Looking for an informative TSheets vs Hubstaff comparison?
The right time tracking solution does more than just record time. It can also help you manage your time and improve productivity.
While TSheets and Hubstaff are both popular solutions, they focus on different aspects of time tracking.
In this article, we’ll provide a one-on-one comparison of these tools so that you can decide on the right one. We’ll also offer you a more straight-forward alternative to help you make a well-informed choice.
Table of Contents
- What is TSheets?
- What is Hubstaff?
- TSheets vs Hubstaff comparison
- The best TSheets vs Hubstaff alternative
Let’s get started.
What is TSheets?
TSheets is a cloud-based time tracker that not only helps you track work hours but also makes payroll and invoicing easier.
Primarily a tracker app, it also lets you:
- Track time from anywhere – web, desktop (Mac, Windows, or Linux), and iOS or Android app.
- Schedule and manage employee shifts.
- Track employees’ location with GPS tracking.
- Keep track of time spent on specific projects.
- Generate insightful reports to measure and improve employee productivity.
What is Hubstaff?
Hubstaff is an intelligent time tracking app focused on productivity management. It can track the amount of time your team spends on projects and individual tasks.
With Hubstaff, you can:
- Track time from the web, desktop (Mac, Windows, or Linux), Android, or iOS mobile apps.
- Monitor your team’s computer screens and URL history.
- Review and approve employee timesheets.
- Evaluate how employees spend their time with several comprehensive reports.
- Automatically start tracking time when an employee enters a location with Geofences.
TSheets vs Hubstaff comparison
Let’s see how these two weigh up against each other:
1. Time tracking
Tracking time is a crucial business activity if you want to ensure your team members are spending their work hours productively.
Here’s how these two solutions approach time tracking:
A. TSheets time tracking
TSheets tracks the hours and minutes worked by your team wherever they are. It’s suitable for a wide range of industries, including hospitality, manufacturing, field service technicians, etc.
These are a few of the features available to track time:
1) Online time clock
All your employees can clock in and out on the web dashboard in real-time.
Here’s how it works:
- Employees can enter their billable hours manually or automatically when they sign in.
- Employers can alter and assign shifts and jobs to employees daily, weekly or monthly.
- Your team can record when they take a break or make changes to job codes.
2) Time Clock Kiosk
Employers who require one central system for the entire team to clock in and clock out can use the Time Clock Kiosk.
The Time Clock is a tablet-based system for capturing time. Employees in one location can share one device to record their time.
Teams begin tracking time with a four-digit PIN or through facial recognition.
It’s a good option for employers with seasonal employees (such as construction sites or warehouse-based employees) to eliminate buddy punching.
B. Hubstaff time tracking
The TSheets alternative — Hubstaff, uses manual time tracking.
It lets you track the time spent on every project and task. Once installed on your computer or laptop, you click on the play button to start tracking time.
When you log in, you will see two dashboards to choose from: “Me” or “Team.”
1) Me dashboard
If you select the “Me” dashboard, you’ll be able to see:
- The total number of hours worked for the day.
- The total hours you worked for the week, including an activity percentage.
2) Team dashboard
The “Team” dashboard shows you the same information as displayed under the “Me” dashboard for the entire team.
Information displayed includes:
- Who’s online.
- Activity levels of online employees.
- A graphical display of the total number of hours worked by your team for the week.
- Timesheet data — number of hours an employee worked on a particular project or task and their activity levels.
Quick recap
With Hubstaff’s desktop client, you can track time manually. Moreover, with its mobile GPS tracking feature, employees can clock in and clock out automatically. Meanwhile, TSheets offers you the flexibility of recording time manually or automatically.
2. Project and budget management
TSheets and Hubstaff aim to help you stay on track and budget with your projects.
Let’s see how they accomplish this:
A. TSheets project and budget management
With the TSheets Project feature, you can:
- Assign employees to tasks and projects.
- Compare the actual hours of a project to budgeted or forecasted hours.
- Track the project’s progress and see whether your team will meet its deadlines.
- Track time spent on tasks by various employees working on different jobs within one project.
- Keep everyone updated on progress — all employees have access to the Project Activity Feed.
- Add digital signatures to timesheets for submission and approval.
- Get detailed project reports that can be exported and sync with Quickbooks for seamless data imports.
B. Hubstaff project and budget management
Hubstaff aims to help you manage budgets and deadlines with three main project management features:
1) Kanban-style workflows
With automated Kanban workflows, you can keep all projects organized.
Here you can determine whether projects and tasks are:
- Backlogged
- In progress
- Completed
You can seamlessly shift tasks to different columns with one click.
2) Sprints for project management
With the automated project management feature, you can build and manage your projects. You can also stay focused on the most important tasks.
Here you can:
- Plan your weekly schedule.
- Get an overview of projects.
- See top priorities.
3) Project budgeting
For managing project budgets, Hubstaff lets you:
- Set project budgets and set limits based on cost or time.
- Get weekly alerts to monitor limits and ensure you aren’t exceeding them.
- Use the project reports to gauge time spent on projects or tasks for future estimates, planning, etc.
Quick recap
While TSheets offers an overview of projects and tasks, Hubstaff offers more in-depth functionality to track progress and budgets.
Hubstaff has a built-in budget management feature, but with TSheets, you’d need to integrate with Quickbooks to access this function.
3. Team management
Effective team management is one of the primary reasons many organizations choose to adopt tracking software.
Let’s look at how these software approach team management:
A. TSheets team management
Here’s how TSheets helps you manage teams:
1) Employee scheduling
Tracking, assigning, and editing employee schedules is simple with TSheets.
With the scheduling feature, you can arrange shifts by:
- Job: Select the day, time, and client and assign employees. You can drag and drop jobs into free employee time slots to schedule. Your team will be alerted to shift schedules and changes.
- Shift: Select the day, time, and employee to assign to a shift. You can drag and drop shifts into employee time slots to schedule.
2) Who’s Working Window
The Who’s Working Window gives you an overview of your team at a glance. It reveals who’s at work and where they’re working from with its GPS tracker.
B. Hubstaff team management
Hubstaff’s approach to team management is slightly different, focusing more on employee monitoring.
These are the functions available:
1. Screenshots
You can view what each employee is working on with random screenshots of their work screen.
Administrators can set the feature to take a screenshot once, twice, or three times per ten seconds. You can also turn it off completely.
2. Website and app tracking
You can also see which websites and applications your team visits during working hours. These URLs are recorded and presented to you with the percentage of total time used on these sites.
There’s also a web and app use report to delve deeper into employee usage. This way, you can ensure employees aren’t spending too much time on unproductive sites like social media.
Quick recap
Hubstaff’s approach is more of employee monitoring, letting you see what your team is doing at any given time. TSheets also gives you an overview of team activities but in a less intrusive manner. It also simplifies employee scheduling.
4. Payroll
TSheets and Hubstaff both aim to simplify payments:
A. TSheets payroll
TSheets is a subsidiary of Quickbooks, and integrating the two solutions will simplify your payroll and expense tracking.
There are three options available:
- Sync with Quickbooks Online: Quickly review, edit, and approve timesheets within the app.
- Sync with Quickbooks Desktop: Sync data from TSheets to Quickbooks for Windows for accurate timesheets.
- Sync with Intuit Online Payroll: You can import your hours directly from TSheets to Intuit Online Payroll (IOP) with a single click.
B. Hubstaff payroll
With Hubstaff, you can set up automatic payments and payroll through integration with your preferred payment gateway Payoneer, PayPal, Bitwage, or Wise (formerly TransferWise).
Once your employees link their accounts with yours, you can:
- Set automatic payments.
- Choose the payment period — monthly, weekly, etc.
- Set payment types, payment rates, and billing rates.
- Pay overseas employees in their local currency.
You can also choose to pay team members manually.
Quick recap
To make payment via TSheets, you’d need to integrate with Quickbooks and connect through your bank.
Hubstaff’s approach is slightly more convenient – letting you make payments, automatically or manually through several payment gateways like Paypal.
5. Mobile apps
Mobile apps offer you the convenience of tracking time from anywhere.
Let’s see whether TSheets or Hubstaff has a better mobile app:
A. TSheets mobile app
Available for Android and iOS devices, TSheets mobile app enables you to track time online and offline.
With the mobile app, you can:
- Track projects and view their status.
- Keep track of employee hours.
- Keep track of leave requests and PTO (paid time off).
- Capture employee signatures for timesheets.
- Track employees’ location in real-time with geofencing and GPS tracking.
B. Hubstaff mobile app
You can use the Hubstaff mobile app in conjunction with the main application or on its own.
It has apps for your iOS or Android device.
With the Hubstaff GPS app for mobile, you can:
- Start tracking time to projects and tasks by pressing the Play button.
- Record time and location information. (It can’t record screenshots, activity levels, apps, or URLs).
- Clock in and out automatically with geofencing.
- Track tasks and view team activities.
Quick recap
Both mobile apps have a wide range of functions for tracking remote teams.
6. Integrations
Integrations are essential as it streamlines workflow.
Here’s more about TSheets and Hubstaff integrations:
A. TSheets integrations
TSheets integrates with your accounting software solution of choice as long as it accepts flat files such as CSV. Integration is possible with Sage, ADP, Namely, etc.
TSheets open API (Application Programming Interface) allows developers to merge their applications with TSheets.
B. Hubstaff integrations
Hubstaff integrates with 30+ solutions.
Notable integrations include:
- Project management applications: ClickUp, Github, and Wrike.
- Payment gateways: Gusto.
- CRM integrations: Salesforce.
- Accounting software: Quickbooks and Freshbooks.
Quick recap
While Tsheets integrates with leading accounting and expense tracking software, Hubstaff integrates with a wide range of project management and communication tools.
7. Pricing
Now that we know what they have to offer, let’s compare pricing plans for these solutions:
A. TSheets pricing
The paid TSheets’ plan starts at $8 per user, per month, plus a $20 per month base fee.
You also get a free 14 day trial with the TSheets account. No credit card is required.
B. Hubstaff pricing
Hubstaff’s paid pricing plans begin at $7 per user, per month (two users minimum.)
A limited free plan is also available.
Quick recap
If you consider the base fee attached to the TSheets subscription, it’s the more expensive option.
The best TSheets vs Hubstaff alternative
We’ve compared both TSheets and Hubstaff on time tracking, project and budget management, team management, payroll, mobile apps, integrations, and pricing.
But there’s another tool that you should also be considering…
It’s called Time Doctor, and it does a lot more than just basic time tracking.
What is Time Doctor?
Time Doctor is a time tracking software used by large corporations like Ericsson as well as startups and SMBs, like Thrive Market, to track time and gain valuable insights into productivity within the organization.
It’s also used by freelancers to help them track billable hours and manage time.
With Time Doctor, you can:
- Track time automatically or manually.
- Generate several reports to gain insight into organizational performance.
- Categorize websites as productive or unproductive with the Productivity Ratings feature.
- Get screenshots of employee screens to keep track of their activities.
Like Hubstaff, Time Doctor has a convenient Payroll feature.
You can pay your employees directly through your preferred payment gateway — Paypal, Wise (formerly TransferWise), ADP, or Gusto.
Time Doctor has a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms and a mobile app for Android devices. You can also easily track time across several apps with the Chrome browser extension.
Additionally, unlike TSheets and Hubstaff, Time Doctor offers an extensive range of integrations with more than 50 tools like Asana, Basecamp, Slack, Trello, Freshbooks, etc.
But how much will it cost you?
Time Doctor’s paid plans start at just $8 per user, per month! There’s also a 14-day free trial available (no credit card required).
The final verdict
TSheets is more of a timesheet app that focuses on recording billable hours for accounting purposes. It works best when integrated with Quickbooks accounting software.
On the other hand, Hubstaff is a tracking tool for project and team management. Its focus is on monitoring your employees and keeping projects on track.
However, Time Doctor is a great alternative to both tools. It combines the best of Hubstaff and TSheets to offer time tracking, invoicing, and useful productivity management features.
So why not try out Time Doctor today to experience its powers?
