You open Clockify to pull last year's hours for a client, and the report won't cover more than 31 days at once. The CSV option is gone. The entries you marked billable all spring export without the flag.
That's Clockify's 2026 free plan, and it's probably why you're here reading about Clockify alternatives. Not everyone should switch. For a small team, Clockify's own paid plan is still one of the cheapest fixes on this page — and for some people the real problem was never Clockify at all.
Short answer: pick a Clockify alternative by the problem you're solving. If your team outgrew the 5-user free plan, Clockify Basic ($3.99 per seat per month, billed annually) still undercuts Toggl and Harvest; Kimai Cloud is cheaper again, and Kimai or solidtime self-hosted cost only a server. If you keep forgetting to start the timer, you need an automatic tracker, not a nicer timer. If you need invoices from tracked hours, look at Harvest, Clockify Standard, Kimai or solidtime Professional.
Why people are looking for Clockify alternatives in 2026
Mostly because the free plan shrank. On April 21, 2026, CAKE.com announced (2026) that Clockify's free plan would drop from unlimited users to five and that several features would move to paid plans. Per Clockify's help center (2026), the free plan now means:
- 5 active users, owner included. Anyone past that is deactivated when a trial ends.
- Reports cover 31 days at a time. A year-end summary is twelve separate runs.
- PDF exports only. CSV and Excel reports are paid.
- No billable rates. You can't mark time billable or attach amounts to projects.
- Every project is public, and every member can create clients, projects, tasks and tags.
- 30 API requests an hour and three webhooks.
For many existing workspaces the changes landed in mid-June, and the r/clockify threads from June 2026 read like a support queue: freelancers finding months of entries stripped of billable status, people who say they never saw a notice. Clockify staff replied (2026) that owners and admins got emails and a month-long in-app banner; in July the company posted on r/clockify (2026) offering a 30-day trial that restores the old setup.
Is Clockify free? Yes, and to be fair to Clockify, the free plan is still a real product. It keeps unlimited tracking and projects, timer, timesheet, calendar, mobile and desktop apps, idle detection and a private Auto tracker, per Clockify's pricing page (2026). Its help center says outright that a solo user who needs basic tracking and PDF summaries can keep using it for free. If that's you, you can stop reading here.
Clockify pricing vs the alternatives for 1, 5 and 10 people
At ten people the yearly bill runs from about €359 (Kimai Cloud) to $1,080 or more (Toggl Starter, Harvest Teams), with Clockify Basic at $478.80. Every number below comes from the vendor's own pricing page, checked October 2026, billed annually.
| Plan (billed annually) | Per seat / month | 1 person / year | 5 people / year | 10 people / year | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clockify Basic | $3.99 | $47.88 | $239.40 | $478.80 | Up to 5 users |
| Clockify Standard (adds invoicing) | $5.49 | $65.88 | $329.40 | $658.80 | — |
| Toggl Starter | $9 | $108 | $540 | $1,080 | Up to 3 users |
| Harvest Teams | from $9, plus usage | $108+ | $540+ | $1,080+ | 1 seat, 2 projects |
| Kimai Cloud Standard | €2.99 | €35.88 | €179.40 | €358.80 | Self-hosted is free |
| solidtime Professional | €8 | €96 | €480 | €960 | 1 user in the cloud; self-hosted is free |
Paying month to month instead: Clockify Basic $4.99, Toggl Starter $12, Harvest Teams $11, Kimai €3.99, solidtime €9.
The number that actually bites is the cliff at the edge of each free tier. Clockify's help center (2026) is explicit that once you upgrade, the free allowance disappears and every user needs a paid seat. So the sixth person doesn't cost $47.88 — they turn $0 into 6 × $3.99 × 12 = $287.28 a year on Basic. On Toggl, the fourth user means $432 a year. On Harvest, the second seat means $216 before usage charges.
Harvest pricing now has those: its page (2026) says additional invoices, projects, clients and tasks "are billed based on what you use", without printing a per-unit rate. Ask for a quote before you migrate a busy account.
Which problem are you solving?
Find your row before you compare tools.
| If your problem is… | Look at | Don't bother with |
|---|---|---|
| Five people or fewer, you only track and read PDFs | Staying on Clockify Free | Switching |
| You outgrew five users, or need CSV and billable rates | Clockify Basic, Kimai Cloud, Toggl Starter, solidtime | Plans priced for features you won't use |
| You want the data on your own server | Kimai or solidtime, self-hosted | Cloud-only tools |
| You keep forgetting to start the timer | An automatic tracker (Clockify's own Auto tracker first) | Another manual timer |
| You need invoices from tracked time | Harvest, Clockify Standard, Kimai, solidtime Professional | Trackers that stop at reports |
Problem 1: your team needs a cheaper or simpler timer
On price alone, the answer points back to Clockify: Basic brings back CSV exports, billable rates and long reports for $3.99 a seat. If you're leaving on principle after the rollout, these are the realistic options.
Toggl Starter costs more than Clockify Basic but comes with a free plan for up to three users and a 30-day trial, per Toggl's pricing page (2026). Wrinkle: Toggl now sells a combined tracking-and-planning product, "Toggl 2.0", and keeps Toggl Track for existing users. Per Toggl's support docs (2026), Toggl Track's free plan exports PDF only; Toggl 2.0's exports CSV. I ran the long-run Toggl pricing math separately.
Kimai is open source under AGPL-3.0, per its GitHub repository (2026): invoicing, budgets, per-customer rates, SAML/LDAP login and a JSON API. Self-hosting needs PHP 8.2 or newer, MariaDB or MySQL, a web server and a subdomain; Kimai Cloud (2026) is hosted in Germany. One r/selfhosted commenter summed it up as "Least pretty, most complete" in a 2026 reply.
solidtime is the newer open-source time tracker (AGPL v3, per solidtime's GitHub (2026)) with a modern interface and Docker-based self-hosting. Per its pricing page (2026), the cloud version is free for one user; teams need Professional at €8.
Clockify vs Toggl, on the facts
Clockify is cheaper per seat and has the bigger free plan; Toggl refuses monitoring features by design and gives you a longer trial.
- Free plan: Clockify up to five users, Toggl up to three.
- First paid tier (annual): Clockify Basic $3.99, Toggl Starter $9. Both put billable rates there.
- Free-plan exports: Clockify PDF only; Toggl depends on which product you're on (see above).
- Monitoring: Clockify Pro ($7.99) adds activity monitoring, GPS and screenshots. Per Clockify's screenshot docs (2026), an admin must switch screenshots on, members are notified, and images are blurred by default. Toggl's pricing FAQ (2026) says it takes no screenshots and records no keystrokes, browsing history or location.
- Automatic capture: Clockify's Auto tracker (2026) records apps and sites locally, visible only to you, and keeps 45 days. Toggl 2.0's desktop activity tracking records apps and websites used for over 10 seconds and lets you pick which become time entries, per Toggl's pricing page (2026); Toggl Track's Timeline keeps 90 days, per Toggl's export docs (2026).
- Trial: Clockify 7 days of Pro, Toggl 30 days.
Problem 2: you keep forgetting to start the timer
Then a different timer won't fix it. You need something that records while you work and lets you label the record afterward. I wrote up why this failure is structural in the Toggl alternative post — the busiest hour is the one nobody remembers to time.
Try the free option first. Per Clockify's Auto tracker docs (2026), its desktop app records apps and websites you stay on longer than a threshold (60 seconds by default, 10 at minimum), keeps the data on your computer, shows it only to you and deletes it after 45 days. You still turn activities into time entries by hand. On a Mac, it's only in the version downloaded from Clockify's site, not the App Store one.
If that's not enough, the dedicated automatic trackers, prices checked October 2026:
- Timing (Mac): Professional $108 a year, Expert $132, Connect $192 with team features, 30-day trial, per Timing's pricing page (2026). Every plan includes sync and cloud backup across your Macs.
- RescueTime (web, desktop and mobile apps): $144 a year for Solo+ with Timesheets, $84 for the focus features alone, 14-day trial, per RescueTime's pricing (2026).
- Rize (Mac and Windows, cloud): $9.99 a month billed annually, about $120 a year, with AI categorization, per Rize's pricing (2026).
The fourth option is mine. I make Timex: it samples the frontmost app, window title and browser tab URL once a second into one SQLite file on your Mac — no account, no cloud. After two minutes without input it stops counting (calls and videos in the front app keep counting), and when you come back from five minutes or more away it offers to turn the gap into a categorized entry. It's $49 once for up to three Macs, with a 100-hour free trial, and it needs macOS 15 or later on Apple Silicon. It is also solo and Mac-only: no team dashboards, no Windows, no invoicing. It answers this problem and none of the others on this page.
The fuller Mac comparison lives in the best Mac time tracking apps, and the time tracker cost calculator runs 1-, 3- and 5-year totals for its preset Timing, Rize and RescueTime plans.
Problem 3: you need invoicing too
Harvest is the tool built around invoices. If Harvest pricing is what sent you looking for a Harvest alternative instead, Clockify Standard and Kimai invoice from tracked time for less per seat; solidtime Professional, at €8, lands roughly level with Harvest's $9 base seat.
- Harvest: per its pricing page (2026), the free plan includes invoicing and expenses for one seat and two projects; Teams adds Stripe, QuickBooks Online and Xero integrations from $9 a seat plus usage.
- Clockify Standard: $5.49 a seat for invoices, recurring invoices and QuickBooks sync, per Clockify's pricing (2026). Basic doesn't invoice.
- Kimai: invoicing with custom templates from the €2.99 Cloud plan (2026), or free self-hosted.
- solidtime Professional: €8 for invoicing, rounding and PDF reports, per solidtime's pricing (2026).
If you're a consultant weighing these, there's a separate guide to time tracking software for consultants.
How to leave Clockify without losing your history
Export year by year from Workspace settings, do it inside a trial if you need billable data, and import into a tool that reads Clockify files.
- Ask for the restored-access trial first. Clockify's July post says to email support@clockify.me for a 30-day trial that returns the old setup. In the June 2026 threads, a Clockify staffer says the trial is how you "get billable information on that export".
- Export one year at a time. Per Clockify's help center (2026): Workspace settings ▸ Import tab ▸ Data export, enter the year, click Export Time Entries. The free-plan page lists this as an owner action.
- Going to Kimai? Export report CSVs during the trial. Kimai's free Importer plugin (2026) wants Clockify's report columns, including Billable, Billable Rate and Billable Amount, and fails if one is missing — and CSV reports are paid in Clockify now. The plugin's changelog lists a 5,000-row, 4 MB limit per file, so export a busy team month by month. Set Clockify's date format first; Kimai's docs warn of parse errors otherwise.
- Going to solidtime? Use the built-in importer. Per solidtime's docs (2026): Admin ▸ Import, pick the Clockify importer, follow the export steps it shows, upload. You need the Admin or Owner role. It also reads Toggl and Harvest exports.
- Compare one month's totals in both tools before you delete anything. Deleting your Clockify account deletes the workspaces you own immediately, and there's no undo.
The honest caveats
Prices move. Clockify moved features between tiers this year, and Harvest's page now bills some usage on top of seats. Check the vendor page on the day you buy.
Currencies and taxes differ. Kimai and solidtime price in euros; they and Clockify list prices before VAT or sales tax.
This is a reading of published plans and docs, not a team rollout.
Self-hosted time tracking isn't free. The license is; the server, updates and backups are your job.
So, switch or stay?
If you're five people or fewer and only need hours and PDFs, stay on Clockify Free. If you outgrew it, put Clockify Basic's $287.28 a year for six people next to the cost of moving before you leave on principle. And if the real problem is that the timer was never running, that's the one I built Timex for.
Download Timex — the trial is 100 hours of real tracking with no card, and the week you forgot to time shows up anyway.
— DK