owntime vs Harvest
The verdict first: if you bill clients for time and the price hike broke your budget, owntime replaces it. If you run a 20-person shop with schedulers and Stripe payouts, stay.
You already know what happened in August 2026. This page is the sober version: side-by-side, including the rows where Harvest wins.
| owntime | Harvest | |
|---|---|---|
| Price model | $99 once per person. Forever. | Per seat, per month. Raised sharply in 2026 after acquisition — check your renewal. |
| Where data lives | Your disk. One SQLite file you can open with anything. | Their cloud. Export exists; hosting is theirs. |
| Can prices rise on you? | No. Your copy never calls home to check. | Yes. That’s the event that sent you here. |
| Timer & timesheet | Timer, manual entries, weekly grid, idle detection, hotkey | Mature, polished, mobile apps included |
| Invoicing | Select entries → grouped lines → PDF with your terms. Payments land wherever you link (UPI/Stripe text links) | Built-in invoicing with online payments via their Stripe integration |
| Expenses & receipts | Local receipts, rebilled onto invoices | Yes, with OCR-ish capture on mobile |
| Team features | Deliberately none. Solo / small studio. | Full team suite + Forecast scheduling |
| Integrations | CSV everywhere, local API for tinkerers | Dozens: Slack, QuickBooks, Asana… |
| Offline | Fully. Planes, cabins, trains. | Needs connection |
| Data export | It’s already yours. Plus CSV/XLS reports. | CSV export of everything |
What Harvest still does better. Say it plainly.
- Mobile apps. Native iOS/Android timers. We have no phone app and aren’t building one yet.
- Forecast scheduling for capacity planning across a team. Different product category; we skip it on purpose.
- Payments in-product. Clients pay invoices by card inside Harvest’s flow. Ours links out; money lands directly in your account instead.
- Integrations marketplace. If your workflow depends on Asana→Harvest sync, leaving costs you that glue.
- A 20-year head start on edge cases for big teams.
Who should switch
You track time mostly at a desk. You bill clients yourself or hand an accountant a report. Your team fits around one table. The new price is more than the value you feel, and the words “per seat, per month” now read differently than they did in 2024.
Who should stay (for now)
You need phone timers daily. You rely on Forecast to juggle 15 people’s week. You want card payments reconciled inside the tool. Harvest’s new price might still be cheaper than rebuilding those workflows. We’d rather say that than pretend otherwise.
THE PART THAT DOESN'T SHOW IN A TABLE
Whatever you choose, export before you decide anything else. A tracker you can leave is a tool. One you can’t is a lease.