Clockify Review: A Deep Dive into Time Tracking for Teams

Every project manager knows the frustration: you start the week with a clear plan, but by Friday, you’re left wondering where all the hours went. For freelancers, small business owners, and even large enterprises, accurate time tracking isn’t just about billing clients; it’s about understanding productivity, optimizing workflows, and making data-driven decisions. Without a reliable system, valuable hours can slip away, impacting profitability and project timelines.

This is where Clockify steps in. As a highly popular and widely adopted time tracking software, Clockify promises to simplify how individuals and teams log their work hours, manage projects, and analyze their time usage. It aims to provide clarity and control over one of your most valuable assets: time. But does this seemingly simple tool truly deliver on its promise of comprehensive and efficient time management? In this detailed Clockify review, we’ll explore its core features, evaluate its performance, break down its pricing structure, and help you determine if it’s the right solution to keep your projects on track and your team productive.

What is Clockify?

Clockify is a widely used time tracking and work management software that enables individuals and teams to track work hours across various projects. Primarily known for its generous free tier, it provides a comprehensive suite of tools designed to monitor productivity, manage project costs, and streamline invoicing.

At its core, Clockify offers flexible methods for time entry, including a timer, manual input, an automatic tracker, and a shared kiosk, making it a foundational tool for understanding how time is spent. This is invaluable for both personal productivity and team supervision.

However, its functionality extends significantly beyond simple timekeeping. The platform integrates robust project management capabilities, allowing users to create projects, assign tasks, and set budgets to monitor progress and financial health in real-time. It also serves as a powerful team management tool by providing features for scheduling work, managing time off, and overseeing team activity to gain insights into workload distribution and performance.

Available as a web app and on desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux) and mobile (Android, iOS), Clockify’s cross-platform accessibility solidifies its position as a central hub for work management.

Key Features Breakdown

Clockify boasts a robust set of features, catering to diverse time tracking and project management needs.

Time Tracking Functionality

• Flexible Time Entry: Users can track time using a real-time timer (start/stop), manually enter hours into timesheets, or utilize a shared kiosk with PIN codes.
• Auto Tracker: Desktop apps can automatically track time spent on applications and websites, providing a detailed overview of computer usage.
• Idle Detection & Reminders: Helps prevent inaccurate time logging by detecting inactivity and prompting users to stop or continue their timers.
• Pomodoro Timer: A built-in feature to assist with focus and structured breaks, promoting productivity.

Project Management & Collaboration

• Projects & Tasks: Create unlimited projects and tasks, assign them to team members, and categorize them by clients. This allows for granular tracking of time against specific work items.
• Estimates & Budgets: Set time and money estimates for projects and tasks, enabling you to compare estimated vs. actual time and receive alerts when projects are nearing or exceeding their budget.
• Billable & Non-Billable Hours: Easily mark time entries as billable or non-billable, crucial for client invoicing and internal cost analysis.
• Team Management: Invite unlimited users, assign roles, and view team activity, including who is working on what in real-time.
• Scheduling & Forecasting: Plan work, assign shifts, manage team capacity, and visualize project timelines. (Available in higher-tier plans).

Reporting & Analytics

• Detailed Reports: Generate comprehensive reports (summary, detailed, weekly, assignment, attendance, expense) that can be filtered by user, project, client, task, and tags.
• Customizable Exports: Export reports in various formats (PDF, CSV, Excel) with customizable columns and company logos.
• Cost & Profit Analysis: Set hourly rates for users and projects to calculate earnings, costs, and profit, providing insights into project profitability.
• Timesheet Auditing: Tools to identify and correct uncategorized or suspicious time entries, ensuring data accuracy.

Additional Features

• Invoicing: Generate professional invoices directly from tracked billable hours and expenses.
• Expenses: Record project-related expenses and attach receipts, integrating them into invoices.
• Time Off Tracking: Manage team leaves, holidays, and track remaining balances.
• Integrations: Connects with over 80 popular business tools via browser extensions (e.g., Trello, Asana, Jira, Todoist, Google Docs) and Zapier for broader automation.

For those who prefer a visual guide, we’ve included a video that provides a great overview of Clockify’s main features. In this video, you’ll get a quick tour of the platform, showing you how to get started with time tracking, project management, and reporting. It’s a perfect way to get acquainted with the tool in just a few minutes!

Who is Clockify For?

Clockify’s versatile feature set and flexible pricing model make it suitable for a wide array of users, aligning perfectly with our target audience groups:

• Tech Entrepreneurs & Small Business Owners (Primary Audience): Clockify is an ideal solution for this group due to its robust free plan, which offers unlimited users and projects—a rarity in the time tracking space. This allows startups and small businesses to implement crucial time tracking without an initial financial commitment. As they scale, paid plans provide advanced features like invoicing, detailed reporting, and project budgeting, which are essential for managing growing teams and client projects effectively.
• Digital Marketing Professionals (Secondary Audience B): Marketing agencies and individual digital marketers greatly benefit from Clockify. They can accurately track time spent on client campaigns, SEO tasks, PPC management, and social media content creation. The ability to categorize time by client and project, generate detailed reports for billing, and identify areas for productivity improvement makes it an invaluable tool for managing multiple client accounts and proving work done.
• Corporate Tech Leaders (Managers & CEOs) (Secondary Audience A): While perhaps not their daily time entry tool, managers and CEOs can leverage Clockify’s reporting and team management features to gain high-level insights into team performance, project progress, and resource allocation. The ability to monitor budgets, analyze labor costs, and approve timesheets supports strategic decision-making and ensures project profitability at an organizational level.

Clockify is particularly strong for those who need a flexible, cloud-based solution that scales from individual freelancers to larger teams, emphasizing accurate time data for productivity and financial management.

Performance & Findings

Our hands-on evaluation of Clockify focused on its ease of use, reliability, and responsiveness across its various platforms.

Clockify consistently demonstrated a high level of usability. The web interface is clean and intuitive, making it straightforward to start and stop timers, log manual entries, and navigate reports. The desktop and mobile applications mirror this ease of use, ensuring a consistent experience regardless of the device. We found the real-time timer to be highly responsive, accurately logging seconds. Manual time entry via timesheets was also efficient, allowing for quick bulk additions.

The project and task creation process is simple and logical, enabling effective organization of work. Reporting generation was swift, even for large datasets, providing clear, actionable insights through its summary, detailed, and weekly views. The ability to apply various filters rapidly made it easy to drill down into specific data points (e.g., time spent per client per month).

The browser extensions proved to be incredibly convenient, embedding the timer directly into popular project management tools and other web apps, minimizing context switching. While the core time tracking is robust, some advanced features like scheduling and forecasting (which are part of higher-tier plans) offer good functionality but might not be as deeply integrated or as visually sophisticated as dedicated project management platforms. We noted consistent performance across different browsers and operating systems, with data syncing seamlessly between devices. Offline tracking capabilities on mobile apps also worked reliably, syncing entries once an internet connection was restored.

Our Experience: A Real-World Test

To give this review a practical foundation, it’s important to note that we aren’t just looking at Clockify from the outside. We have been active users for years.

Our team first integrated Clockify into its workflow on June 13, 2019. Drawn in by its feature set, we upgraded to a paid plan to explore its full capabilities. However, we eventually reverted to the free tier after realizing the core features were more than sufficient for our needs—a testament to how powerful the free version truly is.

Throughout this time, Clockify has proven to be a highly reliable time tracker and an effective work management tool. Its “free forever” promise isn’t a gimmick; it’s a robust, functional, and dependable platform that has become essential to our operations, and we continue to rely on it to this day.

Pricing

Clockify is well-known for its generous freemium model, making it accessible for a wide range of users while offering paid tiers for expanded features.

• Free Plan:
  • Cost: $0 (Free forever)
  • Features: Unlimited users, unlimited time tracking, unlimited projects, basic reporting, Pomodoro timer, auto tracker (desktop app), idle detection, and integrations with popular tools (via browser extensions). This plan is incredibly robust for individual freelancers and small teams primarily needing core time tracking.
• Paid Plans (Billed Annually / Monthly):
  • Basic Plan:
    • Cost: $3.99 per user/month (billed annually) / $4.99 per user/month (monthly)
    • Features: All Free features, plus timesheet customization, bulk editing, required fields, and time auditing tools.
  • Standard Plan:
    • Cost: $5.49 per user/month (billed annually) / $6.99 per user/month (monthly)
    • Features: All Basic features, plus time off tracking, timesheet approvals, invoicing, and QuickBooks integration.
  • Pro Plan:
    • Cost: $7.99 per user/month (billed annually) / $9.99 per user/month (monthly)
    • Features: All Standard features, plus scheduling and forecasting, expense tracking, labor cost and profit summaries, GPS tracking, and optional screenshots (desktop app). This plan is ideal for professional teams needing deeper insights and project management capabilities.
  • Enterprise Plan:
    • Cost: $11.99 per user/month (billed annually) / $14.99 per user/month (monthly)
    • Features: All Pro features, plus single sign-on (SSO), custom subdomain, audit log, and dedicated support. Designed for larger organizations with specific security and administrative needs.
• Kiosk Pricing (Additional Add-on): For organizations using the kiosk feature, there are additional per-kiosk-user monthly fees that vary by plan.

Clockify’s pricing model allows users to start free and seamlessly upgrade as their needs and team size grow, making it a highly scalable solution.

A Balanced Review: Pros and Cons

Clockify offers a compelling package, but it’s important to consider both its strengths and limitations.

Pros:

• Generous Free Plan: Offers unlimited users, projects, and basic tracking, making it highly accessible for startups and small teams.
• User-Friendly Interface: Intuitive design across web, desktop, and mobile apps ensures ease of adoption for all users.
• Versatile Time Tracking: Multiple methods (timer, manual, auto-tracker, kiosk) cater to different work styles and environments.
• Robust Reporting: Powerful reporting features allow for deep analysis of time, costs, and profitability.
• Scalability: Grows with your business, with paid plans unlocking advanced project management, invoicing, and team features.
• Cross-Platform Availability: Works seamlessly across all major operating systems and devices.
• Integrations: Good integration capabilities with popular project management and business tools.

Cons:

• Advanced Features Behind Paywall: While the free plan is great, many valuable features like invoicing, scheduling, and detailed cost analysis require a paid subscription.
• Less Granular Project Management: While it has project features, it’s not a full-fledged project management suite like Asana or Jira, and may require integration with other tools for complex task management. However, the company now offers a powerful solution to this with their new product bundle (more on that in our update below).
• Limited Customization in Free Tier: Customization options for reports and timesheets are primarily available in paid plans.
• Screenshot & GPS Tracking (Pro Plan): While useful for some, these features for employee monitoring are only available on the Pro plan and might raise privacy concerns for some teams.

Update: Supercharge Clockify with the CAKE.com Bundle

In our review, we noted that while Clockify is a world-class time tracker, it lacks the robust, built-in project management features that larger teams might need. The team at CAKE.com has clearly heard this feedback and has created a powerful solution by integrating Clockify into a larger suite of productivity tools.

This ecosystem approach allows you to keep Clockify for what it does best—time tracking—while seamlessly adding dedicated tools for project management and team communication.

Introducing Plaky and Pumble

To complete the suite, CAKE.com offers two other powerful platforms:

• Plaky: This is the answer to the project management gap. Plaky is a flexible and powerful project management platform designed to handle everything from simple task lists to complex workflows. Best of all, a direct integration between Clockify and Plaky is planned for release soon, which will create a seamless workflow between tracking your time and managing your projects.
• Pumble: This is a comprehensive team communication app, offering chat, channels, and voice/video calls. It’s designed to replace tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams.

The great news for partners is that both Plaky and Pumble are also part of the CAKE.com affiliate program, giving you more opportunities to earn.

The Bundle Plan: Get All Three for Less

While each product is powerful on its own, the real value comes from the CAKE.com Bundle. You can get the Enterprise-level plan for all three products—Clockify, Plaky, and Pumble—for a single, heavily discounted price.

Here’s how the savings break down:

• Bundle Plan Price (Annual): $12.99 per user/month
• Bundle Plan Price (Monthly): $15.99 per user/month

For comparison, paying for the Enterprise plans of all three products separately would cost $27.99/user (annually) or a staggering $43.99/user (monthly).

This means the bundle offers a massive 53% to 63% savings, making it an incredibly compelling offer for any business looking for a complete productivity suite.

‘The CAKE.com bundle can be purchased through any of CAKE.com’s products:’

• Clockify
• Pumble
• Plaky

The Verdict

Clockify stands out as an exceptional time tracking solution, particularly for its accessibility and scalability. Its free-forever plan, offering unlimited users and projects, provides an unparalleled entry point for freelancers, startups, and small businesses looking to gain control over their time without immediate financial commitment. As businesses grow, Clockify’s paid tiers unlock a powerful array of features, from advanced reporting and invoicing to scheduling and expense tracking, making it a comprehensive tool for managing productivity and profitability.

For tech entrepreneurs and small business owners, Clockify is a highly recommended tool to accurately track billable hours, monitor project progress, and understand team utilization. Digital marketing professionals will find its client-specific tracking and detailed reporting invaluable for client billing and optimizing campaign efforts.

While Clockify itself remains focused on being a best-in-class time tracker, its integration into the CAKE.com bundle directly addresses its previous limitations. By combining it with Plaky for project management and Pumble for team communication, it is no longer just a standalone tool but a core component of a complete productivity suite.

This makes Clockify undeniably one of the leading solutions available, offering a perfect blend of simplicity, power, and affordability that caters to the evolving needs of modern businesses.

Essential Tools for Time Tracking & Productivity (Beyond Clockify)

For those exploring alternatives or complementary tools in time management:

1. Toggl Track: A popular alternative known for its simple interface and powerful reporting, also offering a generous free plan. Great for individuals and teams focused purely on time tracking.
2. Harvest: A long-standing time tracking and invoicing solution, popular among agencies and freelancers for its robust billing capabilities and integration with accounting software.
3. TimeCamp: Offers automatic time tracking and project profitability analysis, with features like website and application usage tracking.
4. Monday.com: While primarily a work OS, it includes robust time tracking features integrated within its broader project management and workflow automation capabilities.
5. Everhour: Integrates directly with many popular project management tools (like Asana, Trello, Jira), allowing for seamless time tracking within existing workflows.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Clockify truly free for unlimited users?

Yes, the core time tracking features of Clockify are free forever for an unlimited number of users and projects, making it a very cost-effective option for basic time tracking needs.

Can Clockify generate invoices from tracked time?

Yes, Clockify can generate professional invoices based on your tracked billable hours and expenses, but this feature is available in the Standard plan and higher.

Does Clockify offer employee monitoring features?

Yes, the Pro plan includes optional features such as GPS tracking (for mobile) and periodic screenshots (for desktop app), which can be used for employee monitoring.

Can I use Clockify on my phone or desktop?

Absolutely. Clockify offers dedicated desktop applications for Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as mobile apps for Android and iOS, ensuring you can track time from anywhere.

How does Clockify help with project budgeting?

In its paid plans, Clockify allows you to set time and money estimates for projects and tasks. It then tracks actual time against these estimates, providing alerts and reports to help you stay within budget.

Does Clockify integrate with other business tools?

Yes, Clockify integrates with over 80 popular tools through browser extensions, allowing you to start timers directly within apps like Trello, Asana, and Jira. It also supports Zapier for broader custom integrations.