As a freelancer juggling multiple tasks and clients, you’ll quickly realise that managing your time effectively is crucial to a successful freelance career. Tracking the time spent on each task helps you plan your day more effectively and stay productive while meeting deadlines like a proper professional.

In this article, we’ll explore five of the best time-tracking tools to help you stay organised and have more control over your tasks and projects.

But first, let’s take a quick look at why time tracking is vital for freelancers:

1. Increased productivity: Time tracking helps you identify where your time goes, i.e., time spent on tasks, websites, and programs. These insights help you pin down and minimise distractions and time-wasting activities, helping you stay focused and work more efficiently.
2. Accurate billing: With time tracking tools, you can track billable hours invested in a task or project and charge clients accordingly**.**
3. Project management: Time tracking helps estimate how long specific tasks and projects will take, allowing you to set realistic deadlines, manage client expectations and avoid project scope creep.
4. Transparency and trust: Time tracking tools often have timesheets, which show clients a clear record of how much time was spent on their project. This builds confidence in your work and pricing.

Also read: How to stay motivated and productive as a freelancer

Now that we’ve covered the importance of time tracking, here are some of the best tools to help you get started.

Top time tracking tools for freelancers

Toggl Track has a friendly user experience

Toggl Track is a popular time-tracking tool that individuals, teams, and businesses use to manage time and track productivity. It’s known for its user-friendly interface, detailed reports, and automatic time tracking across multiple devices and websites.

Toggl makes collaboration and project management easy with clients and team members, seamlessly integrating with tools like Asana, Trello, Slack, and Notion.  It also allows you to track billable hours for transparency, generate performance insights, and manage your budget, helping you build trust and good relationships with your clients.

Toggl Track has a free plan designed for freelancers to support up to five users. Premium plans start at $10 billed monthly and offer saved and customisable reports, project templates, and more integrations.

Harvest has an inbuilt invoicing and payment feature

Harvest is an excellent tool for tracking time across multiple clients and projects. It allows you to create timesheets for different clients and projects and easily turn them into reports. However, Harvest's built-in invoicing and payment feature makes it stand out from other time management tools.

With Harvest, you can convert your timesheets into accurate invoices and request client payments. You can also create fast and easy invoices with Grey to get seamless and hassle-free payments from clients.

Harvest has a free plan that is perfect for freelancers but is limited to one seat and two projects. On the other hand, the premium plan costs $10.80 monthly (billed annually) and offers unlimited seats and projects, making it ideal for teams with larger workloads.

Hubstaff adds GPS time tracking for freelancers on the go

Hubstaff is another robust time-tracking tool that automatically generates invoices from timesheets,  simplifying the payment process for freelancers.

In addition to tracking time and activity levels like mouse movements and keyboard usage, it offers GPS time tracking for freelancers working on location-based projects. GPS tracking lets you log hours while on site, ensuring accurate billing for work done.

Hubstaff integrates with various payments, communication and project management tools like Asana, Slack and QuickBooks. Its reporting tools provide deep insights into your project’s progress, with data visualisation, helping you optimise your workflows, stay productive, and meet deadlines.

Hubstaff has four premium plans starting at $4.99 per seat monthly, with a 14-day trial period for new users.

Memtime is a simple, desktop only time tracking tool

Memtime is a simple time-tracking tool that runs automatically in your background, capturing how much time you spend on different tasks and activities. While it only functions as a desktop app, its simplicity and features make it a top choice for freelancers.

Memtime’s automated time tracking displays your activities in programs and populates them in real time. There are also detailed custom timesheets and reports showing data like your programs’ use and top websites to help you identify distractions or areas for improvement. However, this tool is a freelancer favourite because of its privacy policy. Your captured activities are stored exclusively on your device and won’t be shared with your clients, colleagues, or bosses.

Memtime’s pricing starts at $12 per user monthly (billed bi-annually) and covers custom reporting, time tracking, project management integrations, and calendar sync.

RescueTime is a lower-cost option that offers focus modes and in-depth reports

Like other time-tracking tools, RescueTime also automatically tracks your time across different apps, websites and tasks, categorising your activities to give you a clear picture of how your time is spent throughout the day.

Beyond time tracking, RescueTime offers focus sessions called FocusTime that block distracting websites during set work hours, helping you stay focused. It also has in-depth reports and daily summaries to give insights into your productivity patterns.

While it doesn’t have the invoicing and billing features that some time trackers offer, RescueTime is a great choice for freelancers who want to optimise their productivity for their benefit. It has a free version and a premium plan starting at $6.50, which includes features like calendar integration and focus sessions.

Also read: 11 must-have tools for freelancers in 2024

Final thoughts

Time is one of your most valuable assets as a freelancer, as it directly affects your productivity, health, and earnings. With time tracking, you can see where your time goes, identify areas for improvement, work smarter, not more complexly, and ultimately have a successful freelance career.