140k global users trust Hubstaff for time tracking
Time tracking tools have evolved beyond just logging hours—they now help teams understand productivity, manage workflows, and even run operations. Hubstaff and Apploye both offer time tracking and employee monitoring, but they take very different approaches.
Hubstaff focuses on depth—connecting time tracking to analytics, workflows, and financial operations. Apploye, on the other hand, emphasizes affordability, simplicity, and a wide set of monitoring features.
TL;DR: Best use cases for each tool
Choose Hubstaff if:
- You’re looking for a time tracking tool that streamlines the entire payment process with timesheets, invoices, and in-app payroll.
- Time tracking is a base-level need you’d like to build upon with workforce analytics and reporting.
- You manage cross-functional teams working on different projects, clients, or locations.
Choose Apploye if:
- Affordability is a top concern, but not at the expense of built-in features.
- You need increased visibility in the form of screenshots, screen recording, or live productivity monitoring.
- High-level reporting, extensive integration options, and in-app payments are not a priority.
Hubstaff vs. Apploye: At a glance
How do these two tools stack up against each other? Before we get into an in-depth breakdown, here are some key features of these time tracking software worth comparing:
| Category | Hubstaff | Apploye |
|---|---|---|
Core focus | Time tracking with built-in productivity monitoring, workforce analytics, and automated payments | Time tracking and employee monitoring features for basic productivity tracking |
Time tracking | Automatic and project-based tracking across desktop, web, and mobile (GPS tracking included) | Project/task tracking across desktop and mobile |
Productivity Monitoring | Keyboard and mouse activity levels, Apps/URL tracking, optional screenshots, idle time | Screenshots, screen recording, live activity monitoring |
Workforce analytics | Utilization, capacity planning, benchmarking, high-level performance insights | Basic productivity metrics and activity tracking |
Payments & invoicing | Built-in payments, invoicing, and real-time project budgets | Limited / basic support |
Scheduling & time off | Scheduling, attendance, PTO, overtime tracking | Limited / surface-level support |
Integrations | 35+ integrations + Zapier extensibility | Limited integrations (PM tools only) |
Pricing | Mid-market tiers (~$7–$12/user/month) | Lower-cost (~$5–$9/user/month with add-ons) |
Best for | Scaling teams, operations | SMBs, price-sensitive teams |
Key Feature Comparison
Structured time tracking vs. basic time tracking
Hubstaff
Hubstaff is a versatile time tracker with automatic, project-based, and GPS time tracking capabilities. No matter which method you choose, time tracking automatically triggers timesheets, payments, invoices, reports, and more.
Apploye
Apploye offers desktop and mobile time tracking, but it’s positioned more as a monitoring tool with screenshots, activity levels, and even live activity monitoring features.
Key takeaway: Hubstaff’s time tracking data connects the entire payment process from timesheets and invoices to global payments and reports. Apploye’s time tracking serves primarily as an anchor for their flagship employee monitoring features.
Contextual monitoring vs. monitoring-first
Hubstaff
Hubstaff functions as a time tracking tool with built-in app and URL tracking, activity levels, optional screenshots, and more. These features provide context behind the hours tracked, enabling you to enable, disable, blur, or adjust the frequency by project, user, or across the whole organization.
Apploye
Apploye is an employee monitoring tool where time tracking serves only as an anchor for high-intensity monitoring. Features like screenshots, live activity feeds, and screen recording provide visibility more so than context.
Key takeaway: Hubstaff provides context to time tracking with monitoring and workforce analytics features built in, while Apploye prioritizes high-level monitoring for increased visibility.
Valuable insights vs. basic visibility
Hubstaff
Hubstaff provides high-level workforce analytics with Insights. In addition to time, activity, and website and app usage data, users can gauge utilization rates, balance meeting time, spot unusual activity patterns, and more.
Apploye
Apploye provides transparency with basic activity tracking features like app and URL tracking and screenshots, but it lacks detailed workforce analytics and in-depth reporting.
Key takeaway: Hubstaff is capable of functioning as a high-level workforce analytics tool — especially with the Insights add-on. Apploye is best for teams primarily focused on basic visibility and reporting.
Flexible, automatic tracking vs. stealth monitoring
Hubstaff
Hubstaff offers automatic time tracking on company-owned devices. Businesses can set their own device policy to determine when tracking starts, configure bulk provisioning settings, and, on Enterprise plans, enable MDM-based deployments.
Apploye
Apploye offers a silent, Stealth Mode option that runs in the background to capture activity data with limited setup or user interaction. Like the Hubstaff equivalent, you schedule tracking, screenshots, screen recording, and live monitoring with scripts or multi-user setups.
Key takeaway: Hubstaff prioritizes automatic tracking to simplify time and activity tracking for larger businesses using company-owned devices. Apploye’s Stealth Mode implores high-intensity monitoring that’s quite invasive outside of compliance-heavy environments.
Take our Apploye Alternative for a Test Drive
Discover how Hubstaff's versatile time tracking software helps global teams increase transparency, maximize productivity, streamline payments, and more in our full-featured interactive demo.
Full-scale payments vs. limited billing support
Hubstaff
Hubstaff offers built-in payment features that help teams manage the entire payroll process from time tracking through payments. Automated timesheets and invoices, and integrations with tools like Wise, PayPal, and Payoneer, streamline the process from a single central app.
Apploye
Apploye lacks traditional payroll and payment features. While it does have payment recordkeeping abilities, the data would need to be transferred to another tool to complete payments.
Key takeaway: Hubstaff helps you streamline the entire payment process in one central location. Apploye can track payment records, but there’s no way to make in-app payments at this time.
Interactive scheduling vs. basic attendance
Hubstaff
Hubstaff provides intuitive scheduling features, PTO management, overtime tracking, and more. Users can set up alerts for late, missed, or abandoned shifts and make real-time adjustments to prevent coverage gaps and unnecessary overtime costs.
Apploye
Apploye offers basic employee scheduling features. You can assign daily and weekly shifts, track overtime and holidays, and manage attendance at multiple locations with the desktop or mobile app.
Key takeaways: Both tools offer intuitive scheduling features, but Hubstaff has a more robust interface and useful features like customizable alerts, giving it a slight edge.
Advanced reporting vs. limited visibility
Hubstaff
Offers real-time performance insights from a fully customizable dashboard with drag-and-drop widgets for hours worked, activity, PTO, attendance, and more. 20+ reports for Time and Activity, Payments, and Amounts owed round out a versatile reporting suite.
Apploye
Apploye also provides an intuitive live dashboard, but it only offers 8 reports that cover the basics like timesheets, attendance, and screenshots.
Key takeaway: Apploye offers a solid reporting framework for the price, but Hubstaff provides more customization, with the ability to filter and group reports by project, user, client, or timeframe.
Integrated workflows vs. limited integrations
Hubstaff
Hubstaff offers 30+ integrations with popular payroll, CRM, communication, and PM tools like Salesforce, Slack, Asana, QuickBooks, and PayPal to streamline workflows and strengthen your tech stack.
Apploye
Apploye has a handful of integrations, primarily with project management tools like Jira, Trello, Asana, and ClickUp.
Key takeaway: Hubstaff offers over 30 integrations with a wide array of tools. There’s also a Zapier integration that extends Hubstaff’s integration capability to even more tools. For teams with smaller tech stacks where integrations are a lower priority, Apploye might be more cost-effective.
Pricing comparison
Hubstaff has a slightly higher price tag than Apploye, but it’s a time-tracking tool designed to scale as your team grows. Lower tiers focus on time tracking, while higher tiers unlock better employee productivity, scheduling, and payment features.
Apploye has a lower price tag, and you may see more value upfront if you’re primarily focused on employee monitoring features.
| Plan tier | Hubstaff | Apploye |
|---|---|---|
Entry | Starter: $7/user/month | Standard: ~$5/user/month |
Mid | Grow: $9/user/month | Elite: ~$7/user/month |
Advanced | Team: $12/user/month (includes payments, scheduling) | Stealth Mode add-on pushes total to ~$9/user/month |
Enterprise | Enterprise plan: $25/user/month (custom pricing, MDM, advanced controls) | No clearly defined enterprise tier |
Each month, Hubstaff tracks:
What our customers say
“We work in a lot of different industries, so I can’t always know what’s a 45-minute task and what’s a four-hour task. With tools like Hubstaff, you can tell. You then decide if a whole project should’ve taken 16 hours or if someone is just not the right fit.”
OneIMS President and Founder
“We believe — just like Hubstaff — that talent is everywhere and people should be able to work any time, anywhere, even in their pajamas,” says Kothari. “As a company, we believe in the same future of work as Hubstaff, which is great because our values align.”
Co-founder at Tallyfy
Ease of use: Hubstaff vs. Apploye
Hubstaff
Hubstaff may require more setup up front, as it offers more customization, permissions, and high-level workflows for users to experiment with. Customer service is available via email, chat, and, on higher tiers, live support.
Apploye
Apploye has a sleek interface too, but its onboarding process is faster. For teams that need strictly monitoring features and basic time tracking, it may be less of a headache to set up upfront.
With Apploye, the reports provided were unreliable. The main issues were inaccurate totals and inconsistencies in recorded hours, especially within Apploye’s custom report feature. We also dealt with frequent platform bugs—most notably the tracker stopping on its own, which created a high volume of manual time adjustments each day. Now that we're using Hubstaff, our managers can monitor team productivity reliably, helping us better serve our clients.
Hubstaff vs. Apploye: The final verdict
Both Hubstaff and Apploye are sound tools, but they address different needs. Hubstaff is a time tracker with a robust and versatile set of built-in features, like employee productivity, workforce analytics, payments, reporting, and more.
Apploye prioritizes productivity monitoring with a cheaper price tag, easier setup, but more limited features.
Ultimately, the right choice is based on your team’s unique needs, as Hubstaff may be better suited for those in need of a high-level time tracking tool that helps you consolidate tools to manage payments, reporting, and other aspects of your business in one place.
If you’re interested in test-driving it for yourself, try a free, 14-day trial of Hubstaff today.