Best Time Tracking Software for Consultants: 8 Tools Compared

#1

Harvest

Best for: consultants who invoice for every tracked hour

Visit getharvest.com

Harvest has been the default time tracker for consulting firms and agencies for nearly two decades, and the reason is boring in the best way: it turns hours into invoices faster than anything else in this list. Log your time against a project, hit a button, and a polished invoice is ready to send, with payments accepted through Stripe or PayPal right from the invoice.

For consultants, the budget alerts deserve special attention. You set an hour or money budget per project, and Harvest flags it before you blow past it, not after. The retainer tracking is equally useful if you sell monthly hour banks to clients. The catch is pricing discipline: at $9 a seat per month billed annually, a 20-person firm pays $2,160 a year, and the free plan only covers one seat, so solo users get the full experience while teams pay up. But if your revenue model is "hours in, invoice out," that cost is a rounding error against the hours you stop forgetting to bill.

#2

Toggl Track

Best for: consultants who want tracking that takes seconds, not minutes

Visit toggl.com

Toggl Track is what consultants reach for when adoption is the worry. The one-click timer, idle detection, and calendar integrations mean hours get captured as work happens rather than reconstructed on Friday afternoon. For a consulting practice, the billable-rate setup on the Starter plan lets you tag every hour with a client rate, and the reporting breaks time down by client, project, or team member for clean invoicing inputs.

The honest limitation: Toggl Track will not invoice for you. You will export or integrate into your billing workflow, which adds a step Harvest and BigTime skip. But if you are a solo consultant or a small team that mostly needs accurate records to feed an existing accounting process, Toggl's speed of capture beats feature depth. The free plan is generous enough that many independent consultants never pay, and that is hard to argue with.

#3

Clockify

Best for: consulting teams that refuse to pay for tracking

Visit clockify.me

Clockify is the budget answer to the entire category. The free plan genuinely covers unlimited users and projects, so a consulting firm can track every hour across the whole practice for $0 and only upgrade when it needs invoicing, approvals, or billable-rate controls. Paid tiers start at $3.99 a user per month billed annually, which is roughly half of what most competitors charge.

There is a trade-off for that price. Clockify is broad rather than polished: it does timesheets, scheduling, time-off, GPS tracking, and invoicing, but none of it feels as refined as the specialists. Consultants who bill by the hour will want at least the Standard plan for invoicing and task rates. But as a first tracker for a firm formalizing billable hours, Clockify removes every financial excuse, and it works on every platform including Linux.

#4

Timely

Best for: consultants who chronically forget to start timers

Visit timely.com

Timely attacks the core failure mode of consultant time tracking: the forgotten timer. Its Memory tool watches which apps and documents you use, and its AI drafts your timesheet automatically. You review, adjust, and approve in minutes instead of reconstructing a week from calendar invites and sent-mail folders. For consultants whose billable work scatters across email, research, calls, and documents, the captured-hours math alone can justify the $9 a seat.

The privacy design matters too. Nothing is shared until the user approves it, which makes this the easiest automatic tracker to sell to privacy-conscious teams. The downside is that there is no free forever tier, only a 14-day trial, and the AI categorization occasionally misassigns work to the wrong client, so a weekly review habit is still mandatory. If your practice loses more to uncaptured hours than to any software fee, Timely is the answer.

#5

BigTime

Best for: consulting firms that run on QuickBooks

Visit bigtime.net

BigTime is not a time tracker with billing bolted on; it is professional services automation where time tracking is one piece of a quote-to-cash system. For consulting firms that already live in QuickBooks, that is the whole pitch: hours, expenses, rate cards, project budgets, and invoices stay in one workflow, with timesheets feeding invoices that sync back to the general ledger.

The AI-assisted features and utilization reporting give partners a live view of margin while a project is running, not after it closes. The honest catch is weight. BigTime expects setup: rate cards, billing rules, and GL mapping need configuration, and the quote-based pricing means you will talk to sales. Firms under ten people will usually do fine with Harvest or Clockify. Firms where billing accuracy touches revenue every single week are exactly who BigTime is built for.

#6

Avaza

Best for: small consulting practices that want projects, time, and invoices in one app

Visit avaza.com

Avaza is the value play for consultants who are tired of paying for five apps. One subscription covers project management with kanban and Gantt views, timesheets with flexible per-project rates, expense tracking, quotes, invoices, and even team chat. The flat monthly pricing is unusual in this category: the Startup plan is $11.95 a month total, not per user, which makes it dramatically cheaper than per-seat tools once your team passes a handful of people.

The time tracking itself is straightforward rather than clever: timers, manual entries, timesheet approvals, and billing by project or user rate. You will not get Timely's automatic capture or BigTime's deep financial logic. But for a small consultancy that wants one login for delivery and billing, Avaza covers the whole operational surface at a price that is hard to argue with. The free plan is enough to evaluate it honestly before committing.

#7

Hubstaff

Best for: consulting firms with remote contractors who need verified hours

Visit hubstaff.com

Hubstaff is the tool consultants pick when the question is not "how many hours did we spend" but "can we prove it." The activity tracking, optional screenshots, and app/URL logs create verifiable time records, which matters when clients audit invoices or when you pay subcontractors by the hour. The payroll automation then turns approved timesheets into payments through PayPal, Wise, and others, which is genuinely useful for firms managing distributed contractor teams.

The caveat is cultural. Screenshot monitoring sits badly with senior consultants who sell expertise, not keystrokes, and you can disable the surveillance features, which most practices should. Used as a clean tracker with optional verification, Hubstaff is a solid, cheap option starting at $4.99 a user a month billed annually. Used as spyware, it will cost you your best people. Decide which one you are buying before you sign up.

#8

Everhour

Best for: consultants who manage work in Asana, ClickUp, Trello, or Jira

Visit everhour.com

Everhour understands something most trackers miss: consultants already work inside project management tools, and making them switch to a separate timer is where adoption dies. Its browser extension puts start and stop buttons directly on Asana tasks, ClickUp items, Trello cards, and Notion pages. Time flows into Everhour's reports, budgets update in real time, and invoices generate from approved timesheets.

The single Team plan at $8.50 a user a month billed annually keeps pricing simple, and the free plan covers up to five seats, which is generous for a small practice. The 5-user minimum on the paid plan means a 2-person consultancy pays for five, which stings a little. But for teams that already run their delivery in one of the supported PM tools, Everhour's embedded tracking removes more friction than any other feature on this list.