Honest Clockify Review: Pros, Cons, Features & Pricing

How I Tested Clockify

I signed up for Clockify’s Pro plan and added 5 users to my workspace to see how the software works for teams. I tracked time, created projects and schedules, and submitted time off requests.

I also created overlapping time entries and left the timer running indefinitely to see how Clockify handles errors. On top of that, I contacted Clockify’s customer service team before and during my trial to evaluate the support team’s responsiveness.

Clockify Pricing

Clockify offers 5 paid plans and 1 free-forever plan. You get a 7-day free trial of the Pro plan when you sign up.

The plans have loads of little differences, but here’s a high-level comparison:

Want to track time for certain workers on a kiosk only (without scheduling, time off, or other full account features)? Clockify considers these “limited members,” who have a lower per-seat cost, as shown below.

Kiosk pricing

Compared to many time clock and scheduling platforms, Clockify is on the affordable side. For example, Hubstaff (Team) costs $10/user/month (annual billing), and ClockShark costs $9/user/month plus a $40 monthly base fee, compared to Clockify Pro’s $7.99 for similar features.

At the same time, there are full-featured scheduling, paid time off (PTO), and time tracking platforms that are easier on the wallet. For instance, for 20 users, Clockify Pro costs $159.80/month. By comparison, Zoho Shifts (Standard) would bill $33.30/month and Connecteam (Advanced) $49/month (both billed annually).

Clockify Usability and Interface

Getting started with Clockify was incredibly simple. I just entered an email address, and the platform launched right away, with almost no hoops to jump through. I didn’t even have to create a password since Clockify uses an emailed authentication code by default.

Adding new employees was also easy. I was able to invite them by email, then assign them to a user role to control their permissions within Clockify. However, I didn’t find a way to bulk import users, which will slow things down if you have a lot of employees.

I really liked Clockify’s minimalist user interface, which is pretty intuitive even for employees who have never used time tracking software before. The time clock opens by default when you navigate to Clockify’s web app, and there’s a prominent “Start” button to begin tracking time.

I also appreciated how Clockify organizes its features. Everything is accessible from a left-hand panel menu, so it’s easy to move between the time tracker, timesheets, time off requests, and schedules. Clockify also organizes your dashboard into workspaces, and you can add different employees to different workspaces. This can be very useful if you’re managing employees in different branches and locations.

I also tested Clockify’s desktop app for Windows. The desktop app can only track time. It doesn’t offer timesheets, schedules, time off, or anything else, but its interface is just as intuitive as the web platform’s.

Lastly, I tested Clockify’s Chrome extension, which lets you track time without leaving your current tab. The browser extension was easy to use, and I especially liked that it can automatically start tracking time when you open your browser and stop when you close it.

The biggest complaint I have about Clockify’s interface is that it can sometimes feel too simplistic. For example, there’s no way to group projects by client or users by team for a more nuanced view of your time data. I also found myself wishing to view projected labor costs in the scheduling tool and invoice amounts in the projects tool, which would have felt more intuitive.

In addition, Clockify hasn’t done much to make its platform accessible for employees with disabilities. It works with screen readers, but there’s no support for speech-to-text or keyboard navigation.

Mobile app

For employees, the Clockify mobile app mirrors the web experience. You can track time (even when offline), update your timesheet, check your calendar, add expenses, request time off, and see your own activity and reports. I found all these tools easy to use and glitch-free.

For admins, however, several features are missing on mobile. For example, you can’t create schedules, manage kiosks, approve timesheets, send invoices, set rates, or add users. That makes it difficult for field-based managers to use Clockify effectively, since you require a laptop or computer to access core features.

That said, I did appreciate that Clockify provides basic reporting on mobile since the average time clock app doesn’t. You can filter time data by team, client, project, task, description, and tag. You can also slice a time entry pie chart by different projects, clients, and users. However, for PDF and CSV exports, the app redirects you to the mobile web version.

Clockify Core Functionalities

Time tracking

I tested the Clockify time tracker on its web, mobile, and desktop apps, and found it was very straightforward. I could track work with a timer or enter it manually and categorize it using projects and tags. Employees can also mark time entries as billable or non-billable, track breaks, and split time entries to get more granular in their tracking and tagging.

On web and desktop, I was able to start tracking time with a single click. I didn’t have to enter a description for the time entry or assign it to a specific project, which sped up the process. This “track first, add details later” approach can encourage untagged entries, but Clockify also lets you require a description, project, or tag before an entry can be saved.

On mobile, starting the timer takes 2 taps. It’s not a huge inconvenience, but it is worth noting that apps like Connecteam let you track time with a single tap. On the plus side, you can stop tracking time with 1 tap, and you can even stop the timer outside the app itself by swiping down the top of your screen to view notifications.

One of my favorite things about Clockify’s time tracker is that in addition to the standard description and tags, you can add custom fields to your time clock. Fields can be text, numbers, links, toggle (on/off), multiple-choice, or checklist items. For example, I used this to require employees to confirm that they completed safety checks before they began tracking time.

The time tracker also has several features to help you prevent time theft:

• You can turn off manual time entries and restrict employees from editing their timesheets.
• You can enable kiosk-based time tracking and require employees to take a selfie when clocking in.
• You can enable GPS location tracking to see where employees are located when they clock in and out and while traveling during shifts.
• You can take screenshots every 5 minutes while the timer is running (on desktop only).

However, I was disappointed to find that Clockify doesn’t support geofences, so you can’t restrict clock-ins to specific job sites. I also found that Clockify won’t automatically stop tracking time on web or mobile after a certain amount of idle time. I left the timer running for several hours and didn’t get any alert about it.

Using Clockify’s auto-tracker can address this problem, since it will at least keep a record of when employees were idle. However, the auto-tracker is only available on the desktop app, not on web or mobile.

I also created an overlapping time entry to see how Clockify would handle it. Surprisingly, Clockify didn’t flag it in any way, either in the time tracker or in my timesheet.

When I submitted the timesheet for approval and then reviewed it as a manager, the conflict wasn’t visible at all since the time entries were lumped together by project and date. This is a big problem if you’re relying on your timesheets to pay employees or bill clients accurately.

More broadly, I was pretty disappointed with Clockify’s timesheets. As an employee, I could see my daily time broken down by project. But as a manager reviewing timesheets, all I saw was the total time the employee had tracked for that pay period.

I could go into the employee’s profile to get more details about their entries, but Clockify still doesn’t offer a simple calendar or timeline view. I never felt fully confident that the timesheets I was approving were error-free, which is a big deal, given that Clockify makes it pretty easy to leave the timer running or to create conflicting time entries.

Worse, sending timesheets to my payroll software was anything but easy. Clockify integrates with QuickBooks and Xero for invoicing, but not for payroll. You have to manually export timesheets using Clockify’s reporting tool, then import them into your payroll platform.

Time off management

I liked Clockify’s time off management feature, which let me create multiple types of leave and holidays.

For each type of leave, I could set how much time employees accrue and on what schedule. I could also adjust policies to allow employees to take certain types of time off without prior approval or to drop into negative balances.

I liked how customizable the feature was. Policies can be applied to your entire workforce or specific teams, and it’s easy to adjust any individual employee’s leave balances.

One thing I especially liked was the time off calendar, which shows when each of your employees has approved or requested time off. This makes it easy to see at a glance if several employees will be out at the same time, so you can deny any further requests for those dates.

That said, I found myself wishing that Clockify offered the ability to black out specific dates for PTO. Managers are required to leave a note with every leave rejection, though, which can help to smooth over the friction that comes with having a PTO request turned down.

Scheduling

Clockify includes a scheduler that allows you to assign employees to work and schedule tasks and projects. However, this scheduler didn’t quite work the way I expected. You can’t create shifts and assign employees to them. Instead, the scheduler functions more like a calendar where you can create one-off or recurring events and assign employees to those.

This distinction is important because Clockify’s scheduler doesn’t work well for shift-based work. You can’t save shift templates, leave shifts open so workers can self-assign, or recur slots daily. You also can’t build schedules and then auto-assign employees to them based on qualifications and availability like you can in Connecteam.

I found that the scheduler worked best as a project management tool. I could assign tasks or appointments to specific employees at specific times, then use the scheduler to track my workforce’s overall capacity. It was also helpful for communicating to employees how much time I expected them to spend on a particular task.

Another nice thing about the scheduler is that I could toggle between scheduled and tracked time. This offers a quick way to check whether your employees are being overworked or underworked.

However, I still wasn’t thrilled with the scheduler. It felt cumbersome to use and had a handful of quirks and limitations. For example:

• You can’t add new projects or team members from the scheduler. The “Add project” button is a trap: It lets you add only existing projects to the schedule.
• A published schedule triggers notifications for assignees. Getting 1 notification per slot in a recurring schedule is a bit redundant.
• There’s a red overlay to indicate when employees have approved time off. However, there’s no overlay for pending time off requests and no warning if you schedule a task when an employee is off.

Given these issues, I had a hard time using the scheduler to orchestrate more complex projects.

Project tracking

Clockify is built around the idea that time will be tracked to specific projects and clients, so I was interested to see how flexible the project management tools would be. Overall, I found them to be basic but effective.

First, I liked how simple it was to create new projects and clients. To add a new client, all that’s required is a name and billing currency. You can add multiple email addresses to each client, too, which is helpful if you have multiple points of contact.

Projects were similarly simple to create, and you can configure them with details like team member access, default billable status, billable rate, cost rate, and time or budget estimates. I found this very useful for organizing projects across multiple teams.

I also liked that you could assign multiple tasks to each project and assign different hourly rates and costs to specific tasks. Clockify uses this information to forecast your profitability from each project, which is a core feature for project management software.

However, Clockify did have a number of shortcomings as a project management platform. It didn’t support recurring tasks and mainly relied on lists to show what tasks were open or completed.

There are no visualizations like kanban boards or Gantt charts, and no way to automatically send updates when a task is finished. Clockify also lacked comments on tasks or other ways to communicate about work.

Overall, I felt like projects were useful mainly as a way to organize time entries rather than as a way to manage work. That’s good if you only want to use Clockify as a time tracking tool, but less helpful if you’re looking for an all-in-one work management solution.

Invoicing

I had a good experience with Clockify’s invoicing tool, which does a great job of simplifying billing. Here’s what you can get done with Clockify:

• Set custom rates for different clients, projects, and tasks
• Track clocked hours versus remaining budgets
• Invoice in multiple currencies
• Auto-calculate subtotals using client- and project-based time entries
• Mark invoices as sent, paid, or void

It took me less than a minute to create a test invoice, and I appreciated that Clockify made it simple to set up recurring invoices on a weekly or monthly schedule. It’s also possible to add taxes and discounts to your invoices.

That said, a few things could be improved. I was surprised that the “Currency” field isn’t a dropdown but free text. Clockify also doesn’t track payments (even if you integrate your accounting software), so you have to manually mark invoices as paid. If a client doesn’t pay, Clockify will mark the invoice as overdue, but it won’t automatically send a follow-up.

Clockify Security Features

Clockify is owned by CAKE.com, which holds ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC 2 Type II security certifications. These are widely considered the gold standard certifications for cybersecurity.

Clockify’s data is stored on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and you can choose where in the world you want your data to be stored. Connections are protected by 256-bit SSL encryption, which is the same level of protection used for online banking.

Clockify is fully compliant with privacy laws like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). However, it’s not HIPAA-compliant and can’t be used to store protected health information.

For day-to-day security, Clockify supports 2-factor authentication (2FA) and single sign-on (SSO), but not biometric authentication. You can require employees to take a selfie when clocking in on a kiosk, but this isn’t available for logging in to the platform.

Helpfully, I found Clockify offers a number of customizable user access roles, including owner, admin, project manager, team manager, and regular user. You choose who can view and edit time entries and rates, create tasks and projects, approve timesheets, view and download reports, and more.

Clockify Reporting & Analytics

Clockify offers highly detailed and customizable reports, but it takes a surprising amount of work to get the data most businesses will want out of the platform. There aren’t any ready-made, clearly labeled reports that you can pull up in seconds, which feels like a major oversight.

Instead, you have to use a series of filters for client, project, task, description, tag, month, week, and date. You can get exactly the information you need and generate highly specific reports, but it takes a few minutes. Unfortunately, I found that Clockify doesn’t let you save filter sets as presets, so you have to go through this process every time you want to create a report.

The good news is that Clockify has some really great reporting options if you dig in and have the time. You can create time audit reports for specific tasks and projects, team reports that show attendance and assignments, and expense reports for any team, client, or project.

Clockify offers a mix of bar charts, pie charts, and tables, and all the data can be exported as a CSV, XLSX, or PDF file so you can easily create your own visualizations.

Clockify Customer Support

Clockify offers 24/7 support via email, phone, and live chat. I got in touch via live chat and was connected to a representative in under a minute. Reviews I read from other customers indicate that this quick responsiveness is typical for Clockify.

Clockify also has a robust online knowledge base with hundreds of articles on how to use the platform’s features. Each article was packed with screenshots, so it was easy to follow along. There’s also a series of video tutorials that walk you through tracking time on different devices, managing time off, building reports, and more.

Overall, I was quite happy with Clockify’s support.

What Are Clockify’s Review Ratings from Review Sites?

Clockify App Review

Clockify is well-suited for small, desk-based teams that need reliable time tracking. It makes it easy to track hours, assemble and approve timesheets, manage time off, and invoice clients.

However, Clockify falls short for field-based teams since the mobile app severely limits what features managers can access. Businesses looking for an all-in-one workforce management tool may also want to steer clear of Clockify. The schedule module falls far short of expectations, and the project management tools don’t offer much flexibility.

Connecteam: The Better Clockify Alternative

Connecteam is an all-in-one time clock app with advanced scheduling, leave management, and task management features. It offers more customizable tools than Clockify, while also being more affordable for teams of all sizes.

Here’s why Connecteam is the best Clockify alternative:

Time tracking

Start for free

Connecteam offers more than a 1-click, project-based employee time clock. Admins can quickly approve timesheets on mobile, see who’s currently clocked in, and customize late clock-in rules and alerts.

Unlike Clockify, you can also geofence job sites where employees are allowed to clock in, in addition to tracking workers’ locations while they’re on the clock (tracking stops as soon as workers clock out, which I really appreciate).

An additional advantage is sending approved timesheets for payroll without the need for messy downloads and uploads. Connecteam integrates with QuickBooks, Paychex, Gusto, and more.

Scheduling

Advanced employee scheduling is easy on the web and mobile, even on the free plan. Create shift templates, open shifts, and recurring jobs; let employees self-assign and swap shifts; and easily drag and drop slots across team schedules.

I especially like the auto-schedule tool, which assigns unfilled shifts in moments based on availability and qualifications.

Additionally, unlike with Clockify, you can add tasks, attachments, digital forms, and checklists to shifts, ensuring employees are fully equipped.

I also feel Connecteam’s time off policies and overtime rules are more advanced than Clockify’s.

Plus, you get…

• Task management: Assign, recur, and organize tasks, and add attachments and sub-tasks.
• Online team chat: Reach out in 1-to-1 and group chats, add media, and send voice notes.
• Training tools: Build bite-sized training using multimedia (such as text, videos, and links) and interactive quizzes.
• And many more HR, skills, communication, and operations features.

Connecteam is free for life for up to 10 users, and starts at just $29/month for the first 30 users.

Start now, it’s free!