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Desktime Review - Real World Usage, Pros & Cons, Pricing (2024)

By James LePage
 on September 23, 2022

Desktime Review - Real World Usage, Pros & Cons, Pricing (2024)

By James LePage
 on September 23, 2022

With more and more businesses adopting hybrid and remote work models, it is becoming increasingly difficult to track time and employee productivity.

And businesses that work with freelancers from different parts of the world also need to record the billable hours.

Time tracking benefits not only businesses but employees and contractors too.

When we work for long hours, we end up forgetting how much time we spent on what.

This is where time management and tracking solution comes into the picture.

In this Desktime Review, we will talk about the overview, key features, pricing, benefits, and other aspects of Desktime time management and tracking software.

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The idea is to help you make an informed decision when shopping for time management and tracking solution for employee productivity such as Desktime.

Desktime Overview

What is desktime employee management solution?

It is a powerful time tracking solution that works on all devices- desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets.

Using this solution, managers can track time and monitor the activities of employees on their desktops, and give honest feedback. 

Desktime offers robust tools to help businesses streamline time tracking.

With help of this solution, businesses can experience higher productivity.

With the help of Desktime, managers can track time and be sure that employees utilize work hours to address meaningful tasks.

Some of the core capabilities of Desktime include an offline time tracker, app tracker, and website tracker. 

Desktime offers a comprehensive dashboard to help managers track time and monitor the day-to-day activities of every employee, overtime, and days off.

Don’t worry; I will cover all the features of Desktime in the next paragraphs.

Desktime History

Desktime was launched in 2011 in Latvia.

The premise behind Desktime was to increase workplace transparency between employees and management by allowing them to track time.

Since its launch, Desktime has tracked over 171 million hours.

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And more than 6000 companies use Desktime time management and tracking software.

In 2012, Desktime rolled out version 2.0, which allowed users to track projects and tasks using the Projects Feature.

This version also came with Offline time monitoring and tracking.

The new version had a better design and visualization.

In 2016, Desktime came out with another major design makeover.

Soon, the time tracking solution added the screenshots functionality.

In 2017, the Company launched its integration with Google Calendar.

And by 2018, Desktime could be integrated with Jira, Asana, Basecamp, and Zapier.

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This year, Desktime introduced the new Booking feature, so users can book desks, meeting rooms, and parking spaces.

Desktime Review: Benefits

Let’s understand how Desktime benefits both businesses and employees.

Flexibility

One of the biggest advantages of using Desktime is its flexibility and compatibility with devices such as desktops, tablets, and smartphones.

Since we all use smartphones even at work, Desktim’s mobile capability comes in handy for managers.

Using this solution, managers can monitor employees’ activities even when they are away from their office. 

Desktime integrates natively with Android and IOS.

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You can download the app from Google Play or the Apple store.

Automated Time Tracking

It can be a pain for managers and employees to manually enter hours and monitor them.

Thankfully, Desktime allows automatic time tracking. 

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With Desktime, employee hours are automatically monitored. 

This means no more manual data entry.

You can even automate reports in Desktime so important employee time data is sent to the company via email.

With Desktime, managers can even monitor what their employees are doing on their computers. 

The solution shows the websites and desktop applications frequently visited by the employee during working hours. 

This data can be useful for businesses to assess which employees are productive and which ones are not.

Improving Productivity

Being able to monitor employees’ activities helps improve employee productivity.

As DeskTime helps identify unproductive employee activities during working hours, it helps managers get a better view of what employees are doing.

With daily custom reports (automatically sent to managers), managers can analyze the things that are hurting productivity, and build on tasks that are aiding productivity.

Desktime Review: Features

Automatic Time Tracking

DeskTime's automatic time management and tracking help teams and freelancers achieve their goals faster and smarter.

Using this feature, employees and managers can oversee and document the amount of time spent on activities, tasks, and other projects throughout the day or any other specified period of time. 

Automatic time monitoring is a really cool feature of this time tracking tool.

This feature eliminates the need to manage timers or manually feed data.

URL and app tracking

Using this essential security feature, you can see what websites, apps, and programs your employee use.

You can also categorize those into productive or unproductive based on your projects.

There is also an option to categorize those into “neutral”.

These are the websites and apps that don't interfere with or distract from work but are not directly involved in productivity.

The cool thing about using DeskTime is that it automatically starts tracking URLs and apps as soon as the user turns on the computer.

Document title tracking

You might want to know which tasks your team is working on.

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And maybe which programs they are using.

Desktime not only displays the total time spent on each program (Excel, MS Word, Photoshop), but it also records the titles of documents or files and the time spent on each of them.

This functionality works with design tools such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Sketch; email service providers such as Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo; and teal collaboration software such as Slack and Skype.

Integrated web time tracker

With Desktime, you can track projects/tasks and time and use the break timer directly from your browser, without having to install any software.

Desktime’s web time tracker is simple and intuitive.

A user can turn it on manually when they want to track their time.

Booking

Managing shared workspaces can be challenging for businesses.

With Desktime’s Booking feature, you can create bookings, customize your bookings, update/edit bookings in real-time, and monitor all your bookings.

Desktime allows both desk bookings and bookings for parking spaces, office gadgets, and vehicles.

Auto screenshots (Time Tracking Screenshots)

This is an awesome functionality in Desktime.

The time management solution creates automatic screenshots, thus allowing managers to see what programs and apps are actively used.

Since these screenshots are taken at random intervals of time, it gives a more transparent view of employees’ work.

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Time-tracking screenshots is especially beneficial for remote teams.

Also, this feature allows you to quickly check suspicious or unproductive screen captures.

The solution lets you choose a time interval for capturing screenshots (5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes).

You even have the flexibility to choose print screen quality- blur or not to blur screenshots.

Offline time tracking

Desktime time tracking app starts automatically when you turn on your computer.

The software runs unobtrusively in the background. 

This time tracking app tracks the offline time when you’re not at your desk.

You can then log it into the time tracker manually. 

This is a great feature for employees so work hours are not unaccounted for.

Managers have the freedom to control how employees add their offline time to Desktime.

Project time tracking

Using this feature, the solution allows collaboration.

In other words, the Desktime time tracker helps teams and employees work on the same project.

It also allows the users to see the total time spent on the project and divide it up individually to see who has contributed and how much time. 

DeskTime's Invoicing feature comes in handy when you want to convert your time tracking data into billing.

More on that later.

Cost calculation and project billing

As a business, you should know how much each project costs to your company.

Moreover, you should also know how much to charge your clients.

Thanks to the integrated time billing feature, Desktime allows you to do all this with ease.

You can set your and the team's hourly rates and leave the rest to Desktime.

The solution automatically calculates project costs based on time spent working on it.

You can use DeskTime as time tracking and project billing software in three ways.

One, you can record billable hours using the time tracker app.

Two, you can perform project cost calculations.

And three, you can see each employee’s earnings.

Pomodoro timer

A little trivia here.

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management system that helps to reduce mental fatigue and burnout. 

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You and your employees must take a break from time to time to rejuvenate and recharge themselves.

DeskTime’s Pomodoro time tracking makes sure that employees take a break at regular intervals to restore their productivity levels.

The timer has three different intervals to select from (52, 60, or 90 minutes).

Some of the effective research-backed activities include exercising, eating, playing a game, and taking a power nap.

Private time option

This is a powerful feature inside Desktime.

With this functionality, your employees can take a digital timeout on their computers. 

When enabled, this feature pauses auto-time tracking.

In other words, all tracking activity on their computer stops.

Employees can use Desktime private time for personal reasons, social media browsing, shopping, or proof of work.

Employee absence calendar

The absence calendar in Desktime allows businesses to trask employee absence effectively.

Using this feature, employees can log their out-of-the-office days, and managers can review the submissions and approve or deny them.

Employees can use DeskTime's Absence calendar to log vacation days, business trips, conference attendance, unpaid leaves, sick days, and more.

This feature also serves as an absence tracking software for HR professionals.

It helps them plan HR better, create an employee absence schedule, quickly calculate salaries, and see who’s in the office and who’s not.

Team's contacts

Desktime offers a visual contact card information directory known as Team Contacts.

This gallery contains important employee details such as their phone number, email, or alternative contact.

You can sort the gallery by tabs.

Each tab corresponds to the teams that exist in the organization.

And this feature is customizable.

You (and employees) can add your own custom fields with alternative contact details. 

Work Schedules

DeskTime's built-in employee shift scheduling helps you define and create work schedules for your employees. 

Using work schedules, you can better plan your team's shifts and get detailed performance breakdowns in a centralized location.

Mobile app

Desktime comes with a full-fledged phone time-tracker app.

The app allows you to quickly track either your own or your employee’s work time. 

It offers two options when you are away from the desk- project-based time tracking and manual time tracking.

DeskTime mobile time tracking app is intuitive and easy to navigate.

It gives you important desktop features such as team member management, offline time assigning, and project progress. 

Invoicing

Desktime serves both as a time tracking and billing software, without the need to have two different apps.

You can use the tracked time to generate invoices, and check the status of the invoices.

The software also lets you send automated reminders when an invoice is overdue.

Custom reports

With Desktime, you can customize reports using various filters.

Let’s take an example.

You can use DeskTime Reports to create reports related to overall productivity, most viewed websites, time spent on tasks, and so on.

The software lets you share, print, and export reports.

Integrations with 3rd party apps

Desktime integrates seamlessly with a wide number of third-party apps such as Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, Trello, Gitlab, Asana, Basecamp, Jira, and Zapier.

Desktime Review: Pricing

Desktime offers four pricing plans- Desktime Lite, Desktime Pro, Desktime Premium, and Desktime Enterprise.

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All these plans offers a good value for money for small businesses.

Desktime Lite

The Desktime Lite plan is available for free.

It is limited to a single user (one user), and is perhaps the best value for money plan from Desktime.

And it comes with features such as automated time tracking, URL and app tracking, an integrated web timer, and a mobile app.

Desktime Pro

The Pro plan costs $7 per user per month. 

On top of features such as automated time tracking, URL and app tracking, and an integrated web timer, the Pro plan offers productivity calculation, idle time tracking, and project time tracking.

Desktime Premium

Desktime Premium plan costs $10 per user per month. 

It offers all the features available in the Desktime Pro plan.

Additionally, you get useful features such as automatic screenshots, absence calendars, shift scheduling, invoicing, company integrations, offline time approval, and IP restrictions.

This plan offers a good value for money for businesses looking for more features and usability flow.

Desktime Enterprise

The Enterprise plan from Desktime is available for $20 per user per month,

Desktime Enterprise plan offers all the features available with the Desktime Premium plan.

And you also get cool features such as VIP support, personalized onboarding, unlimited projects, unlimited tasks, unlimited data history, and custom API functions.

All paid Desktime plans are available on a “free trial” basis without the need to enter credit card details.

If you want to try their newly launched Booking feature, it would cost you an additional $2 per user per month.

The Booking feature offers good value for money with its reasonable cost.

Desktime Review: Conclusion

Desktime is a powerful time tracking application for solopreneurs, remote employees, and businesses.

Having been in business (and growing) for several years, Desktime has earned a positive name in the time tracking software arena.

This software has an intuitive user interface that allows you to measure productivity.

Try Desktime for free to get to see its robust features in action.

You can also sign up for a 1:1 demo call with Desktime’s product expert and take a personalized tour of the time tracking software for small businesses.

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James LePage
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James LePage is the founder of Isotropic, a WordPress education company and digital agency. He is also the founder of CodeWP.ai, a venture backed startup bringing AI to WordPress creators.
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