As a remote agency, we’ve tested and relied on several employee monitoring tools over the years to track time, manage contractors, and keep client billing accurate. Here, we rank the seven tools we’ve actually used, based on real day-to-day agency work:
- Apploye
- Hubstaff
- Time Doctor
- DeskTime
- TimeCamp
- Insightful
- Toggl Track
Each tool takes a different approach to “monitoring” — some focus on screenshots and activity levels, others stick to simple time tracking, and a few combine monitoring with payroll, invoicing, and project management.
Pricing ranges from free to $20 per user/month, but cost alone didn’t decide our ranking; day-to-day usefulness did. Below, we break down how each tool performed on tracking accuracy, ease of use, pricing, and how well it actually supported running an agency.
Quick Overview
The best remote employee monitoring tool for teams in 2026 is Apploye, thanks to its combination of productivity monitoring, time-tracking, and agency operations in one platform.
Its paid plans include time tracking, screenshots, app and URL tracking, real-time activity views, projects, tasks, client invoicing, payroll, and reporting — with the Elite plan starting at $4.50 per user/month (billed annually) and a free Starter plan available.
Even you get all the features in its free plan for up to 10 people.
Alternatives like Hubstaff, Time Doctor, DeskTime, TimeCamp, Insightful, and Toggl Track range from $0–$20 per user/month, but most charge separately for payroll or invoicing, or skip deeper monitoring features like screenshots and activity analytics.
What Actually Matters When You’re Running a Remote Team
Before the ranking, here’s what we learned the hard way, usually after picking wrong.
- Does billing come with it, or is that a separate tool?
If you invoice clients by the hour, a monitoring tool that doesn’t handle invoicing means maintaining two systems that must reconcile every pay cycle.
- How much does it actually cost once your team grows past 5-10 people?
Several tools on this list look cheap at small scale and get expensive fast once you add screenshots, API access, or higher-tier reporting as separate add-ons.
- Does the tool even do monitoring, or just time tracking?
This mattered more than we expected. Toggl Track, for example, is built around privacy-first time tracking and intentionally skips screenshots and keystroke data. That’s a feature for some teams and a deal-breaker for others.
- Can you adjust monitoring depth per person or team?
Not every role needs the same level of oversight. The tools that let us dial this up or down per team saved a lot of internal friction.
- Is support actually responsive when payroll is on the line?
Time tracking touches payroll. When something breaks, you need an answer same-day, not a ticket queue that takes 48 hours.
Our 7 Ranking, From What We’d Use Again to What We Wouldn’t
We’ve tried a lot of employee monitoring and time tracking tools while managing remote teams, and honestly, they’re not all worth keeping around.
Here’s our ranking, from the tools we’d happily use again to the ones we probably wouldn’t choose unless we had a very specific reason.
1. Apploye: Where We Landed, and Why We Stayed
Apploye is an employee monitoring tool we’ve used the longest, and the reason is fairly unglamorous: it just covers more of what we actually need without charging extra for each feature.
We manage both in-house staff and outsourced contractors, so activity monitoring matters to us. At the same time, invoicing clients accurately and calculating payroll without exporting spreadsheets into a third tool is also vital.
Apploye handles all of it from one dashboard, and it’s GDPR and HIPAA-compliant, which mattered once we started working with a healthcare-adjacent client.
One detail we particularly like is what Apploye doesn’t track through its desktop activity monitoring.
It measures mouse and keyboard activity to calculate an activity percentage, but it does not record what someone actually types.
Its app and URL tracking records application or website names and how long they’re active, rather than the detailed contents of documents, messages, or web pages. Tracking also stops when the timer is stopped.
That distinction matters for agencies because monitoring can quickly become intrusive if you aren’t careful about what data you’re collecting.
Apploye’s Data Processing Agreement also makes clear that customers choose whether to use its monitoring functions and are responsible for that decision.
For agencies that bill clients by the hour, the billable-time workflow is another useful piece.
Apploye lets teams separate billable and non-billable hours, connect tracked work to projects, and use time records and screenshots to support client billing. Its own agency and call-center materials specifically position the platform around cleaner billing, payroll, and project-level visibility.
And the pricing is hard to ignore.
Here, pricing starts with a free plan for up to 10 users, genuinely usable and not just a stripped demo, which is how we tested it before paying anything.
The Elite plan runs $4.50 per user per month, billed annually ($7 monthly), and includes full online and offline time tracking, 18 screenshots per hour, full app and URL tracking, unlimited tasks, client invoicing, payroll, and custom reports.
In fact, the Power plan is $8 per user per month, billed annually, and adds 60 screenshots per hour, real-time instant screenshots, and API access, which we ended up needing once we started pulling data into our own internal reporting.
A few add-ons worth knowing about: Stealth Mode (monitoring with no visible icon or notification) costs an extra $2 per user per month, and there’s also a screen recording add-on at $4 per user per month if you need full video playback rather than periodic screenshots.
Best Features of Apploye You Must Check
- Automatic Time Tracking: Track employee hours automatically across projects and tasks, with support for both online and offline time.
- Screenshot Monitoring: Capture periodic screenshots to give managers a visual record of work activity. Screenshot frequency can be configured based on the plan.
- App & URL Tracking: See which applications and websites are being used and how much time is spent on them, helping agencies understand where project hours are going.
- Activity Monitoring: Apploye measures keyboard and mouse activity to provide an activity percentage without recording the actual keystrokes employees type.
- Real-Time Active View: Managers can see who’s currently working and what they’re working on through the real-time activity view.
- Project & Task Tracking: Connect tracked hours directly to projects and tasks, making it easier to monitor budgets, workloads, and client work.
- Billable Hours & Client Invoicing: Separate billable and non-billable time and turn tracked work into client invoices without moving data into another platform.
- Payroll Management: Use tracked employee hours to simplify payroll calculations and reduce manual spreadsheet work.
- Attendance & Leave Tracking: Manage attendance, work schedules, and leave alongside employee time records.
- Detailed Reports: Generate reports on time, activity, projects, attendance, screenshots, and other workforce data for management and client reporting.
- Screen Recording: Teams that need more than periodic screenshots can add screen recording for continuous visual playback.
- Stealth Mode: Apploye offers Stealth Mode as an optional add-on for organizations that have a legitimate need for less visible monitoring.
- API Access: Power and Enterprise plans include API access, making it possible to connect Apploye data with internal systems and reporting workflows.
- Custom Reports & Integrations: Create more tailored reporting workflows and connect Apploye with other tools used by your organization.
- Multi-Platform Support: Apploye supports employee time tracking across major desktop and web environments, making it practical for distributed teams using different devices. For example, the Mac employee monitoring software of Apploye is a true piece of development that runs uninterruptedly on Mac os.
Best for: Agencies and BPOs that want monitoring, billing, and payroll under one login instead of three separate subscriptions.
Apploye Pricing
Starter — Free
- $0 per user/month
- Includes basic time tracking
- Timesheets with limited history
- Attendance and leave tracking
- Basic screenshots
- Limited app and website tracking
- Up to three projects
Elite — $4.50/user/month
- Billed annually
- $6/user/month when billed quarterly
- $7/user/month when billed monthly
- Full-time tracking
- Attendance and leave
- Screenshot monitoring
- Apps and URL tracking
- Real-time active view
- Activity analytics
- Unlimited tasks
- Client invoicing
- Payroll
- Custom reports and integrations
Power — $8/user/month
- Billed annually
- Includes everything in Elite
- Higher screenshot capacity
- Real-time instant screenshots
- API access
- Additional advanced capabilities
Enterprise
- Custom pricing
- SSO
- Account provisioning
- Higher API limits
- Guided onboarding
- Dedicated account support
Apploye also offers optional add-ons for features such as Stealth Mode, additional screenshots, API access, white labeling, on-premise hosting, screen recording, and BigQuery data export. Pricing and availability should be checked on the current pricing page before purchase because these options can change.
What We’d Tell Another Agency:
- The free plan is generous enough to test with a real team, not a locked-down demo account
- Offline tracking synced properly when our team traveled with spotty internet, which genuinely surprised us the first time
- Available on Mac, Windows, and Linux, plus Android and iOS apps, so device compatibility was never an issue across our mixed team
- Support has been consistently fast when payroll timing was on the line
Where It’s Not Perfect:
- Reporting customization is solid but not as deep as dedicated analytics platforms like Insightful
- Fewer third-party integrations than older, more established names like Hubstaff
2. Hubstaff: Reliable Name, But You’ll Outgrow the Starter Plan
Hubstaff was actually the first tool we used, years ago, and it’s still a name most clients recognize the moment we mention what we’re using.
The Starter plan is priced well at $4.99 per user per month, but it comes with a 2-user minimum, and screenshots plus app and URL tracking are noticeably limited until you move up a tier.
We upgraded within a few months because the Starter plan’s monitoring depth wasn’t enough once we had contractors we didn’t work with face-to-face.
Where Hubstaff genuinely shines is in integrations. If your team already lives inside Asana, Trello, or QuickBooks, it plugs into almost everything without friction.
3. Time Doctor: The Most Detailed Reports We’ve Seen
Time Doctor’s reporting is genuinely the most detailed of everything we’ve tried.
The screencasts and activity summaries go further than a simple screenshot, which was useful during one stretch where a client wanted to see exactly how billed hours were spent, down to the app level.
That detail comes at a price, starting at $6.70 per user per month on the Basic plan. Honestly, the depth of reporting can feel like overkill if you’re a small team that mostly just wants to know who’s online and roughly what they’re working on.
4. DeskTime: Good If Your Team Won’t Use a Timer
Usually, we tried DeskTime during a stretch when half our team kept forgetting to manually start their timers. DeskTime’s fully automatic background tracking solved that specific problem well, no start or stop button required.
Pricing starts around $6.42 per user per month billed annually on the Pro plan, with screenshots and absence management reserved for the pricier Premium tier at roughly $9.17 per user per month.
It’s a solid tool, but we found ourselves missing the invoicing and payroll features we’d already gotten used to elsewhere.
5. TimeCamp: Cheap Entry Point, Gets Pricier at the Top
TimeCamp has one of the more generous free plans on this list, unlimited users at $0, though the free tier is fairly basic.
The Starter paid plan runs $3.99 per user per month, billed annually, and adds invoicing, attendance calendar, and time-off management.
Premium jumps to $6.99 per user per month and adds resource planning and budget estimates, while Ultimate at $9.99 per user per month adds screenshots, remote work detection, and SSO login.
The catch is that screenshots, the core “monitoring” feature most agencies actually want, only show up on the top Ultimate tier. If monitoring is your main reason for buying, TimeCamp’s effective starting price is closer to $10 than $4.
It is best for teams that mainly want time tracking and invoicing, with monitoring as a secondary nice-to-have.
6. Insightful: Built for Bigger Teams, Priced Like It
Insightful, formerly known as Workpuls, is workforce analytics software rather than a simple time tracker, and it’s priced accordingly.
The Workforce Analytics plan starts at $8 per seat per month and includes screenshots, activity tracking, and Stealth Mode built in from the entry tier. Workflow Optimization runs $12, and a combined plan runs around $16 per seat per month. There’s no permanent free plan, only a free trial.
We tested Insightful during a phase when we were considering scaling past 30 people, and the analytics depth was genuinely impressive.
But for a smaller agency, it felt like more platform than we needed, and several deeper features (on-demand screenshots, screen recording) are separate paid add-ons on top of the base price.
7. Toggl Track: Great Tool, Wrong Category for Us
Here, we’re including Toggl Track because we did use it for about eight months, but it’s worth being upfront: Toggl Track isn’t really an employee monitoring tool.
It’s built around privacy-first time tracking, and it deliberately does not offer screenshots, keystroke logging, or activity percentages. Employees log time manually or via an auto-tracker, and that’s it.
Pricing is free for up to 5 users, then $9 per user per month billed annually on the Starter plan, rising to $18 per user per month on Premium.
For teams that want visibility without any monitoring at all, this is a genuinely well-built, polished tool. For us, once we started managing contractors we didn’t know well, we needed more visibility than Toggl Track was designed to give.
Teams that want clean time tracking and billing without any activity monitoring at all: this tool is good for them.
So, Which One Would We Actually Recommend?
For an agency, the answer depends heavily on what you’re actually trying to solve.
If the problem is “We need to know how our remote team spends its time, connect that time to projects, and make client billing easier,” Apploye is the strongest overall choice.
That’s mainly because it combines employee monitoring with the rest of the agency workflow.
You get time tracking, screenshots, app usage, URL tracking, activity analytics, projects, tasks, client invoicing, payroll, and reporting without moving into the pricing structure of a dedicated security platform.
Hubstaff is a close alternative if integrations, payments, and GPS workforce features are particularly important.
Time Doctor is worth considering when detailed remote-work visibility and proof-of-work reporting are the priority.
To be honest, if you’re running an agency or managing outsourced staff and want one tool that handles monitoring, time tracking, invoicing, and payroll without charging extra for each piece, Apploye is where we landed and where we’ve stayed.
The free plan alone is worth testing with your actual team before committing to anything paid.
If detailed, defensible reporting for client billing disputes is your main concern, Time Doctor is worth the higher price.
But if you’re scaling past 30-40 people and need genuine workforce analytics, Insightful is built for that, at a matching price.
Also, If your team just needs clean time tracking without any monitoring at all, Toggl Track does that better than anything else on this list, precisely because it doesn’t try to do more.
But for a typical digital agency, you probably don’t need the heaviest monitoring product available.
You need reliable time data, enough activity information to understand how work is progressing, useful project reports, and a straightforward way to turn tracked work into business results.
That’s where Apploye has the advantage.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do we actually need screenshots, or is activity tracking enough?
It depends on the team. For contractors or offshore staff, we don’t see face-to-face, screenshots gave us peace of mind early on. For long-tenured staff, we’ve dialed it back to just activity tracking on some of these tools.
Is it worth paying more for a tool with payroll built in?
For us, yes. Running payroll and invoicing separately from time tracking meant reconciling two systems every pay cycle, which cost more in admin time than the cheaper standalone tools saved us.
How much should a small agency expect to pay per person?
Based on what we’ve actually paid across these eight tools, expect somewhere between $4 and $10 per user per month for a genuinely useful plan that includes real monitoring, before add-ons like extra screenshots, screen recording, or API access.
Is Toggl Track really not a monitoring tool?
Correct, and this tripped us up initially. Toggl Track is time tracking only, no screenshots, no activity percentages, no keystroke data. If “monitoring” specifically is what you need, it’s not built for that use case.
Did switching tools cause any real disruption?
Some. Payroll history and old timesheets don’t always migrate cleanly between platforms, so budget a short overlap period when switching rather than cutting over on day one.
Would we switch again?
Possibly, if pricing or features change significantly. But after eight tools, Apploye is the first one that’s covered enough of what we actually need that we haven’t felt the itch to look elsewhere.
Sum Up
We didn’t set out to become a case study in employee monitoring software; we just needed a tool that scaled as our team grew and our client list got more demanding.
Remote agencies don’t need more dashboards for their own sake; they need answers.
- How much time did a project actually take?
- Which client is consuming the most hours?
- Are contractors tracking their work correctly?
- Is a project nearing budget?
- Where is the team spending its time, and can that data become invoices, payroll, and better decisions?
That’s where Apploye takes our #1 spot — it’s the only tool that combines real monitoring with payroll and invoicing, without charging extra for each piece.
Hubstaff suits agencies wanting a mature time-tracking and payments ecosystem; Time Doctor offers deeper remote-work visibility; Insightful and ActivTrak lean toward workforce analytics.
But for a typical remote agency that wants monitoring, time tracking, project management, billing, and payroll in one place, Apploye is the most balanced starting point.