The Best Employee Time Tracking Software in 2023 | Monitor Your Employees’ Performance

The best employee tracking software will provide you with time-tracking tools and detailed reports to help you monitor employee productivity, internet, and device activity. Besides helping with the accuracy of timesheets, the best employee monitoring tools will help keep your business data safe from any leaks and theft.

However, finding the best tool for your business can be challenging. In this guide, we review the top 10 employee time tracking software. Read on to find out how the likes of industry leaders like Teramind, ActivTrak, and HubStaff compare and how they can help you improve employee productivity, attendance, and more.

The Best Employee Time Tracking Tools 2023 | Quick Answer

In our testing, we found Teramind to be the best employee monitoring and time tracking software, credit to its wide array of video capturing options, automated alerts, low prices, and a generous 30-day money-back guarantee. With that said, there are other viable options in the pack, too — see if they catch your eye:

1. Teramind – The Best Overall Employee Tracking Software in 2023. Put It To The Test With a 14-Day Free Trial + a 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee.
2. ActivTrak – The Best Free Employee Time Tracking Software For Improving Employee Productivity. Try It Now With a 14-Day Free Trial.
3. HubStaff – The Best Software For Tracking Employees Based on Their Location. Leverage HubStaff’s Free Plan and a 14-Day Free Trial.
4. StaffCop – The Best Employee Time Tracking App For Security. Judge Its Suitability For Your Need With a Live Demo and a 15-Day Free Trial.
5. Controlio – The Best Employee Monitoring Software For Data Organization. Try It Risk-Free With a Live Demo and a 14-Day Free Trial.
6. mSpy – The Best Employee Monitoring Software for Mobile Devices. Put It To The Test With a Free Live Demo and a 14-Day Money-Back Guarantee.
7. EyeZy – A Top Employee Monitoring Tool For Latest Video Recording Features. Try It Now With a 3-Day Free Trial and a 14-Day Money-Back Guarantee.
8. uMobix – A Fantastic Employee Tracker Covering Over 30 Apps. Has a Live Demo and a 14-Day Money-Back Guarantee.
9. Cocospy – A Top Mobile Employee Monitoring Solution For Small Businesses. Try It With Its Live Demo and a 14-Day Money-Back Guarantee.
10. Spyic – The Employee Time Tracking Software With The Longest Money-Back Guarantee of 60 Days. Also Has a Free Demo.

The Best Employee Time Tracking Software in 2023 | In-Depth Reviews

Here, we dive into the details of each of our top 10 employee time monitoring software, including their best features, pricing, pros, and cons. If you’re pressed for time, check out our crisp comparison table towards the end of these reviews.

1. Teramind – The Best Overall Employee Tracking Software in 2023

Teramind tops our list, and for good reason. There are fewer tools that can combine monitoring, analytics, and reporting features the way Teramind does. It goes beyond basic employee monitoring features and provides detailed activity updates and insights on your employees’ performance and productivity.

You’ll have a database of all your employees, with their respective departments written alongside their names, so you’ll know if any department as a whole is slacking. The Teramind dashboard will give you detailed insights into your employees’ day, including their current task in hand, active and idle time, and code of conduct violations, if any.

With Teramind’s alerting feature, you can send automated notifications to your employees if they spend more than a certain amount of time on an unproductive app, which, of course, you’ll have the option to specify beforehand. Other remedies include blocking the app, logging the employee out, and more. Need we say more?

We do. Teramind’s video capturing is highly versatile — you can capture:

• Normal screen recordings
• Live broadcast of employee PCs
• Zoom sessions

To top it off, Teramind backs up its beyond impressive catalog of features with a seamless user experience. Starting from a live demo — get a glimpse of the tool in action — to live chat for any queries that you might have, enjoy every step of the journey is hurdle-free with Teramind.

Pricing

Teramind’s paid packages are some of the most affordable in the industry. At $10/user/month, the Starter plan comes with social media tracking, remote control, alerting, activity blocking, and more.

Teramind also tags along with a live demo, a free plan, a 14-day free trial, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Try it now to see if it’s for you.

2. ActivTrak: The Best Free Employee Time Tracking Software For Improving Employee Productivity

ActivTrak is the best free employee time tracking app. What sets it apart is its equal focus on both employee tracking and improving worker productivity. With one of the easiest-to-understand UIs in the industry, ActivTrak chalks up a productivity bar chart that shows productive, unproductive, and idle time separately. You can also filter the results to show a specific department or user.

ActivTack doesn’t have targeted views like Teramind, but it does an impeccable job of showing what websites and apps your employees are currently on. Click on the Camera icon to take a screenshot if you want to zoom in.

ActivTrak puts time tracking on autopilot; it’ll send out real-time threat alerts and non-compliance reminders to employees. What’s more, ActivTrak is also customizable — you can decide the time interval after which you want ActicTrak to take a screenshot of the employee device.

The best part? You can view old screenshots by filtering them under categories such as user, date, and productivity. And not only can you mark websites and apps as productive/unproductive, but you can also segregate them further into categories like banking, games, email, entertainment, and more.

ActicTrak’s bottom line is not to pry on employees but to produce analytics and insights that give you a better idea of how you can improve their productivity. For example, based on employee searches, you can zero in on the areas they’re incompetent at and design a coaching/training module accordingly.

Pricing

ActivTrak starts free and offers a compelling free package with features such as activity alarms and 24/7 access to educational resources. If you need a little more from the tool, go for the Advanced plan ($10/user/month) that comes with features such as remote installation and alarm-triggered screenshots.

Note that ActivTrak’s 14-day trial plan is equivalent to its Premium plan.

3. HubStaff: The Best Software For Tracking Employees Based on Their Location

HubStaff is one of the biggest employee tracking apps out there. Every month, it helps over 40,000 businesses worldwide with their combined 4 million tasks and over 21 million hours of tracking.

HubStaff’s USP is the geofenced time-tracking feature on its mobile app. Here, the concerned employee gets clocked in and out automatically, based on their location, so that you don’t have to worry about your team rigging the timesheet for onsite jobs.

Other time tracking features include online timesheets, time reports, and timesheet approval to get accurate numbers on hour-based wages and to ensure you pay for only legitimate hours. Such built-in integrations will save you money that you’d have otherwise spent on third-party payroll and invoicing integrations.

You can also track what websites and apps your employee visits, how long their sessions are, see the activity provided by their mouse and keyboards (HubStaff doesn’t log keys per se), and capture screenshots remotely. You can then access all this info from HubStaff’s dashboard, where you can filter the results by user.

Another standout HubStaff feature is how it integrates with leading project management tools like Asana and Trello to give you a better understanding of your employee’s productivity and progress with assigned tasks.

Pricing

HubStaff, alongside Spyic, are the only two employee time-tracking apps with a 60-day money-back guarantee — ActivTrak doesn’t have one. And, with a free plan and paid plans starting as low as $5.83/user/month, HubStaff sells itself.

However, if you want your hands on HubStaff’s most prestige feature — GPS tracking, you’ll have to put down $10/month/user, which is still at par with the industry’s best though.

4. StaffCop: The Best Employee Time Tracking App For Security

StaffCop is a fantastic end-to-end employee monitoring app, but we’d like to talk about its unprecedented security features. For starters, it comes with a powerful insider threat prevention feature that not only tracks employee activity but also assesses whether what they’re doing is in accordance with your organization’s code of conduct.

StaffCop and Teramind are the only providers that offer OCR (Optical Character Recognition), but StaffCop’s OCR is different in that it’s open to every data type possible.

Here, let us explain: you can pick a certain keyword — for example, a corporate card’s number — that might hint at unethical employee practice and search for it across chats, keystrokes, emails, Google Drive, OneDrive, and even within Microsoft Word or PDF documents saved locally on the employee device.

StaffCop will send real-time alerts on unwanted employee behavior. You’re also free to set up custom alerts and screenshots with multiple behavior anomalies as triggers. Taking our earlier example, you can customize StaffCop to send you an alert or a screenshot any time an employee enters a corporate card number.

Other noteworthy features include StaffCop’s Live Administration (allows you to take complete control of an employee device remotely) and detailed Summary Reports (shows a list of top latecomers, time spent on productive vs unproductive apps, and more).

Pricing

StaffCop’s pricing is peculiar but simple. You can either purchase it for 3 months, 12 months, or for perpetuity. The yearly plan is priced at $8.16/month/user for 5 users and $5.83/month/user for 10 users.

StaffCop comes with a live demo and a 15-day free trial, so try it now without any financial commitment.

5. Controlio: The Best Employee Monitoring Software For Data Organization

Controlio should be your pick if you don’t want to comb through heaps of data to find who your most productive/unproductive employees are. It ranks your employees based on their productivity score, which it prepares by tracking and then averaging your team’s productive and distracted hours.

Controlio is better than other employee tracking solutions by virtue of its data organization. There are countless fields for which you can generate a report, including attendance, searches, emails, online sessions, and more. And for each of these, there’s hardly any info Controlio leaves out, then be it the user’s details, the computer used, or even time stamps.

Controlio is at par with the industry’s best as far as tracking your employees’ activities, productivity, as well as behavior anomalies all in one place is concerned. Like Teramind, Controlio, too, provides live video recordings, an intuitive keylogger, automated alerts, and scheduled reports to keep an eye on employee productivity and threat detection remotely.

Although Controlio doesn’t allow you to enter a custom field for triggering alerts, it more than makes up for it by providing an exhaustive list of events that you might want to receive an alert. This includes launching an app, visiting a specific website, specific keystrokes, and more.

Controlio is cloud-based, which makes it highly scalable and, therefore, a perfect solution for employee monitoring needs of small to midsize businesses.

Pricing

Controlio starts at $7.99/user on the monthly plan, which is still very affordable but bump your plan from a monthly to an annual, and you’ll be paying only $6.65/month/user.

A live demo, a 14-day free trial, and a 7-day hosting refund will give you enough room to try the tool out for free before putting down any money on it.

6. mSpy: The Best Employee Monitoring Software for Mobile Devices

mSpy simplifies employee time tracking and offers a comprehensive solution for employee activity and location tracking — in addition to being one of the best keyloggers for iOS and Android.

mSpy is a champion of tracking communication channels. You’ll be alerted with every new message and reply, then be it the target’s Whatsapp, Snapchat, or Facebook Messenger; mSpy’s eyes are everywhere.

It has a phenomenal keystroke logger that will tell you every keystroke that was entered, on what app (browser search bars included), and when.

You can manage your field workers with mSpy’s live GPS tracking or location history to ensure they’re not up to anything spooky.

In addition to providing live video recordings, mSpy’s screen recorder also lets you download every conversation’s screenshot — in case you need to build up evidence against the unethical practices of an employee.

With a graph of the target phone’s overall device activity, including a list of the contacts and websites they recently visited, mSpy leaves no stone unturned in securing your business’s data and productivity.

Pricing

1. Monthly: $69.99/month
2. Quarterly: $40/month
3. Yearly: $16.67/month

mSpy’s yearly plan at $16.67/month is a bargain. Plus, it often comes up with additional discounts, so keep an eye out for those.

How can we not mention the 14-day money-back guarantee — try mSpy now, and if you don’t like it, get a full refund.

7. EyeZy: A Top Employee Monitoring Tool For Latest Video Recording Features

EyeZy is not very different from mSpy — both are excellent parental control apps but double up as fantastic employee time and activity trackers too.

EyeZy’s keylogger requires jailbreaking/rooting the target device, but it does a solid job of churning out every detail about every keystroke, including what app/search bar/chat it was typed in.

In addition to knowing what your employees are searching for online, you’ll also have access to their call log — in fact, Eyezy is one of the best call logger apps out there.

Yes, you can use EyeZy to remotely restrict your employees’ access to specific websites and apps, but you can do one better to be a little more accommodating — set a specific time limit on usage of unproductive apps during work hours. Once the set time limit is crossed, your employees won’t be able to access those apps altogether.

Speaking of EyeZy’s screen recording feature, it’s always the first in the industry to implement new technology, leaving little to no room for your employees to hide malicious intent.

EyeZy takes a screenshot any time your target phone receives a new message or sends one, but you’re free to customize alerts for any specific set of keywords.

Pricing

1. Monthly: $47.99/month
2. Quarterly: $27.99/month
3. Yearly: $9.99/month

At $9.99/month, EyeZy offers the best value-for-money proposition as compared to other secret screen recorders. Plus, with a free demo, a 3-day free trial, and a 14-day money-back guarantee on your side, you can have a good taste of whether EyeZy is the one for you before you put any money in it.

8. uMobix: A Fantastic Employee Tracker Covering Over 30 Apps

uMobix is not only one of the best phone spy apps but also excels as an employee time tracking app, too, thanks to its phenomenal device tracking and time monitoring features. For starters, it can monitor over 30 mobile apps completely undetected, including Telegram, Chrome, Whatsapp, and Instagram.

uMobix also gives you data regarding your employees’ media files, GPS locations, internet searches (even in incognito mode), and all copy-pasted/typed/deleted texts, including the time spent on these activities, so you’ll know how productive a particular user or department is.

With access to your team’s messages and call logs, you’ll be able to ensure they are communicating well with the clients and are sparing enough time for them.

In addition to all this, you can access your employees’ deleted data and control their devices remotely — you can restrict access to specific websites and apps —  so that they do not overstep your business’s internal code of conduct.

Besides being a feature-rich employee tracker, uMobix is incredibly accommodating too. It’s available in multiple international languages and tags along with a free demo, making it easier for you to get acquainted with its interface.

Pricing

• 1-month: $49.99/month
• 3-month: $27.99/month
• 12-month: $11.66/month

At just $11.66/month, uMobix’s 1-year plan is a great value-for-money deal.

Try it risk-free with a live demo and a 14-day money-back guarantee.

9. Cocospy: A Top Mobile Employee Monitoring Solution For Small Businesses

Cocospy — available for both Android and iOS — is a good solution for small businesses that need few but robust employee monitoring features. With Cocospy, you can keep an eye on your employee-client relationship by enjoying live access to your team’s primary communication channels like calls, SMS messages, and even group chats like that on Skype or any other communication channel, for that matter.

Cocospy also excels in monitoring field workers, primarily due to its accurate GPS tracker and geofencing capabilities that track their live location and send you an alert anytime they try to leave the worksite before the scheduled hours. In fact, it’s one of the best geofencing apps to use in 2023.

You can also track your employees’ web activities to ensure they are only looking for work-related queries instead of wasting hours on unproductive/malicious websites or apps.

Although Cocospy can’t take screen recordings, it does a fabulous job in providing unrestricted access to your employee device’s media files, where you can look for records or data they shouldn’t be having.

Pricing

• 1-month plan: $49.99/month
• 3-month plan: $29.99/month
• 12-month plan: $12.50/month

Try Cocospy today with a free demo and a 14-day money-back guarantee.

10. Spyic: The Employee Time Tracking Software With The Longest Money-Back Guarantee of 60 Days

Spyic might not be the most feature-rich service for employee monitoring but it’ll still do a decent enough job for small businesses with a small team (3-5 members) that do not require extensive tracking across multiple fronts.

A Spyic feature that stands out is call tracking; Spyic is near-perfect if you want info about the number of calls your employees make, the duration of each, and their timestamps. With access to all their incoming and outgoing calls, you’ll know whether they’re attending personal calls during office hours or being unproductive.

Like mSpy and EyeZy, Spyic, too, has prompt a GPS tracker and geofencing alerts that’ll notify you if your employee is somewhere they shouldn’t be when it’s time to work.

Other useful employee tracking features include web monitoring and SMS, social media, and SIM card tracking — Spyic will send you an alert if your employee tries to outwit you by inserting their own SIM card in the phone provided and paid for by the company.

Pricing

• 1-month plan: $49.99/month
• 3-month plan: $23.33/month
• 12-month plan: $9.99/month

Apart from this, Spyic also has a Basic and a Family plan with more device coverage and a few enterprise-level features, so check those out too.

Spyic provides a generous 60-day money-back guarantee in addition to a demo, so try it risk-free today.

The Best Employee Time Tracking Software Comparison Table

Read on to find out the key differences between the top 10 employee monitoring solutions in about a couple of minutes:

How We Choose The Best Employee Time Tracking App?

If you are to trust our selection, you might want to know how we picked the best employee tracking app. So here is a glimpse of our checklist:

1. Scalability 

With the right resources and business plan, your company will keep growing. So you need an employee tracking app that can grow with your company. Whatever time tracking app you pick should be able to handle a huge team of an enterprise just as well as they handle the team of a small business.

Choosing a scalable employee time tracking app will ensure that lack of human resource management isn’t restricting your growth.

2. Filters & Customization

The more your company goes, the bigger your team will be. Powerful employee tracking apps like the ones mentioned above will do their best to extract every little piece of information about your team. While this information is certainly important, can you imagine the amount of data you will have to deal with on a day-to-day basis?

If you don’t want to waste your time looking for important data in heaps of information, make sure your employee tracking app offers enough customizations and filters to help you shift through the piles of information and find the ones you are looking for in just a few seconds.

3. Comprehensive Reporting 

When you are responsible for running the whole business, you obviously won’t have the time to go through every little employee activity update. In that case, the best way to stay updated is through a tracking app that automatically creates reports on employee activity and productivity.

This way, you will have all the important highlights ready whenever you have the time to check instead of making your own list of important events of the week.

4. Automated Alerts 

Even if the employee tracking app keeps everything ready for you to check, it’s practically impossible to get on the app every few minutes just to keep an eye on your employees. That’s why most popular tracking apps like Teramind have an automatic alerting feature under which you are immediately notified of employees being unproductive for too long.

Some of these tools will also let you send automated warnings in case your employees cater to their personal tasks during working hours.

5. Pricing 

The best part about our list of employee tracking apps is there is something for every budget. Whether you want a cheap, beginner-level plan or a premium, customizable one for your enterprise-level need, our top 10 picks cover you well. After all, no matter how brilliant the app is, you cannot let it wreck your budget.

If you are not ready for any financial commitment yet, you can also use ActivTrak’s free plan to get accustomed to the tool first. Most of these tools also come with a live demo or free trial before moving to a paid plan.

How To Set Up An Employee Time Tracking App

If you need a little help setting up your employee time-tracking app, here is a quick installation guide with Teramind:

1. Visit the Teramind website and click on the “Free Trial” button on the top-right corner of the screen.
2. You will get a pop-up asking you to enter your business email address. Enter your email and move to the next step.
3. On the next page, you will have to enter more information about your business, like the number of employees you have, company phone number, company name, and your full name. On the same page, you can choose whether you want to self-host Teramind or opt for cloud hosting. Hit “Start Your Free Trial” once you have filled everything in.
4. After your account has been created, log in to your dashboard. It will look something like the picture below.
5. From here, you can get a complete overview of your employee’s activity or click on the categories in the left-side menu for a closer look at some specific parameters.

Remember, every app works differently. However, since Teramind is one of the most beginner-friendly tools here with the best employee time-tracking features, we decided to give you an idea of how to go about it with Teramind as an example. You are free to pick any other tool you wish. ActivTrak, Hubstaff, and all the other apps are just as easy to set up.

Employee Time Tracking Software FAQs