What Harvest Still Does Better Than owntime

#Why I am writing this

I make owntime, a buy-once, local-first time tracker and invoicing app. owntime exists because Harvest raised prices roughly 1500% for some teams after Bending Spoons acquired it, and a lot of small agencies started looking for the exit.

You would expect the maker of the alternative to publish a page called "Why Harvest is terrible." This is not that page.

This is the list of things Harvest still does better than owntime. It is not a rhetorical setup where I list Harvest's wins and then reveal they do not matter. Some of them matter a lot. If you need what Harvest has and owntime does not, you should keep using Harvest, and this page will tell you so directly.

There is a reason to write this down. The people fleeing Harvest are deciding based on trust, and trust is built by telling the truth about your own product's weak spots before someone else does.

I will also admit the selfish reason. Every week someone emails me asking whether owntime can replace the thing Harvest did for them, and half the time the honest answer is "not for you, not yet." Writing that answer once, in public, saves us both an email. So here are the honest gaps, starting with the biggest. I am Amit, by the way. I answer that email myself.

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#1. The mobile app

Harvest has a real mobile app. You can start and stop a timer from your phone, log time on the go, and check what the team has tracked. For people who bill time away from a desk, that is not a nice-to-have. It is the whole workflow.

owntime does not have a mobile app. It is a Mac desktop app, period. If you track time from a phone today and that is how your business runs, owntime will not replace Harvest for you. Not yet, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.

Mobile is the first thing I would build if owntime grew a second platform, and it is also the honest reason some people should stay on Harvest.

#2. Forecasting and scheduling

Harvest owns Forecast, a scheduling and resource planning product. You can look at who on your team is booked, when they are free, and what is coming down the pipeline. It turns Harvest from a record of the past into a plan for the future.

owntime is deliberately not building this. Forecasting is a different product category, and building a half version of it would betray the buy-once, local-first promise in a dozen ways. There is no owntime scheduling feature coming. This is not a gap we are closing later. It is a gap by design.

If resource scheduling is core to how you run your agency, Harvest with Forecast is the better tool, and you should not switch to owntime expecting a substitute.

#3. Integrations, the long tail

Harvest connects to more than a hundred tools. QuickBooks, Xero, Slack, project management apps, payment processors. If your stack is built around Harvest, your invoice data flows into your accounting, your time data flows out of your project tools, and the plumbing is already done.

owntime takes a different position. Import works from Harvest, Toggl, Clockify, and FreshBooks, and there is a local API plus a CLI for the terminal crowd. But the long tail of integrations, the hundred-plus connectors, is not there, and the anti-roadmap says it will not be. Integrations are where subscriptions creep back in, and owntime would rather be small and owned than connected and rented.

That is a real trade. If your business runs on a dozen integrations, owntime will feel bare.

#4. Team features done at scale

Harvest is built for teams. Live editing, shared project views, roles and permissions, a single source of truth that everyone works from. A 15-person agency can run its whole time and billing operation on Harvest with everyone looking at the same numbers.

owntime is built for the opposite assumption. Each person keeps their own file, one license covers up to three people, and team roll-ups are planned as an export rather than a live shared workspace. For a team that needs to see everyone's hours in one place in real time, Harvest is the better fit, full stop.

The owntime thesis is that a lot of "teams" are really two or three people who each bill their own clients and compare notes on Friday. For that group, separate files are fine. For an actual team operation, they are not.

#5. Maturity and polish

Harvest has been shipping since 2006. That is two decades of edge cases found and fixed, of invoice templates refined, of reporting tuned to what agencies actually ask. The product is boring in the best way. It just works.

owntime is at version 0.4.x. It is notarized, it ships signed updates, and the core loops, timer, entries, invoices, import, are solid. But it does not have twenty years of polish. There will be rough edges. There will be a workflow Harvest handles that owntime has not seen yet.

That is the honest trade at the heart of every "alternative to the big tool" story. You are trading years of maturity for a different relationship with the product, one where you own it and it cannot reprice you.

#6. Online payments

Harvest can process payments. Your client clicks a link on the invoice and pays, and Harvest handles the transaction.

owntime links out instead. Invoices carry a payment link that lands in your Stripe or other account, but owntime never touches the money. That keeps owntime out of the compliance and subscription logic that processing payments requires, and it is a deliberate line in the anti-roadmap.

The cost is convenience. With Harvest, payment is one click inside the flow. With owntime, your client clicks through to your payment processor. It works. It is just an extra step, and Harvest does it better.

#The one thing owntime does that Harvest cannot

After all those concessions, here is the counterweight, and it is not a feature list.

Harvest can raise your price 1500%. It just did. Not because the new owner is evil, but because the architecture allows it. Your team's history lives on their servers. Your billing runs through their product. The leverage was built into the deal from day one.

owntime cannot do that. There is no server, no subscription, no monthly invoice, no way to charge you again. The app verifies a license offline and runs forever on your machine. Your history is one SQLite file on your disk at ~/Documents/owntime/timesheet.db, and if owntime disappeared tomorrow, your copy would keep working until your Mac dies.

So the honest summary is not "owntime is better than Harvest." It is: Harvest is better at being a hosted team product, and owntime is better at being owned. Those are different categories wearing similar faces, and which one you need depends on what you are optimizing for.

#A decision guide, not a verdict

If you need...	Pick
A phone app and on-the-go tracking	Harvest (or Toggl)
Forecasting and team scheduling	Harvest with Forecast
100+ integrations in your stack	Harvest
Live multi-user team editing	Harvest or Toggl
Twenty years of polish	Harvest
A price that cannot change	owntime
Your history as a file you hold	owntime
Offline-forever software	owntime

The rows are not in competition. They are a map of who each tool is for.

#FAQ

Does Harvest really have better mobile than owntime?

Yes. Harvest has a full mobile app for starting and stopping timers and logging time on the go. owntime is a Mac desktop app with no mobile app. If phone-based tracking is essential, Harvest is the better fit.

Can owntime do team scheduling like Harvest Forecast?

No. owntime is deliberately not building forecasting or resource scheduling. That is a different product category, and the buy-once, local-first design does not extend to it. Harvest with Forecast remains the better choice for that need.

Is owntime missing Harvest integrations?

owntime imports from Harvest, Toggl, Clockify, and FreshBooks and offers a local API and CLI, but it does not carry Harvest's long tail of 100+ integrations. That is a deliberate anti-roadmap choice to keep the product server-free.

Why would anyone pick owntime over Harvest then?

Because the one thing Harvest cannot offer is ownership. Harvest can reprice you, as the 2026 increase showed. owntime has no server and no subscription, so there is nothing to reprice, and your history lives in a file you hold rather than a database they control.

Is this page really written by the owntime maker?

Yes. I am Amit, the developer of owntime. This page concedes real Harvest strengths because the decision to switch should be made on accurate trade-offs, not on a biased comparison.

#The bottom line

Harvest is a genuinely good product, and after the price hike, it is still the right tool for a specific set of needs: mobile tracking, forecasting, deep integrations, real team editing.

owntime is the right tool for a different need. You want to own the software and hold the file, and you have decided the rent is not worth the risk anymore.

If you read this page and realized you need what Harvest still does better, thank you for reading this far, and honestly, stay on Harvest. It will serve you well.

If you read it and realized the features you actually use are the ones owntime covers, timer, grid, invoices, import, and the thing you cannot stomach is another price hike, then owntime is worth fourteen free days of your time.

Try owntime free for 14 days · See the full Harvest vs owntime comparison · Buy once, $99 early bird

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