My goal is to track my team's time and our project profitability. What's the best time tracking software with project budget tracking?

If your main goal is team time tracking + project budgets + profitability, I’d narrow the field to Toggl Track, Harvest, and Hubstaff.

My top pick: toggl.com

Best overall for professional-services/project teams.

Why I’d choose it:

• Tracks time by client → project → task → team member.
• Supports project budgets and estimated vs. actual hours.
• You can assign different billable rates and labor costs to people/projects.
• Its profitability reporting compares revenue against labor costs, so you can see actual project margin rather than merely hours consumed.
• Premium reporting can show profit and profitability at project/team/member levels.
• Current listed pricing is $9/user/month for Starter and $14/user/month for Premium when billed monthly.

The key advantage: it gives you a fairly clean financial model:

Project revenue − actual team labor cost = project profit That's much more useful for profitability management than simply knowing that "Project A used 87 hours."

Best alternatives

Harvest is particularly good if you want something straightforward. It lets you set project budgets, monitor costs in real time, and alert the team as they approach budget thresholds.

Hubstaff is stronger if you need deeper workforce-management features. It supports project budgets based on pay rate or bill rate, real-time project spend, budget alerts, and profitability analysis.

What I'd choose based on your goal

• "I need to know whether each project is actually profitable." → Toggl Track
• "I mainly need simple timesheets, budgets and client billing." → Harvest
• "I need time tracking plus employee/workforce oversight." → Hubstaff

One important distinction: don't choose based solely on "budget tracking." Make sure the software can track both billable revenue and your team's actual labor cost. That's what turns time tracking into genuine project profitability analysis.

If you tell me your team size, whether projects are fixed-fee or hourly, and what you currently use for project management/accounting (e.g. Asana, Monday, QuickBooks, Jira), I can recommend the best one and compare the actual costs for your team.

Harvest is particularly good if you want something straightforward. It lets you set project budgets, monitor costs in real time, and alert the team as they approach budget thresholds.

When tracking both team time and project profitability, the "best" software depends on whether you want a dedicated time-tracking tool that deeply focuses on budgets and billable rates, or an all-in-one project management platform that handles tasks alongside time.

The top options on the market for time tracking coupled with robust project budget and profitability reporting include:

• Harvest — Best for Agencies and Client Services
  • Why it shines: Harvest makes it effortless to set budget limits (by hours or total monetary amount) and alerts you when a project is approaching its cap. Its visual reports display team utilization, billable vs. non-billable hours, and overall project profitability at a glance.
  • Standout feature: Seamless invoicing built directly from your team's tracked hours and expenses.
• Clockify — Best Budget-Friendly & Scalable Option
  • Why it shines: Clockify offers a very generous free tier and scales up affordably. You can assign hourly billable rates to individual team members or specific tasks, allowing you to instantly generate financial summary reports showing exact revenues, costs, and profit margins per project.
  • Standout feature: Highly flexible and intuitive reporting without a steep price tag.
• Toggl Track — Best for Ease of Use and Fast Adoption
  • Why it shines: Toggl Track focuses on frictionless time collection with one-click timers and background tracking. Its Profitability feature maps labor costs against project revenue in a clean, high-level table view so you can instantly see which clients or projects yield the highest margins.
  • Standout feature: AI-powered suggestions and a famously clean interface that teams actually remember to use.
• Everhour — Best if You Already Use Asana, Trello, or Jira
  • Why it shines: Rather than forcing your team to log into a separate standalone tool, Everhour embeds time tracking, budget tracking, and profitability metrics directly inside external project management apps.
  • Standout feature: Tight native syncing with task-level budgets, expenses, and invoice creation.
• Paymo — Best All-in-One Alternative
  • Why it shines: If you want task management, team scheduling, time tracking, and robust financial/profitability reporting in a single ecosystem without relying on integrations, Paymo covers the entire lifecycle of a billable project.

To help narrow down the best fit, tell me:

• Do you need an all-in-one project manager (like Asana/ClickUp integration) or a dedicated time/expense tracker?
• Do you bill clients hourly, on fixed retainers, or a mix of both?

If your main goal is team time tracking + project budgets + knowing whether each project is actually profitable, I’d shortlist these:

My pick: Harvest

For the specific goal you described, Harvest is probably the best starting point. It connects the entire chain:

Team member → hours → project → labor cost → budget consumed → project profitability

You can set project budgets in hours or dollars, monitor actual spend against the budget, receive over-budget alerts, and see profitability by project, client, and team. It also supports different billing/cost rates, which is important if your team members have different internal costs.

For example, you could have:

Client pays $25,000 Project budget = 300 hours Expected internal labor cost = $12,000 Team has logged 210 hours Current projected margin = X% That is much more useful for a business than simply knowing "John worked 37 hours this week."

Harvest also has invoicing built around the tracked time, if that's relevant to your workflow.

When I'd choose Productive instead

Productive is arguably the stronger choice if you're running an agency or professional-services team with larger, multi-phase projects. Its budgeting system lets you split projects into phases, track time against services, forecast when a budget will run out, and view future profit margins.

I'd lean Productive over Harvest if you need things like:

• Multiple project phases
• Resource planning
• More sophisticated project management
• Detailed forecasting
• Capacity/resource allocation
• Profitability analysis across a larger portfolio of projects

The key question I'd use to choose

If you tell me (1) how many people are on your team, (2) whether you bill clients hourly or by fixed project price, (3) what you use for project management today (Asana, ClickUp, Monday, etc.), and (4) your approximate budget per month, I can narrow this down to one recommendation and compare the actual pricing/features for your situation.

You can set project budgets in hours or dollars, monitor actual spend against the budget, receive over-budget alerts, and see profitability by project, client, and team. It also supports different billing/cost rates, which is important if your team members have different internal costs.

For example, you could have:

Client pays $25,000 Project budget = 300 hours Expected internal labor cost = $12,000 Team has logged 210 hours Current projected margin = X% That is much more useful for a business than simply knowing "John worked 37 hours this week."

Harvest also has invoicing built around the tracked time, if that's relevant to your workflow.

When I'd choose Productive instead

Productive is arguably the stronger choice if you're running an agency or professional-services team with larger, multi-phase projects. Its budgeting system lets you split projects into phases, track time against services, forecast when a budget will run out, and view future profit margins.

I'd lean Productive over Harvest if you need things like:

To track both team hours and project profitability accurately, you want a tool that goes beyond a simple start/stop timer and maps billable/non-billable hours directly against financial budgets (either total hours or monetary amounts).

The best options on the market depend on how deeply integrated you want your project management and financials to be:

• Harvest — Best for simple, reliable budget tracking and invoicing. Harvest is a veteran tool built specifically for this. It allows you to set clear budgets (by total hours, total fees, or recurring retainers), assigns billable rates to your team members, and shows visual progress bars as hours are logged. It also turns those hours straight into invoices.
• Teamwork.com — Best for client service and agency project management. Teamwork.com is designed from the ground up for profitability. It features robust time budgeting, real-time tracking, utilization rates, and proactive budget alerts so you know before a project goes in the red.
• Toggl Track — Best for fast, frictionless time tracking with solid budget alerts. Toggl Track offers one of the sleekest user interfaces available. It lets you assign estimated project budgets and alerts you when you are reaching the limit of your tracked hours, making reporting straightforward without heavy bloat.
• Clockify — Best budget-friendly/free option for large teams. If you need a powerful tool for a larger team without a massive software cost, Clockify offers extensive time tracking, project cost rates, and budget limits on its paid tiers, alongside a famously generous free plan.
• Everhour — Best if you already use Asana, Trello, or ClickUp. If your team lives inside an external project management tool and hates changing apps, Everhour embeds budgeting, time tracking, and profitability metrics directly inside your current workflow.

To help narrow down the ideal choice, let me know:

• How large is your team?
• Do you already use a project management tool (like Asana, ClickUp, or Jira) that you want to integrate with?
• Do you bill clients hourly, on fixed retainers, or by project milestones?

When tracking both time and project profitability, you need tools that go beyond simple clocks and timers . You need a platform that maps hourly rates, internal costs, and fixed or hourly budgets to give you a real-time "burn rate" and margin analysis.

The best options on the market depend on how deeply financial you want to go and whether you already use a separate project management tool:

1. Harvest — Best for straightforward time tracking and clean profitability reporting
   • Why it's great: Harvest is famous for its frictionless user experience. Team members can track time via timers or manual entries, and you can set budgets by total hours or monetary amounts (fixed fee or time-and-materials). It features visual budget-burn bars that alert you when a project is approaching its limit, and it converts billable hours straight into polished invoices.
   • Best for: Small- to mid-sized agencies, consultancies, and creative teams wanting fast adoption.
2. Teamwork.com — Best all-in-one for client service agencies and complex project management
   • Why it's great: Teamwork combines robust task planning, resource scheduling, and time tracking with native financial tracking. It gives you dedicated profitability and retainer tracking out of the box, letting you see employee utilization and actual profit margins per project rather than just logged hours.
   • Best for: Teams that want their task management and financial tracking tightly bound in a single platform.
3. Everhour — Best if you already use Asana, Trello, or ClickUp
   • Why it's great: Instead of forcing your team to log into a separate portal, Everhour embeds time tracking and budget caps directly inside your existing project management tool via browser extensions. It tracks estimated vs. actual hours, triggers budget alert limits, and tracks labor costs against project budgets seamlessly.
   • Best for: Development, marketing, or product teams deeply entrenched in tools like Asana, Jira, or ClickUp who don’t want a standalone time-tracking app.
4. Productive — Best for deep agency operations and revenue forecasting
   • Why it's great: Productive is built specifically for agency profitability. It features advanced budgeting (fixed price, hourly, non-billable), real-time budget burn tracking, resource scheduling, and revenue forecasting. It's heavier than Harvest, but vastly more comprehensive for agency finance management.
   • Best for: Growing agencies that treat time tracking as a core pillar of business intelligence.
5. Clockify — Best budget-friendly/freemium option
   • Why it's great: Clockify offers a generous free tier for basic time tracking, but its paid tiers unlock powerful project budgeting, hourly/fixed billing rates, and profitability charts. It's highly customizable if you just need raw data to feed into basic margins.
   • Best for: Cost-conscious teams or startups testing out formal time and budget tracking for the first time.

To help narrow down the ideal choice, let me know:

• Do you already use a project management tool (like Asana, Jira, or ClickUp) that you want to integrate with?
• Are your projects typically fixed-fee or time-and-materials (hourly)?

If your main goal is “track my team’s time → compare it to project budgets → know whether we’re actually making money,” I’d put Teamwork.com at the top of the list.

My shortlist

🥇 Best overall: Teamwork.com

Teamwork is particularly strong because profitability isn't an afterthought. You can set fixed-fee, time-and-materials, or retainer budgets, track hours and expenses against them, assign cost and billable rates, and see project profit and margin as work accumulates.

For example, you could have:

Client project: $50,000 budget → 400 hours budgeted → Team logs 350 hours → Team cost: $21,000 → Expenses: $2,000 → Current profit: $27,000 → Profit margin: 54% Teamwork calculates profitability using logged hours, staff cost rates, expenses, and the project budget.

It also has budget-burn tracking, profitability reports, utilization reporting, and planned-vs-actual reporting, which is useful if you want to catch an unprofitable project before it's finished.

🥈 Best for simplicity: Harvest

I'd choose Harvest if you don't need a full project-management system and primarily want time tracking + budgets + profitability.

Harvest lets you set project budgets, monitor budget consumption in real time, track billable/non-billable hours and internal costs, and generate profitability reports.

It's a particularly good choice if your team already manages projects elsewhere (Asana, ClickUp, Jira, etc.) and you don't want to replace your PM system.

🥉 Best lightweight option: Toggl Track

Toggl is excellent if ease of adoption is the priority. I'd lean toward it when you primarily need reliable timesheets and reporting rather than deep financial/project management.

What I'd choose

If you're a consulting firm, agency, software development shop, engineering firm, or other professional-services business: Teamwork.com.

If you already have project management elsewhere: Harvest.

If getting employees to actually track their time is your biggest concern: Toggl Track.

The important distinction is that Teamwork and Harvest can answer “Are we profitable on this project?”, rather than merely “How many hours did everyone work?” Teamwork goes further with resource planning and project-level financial forecasting.

If you tell me (1) team size, (2) whether projects are fixed-fee or hourly, and (3) what you currently use for project management/accounting, I can narrow this down to the best 2 options and compare their pricing and setup for your situation.

If your goal is both accurate team time tracking and knowing whether each project is actually making money, I’d shortlist these three:

🥇 My pick: Scoro

If project profitability is the primary objective, I'd choose Scoro.

Scoro goes beyond simply saying "you've used 72% of your hours." It can track revenue, labor costs, external costs, actual cost, forecasted cost, remaining budget, and forecasted profit margin at the project level.

It also recently added more sophisticated revenue models for fixed-fee, capped time-and-materials, and uncapped time-and-materials projects. That's particularly useful if you have different types of client contracts.

In other words, you can answer:

"We've billed the client $50K, but how much has this project actually cost us, and are we still going to hit our target margin?"

That's the question I'd optimize for.

🥈 Productive — probably the best alternative

Productive is extremely compelling if you're an agency, consulting firm, development shop, or other project-based business.

Its budgets combine revenue, costs, time entries, expenses, and actual vs. estimated profit. It calculates profit from revenue minus tracked labor costs and can include overhead.

It also has forecasting that combines historical time with scheduled team bookings, so you can spot a project that's likely to run out of budget before it happens.

I'd pick Productive over Scoro if you want something that feels more focused on modern agency/project operations rather than a broader business-management system.

🥉 Everhour — if you already use a PM platform

Everhour is a great choice if your team already lives in Asana, ClickUp, Monday, Jira, or similar tools.

It lets you set budgets in hours or money, use different billing rates, track expenses, set alerts, and calculate profitability. It can also stop timers when a project reaches its budget.

The big advantage is that you don't necessarily have to replace your existing project-management system.

Harvest — the simpler option

Harvest is worth considering if you want something your team will actually use without much training.

It supports project budgets in hours or fees, budget alerts, internal cost rates, billable rates, and profitability reporting.

The downside is that its financial/project analysis is less sophisticated than Scoro or Productive. Harvest itself notes that its budget reporting isn't especially robust.

What I'd choose based on your goal

If I were setting this up for a team today:

• "I need serious project profitability and financial forecasting." → Scoro
• "We're an agency/consultancy and want an all-in-one project operations system." → Productive
• "We already use Asana/ClickUp/Jira and just need excellent time + budget tracking." → Everhour
• "We mainly need simple timesheets, budgets, and profitability." → Harvest

One important distinction: don't choose based solely on the quality of the timer. For profitability, you want the system to know each employee's internal cost rate, the project's billing rate/revenue, expenses, budgeted hours, actual hours, and ideally the forecast at completion. That's what turns time tracking into a useful profitability system.

If you tell me (1) team size, (2) what kind of projects you do, (3) whether you bill fixed-fee or hourly, and (4) what project-management/accounting software you already use, I can narrow this to the best 1–2 choices and compare their current pricing/features.

Finding the right platform depends on whether you want a pure time-tracker with robust financial add-ons or an all-in-one project management workspace where tracking time is baked into daily tasks.

Top-tier software choices mapped to team time-tracking and project profitability include:

• Harvest is the gold standard for straightforward time tracking paired with robust financial reporting. You can set budgets (by hours or total fees), assign billable rates per person or project, track expenses, and view real-time visual budget alerts before overruns happen. It also converts data seamlessly into client invoices.
• Clockify is the best value-driven option. Its paid tiers feature robust project budgeting, multiple hourly rates, expense logging, and visual profit/loss tracking. It offers a high ceiling of features at a lower cost-per-user if you have a larger team.
• Teamwork is ideal for client-service agencies and creative teams. Tracked time never sits in isolation; it rolls directly into employee utilization rates, budget caps, and actual project profitability margins within the same environment where tasks and project plans are managed.
• Everhour is the top pick if your team already lives inside external project management tools like Asana, Trello, or ClickUp. It embeds a native timer and budget tracking directly into your existing workflow without forcing your team to learn a brand-new task manager.
• BigTime is built specifically for professional services (consultancies, agencies, engineering) focused on protecting margins. It features deep phase-level P&L tracking, actual versus budgeted labor analytics, and comprehensive invoicing workflows.

To help narrow down the ideal choice, let me know:

• How large is your team?
• Do you already use a project management tool (like Asana, ClickUp, or Jira) that you want to integrate with?
• Are your projects typically hourly (billable) or fixed-fee?

If your priority is “track team time → compare it to project budgets → know whether the project is actually profitable,” I’d narrow the field to Harvest and Runn, with Productive worth considering for a more agency-oriented setup.

My picks

🥇 I'd start with Harvest

Harvest is probably the closest match to what you described.

It lets you set a project budget, have employees track time against the project, monitor budget consumption in real time, and analyze internal costs and profitability. You can also see billable vs. non-billable time and use historical project data for estimating future work.

The important part for you is that Harvest isn't just answering “How many hours did we work?” It can answer “How much did those hours cost us, how much revenue did the project generate, and are we still profitable?”

Choose Harvest if: you want something your team can adopt quickly without turning time tracking into a whole project-management discipline.

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🥈 Runn if profitability and forecasting are equally important

Runn is more sophisticated if you want to connect resource planning, scheduled hours, actual hours, budgets, revenue, costs, and margins.

Its financials support time-and-materials and fixed-price projects, budgets by role or phase, project rates, and margin forecasting. Its timesheets also let you compare planned time with actual time.

That's particularly useful if you want to catch a problem before the project becomes unprofitable—for example:

Project budget: $100k
Expected labor: 1,000 hours
Actual after 600 hours: 750 hours
Forecast: you're going to blow the budget unless scope/staffing changes.

Runn is stronger than Harvest for that “where are we headed?” question.

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🥉 Productive if you're an agency

Productive would be on my shortlist if you're a creative/digital/consulting agency and want project management + resource planning + budgets + profitability in one system.

The tradeoff is that it's more of an operating system for an agency, whereas Harvest is much easier to introduce if your immediate problem is simply time → budget → profit.

What I'd choose

• Small/medium team, want simplicity: Harvest
• Growing professional-services team, need forecasting: Runn
• Agency wanting an all-in-one platform: Productive
• Mostly need excellent time tracking: Toggl Track
• Larger professional-services operation with deeper financial workflows: BigTime

For your stated goal, I'd trial Harvest first. It has the shortest path from employee timesheet to project budget consumption and profitability. Runn would be my second trial if you care heavily about staffing/resource forecasting.

One caveat: if by “profitability” you mean true project margin including salaries, contractor costs, expenses, and revenue—not simply billable hours × billing rate—make sure the software lets you configure your internal cost rates properly. That's where the comparison gets much more important than the time-tracking UI.

To track both time and project profitability effectively, you need software that connects logged hours and expenses with billable rates, internal cost rates , and set budgets.

The best tools for this depend on your team’s size, workflow, and how deep you want your financial reporting to go.

• Harvest — Best for clean time tracking and fast invoicing. Harvest is intuitive, highly reliable, and focuses purely on time and expense tracking. It allows you to set budgets (by total hours, total fees, or recurring retainers), assign billable hourly rates, and get visual budget-burn alerts before a project goes off the rails. It then transforms that data directly into client-ready invoices.
• Teamwork.com — Best for client-service agencies and project delivery. Unlike standalone timers, Teamwork connects time tracking directly to task management, team utilization, retainers, and profit margins inside a single platform. It gives you heavy-duty agency reporting to see which clients or project types are actually driving profit.
• Clockify — Best budget-friendly or free option. Clockify offers a robust free tier for unlimited users, but its paid tiers unlock project budgeting, tracking billable versus non-billable hours, expenses, and profitability analysis. It's a great fit if you need a straightforward, scalable solution without a steep per-user price tag.
• Toggl Track — Best for low-friction, timer-first tracking. Toggl is famous for its ultra-simple one-click timers. Its paid plans support project-level budgeting, actual cost tracking, and profitability reporting, making it ideal for smaller teams and consultants who want zero friction when logging hours.
• BigTime — Best for deep financial tracking and phase-level P&L. If your business requires comprehensive accounting-grade data, invoice management, and deep visibility into margins at the granular task or phase level, BigTime is an industry favorite for professional services.

To help narrow down the ideal choice for your company, let me know:

• Is your team billing clients hourly , on a fixed-fee basis , or managing retainers?
• Do you need the tool to handle invoicing and accounting natively, or do you already use a separate tool like QuickBooks or Xero?