10 Best Remote Employee Monitoring Software Systems of 2023

Desktime helps small business owners manage remote employees by monitoring their performance with time-tracking software and providing detailed productivity reports. 

Why I picked DeskTime: This app tracks employee activity automatically and calculates productivity. The URL and app tracking features show you exactly what websites, programs, and apps your employees use. These can be categorized as being productive or unproductive. 

You can also see exactly which documents employees are working on. The integrated web time tracker measures time, projects, and tasks. A broken timer allows employees to take time off when permitted. A booking facility also allows people to book meeting rooms and other shared resources. 

DeskTime Standout Features and Integrations

Features include automatic time-tracking, offline time tracking, private time options, document title tracking, a Pomodoro timer, custom reports, cost calculations, a mobile app, and shift scheduling. 

Integrations include Asana, Basecamp, Google Calendar, GitLab, Jira, Outlook Calendar, and Trello.

ActivTrak is an employee tracking tool that facilitates flexible schedules, ensures compliance, and promotes a healthy work balance for better long-term productivity. 

Why I picked ActivTrak: Using ActivTrak, you gain visibility into digital work so you can balance productivity, flexibility, and employee well-being. The software analyzes daily work activity data, giving you insights into time and technology usage, resource gaps, and productivity trends. 

You can measure daily work activity across hybrid and remote employees, and determine active or passive online status and current work focus. You can also categorize apps and websites by team, role, or job function to analyze usage. ActivTrak compares the habits of remote and in-office employees to understand productivity and process bottlenecks. 

ActivTrak Standout Features and Integrations

Features include dashboards, productivity reports, location insights, impact analysis, application and website usage, workload management, productivity coaching, team summaries, and website blocking.  

Integrations include Asana, Google Calendar, Jira, Lattice, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Workday, and Zoom.

TimeDoctor gives you direct visibility into your team’s workflow and productivity, showing you the websites and apps used by each employee throughout the day. 

Why I picked TimeDoctor: This app gives you actionable insights and information on employee performance trends designed to help you boost productivity. You can take screencasts of your employee’s screens at specified intervals and see which websites and apps they use the most. 

Time Doctor also helps you generate accurate payroll information and process invoices. Thanks to integrations with a wide range of popular business applications, you can adapt TimeDoctor to suit your organization’s needs. Overall, you get a clear picture of how employees are performing, allowing you to optimize team productivity and efficiency. 

TimeDoctor Standout Features and Integrations

Features include time-tracking, employee monitoring, online timesheets, payroll, project budgeting, distraction alerts, chat monitoring, offline time tracking, and email notifications. 

Integrations include Asana, ClickUp, Evernote, HelpScout, Jira, Payoneer, PayPal, Pipedrive, Salesforce, and Trello.

Hubstaff offers a unique blend of time-tracking and employee-monitoring software so you can see how your team works in real-time. 

Why I picked Hubstaff: You can use Hubstaff’s remote employee monitoring software to track your workforce’s time and generate accurate timesheets. You can also create automatic reminders to ensure that people don’t forget to track their time.

Website and app usage are directly measured by the software, giving you insights into potential distractions. You can also arrange automatic screenshots to keep track of user activity.  

The software tracks keyboard and mouse activity, but never obtains sensitive data. Instead, it measures the frequency of activity. 

Hubstaff Standout Features and Integrations

Features include time-tracking, online timesheets, time reports, timesheet approvals, screenshots, employee monitoring, and productivity tracking. 

Integrations include ActiveCollab, Asana, Breeze, ClickUp, GitHub, GitLab, Insightly, Jira, Liquid Planner, and Mavenlink.

Teramind offers remote work monitoring software that aims to increase both employee productivity and data security. 

Why I picked Teramind: This software application visually records every action that remote users make, including contractors and third parties. You can track all activities, including those taken in custom apps, and configure rules and policies to collect data on any user action. 

You can track all user activity while complying with any applicable employee privacy requirements. The software can monitor work done on local machines, remote domains, servers, or terminal servers. You can request a breakdown of work-related versus non-work related tasks, and get minute-to-minute trends graphs showing how much time is spent on specific projects. 

Teramind Standout Features and Integrations

Features include smart rules, automated alerts, live view, historical playback, website monitoring, application monitoring, email monitoring, instant message monitoring, time-tracking tools, and social media monitoring.

Integrations include ArcSight ESM, IBM Security Jira, QRadar, Redmine, Splunk Enterprise, and Zendesk.

EmailAnalytics gives you visibility into daily email activity and unlocks insights into how your team members respond to email inquiries.  

Why I picked EmailAnalytics: This tool shows your sales team’s email activity in an email analytics dashboard, so you can see how many emails are sent and received each day. You get insights into how many people your team corresponds with and the number of spam complaints received. You can also drill down into any metric to get further information.

It’s easy to see who sends the most emails, which clients team members respond to, and the average response time for each recipient. You can also check how many unread emails are in each person’s inbox or how many are labeled ‘important.’ The system also analyzes emails by time of day, so you can see when people are most active. 

EmailAnalytics Standout Features and Integrations

Features include emails sent & received, email traffic by day of the week, top senders & recipients, traffic by hour of the day, email response time, and team management. 

Integrations include Gmail, HubSpot, and Outlook.

Monitask offers employee monitoring for remote workplaces, including everything from automatic time-tracking to proof-of-work screenshots. 

Why I picked Monitask: This app keeps a record of when home-based employees start work and when they finish. In addition, it monitors the work hours of remote employees and ensures they work their full shifts. The employee productivity tracking ensures that team members stay focused and avoid distractions. 

Their employee monitoring solution also helps in ensuring the safety of sensitive data, especially when it is to be accessed outside the safe website. The system monitors if such sensitive data is being sent by email, uploaded to the cloud, or copied to an external USB device. Admins are alerted accordingly.

Monitask Standout Features and Integrations

Features include screenshot monitoring, a live dashboard, automatic time-tracking, productivity monitoring, app tracking, project management, and idle time removal.

Integrations include ActiveCollab, Active Directory, Acuity Scheduling, Basecamp, Box Time, ClickFunnels, ClickUp,  Convertri, DeskTime, and Easy Projects.

Interguard helps you monitor remote and work-from-home employees, keeping your business safe and productive wherever your team members are located.

Why I picked InterGuard: This software application will alert you if employees break rules, such as by exporting your customer list from your CRM. You can also go beyond monitoring and set up policies to block sensitive data from being sent by email, uploaded to the cloud, or copied to an external storage device. If employees are suspected of committing fraud or theft, you can lock down their computers remotely. 

The software also monitors employee productivity to ensure you get the best value on your investment. It helps you eliminate distractions and keep projects on track. You can also track the time spent on a project and identify potential delays that slow work down. 

InterGuard Standout Features and Integrations

Features include email monitoring, website blocking, chat monitoring, file tracking, screenshot taking, cell phone monitoring, keystroke logging, insider threat detection, and active time tracking.

Integrations are available through Zapier.

Veriato is a workforce behavior analytics company that gives you the tools you need to manage remote or hybrid employee productivity.

Why I picked Veriato: Veriato helps you manage remote teams effectively, highlighting unproductive employees and optimizing efficiency across the team. The software is ideal for dealing with complex corporate and regulatory compliance requirements in industries such as healthcare, legal, and financial services. 

Veriato makes it easier to run audits and stay compliant, with real-time alerts, customizable reporting, and dashboards. You can track how many minutes an employee’s computer was active or idle during the day, monitor chats, and take automatic screenshots. It’s also easy to set flexible start and finish times and decide when tracking starts or ends. 

Veriato Standout Features and Integrations

Monitoring features include email & chat monitoring, web & app tracking, automatic screenshots, idle & active time-tracking, network activity, file & document tracking, fully-customizable settings, reports, an employee monitoring system, and real-time alerts. 

Integrations with Veriato are available through Zapier.

Controlio is a scalable cloud solution that helps organizations of all sizes monitor employee productivity from anywhere. 

Why I picked Controlio: This solution offers a dashboard available from any device in any location, with all data fully encrypted. It can be deployed on-premises to meet HIPAA and GDPR requirements. The client software is completely invisible to the end user.

Controlio automatically tracks productive and distracting activities, calculating a productivity score for individual users and departments. You can control user behavior, get alerts, and track keystrokes, idle periods, and other data. Managers can also watch users live and see what apps they’re using.  

Controlio Standout Features and Integrations

Features include productivity monitoring, user behavior management, live view, screen recording, app & web usage, compliance monitoring, on-premises deployment, and stealth mode. 

Integrations are available through Zapier.