Paymo and Time Doctor are both time tracking tools, but they are very different in their approach to time tracking and project management.
However, both software solutions offer many similar features, making it difficult to determine which is best for your business.
In this Paymo vs Time Doctor comparison, we’ll check out some of the similarities and differences between these tools and provide you with a detailed overview of the features of each time tracker.
Table of Contents
Let’s get started.
Paymo vs Time Doctor: A brief overview
Before jumping into a detailed comparison between Paymo and Time Doctor, let’s look at their features in a tabular format.
| Features | Paymo | Time Doctor |
| Manual time tracking | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic time tracking | Yes | Yes |
| Real-time time tracking | Yes | Yes |
| Offline time tracking | No | Yes |
| Track time for a specific task/project | Yes | Yes |
| Check when team members clock in and clock out | Yes | Yes |
| Track idle time during working hours | No | Yes |
| Distraction management feature | No | Yes, gently nudges employees with a pop-up notification |
| Monitor websites visited and apps used | No | Yes |
| Employee attendance tracking | Yes | Yes |
| Accurate timesheet for each team member based on recorded work time | Yes | Yes |
| Project management and task management functionalities | Yes | Yes |
| Generate individual and team productivity reports | Yes | Yes |
| Create client invoices per recorded billable hours | Yes | Yes |
| Feature payroll management functionalities | No | Yes |
| Optional employee screenshots and screen recording feature | No | Yes |
| Employee scheduling | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations with other mobile and desktop apps | Yes, 15 integrations to apps like Slack, Zapier, Google Calendar, QuickBooks Online | Yes, 60+ integrations to apps like Asana, Zoho Projects, Trello, GitHub |
| Available for Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Available for Windows | Yes | Yes |
| Available for Mac | Yes | Yes |
| Mobile app | Yes, on Android and iOS | Yes, on Android |
| Google Chrome extension | Yes, but only for PomoDone – their Pomodoro Timer integration | Yes |
Now that we have a brief overview of the features, let’s explore each software tool in more detail.
What is Paymo?
Paymo is a project management tool that started as a standalone time tracking and invoicing app for freelancers.
While it does offer time tracking capabilities, it’s primarily a project management software solution designed to help you:
- Keep track of project progress.
- Accurately invoice clients.
- Manage all tasks using the Kanban Board or Gantt Chart.
Paymo offers its users a desktop app for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Additionally, it provides mobile apps for both Android and iOS devices.
The project management app offers you a 15-day free trial, after which you can either go for the free plan for up to 10 users or choose a paid plan starting at $11.95/user per month.
What is Time Doctor?
Time Doctor is a powerful employee time tracking and performance management software used by major companies, like Verizon and Ericsson, as well as by small businesses, like Thrive Market.
It allows you to:
- Track the time employees spend on each project down to the second.
- Analyze real-time productivity reports for each team member.
- Assign projects and tasks to each employee.
- Check whether an employee is present, late, absent, or partially absent.
- Set up shifts and work schedules for every employee.
- Pay your employees through an in-built payroll management feature.
- View screenshots and screen recordings to ensure proper work efficiency. Note: this is an optional feature.
Read more about Time Doctor’s features and benefits.
Time Doctor offers a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux operating systems. It also offers users an Android mobile app to track every work hour.
This time tracking solution offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card details required. After this, you can opt for one of the paid plans starting at $7/user per month.
Now that we know what each time management app can do, let’s explore their features in more detail.
Paymo vs Time Doctor: Key features comparison
While both Paymo and Time Doctor offer many similar features, their offerings differ in some key ways.
Let’s see how these time management apps compare against each other.
1. Time tracking
Time tracking is recording all employee work time to understand if there are workflow bottlenecks and how much time each task takes.
Time tracking is also helpful when it comes to paying hourly employees or freelancers for their work as well as invoicing clients.
A) Paymo
Paymo offers time tracking as part of its project management capabilities.
The easiest way to do this is through the desktop widgets, allowing employees to enter the task name and strat tracking time directly from their desktop.
This tool also offers a Pomodoro timer (marked by a tomato), which employees can use to work in short bursts to boost productivity.
Paymo offers an automatic time tracking option but only as part of Paymo Plus. This is an add-on to your existing Paymo account but will track all work time, whether on social media sites, actively working, or on a break.
B) Time Doctor
Time Doctor gives employees two ways of tracking their work time – manual/interactive or silent/automatic mode.
In the manual or interactive mode, employees simply need to download the Time Doctor desktop app, enter a project name, and click the Start/Stop button to start and stop tracking time.
The app starts tracking time in the silent or automatic mode as soon as employees start their computers. The app silently tracks time in the background without interfering with the employee’s work activities.
In addition, Time Doctor offers offline time tracking where even if the employee temporarily loses internet connection for some time, the app will continue tracking time. This can help save hours of your employees’ time and improve employee satisfaction.
Quick Recap
While both solutions offer time tracking capabilities, Time Doctor is much more focused on providing an accurate snapshot of your employees’ work time through an automatic tracker and offline time tracking features.
2. Project management and task management
Project and task management are essential for any business looking to expand its operations and improve its profitability.
Let’s compare these two employee monitoring tools on this aspect.
A) Paymo
Paymo is primarily a project management tool and offers employees and managers various ways to visualize projects and track their progress.
For instance, this project tracking app offers both a Kanban Board and a Gantt Chart, so you visualize where each project stands.
These allow you to see who is responsible for each project and how they’re progressing with the same.
Additionally, it can help you see if a project is approaching its due date and is still in its early stages. You can intervene in this case and speed up the process considerably.
B) Time Doctor
Using Time Doctor, employees can easily track time on various projects and tasks.
This allows them to visualize how long each task takes and you to see how long different people collectively spend working on teamwork projects.
You can make invoicing and payroll even easier by organizing all teamwork projects and tasks under the five categories detailed below:
- Permanent tasks: Assigned by admins and can’t be marked as completed.
- Current tasks: Tasks employees are currently working on.
- Next tasks: Tasks employees will work on right after current tasks.
- Future tasks: Tasks employees will work on in the future.
- Completed tasks: Tasks that are completed and marked as such.
Quick recap
Both Paymo and Time Doctor offer you ways to visualize where each project stands and what stage it’s in, but Time Doctor also allows you to see how much time each project took.
3. Employee productivity
Businesses use time tracking software and its actionable data to understand how their employees work and make workflow changes to improve productivity.
Let’s look at how each app approaches this employee productivity management.
A) Paymo
While Paymo offers time tracking capabilities, it doesn’t provide any detailed reports regarding the tracked time that you can use to improve workflows and overall team productivity and time management.
B) Time Doctor
If there is a period of inactivity when the timer is on, this time tracking app will gently nudge employees to either get back to work or take a break with a pop-up notification.
Employees can indicate they’re still working through a mouse or keyboard click.
Note: Time Doctor is not a keylogger; it simply detects mouse or keyboard activity.
This ensures that each time entry is accurate and precise.
Additionally, Time Doctor also sends you many insightful and detailed productivity reports regarding your employees’ work activities, such as:
- Projects and tasks report: Understand your team’s work hours on different tasks in real-time.
- Timeline report: Get a visual timeline of your team’s working hours.
- Hours tracked report: Analyze the number of work hours an employee has tracked during a specific period.
- Activity report: Receive insights on the active time, idle time, desktop and mobile app time, etc., of a particular employee.
- Web and app usage report: View details on which web apps and websites your team uses.
These can help you understand how your team spends their time and how to improve their overall time management.
Quick recap
Time Doctor offers employers many productivity reports and detailed analytics about employees’ work activities, whereas Paymo doesn’t offer any such time entry data.
4. Payroll and invoicing
When it comes to resource management and project budgeting, you need to understand how much time each task took you can bill your clients and pay your employees accurately.
For this, your ideal time tracking tool should include both payroll and invoicing functionalities.
Let’s see how each time tracker fares.
A) Paymo
Paymo offers client invoicing features where you can use timesheet software data to automatically create invoices and manually edit any required details. For instance, you can add your company logo or a personalized thank you note for the client.
You can then download these invoices in bulk as CSV or individually as a PDF and upload them to QuickBooks Online or Xero for your accounting department.
Paymo offers your clients a portal to view all uploaded invoices for easy expense tracking.
However, Paymo doesn’t offer any features for automating your employee payroll.
B) Time Doctor
Time Doctor offers a robust payroll facility using which you can pay your salaried and hourly employees based on the system-generated timesheets and tracked billable hours.
Time Doctor allows you to manually approve each timesheet or set up automatic approval for salaried employees.
You can further customize payroll based on:
- Pay period.
- Payroll currency.
- Payment method.
It integrates with popular payment gateways like PayPal, Gusto, and Wise, so you pay your employees easily. If you’d like, you can also export all these time reports and payroll data in CSV, Excel, or PDF format to a platform of your choice.
Additionally, Time Doctor allows you to use the same timesheets to bill clients accurately for the work done. As a result, you get paid on time by your clients, and they get a bird’s eye view of all project progress.
As a default, Time Doctor only allows you access to these time reports and invoices, but you configure permissions so team leaders and managers can access these templates for future use.
Quick recap
While Paymo does offer many client invoicing options, it doesn’t support any employee payroll management facilities.
Suppose you routinely employ hourly freelancers or need to pay employees in a remote work setting. In that case, you can go for Time Doctor as it offers both client invoicing and employee payroll functionalities.
5. Integrations
Integrating with the proper tool can improve your team’s overall workflow and provide accurate information regarding your employees’ workdays.
Let’s look at the integrations offered by each employee time tracking software.
A) Paymo
Paymo offers only 15 native integrations to apps such as Slack, Xero, QuickBooks Online, and others.
However, it does allow you to use Integromat to use apps such as Basecamp, Google Drive, Harvest, and more. But this approach requires an existing Integromat account which is an additional monthly cost of $10.59/month.
However, it does integrate with the app Integromat. Using this, you can integrate Paymo with hundreds of apps such as Basecamp, Google Drive, Harvest, and more. But this situation requires you to have an existing Integromat account and complicates the process.
To make it easier, you can use the Paymo API to create a customizable tool integration.
B) Time Doctor
Time Doctor offers a Google Chrome extension using which employees can track time across 60+ third-party software tools.
Some of these include:
- Communication: Asana, Slack, Zapier, etc.
- CRM: HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho Projects, and more.
- Help Desk: Freshdesk, Freshservice, Zendesk, and more.
- Payments and Invoicing: PayPal, Gusto, Wise, etc.
- Project Management: G Suite, Office 365 (including Word, Excel, Outlook, etc.), Jira, Odoo, Wrike, GitHub, etc.
Quick recap
Time Doctor offers significantly more integrations compared to Paymo. It also offers users an easy Chrome extension they can use to track time across different apps.
6. Pricing
While it’s important to know what features a time tracking solution has, it’s also important to know how much it costs and whether it’s sustainable to use it long term.
Let’s look at the price of using each software tool.
A) Paymo
Paymo offers a 15-day free trial with no credit card information required. The tool also offers a free plan for up to 10 users.
For in-office or remote teams with more than 10 members, paid plans start at $11.95/user per month. This small office plan allows you to add unlimited users and includes in-app customer support.
With a price point of $18.95/user per month, the large business plan includes a Portfolio Gantt Chart and Employee Leave Management.
B) Time Doctor
Time Doctor offers users a 14-day free trial with no credit card details required. After this, paid plans start at $7/user per month.
However, if you’re looking for app integrations, we recommend going with the Standard plan, starting at $10/user per month. This plan also offers payroll management capabilities and 24-hour customer support.
To access the full range of Time Doctor’s features and services, you can choose the Premium plan starting at $20/user per month.
Quick recap
Both Paymo and Time Doctor offer free trials of their online time tracking software with no credit card information needed.
However, Time Doctor is the more affordable of the two, helping you save at least $4/month approximately while also giving you more robust time tracking features.
Final verdict
Paymo and Time Doctor have many powerful time tracking and project management features that can greatly profit businesses of all sizes.
However, Time Doctor offers many more features compared to Paymo.
To specify, it:
- Allows employees to track offline time.
- Tracks the websites and apps they visit so you can get a better idea of their workday.
- Helps you analyze detailed employee productivity reports.
- Provides payroll management facilities.
- Offers far more integrations and a Google Chrome extension for easy time tracking.
For all these reasons, we would say Time Doctor is the best time tracking software of the two.
Sign up for Time Doctor’s free 14-day trial and give the software a go today!
