Choose Hubstaff and fuel your business with an all-in-one platform
Hubstaff and Insightful are both excellent time tracking tools. Thousands of teams use these tools to boost productivity through advanced time tracking and productivity management features. But which one can help you optimize employee performance and make informed decisions better?
Hubstaff offers a blend of time tracking and employee monitoring, productivity, timesheets, and payroll software, making managing global teams of all sizes easy. While Insightful promises to deliver an efficient time tracking experience for several workforce types, primarily remote teams. Let's compare Hubstaff and Insightful's key features side-by-side.
112,000+ businesses trust Hubstaff for time tracking
Hubstaff vs Insightful: Feature by Feature
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:
| Feature | Hubstaff | Insightful |
|---|---|---|
Time Tracking | ||
Timesheet management | ||
Employee productivity | ||
App and URL tracking | ||
Task management | ||
Reporting | ||
Payroll | ||
Employee scheduling | ||
Invoicing |
| |
Support | ||
Ease of use | Voted the best usability for Mid Market by G2 | Voted best ease of use by Capterra |
Integrations |
Time tracking and timesheets
Hubstaff’s intuitive time tracking features make it easy for global teams of freelancers, independent contractors, and full-time employees to track time. From there, users can track time across the desktop app, web, and mobile and seamlessly convert tracked time into detailed, itemized timesheets.
Like Hubstaff, Insightful promises to deliver an efficient time tracking experience. Its features help address the needs of several workforce types but primarily focus on workforce trends and insights.
Winner: Hubstaff
Location tracking
Hubstaff’s mobile app includes built-in GPS location tracking capabilities, allowing field teams to track time while on the move. Geofenced time tracking allows you to create designated Job sites and automate clock-ins and clock-outs when team members enter or leave.
Insightful takes a different approach, focusing on tracking the location of employees’ work computers. This approach may seem excessive for employees who already work at desks all day. While it provides detailed monitoring for remote employees and those in the office, this level of location data is a bit too much attention to detail—especially for non-mobile teams.
Winner: Hubstaff
Productivity and activity monitoring
Hubstaff provides employee monitoring features like optional screenshots, URL and app usage, and idle time detection. It also measures activity data based on keyboard and mouse activity. The new Insights add-on lets you view and compare industry-standard activity benchmarks in real time.
Like Hubstaff, Insightful offers activity tracking, live screen recording, and web and app monitoring. Hubstaff’s optional screenshots and user notifications promote transparent monitoring, while Insightful’s live screen monitoring feature suits high-security environments. However, the need for such intensive monitoring may be debatable for everyday productivity purposes.
Winner: Hubstaff
Reporting and analytics
Hubstaff has a fully customizable dashboard with real-time widgets for hours worked, PTO, employee activity tracking, and other workforce analytics insights. You can also take a hands-off approach to management by scheduling up to 20+ reports on time and activity, attendance, and more.
Insightful combines in-depth reporting features like custom reports, live dashboards, and activity summaries to help managers track and analyze time spent across tasks. However, Insightful focuses primarily on productivity metrics, while Hubstaff can produce reports for broader business aspects such as project budgets, payroll, and schedules. This makes Hubstaff a more versatile option for businesses.
Winner: Hubstaff
Automatic invoicing
Create your own invoices with custom line items, branding, and expense tracking. Once you're finished, you can email them from the Hubstaff web app. Or, use an integration with QuickBooks, Bitwage, FreshBooks, or another preferred platform.
Insightful also offers invoicing capabilities like billable hours tracking, invoice exporting, and detailed work breakdowns that'll help you bill clients accurately based on tracked time. However, Hubstaff has a clear advantage with its more automated approach. Businesses can create and send invoices directly from tracked time entries and allow clients to pay for the invoice through the same invoice.
Winner: Hubstaff
Project budgeting
Hubstaff offers robust project budgeting features, such as real-time cost tracking, budget notifications, and detailed budget reports, to keep projects within financial constraints. Hubstaff excels in providing direct project cost management with real-time cost tracking, budget notifications, and detailed financial reports.
Insightful focuses on capacity management, providing tools to balance employee workloads effectively. While it doesn’t track project costs directly, it offers tools that support cost management through efficient resource allocation.
Winner: Hubstaff
Shift scheduling
With Hubstaff's scheduling features, you can manage overtime costs, PTO, paid and unpaid breaks, and more. Use insights from the Hubstaff dashboard to see your team's most productive hours and plan schedules for peak efficiency.
Insightful also has functional scheduling capabilities like attendance tracking and shift and task scheduling to help your business manage workloads. Hubstaff and Insightful provide practical scheduling tools to impact your team's work positively. No matter which one you choose, you'll get a tool you can rely on for scheduling.
Winner: It's a draw
Payroll management
Hubstaff converts tracked time into timesheets, and timesheets into payments with ease. Use Hubstaff to pay freelancers, contractors, and employees. Alternatively, you can utilize integrations with premier payroll platforms like PayPal, Wise, and Deel to pay teams on their preferred platform right from Hubstaff.
Hubstaff is the clear winner in terms of payroll capabilities, as Insightful does not offer payroll management features. While it provides robust tools for tracking time and productivity, businesses will need to handle payroll separately using other software solutions.
Winner: Hubstaff
Ease of use
Hubstaff’s ease of use across the web, desktop, mobile, and even Google Chrome extensions sets it apart from its competitors. You can seamlessly switch between your computer, mobile device, or tablet without losing a second of tracked time.
Insightful offers a sleek, intuitive time tracking interface, but the inability to pay teams directly from the app adds confusion to an otherwise great time tracker.
Winner: Hubstaff
Integration options
Hubstaff seamlessly integrates with over 35 tools for payroll, project management, CRM, and more. You can also use the Hubstaff Tasks add-on to combine project management and time tracking.
While Hubstaff’s integration capabilities are impressive and primarily focused on workforce management tools with time tracking, project management, and attendance features, Insightful integrations focus on productivity metrics and time tracking capabilities. With a broader range of integrations, Hubstaff takes the title of winner.
Winner: Hubstaff
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
Hubstaff vs. Insightful: The final verdict
When it comes to time tracking, you can’t go wrong with Insightful or Hubstaff. Intuitive interfaces and flexibility across various devices and time tracking methods make both tools premier options in the time tracking space. However, if you’re looking for more than a time tracking tool, there are some key differences worth considering:
Hubstaff is best for:
Employee monitoring
Payroll
Employee productivity
Workforce analytics
Insightful is best for:
Implementing a powerful workforce analytics tool with security features
Businesses that require comprehensive data on employee performance
Want to unlock your team's full potential?
Start a free 14-day trial of Hubstaff for better time and activity tracking.