"The Ownership Matrix: Harvest vs Toggl vs Clockify vs owntime"

#The short version

Four tools, one question: who controls the price and the data after you commit?

• Harvest is the cautionary tale. Great product, now owned by Bending Spoons, with pricing that reportedly jumped around 1500% for some teams.
• Toggl Track is the closest feature match and genuinely good. But it is a subscription, and your data lives on their servers.
• Clockify is free, and "free" is real. But free is a strategy, not a promise, and your history sits in their cloud.
• owntime is buy-once and local-first. One payment, one file you hold. It gives up team features and a phone app to make ownership structural.

There is no single winner for every team, and this page is not going to pretend there is. What follows is the honest matrix, with the verdicts stated plainly and the trade-offs conceded up front.

One disclosure before the table. I am Amit, and I make owntime, so this page has a thumb on the scale. I built owntime in the week after Harvest raised my own bill, and the spreadsheet near the bottom of this post is the spreadsheet I ran on myself before I decided to build instead of shop. I am going to show you the rows that embarrass me, including the ones where the subscription tools are genuinely better, because the only comparison worth reading is the one that tells you when not to buy my product.

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#The matrix

Factor	Harvest	Toggl Track	Clockify	owntime
Pricing model	Subscription per seat	Subscription per seat	Free tier, paid plans	One-time purchase
Typical cost, solo	~$11-12/user/month	~$9-14/user/month	$0, or ~$9-15/user/month	$99 once (early bird), then $149
6-person studio, 3 years	~$2,570	~$1,944	$0, or more on paid plan	~$198 (2 one-time licenses, 3 people each)
Where your data lives	Their cloud	Their cloud	Their cloud	One local SQLite file you keep
Data export	CSV	CSV, full export	CSV	The file itself, openable in any SQLite tool
Works offline	Limited	Limited	Limited	Fully, forever
Team live editing	Yes	Yes	Yes	No (each person has their own file)
Phone app	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Invoicing	Yes	Via integrations	Paid plans	Yes, built in
Can the price change on you?	Yes, proven	Yes	Yes	No, architecturally
Can they disappear with your data?	Yes, risk	Yes, risk	Yes, risk	No, you hold the file

6-person studio, 3 years. owntime is one-time, not annual.

#What this page is not doing

A few honesty notes before the deep dive, because comparison pages usually bury these.

I make owntime. This whole page has a thumb on the scale, and you should read it knowing that. The fix for bias is not pretending to be neutral. It is showing you the real trade-offs and letting the competitor wins stand.

Harvest and Toggl are good products. If this page reads like they are not, the page is wrong. They have teams of engineers, years of polish, and features owntime does not have. You can see those differences in the matrix above: team editing, phone apps, integrations.

Clockify's free tier is genuinely free. Not a trap, not a bait and switch. For a solo user who just needs to track time and does not care where the data lives, Clockify is a completely reasonable choice. The question is what "free" costs you in leverage later.

So this is not "owntime wins, stop reading." This is: here is what each tool costs in money, in data, and in control, and here is who each one is actually for.

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#Harvest: the one that started the exodus

Where Harvest wins

Harvest is a polished, mature product. The weekly timesheet grid that everyone imitates, including owntime, came from Harvest. It has team scheduling with Forecast, a solid mobile app, payment processing, and integrations with everything a small agency uses. For a team that wants one hosted tool to run time, projects, and billing, Harvest was, for a long time, the obvious answer.

It still is, if you trust the new owner.

Where Harvest hurts

The August 2026 repricing is the story. Reports put the increase around 1500% for some teams after Bending Spoons acquired the company. That is not a cost-of-living adjustment. That is a re-pricing of a captive audience.

And here is the structural point. Harvest could do that because of its architecture. Your timesheets, your team, your billing history, all of it lived on their servers. Leaving meant losing or painfully migrating that history. The price hike was not a bug in the product. It was a feature of the business model.

Who Harvest is for now

Teams that need the full hosted suite, that have already budgeted for the new price, and that have decided the risk of another repricing is acceptable. For a 6-person studio on the reported new pricing, the three-year cost is roughly $2,570. You are paying for a lot of product, and you are also paying for the risk that the number changes again.

#Toggl Track: the closest match

Where Toggl wins

Toggl Track is excellent at the daily job. The timer is fast, the idle detection is smart, the browser extension and integrations cover every workflow, and the free tier is genuinely usable. On pure time tracking mechanics, Toggl is the benchmark. Our own gap analysis scores owntime against Toggl feature by feature, and Toggl wins a lot of the rows.

Toggl also has a real Timeline feature that captures what you worked on, which owntime only has as an opt-in local preview. If automatic capture matters to you, Toggl does it today, better.

Where Toggl hurts

Toggl is a subscription, and your data lives on Toggl's servers. That is not a criticism of Toggl specifically. It is the same architecture as Harvest, which means the same leverage exists. Toggl has not pulled a rug, and there is no reason to think they will. But the structure that made Harvest's hike possible is the structure Toggl runs on.

The other cost is cumulative. A solo user on Toggl's paid tier pays roughly $9 to $14 a month. Over three years that is in the $300 to $500 range, more than the one-time cost of owntime. For a 6-person studio it is about $1,944 over three years, against $198 for two owntime licenses.

Who Toggl is for

People who want the most polished time tracker with the best integrations and don't mind renting it. If the monthly line item is invisible to you and you want Timeline-style automatic tracking, Toggl is the honest pick.

#Clockify: the free question

Where Clockify wins

Clockify's free tier is real. Unlimited users, unlimited tracking, no trial countdown. For a solo freelancer or a small team that just needs to know where the hours went, free is hard to argue with. Clockify is owned by COING, which also runs Plaky and Pumble, so it is not a hobby project.

Where Clockify hurts

"Free" is a strategy. Free products still need revenue, and the revenue eventually comes from the users who outgrow free. That is not a prediction about Clockify specifically. It is how the category works, and Harvest is the recent proof that the category can turn on you.

The data point is the same as Toggl. Your history lives in their cloud, and the export, while possible, is a chore you will do once and never again. The day you want to leave, the friction is on their side of the scale.

Who Clockify is for

A solo user or small team that wants zero cost today and accepts that the product, the price, and the data are controlled by someone else. It is the rational choice if you genuinely will not care when the free tier shrinks.

#owntime: the ownership argument

Where owntime wins

The matrix rows where owntime wins are the ones the other tools cannot contest:

• One payment. $99 during early bird, $149 after. The transaction ends.
• The data is a file you keep. A single SQLite file at ~/Documents/owntime/timesheet.db. Copy it, back it up, open it with any SQLite browser. It is yours in a way cloud data never is.
• Offline forever. The app has no servers. License verification is offline. If owntime disappeared tomorrow, your copy would keep running until your Mac gives out.
• Invoicing is built in. Time to invoice without retyping. This is the daily workflow the comparison tools route through integrations or paid tiers.

The structural claim deserves repeating: owntime cannot reprice you, because there is nothing to reprice. No server, no subscription, no lever. The worst case of buying owntime is the tool stops improving and your file keeps working. The worst case of renting is the number changes and your history is the hostage that makes you pay it.

Where owntime hurts

Now the concessions, stated as plainly as the wins.

• No team live editing. Each person keeps their own file. A 6-person studio buys 6 licenses and each person tracks independently. Team roll-ups are planned as an export, not as a shared live workspace.
• No phone app. owntime is a Mac desktop app, macOS 12 or newer, Apple Silicon. Windows and Linux are on the roadmap, not shipped.
• No scheduling or forecasting. Harvest's Forecast is a real product category and owntime is not building it.
• No integrations marketplace. There is a local API and CLI, plus import from the big trackers, but not the 100+ integration catalog the hosted tools carry.
• It is early. owntime is at version 0.4.x. The product is notarized and shipping, but it does not have five years of polish behind it.

These are real gaps, and the comparison pages for each tool say so. The reason to pick owntime is not that it does everything. It is that the things it does, it does in a way no one can take back.

#Cost over time, worked out

The honest cost comparison depends on team size and how long you look. Here is the math for the common case, a 6-person studio over three years.

Tool	3-year cost, 6 people	Note
Harvest	~$2,570	At reported post-hike pricing; varies by plan
Toggl Track	~$1,944	At ~$9/user/month mid-tier
Clockify	$0 on free, more on paid	Free tier is genuinely free
owntime	~$198	2 one-time licenses at $99 each

For a solo consultant, the numbers compress. A solo Toggl user pays roughly $324 over three years at $9 a month. A solo owntime license is $99 once. The solo break-even lands around eight to nine months: after that, every month of owning owntime is cheaper than the month before it would have been rented.

But cost is only half the matrix. The other half is what you lose if the vendor changes the deal. No spreadsheet captures the cost of rebuilding years of history, and the whole point of the ownership row is that owntime removes that risk from the table.

#Who should pick which

• Pick Harvest if you need the full hosted suite, forecasting, and mobile, and you have decided the repricing risk is acceptable for what you get.
• Pick Toggl if you want the best pure tracker with the best integrations and you are comfortable renting it.
• Pick Clockify if zero cost today matters more than control later, and you accept the free-tier risk.
• Pick owntime if you are a solo consultant or small agency that bills by the hour, you just watched your tracker get repriced, and you want the tool and the data to be yours.

The last group is who owntime is for. The first three groups have excellent options already, and this page is not going to talk you out of them.

#FAQ

Is owntime really cheaper than Toggl over time?

For a solo user, owntime breaks even around eight to nine months against a $9 per month Toggl plan. After that, owntime costs nothing while Toggl keeps billing. For a 6-person studio over three years, owntime is roughly $198 against Toggl's ~$1,944.

Does owntime import from Toggl and Clockify?

Yes. owntime imports CSV from Harvest, Toggl, Clockify, and FreshBooks, with a dry-run preview before anything writes. You see exactly what comes in and what gets skipped before you commit.

What does "local-first" mean for a time tracker?

Local-first means the app stores your data on your own machine instead of a vendor's server. owntime keeps everything in one SQLite file at ~/Documents/owntime/timesheet.db. You can back it up, sync it, or open it with other tools, and the app works fully offline.

Can a team of 6 use owntime?

Each person keeps their own owntime file, and one license covers up to three people, one Mac each. A 6-person studio would buy 2 licenses. Team roll-ups are planned as an export rather than a shared live workspace.

Which tool has the best mobile app?

Toggl, Harvest, and Clockify all have mobile apps. owntime does not have one yet. If tracking from a phone matters to you, owntime is not the right pick today.

#The verdict

The four tools in this matrix are not four versions of the same thing. They are two different architectures wearing similar faces.

Harvest, Toggl, and Clockify rent you access to software that runs on their servers, holding your history as the thing that keeps you paying. That is a fine deal until the owner changes, and the owner always changes eventually.

owntime sells you software that runs on your machine, holding your history in a file you keep. The deal is over when you pay, and no future owner can reopen it.

If you are a solo consultant or a small agency billing by the hour, the ownership matrix has one clear recommendation. Own the tool, keep the file, and let the subscriptions fight over everyone else.

Buy owntime once, $99 early bird · Try it free for 14 days · Harvest vs owntime · Toggl vs owntime · Clockify vs owntime

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