-of-work screenshots, website logging, productivity scores, project and task tracking, attendance tracking, summaries and custom reports, software usage tracking, GDPR Compliance, and more.
Integrations include Slack, Trello, Asana, Google Sheets, Jira, ClickUp, Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, Zapier, and more.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Reports on employee productivity
- Available for multiple operating systems
- Tracks time on different tasks
Cons:
- Navigating the platform can be confusing at first
- No mobile app available
Guru is a knowledge management platform that leverages artificial intelligence to provide enterprise-level search capabilities.
Why I picked Guru: I selected Guru after evaluating its extensive features, which cater to the needs of complex workflows and its compatibility with a range of existing tools. Its standout attributes include a user-friendly interface and advanced search capabilities, which are essential for managing digital projects efficiently. I believe Guru is particularly suited for enterprise AI knowledge search because it enables comprehensive searches across various platforms, delivering instant and accurate answers, which is crucial for large-scale operations where timely access to information is key to maintaining productivity.
Guru Standout Features & Integrations
Features include enterprise AI search, an employee intranet, a company wiki, AI suggest and assist, custom branding tools, collaboration and feedback tools, mobile accessibility, and access controls and permissions.
Integrations include Trello, Cognito Forms, Jira Software Cloud, Confluence Cloud, HubSpot, Google Chat, Confluence Server, and GitHub.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Improves communication with clients
- Robust search feature
- Convenient for customer-facing content
Cons:
- Potential for it to reference outdated content within the system
- Limited integrations
Traqq
Best productivity tracking software for comprehensive insights on employee efficiency levels
Traqq enables businesses to retrospect and analyze internal processes. With Traqq, your teams unlock a new dimension in understanding various aspects of work productivity. As a result, you can conduct root cause analysis of low productivity times and quickly implement a workaround to boost efficiency.
Why I picked Traqq: I love how the developers at Traqq have created a simple yet comprehensive productivity tracking software. The activity levels generated on the Traqq dashboard have an interesting algorithm. The tool tracks your employees’ keyboard clicks and mouse movements. Consequently, the activity page populates your employees’ daily activity in different coloured blocks depicting sessions of low, average, and high activity levels.
Traqq detects and reports websites and apps on which your employees spend over 10 seconds. As a result, you can get a quick overview of what distracts your employees. Traqq also takes random screenshots at 10-minute intervals and uploads them to a secure online storage space.
Traqq Standout Features and Integrations
Features include application and URL tracking, activity level generation, desktop screenshots, desktop screen recording, idle time and attendance tracking, team management, analysis and reporting, and others.
Integration details are currently not available.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Accurate employee tracking
- Screenshot-taking can be paused
- Automation of email reports (daily/weekly)
Cons:
- No support for foreign languages
- No support for third-party integrations
We360.ai
Best productivity tracking software for garnering real-time productivity analytics
We360.ai started in Q4 of 2020 and has made significant strides in productivity-tracking software. The software offers many tools, including project management, tracking productivity logs, and real-time analytics.
Why I picked We360.ai: I'm particularly interested in the real-time productivity analytics that We360.ai offers. We360.ai gives you live statistics about your employees' activities: what applications they use, their usage duration, and their availability status. It's like a live stream of your employees' online activities.
Additionally, We360.ai has a nifty leave management system that tracks employee leaves, aiding with payroll processing. As a result, you can easily track, approve, or reject leave requests. The Health360 segment of We360.ai helps you manage your employees' well-being. You can swiftly analyze which employees are overworking or underworking and then intelligently shift workloads.
We360.ai Standout Features and Integrations
Features include real-time analytics, desktop screenshots, a time tracking app, leave management, user data import, CSV report export, cross-OS compatibility, automated attendance, domain blocking, a mobile application for admins, and task & project management tools.
Integrations include 10+ tools like Asana, ClickUp, GitHub, Google Calendar, Insightly, Jira, PayPal, Slack, Trello, Zapier, Zendesk, and others.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- There is an option for a Lifetime Deal (LTD)
- Free and detailed live training
- Dedicated account manager
Cons:
- Issues with bulk downloading screenshots
- The monthly plan requires a minimum of 10 users
Best productivity tracking software for charting email trends and improving email response rates
EmailAnalytics is a very niche focussed productivity tracking software that drills down into your employees’ email habits to draw meaningful trends. EmailAnalytics claims that teams using their software can spike up response times by 42% - which is quite significant.
Why I picked EmailAnalytics: EmailAnalytics visualizes your employees’ email activity. As a result, you can measure and improve their productivity. The tool is a blessing for client management and service teams whose key responsibilities include replying to emails quickly. You can also understand how your sales teams deal with nurtured leads.
I’m impressed by the ability to monitor critical email statistics like day-to-day inbound and outbound email traffic, and typed words per minute. Additionally, you can also figure out which clients take up most of your employees’ time. These metrics will help you discover a whole new dimension of employee productivity.
EmailAnalytics Standout Features and Integrations
Features include day-to-day email traffic monitoring, top recipients & senders, labeling emails as Outlook or Gmail, email response time analysis, hourly email traffic volumes, and others.
Integrations include 5+ tools like Gmail, Hubspot, Outlook, and others.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Trigger sending of weekly or daily email reports
- Visual dashboards collate key information
- Enhanced tracking of email campaigns
Cons:
- Integrations available only with Gmail and Outlook
- Absence of goal-setting capabilities
Best productivity tracking software for setting time-bound restrictions to applications
DeskTrack is a fantastic productivity tracking software that helps a wide array of industries to understand employees’ work trends better. The analytics team at DeskTrack claim that the tool allows enterprises to save 40+ working hours per week.
Why I picked DeskTrack: I’m intrigued by the intelligent application and website tracking features that DeskTrack promises. You can monitor your team’s productivity by analyzing their total time expenditure.
You can also set time limits on applications. For instance, you can set a threshold of 30 mins a day for Facebook, and if an employee exceeds this limit, the additional time gets counted as unproductive hours. Similarly, you can blacklist social media URLs to track how your employees get distracted.
Additionally, DeskTrack enables you to log sub-URLs of a primary domain. For instance, if you want to track time spent by your HR team on LinkedIn, you can assign sub URLs for messaging, profiles, etc., to get a refined view of how your employees spend time within LinkedIn.
DeskTrack Standout Features and Integrations
Features include whitelisting and blacklisting URLs, document tracking, work-from-home attendance, workforce analytics, screenshot monitoring, tracking time spent on mobile applications, and others.
Integrations include DocHub and Dropbox. DeskTrack also has a custom API for more complex integrations.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Helps easily distinguish between average and top performers
- Great customer support
- Mobile app available for Android and iOS
Cons:
- Occasional wrong tagging of apps as unproductive
- Email reporting isn’t very robust
Height is a cloud-based project management software with workflow management and team collaboration tools. Its reporting function can be used to track productivity across tasks, projects, and workflows.
Why I picked Height: This software is highly customizable for various use cases and team needs. Each team member has their own personalized inbox to keep track of all their ongoing work and priorities. Teams can manage their projects using a spreadsheet, calendar, Kanban board, or Gantt chart view. Projects are determined with infinitely nesting subtasks, and higher-level roadmaps can be configured to create the bigger picture.
Because of the software's robust project management functionality, it can be used to track productivity and resource utilization. Reports can be drawn up with filters to track things such as team velocity over time. In addition to tracking productivity, users can implement the automation capabilities of the software to improve their productivity. Auto-assignment of tasks and automated workflows help speed up processes and contribute to better team performance.
Height Standout Features & Integrations
Features include multiple task views, personalized inboxes, task forms, no-code automations, in-app messaging and collaboration tools, multi-step workflows, and custom reports.
Integrations include Slack, Notion, Figma, Zapier, Github, Notion, Sentry, Zendesk, Discord, and Slab. Zapier can also be used to configure additional integrations.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Flexible views and personalized look and feel
- Project communication and collaboration tools
- Highly customizable project management system
Cons:
- Product focus is on project management
- Somewhat rudimentary tracking abilities
ClickUp
Best productivity tracking software for automating sales processes and managing accounts
ClickUp firmly believes in simplifying the world of productivity. Many tools are increasingly becoming available for the tiniest of services, and ClickUp wants to reduce time spent switching between apps to boost productivity. Interestingly, ClickUp’s motto is “Save one day every week.”
Why I picked ClickUp: I like the fact that ClickUp is so versatile and has a lot to offer to diverse stakeholders, be it sales, marketing, product, or engineering. ClickUp allows sales account managers to automate manual sales processes. Sales folks can keep deals flowing through their pipelines with automated follow-ups for leads.
ClickUp also adds an extra dimension to sales teams by helping them track prospects, deals, and clients on a shared list or board. Additionally, the real-time reporting features help senior sales management stakeholders to visualize how productive the sales teams are: who’s closing more deals and how the overall sales performance for a quarter or year is panning out.
ClickUp Standout Features and Integrations
Features include multiple views, custom dashboards, team collaboration, a whiteboard, real-time reporting, goal and milestone setting, useful templates, and others.
Integrations include 10+ tools such as Dropbox, Everhour, Figma, GitHub, Google Calendar, Google Drive, HubSpot, Loom, Outlook, Sentry, Slack, Toggl, Vimeo, Webhooks, Zoom, and others.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Customizable automation builder
- Great collaboration tools
- Generous free plan with unlimited projects
Cons:
- Steep learning curve
- Limited time tracker capabilities
Best productivity tracking software for automated and simple time mapping
Insightful lives up to its name, with the tool promising to deliver several project-related insights and employee productivity attributes. Many small businesses rely on Insightful for spiking productivity and tracking employee efficiency.
Why I picked Insightful: I like Insightful primarily because of the automated time mapping feature. By implementing automatic time data mapping, insightful delivers accurate project insights that eliminate human error. Insightful provides you with a comprehensive view of the time spent by your employees at distinct stages of a project. The tool also offers precise statistics to help you better justify your projects' budgets and billable hours.
Proof of work is another challenge for employers hiring freelancers or contractors who invoice against billable hours. Insightful implements a real-time monitoring method that gives a snapshot of employees' website and app usage. Additionally, you can personally label apps and websites that are productive for your project or organization.
Insightful Standout Features and Integrations
Features include automated screenshots, verified attendance, automated time entries mapping, attendance tracking, historical timekeeping, productivity labeling, and different logins for clients, managers, and employees.
Integrations include 5+ tools like Data Studio, IBM Cognos Analytics, Looker, Power BI, Slack, Tableau, and others.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- User-friendly user interface
- Screenshots depicting window changes
- Includes a REST-based API for custom integrations
Cons:
- Occasional automation bugs
- Can't delete users in some cases
monday.com
Best productivity tracking software for codeless automation of manual and repetitive tasks
monday.com is a staple name in the project management software domain. The software features a cloud-based and customizable management platform aimed at helping teams track workflows and projects - ultimately improving operational efficiency. While monday.com isn’t a traditional productivity tracking tool, it still offers many automation and project visualization features for maximizing productivity.
Why I picked monday.com: In this age of AI and automation, monday.com helps you stay ahead of the curve. With monday.com, you can mix and match to create new automation recipes for your teams. You can define an action based on a predefined trigger and condition. For instance, the ‘when date arrives and status is something, notify someone’ automation is a blessing for sales teams to close renewal contracts for existing clients.
monday.com offers many chart views and widgets for you to visualize how team members perform and how quickly they complete tasks. The chart gallery has several powerful templates, including a pie chart, bar graph, line graph, and stacked graph.
monday.com Standout Features and Integrations
Features include accurate insights, customizable workflows, team collaboration tools, email automation tools, 100+ templates for automation, and an application marketplace with widgets, custom views, and integrations.
Integrations include 10+ tools such as Azure, GitHub, Google Chat, Google Sheets, Limits, Mural Embedded, Power BI, QuickBooks, SAP, Sketch Designs, Snowflake, Supermetrics, Tableau, Trello, and others. You can also use Zapier to integrate monday.com with RescueTime and Clockify too.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Several helpful project management templates
- Great visual interface
- Flexible and customizable automation workflows
Cons:
- The search function is a little buggy
- Steep learning curve
The 10 Best Productivity Tracking Software Comparison Chart
Here’s a comparison chart that summarizes basic details about each of my top productivity tracking software selections. You can view pricing details and the availability of free trials or demos side-by-side to help you find the best software for your budget.
Tools | Price | |
---|---|---|
Monitask | From $5.99/user/month | Website |
Guru | From $10/user/month | Website |
Traqq | From $7/seat/month | Website |
We360.ai | From $6.99/user/month | Website |
EmailAnalytics | From $15/user/month | Website |
DeskTrack | From $2.99/user/month | Website |
Height | From $8.50/user/month | Website |
ClickUp | From $7/user/month | Website |
Insightful | From $8/user/month | Website |
monday.com | From $8/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
Compare Software Specs Side by Side
Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.
Compare SoftwareOther Options
Here are a few other options worth mentioning that didn’t make the best productivity tracking software list:
- Peoplebox
Productivity tracking software for implementing automated engagement surveys
- Wrike
Productivity tracking software for monitoring team progress and identifying potential roadblocks
- Hive
Productivity tracking software for visualizing progress made towards pre-defined goals
- Teramind
Productivity tracking software for analyzing user activity data
- ActivTrak
Productivity tracking software for setting productivity benchmarks and tracking focus trends
- Profit.co
Productivity tracking software for aligning with organization-wide objectives and key results (OKRs)
- Hubstaff
Productivity tracking software for easy budgeting and automated payroll
- Kickidler
Productivity tracking software with keystroke logging features
- DeskTime
Productivity tracking software to identify employees experiencing burnout
- Time Doctor
Productivity tracking software for business process outsourcing and organizations with offshore functions
How I Selected the Best Productivity Tracking Software
To compile this top 10 list, I evaluated and compared a wide range of productivity tracking tools with positive user ratings.
After preparing a primary shortlist, I refined my list using the selection criteria below to see how each tool ranked against the next. I also drew on my previous experience monitoring employee productivity as an HR administrator to pinpoint the features that add value.
Selection Criteria
Here’s a summary of the primary selection and evaluation criteria I used to develop my list of the best productivity tracking software featured in this article:
Dashboard Views
For administrative purposes, summary dashboards are the most effective way to draw inferences. As a result, I’ve analyzed each tool’s dashboarding capabilities regarding data collected and visualization parameters.
Tracking Mechanism
Data points in the backend of a productivity report determine the authenticity of your depiction. As a result, tools that have sophisticated methods to track and collate data score high in my books.
Automation Capabilities
Automation is a real game changer for any tool, and productivity tracking software is no exception. I’ve analyzed the automation features of each tool that can make your tracking activities a walk in the park.
Software Integrations
Integrating a productive tracking software with your existing time-tracking app or project management tools can save time and help with easy onboarding. Consequently, I’ve listed out the top integrations supported by each tool.
Pricing
Productivity tracking software generally follows the software-as-a-service (SaaS) pricing model with a recurring monthly or annual cost. Selecting a tool that provides the best value-to-cost ratio is essential. I’ve included each tool’s pricing information and noted whether it offers a free trial you can test drive.
People Also Ask
Here are answers to some frequently asked questions that you might have about productivity tracking software:
How does productivity tracking software work?
Productivity tracking software is another layer of icing on the delicious technology cake. Productivity is such an integral attribute of the modern employee. With tons of distractions and endless notifications, many employees secretly crave workplace productivity hacks. But how can you track something intangible and intricate, like productivity?
Productivity tracking software lets you track your employees’ work habits that influence their productivity. Instead of manually updating attributes on an excel spreadsheet, productivity tracking software helps automate and streamline the entire tracking process. Especially in the work-from-home and remote work era, productivity tracking software can give you an extra sense of governance over your employees.
How does employee monitoring help measure productivity?
Employee monitoring reveals employees’ most and least productive periods. As a result, you can use this data to streamline operations and make the most of your workforce.
Additionally, tools for employee monitoring can help display when an employee is overburdened with tasks. Consequently, you can efficiently balance workloads amongst employees and promote corporate well-being.
Interestingly, there’s some psychology behind productivity measuring software. The Hawthorne Effect states that when someone is mindful of being observed, their behavior tends to change. When employees are aware of productivity tracking software, they tend to be the best versions of themselves and perform better.
What are some common approaches to boosting productivity?
While the productivity world offers you tons of tips and tricks, here are some easy and actionable tips to boost productivity:
- Journal every day to become aware of time-wasting habits.
- Avoid multitasking and focus on one task at a time.
- Utilize the Pomodoro technique to get started and beat procrastination.
- Check emails in designated blocks of time. For instance, check your inbox once every 60 minutes. During this period, you can mute all notifications to focus on high-value tasks.
- Cancel meetings that are avoidable by sending an extra email.
- Use productivity tools like Trello, Todoist, Evernote, and Google Keep, etc., to break big tasks into smaller chunks.
Wrapping Up
Productivity tracking software does promise many benefits. Consider trying a productivity tracking tool to unravel insightful findings about your employees’ work habits that influence their productivity levels.
If you’re curious about spiking your workspace productivity, check out these thought-provoking resources:
- A Better World of Work is One with Improved Productivity
- 10 Best Remote Employee Monitoring Software Systems
- How to Build an Energized and Productive Team (a podcast)
- 10 Best Task Management Software for Team Efficiency
- 10 Best Goal Setting Software for Keeping Teams on Track
Lastly, sign up for our People Managing People newsletter for the latest articles, podcasts, and tool recommendations in the HR space.