What is the best employee monitoring system in CURRENT_YEAR?

20 Best Employee Monitoring Systems in 2024

What is the best employee monitoring system in 2025?

The best employee monitoring system is Connecteam, owing to its time tracking tool and workforce management system that help you manage employees, whether they are working remotely or on-site. It also has employee scheduling features to help you manage shifts, leaves, breaks, and attendance.

Establishing a proper monitoring system is a critical step to ensuring productivity in the workplace. It is essential to make sure that your employees are doing exactly what they are paid to do. Whether you’re part of a large team or have a handful of staff working remotely, a real-time employee monitoring system can give you insights into your employees’ work behavior.

In this article, we compile 20 of the best employee monitoring systems and discuss what each product has to offer. Hopefully, you can narrow down the options that fit your company’s needs and address your employee monitoring challenges, both for your remote workers and those who work in the office.

Employee monitoring has always been on an upward trend for the past decades. But when remote work became more popular because of the pandemic, the concept of employee monitoring also entered the mainstream. The unprecedented levels of remote working have spurred faster adoption of employee monitoring tools, especially by organizations that want to enhance their productivity levels.

According to a report by Top10VPN, there has been a 54% rise in the demand for employee surveillance software since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. As employee monitoring systems provide new ways to track employee activities in real-time, these systems have gained increasing popularity for various kinds of businesses.

Now that there are more employees setting up home offices for remote work, employers felt the increasing need to track the activities of their employees working remotely. This resulted in a sharp rise in the use of employee monitoring systems.

By monitoring employee behavior during work hours, employers can easily identify potential issues early on. In this way, team managers can address them before they become major problems that negatively impact productivity. Employee monitoring can also encourage a sense of responsibility among employees.

With the help of employee monitoring systems, you can closely keep an eye on your workers’ activities and productivity levels. To help you narrow down your options on what employee monitoring systems are and which tool to use for your company, we list down below 20 of the best products that you can choose from. We also discuss in detail their key features, pricing, and unique capabilities.

Best Employee Monitoring Systems for 2025

1. Connecteam

Connecteam is an all-in-one and easy-to-use workforce management system. As one of the best employee monitoring systems on the market, the platform is packed with collaboration and employee monitoring tools that can help you manage your team. Its features are smartly optimized to help you effortlessly keep in touch with your team, especially with those who are working remotely.

Some of the platform’s most useful features are its time clock and employee scheduling tools. These tools help you track the work hours spent by your employees on jobs, projects, clients, and more. They also allow you to stay on top of your deadlines and make sure that employees are consistently on track to completing their tasks at hand. By keeping a close eye on your employees’ work-related activities, you can easily spot and correct potentially costly payroll errors.

Connecteam provides a comprehensive suite of HR, training tools, and people management. Aside from tracking time on jobs and projects, the platform helps you simplify oversight, minimize unproductive tasks, and manage timesheets on any device, whether on your phone or computer.

Price Range: Connecteam’s pricing plans cost from $29/month to $99/month.

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What is unique about Connecteam?

It has an array of task management features that helps you delegate tasks to your employees.
It provides a neat kiosk station feature that your employees can use to clock in and out.
As an all-in-one business management solution, it brings together all your disparate processes together.

Detailed Connecteam Review

2. Insightful

Formerly called Workpuls, Insightful leverages the best technology for working remotely. It is an employee monitoring software with time tracking and time mapping capabilities. It provides all the essential tools you need to analyze and optimize employee productivity and efficiency. Along with automatic time tracking features, it is also built with employee productivity monitoring and remote work management functionalities. These features help you ensure efficiency and encourage productivity during work hours.

To get a complete view of what exactly your employees are up to every minute of the day, Insightful comes with a variety of activity tracking tools. For instance, the platform lets you track the apps and websites that your employees are using, whether individually, as a team, or on a company level. Insightful also has a screenshot feature that automatically captures each employee’s screen. This helps you make sure that your employees are not wasting time on non-work-related tasks.

Built-in reporting capabilities also make Insightful a powerful employee monitoring system. The platform gives you powerful data and insights into how exactly your employees are using their time. You can receive these reports via email either on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.

Price range: Insightful offers various pricing plans that range from $6.40/month/employee to $18/month/employee.

Insightful

Try out Insightful with their free trial

What is unique about Insightful?

It has project management features that let you add new projects and tasks, assign them to team members, and monitor their progress.
It has budgeting tools that help you reduce the guesswork when it comes to allotting budgets for completing projects.
It is built with an automatic time mapper that lets you schedule tasks and automatically assigns them to employees.

Detailed Insightful Review

3. Time Doctor

Time Doctor is an easy-to-use time tracking tool and employee monitoring system ideal for remote teams and freelancers. It helps you improve staff efficiency and productivity by accurately monitoring the time that your employees spend on their current tasks. It also provides actionable data and insights on how to increase productivity in the workplace and improve employee performance.

The platform is designed to remove the complexity of tracking time, reviewing timesheets, and approving payroll. It allows you to automate timesheets and upload them for bulk billing and batch payments. The system also gives you the option to set timesheets for automatic or manual approval. Its time tracking tool can easily be accessed via desktop, mobile, or tablet.

Price Range: Time Doctor’s pricing plans range from $7/user/month to $20/user/month.

Detailed Time Doctor Review

In just a few clicks, Time Doctor allows your employees to record their time as they work on a specific task.
It has a screenshot feature that lets you capture your employees’ computer monitors remotely.
It easily integrates with online payment systems to streamline payroll processes.

4. FlexiServer

FlexiServer is a simple and user-friendly attendance and productivity software. It automates attendance tracking for your employees, allowing them to record their work hours from the beginning up to the end of their shift. For employees who work remotely, the platform does all hours logging automatically. It also monitors a computer’s idle state and automatically detects lunch and other long breaks.

The platform has an attendance tracking feature that lets you monitor vacation and sick leaves more easily. It also provides a number of activity tracking tools to help you see what your employees are doing during work hours. For instance, it displays the programs and websites visited by your employees.

Price Range: FlexiServer pricing plans range from $35.55/month to $498.

Detailed FlexiServer Review

Once installed, it automatically monitors the attendance of office-based, work-from-home, or field employees.
It tracks time spent by your employees on each application, document, or specific project.
It provides accurate attendance reports.

5. Pivotal Tracker

Pivotal Tracker is a project management solution that helps you monitor employee tasks, projects, and activities. It provides dynamic tools to foster collaboration on your team and improve productivity. It helps you organize tasks and projects and enables your team to stay focused on the work assigned to them. By providing you with a real-time, single source of truth, the platform gives you a clear view of your team’s work and how far along each employee is in completing a tasks.

On top of simplifying your team’s collaboration process, Pivotal Tracker also streamlines and optimizes your workflows. The platform allows you to break down and prioritize projects into manageable chunks, enabling you to set priorities on more important tasks and meet deadlines on time. Pivotal Tracker also provides multi-project workspaces that you can use to view your projects side-by-side and handle multiple tasks at the same time.

Price Range: Pivotal Tracker offers a free plan. Its paid plans, however, range from $6.50/collaborator/month to $10/month.

Detailed Pivotal Tracker Review

It consolidates all of your priority tasks in a single view.
It is a story-based project management application that improves collaboration among teams.
It provides you with real-time updates on each task and project.

6. RescueTime

RescueTime is a cloud-based time management tool that allows you to measure employee productivity through activity tracking. It lets you track active windows, computer activities, programs used, and websites visited by your employees. In doing so, you can easily analyze how employees spend their time throughout their workday. The solution is also built with on-screen reminders and a website blocking feature, enabling your employees to stay focused on their tasks.

Furthermore, RescueTime has goal-setting properties and task-tracking attributes that help you improve the efficiency of your workflows. For instance, you can set alarms for the deadlines of your tasks so you’ll know if a specific activity is consuming more time than what was allotted for it. The platform also has a variety of reporting tools that provides different forms of actionable data and insights, from down-to-the-minute detailed reports to condensed employee performance and activity summaries.

Price Range: RescueTime has a free plan and a paid plan that costs $9/month/user.

Detailed RescueTime Review

RescueTime gives you data on the activities that are potentially interfering with your work.
The platform helps you organize your tasks and create better habits based on your unique workflows.
It identifies and sends you automatic alerts to the best times for uninterrupted work.

7. Hubstaff

Hubstaff is a time tracker tool that helps you manage on-site teams or remote employees. It runs via browser, desktop, or mobile devices, making it easier for your employees to track the time they spend working on the tasks assigned to them. It is also built with in-depth reports that give you insights into employee performance and productivity.

By simply downloading Hubstaff’s apps for Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, or Android apps, employees can start tracking their work hours in real-time. The platform also allows you to generate timesheets automatically based on each employee’s time entries. Furthermore, Hubstaff gives you a detailed breakdown of your employees’ hours whether by date, project, or client.

Price Range: Hubstaff offers a free plan for its users. It also has paid plans that range from $5.83/user/month or $8.33/user/month.

Detailed Hubstaff Review

Hubstaff provides online timesheet data that you can use to invoice clients, process payroll, and have a clear picture of your operational costs.
It has a GPS tracking tool to help you monitor the time and location of your employees as they clock in and out of work.
To monitor your employees’ activities, Hubstaff lets you track the apps and websites that your employees use during work hours.

8. Deputy

Deputy is an all-in-one time management tool that lets you keep an accurate record of employee time and attendance. It helps you manage your day-to-day operations and administrative assignments more easily and efficiently. It provides digital timesheets that your employees can easily clock in and out of their work hours. The platform also has GPS location stamps and facial recognition features to help you verify timesheets submitted by your employees.

Moreover, Deputy is built with wage compliance tools that you can use to calculate your employees’ payroll. You can compute wages for each employee’s shift according to your employment contracts and in compliance with local laws. By simply setting up different rates for different roles, Deputy automatically performs the calculations of your employees’ wages. This helps you streamline payroll processes and makes sure that your employees are properly compensated for the work they do.

Price Range: Deputy’s pricing plans range from $3.50/user/month to $4.90/user/month.

Detailed Deputy Review

It has task scheduling features that automatically set and assign tasks to your employees.
It provides simple timesheets that make it easier for you to calculate payroll.
It has a built-in newsfeed tool that provides timely updates on your tasks and projects.

9. ActiveCollab

ActiveCollab is a robust project management and collaboration tool that combines time tracking, task management, and payroll in a well-designed and user-friendly app. It is packed with highly configurable tools that you can use to streamline your workflows and optimize your processes. It also provides employee monitoring tools that help you keep track of employee hours and work activities.

Furthermore, the platform allows your team to communicate with each other, get informed on the latest task updates, and see what they need to work on next. This helps each one of your employees to stay on the same page, further improving the collaboration and productivity in your team. The platform also allows you to monitor time across multiple assignments, track the time spent on specific tasks, and send detailed time reports to your employees so they can also check their work performance.

Price Range: ActiveCollab’s offers various pricing plans that range from $9.50/month to $11.75/month.

Detailed ActiveCollab Review

It allows you to organize your tasks, projects, and files all in one place.
It provides task lists, Kanban boards, and timeline views to help you manage your workflows and map your goals and milestones.
It integrates seamlessly with payment systems to make payroll processes more convenient.

10. Monitask

Monitask is a productivity and time-tracking solution built purposely for companies with remote employees. It provides a wide range of employee monitoring tools for time logging, app usage tracking, random screenshot, and robust reporting, among others. Along with recording computer activities, it allows you to generate detailed reports on employee productivity, work time, and other important metrics.

The platform is built with time tracking and timesheet tools that let you track your employees’ work hours across multiple projects. It also has a web-based dashboard that provides status updates on employee activity in real-time. This helps you manage and monitor your team’s projects from any browser on any device. With the platform’s time tracking tool, you can easily discover how much time employees work on certain projects, the types of projects they prioritize, and how much time they spend on personal matters.

Price Range: Pricing plans of Monitask are available from $5.99/month/user to $19.99/month/user.

Detailed Monitask Review

It provides an employee monitoring tool that helps you determine how efficient your employees are when they are working.
It allows you to grade your employees’ productivity by providing key performance metrics.
Aside from tracking web and app usage, Monitask also lets you review your employees’ activity levels when they are using their computers.

11. ActivTrak

ActivTrak is an employee behavior analytic solution that enables you to monitor employee activities and performance. It allows you to keep tabs on the applications and websites accessed by your employees throughout their work hours. It collects detailed information on website titles, URLs, and screenshots of your employees’ computer activities. This helps you encourage productivity in the workplace and make sure that your team is not wasting time on non-work-related tasks.

Additionally, the solution helps you identify and categorize which tasks are productive or unproductive. For instance, you can mark particular sites or apps based on how much they can contribute to your employees’ productivity. In some cases, you may have to set this differently for different types of employees. Social media managers in your team, for example, need to access social media to complete their job responsibilities. On the other hand, you can mark social media apps as unproductive for other members of your team.

Price Range: ActivTrak has a free plan, and its paid pricing plans start from $9/user/month to $15/user/month.

Detailed ActivTrak Review

It provides productivity dashboards to help you keep a pulse on workforce health.
It gives you a complete view of your employees’ work performance across teams and individuals.
It helps you see and compare productivity and utilization levels side by side, enabling you to identify imbalances and boost productivity.

12. Interguard

Interguard is an employee monitoring tool that provides comprehensive and real-time productivity and activity tracking insights. It allows you to keep track of your employees’ activities during their work hours and make sure that they are focused on their tasks. The platform helps you improve productivity levels with its employee activity reports, which help you drill down on inefficient workflows and other issues that affect your team’s productivity.

Furthermore, Interguard has program and website access protocols that you can use to prevent unwanted access to distractions in the workplace. This allows you to block non-work-related sites and apps, such as social media, illegal gambling sites, gaming apps, and pornographic sites. The platform also protects your systems from potential viral threats that are often found in shady and unscrupulous websites.

Price Range: Interguard is available from $25/user/month.

Detailed InterGuard Review

It alerts you when employees are trying to access suspicious apps and websites.
It monitors all computer activity, from applications and programs tracking, Internet monitoring, to email monitoring, file activity tracking, chat monitoring, and much more.
It has a web filtering tool that blocks employee access to sites that are unrelated to work or have inappropriate content.

13. We360.ai

We360.ai is a sophisticated employee monitoring tool that provides you with real-time insights into employee performance, productivity levels, as well as the efficiency of your workflows. It allows you to keep track of the time employees spend working with clients, projects, and tasks. It also gives you complete visibility into the websites and applications that your employees use throughout their workday. This helps you assess if employees are wisely and efficiently spending their time at work.

Moreover, the solution provides actionable analytics and reports that help you discover trends and insights on employee time and attendance. Using the platform’s visualization tools like graphs and charts, you can easily view and understand these data and statistics. This helps you improve time allocation, workflow efficiency, internal communication, and employee productivity.

Price Range: We360.ai’s pricing plans start from $3/user/month to $3.99/user/month.

Detailed We360.ai Review

It allows you to monitor specific keyboard and mouse actions performed by your employees.
It lets you keep track of the productive and idle times throughout each employee’s work shift.
It provides attractive and intuitive graphs and charts to help you visualize reports on employee performance and productivity.

14. Workstatus

Workstatus is a comprehensive workforce management software best used for tracking employee activities and monitoring task and project progress. Packed with a variety of productivity tools, it allows you to set goals and measure your performance and progress in accomplishing them. The platform also provides timesheets and productivity data that give you a detailed breakdown of how much time your team allocates to certain tasks and projects.

Aside from time tracking, the platform also serves as a powerful tool for recording employee attendance. It has a screenshot and selfie validation feature that helps you verify employees’ attendance and capture their proof of work. Moreover, it lets you enhance productivity by blocking sites and apps unrelated to work.

Price Range: Workstatus has a free forever plan, as well as paid pricing plans that start at $4.99/user/month.

Detailed Workstatus Review

It has a geofencing feature that allows you to track the location of field or on-site employees.
It allows you to set productivity benchmarks so you can be instantly alerted when productivity levels decline.
It has a screen recording feature that lets you track the current activity of your employees in real-time.

15. Desklog

Desklog combines employee monitoring and project management in a single solution to help you improve your team’s productivity. Ideal for managing remote employees, the solution provides a plethora of tools that allows you to monitor employee activities. It is also built with scheduling features that you can use to automatically assign tasks to employees at a certain time and date. You can also use the platform to manage and schedule shifts, off-work hours, and rest days for your employees.

Additionally, Desklog helps you streamline your workflows with its built-in project management tools. It supports all the stages of your project lifecycle, from the project initiation process to planning, execution, and completion. Desklog also allows you to track the performance and productivity levels of your employees as they work on tasks and projects.

Price Range: Desklog has a free plan, as well as paid pricing plans, ranging from $3.5/user/month to $4.5/user/month.

Detailed Desklog Review

It has an offline time tracking tool that allows you to monitor employee work hours even when they are not connected to the Internet.
It provides an absence calendar that gives you a complete view of your employees’ leaves and away times.
Its attendance management tool allows you to track daily activity, late arrivals, overtime schedules, and more.

16. TheOneSpy

TheOneSpy is an employee monitoring tool designed for Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Android devices. It is packed with activity tracking tools, such as real-time screen recording, browser history tracking, web and app usage, and more. The platform allows you to monitor your employees’ computer activities to make sure that they stay focused on their jobs. It also helps you reduce distractions in the workplace by blocking sites and apps that are not related to work.

Furthermore, the platform allows you to monitor employer-provided mobile phones and devices. It is built with a mobile tracker tool that lets you see the live location of the phones being used by your employees. In case your employees lose their device while working on-site, it will be easier for you to track and find its location on Google Maps. you can also use the application’s data tracking and voice monitoring features to monitor employee devices in all aspects.

Price Range: TheOneSpy offers varied pricing plans that range from $6.25/month to $55/month.

Detailed TheOneSpy Review

It helps you track and monitor employer-owned devices remotely.
It provides a web portal that shows you all device activities as your employees use them for work.
It lets you monitor SMS, emails, conversations on social media apps, browser history, and more.

17. Apploye

Apploye is a productivity solution that promotes transparency and verifiable productivity within your team. It has an array of features to help you keep a close eye on your employees’ activities in the workplace. It combines time tracking, scheduling, and monitoring tools in a single solution, allowing you to manage remote and on-site employees. The platform also provides neat dashboards that show key performance metrics. This helps you assess your team’s productivity and address issues that affect employee performance.

Moreover, Apploye provides daily and weekly productivity summaries that allow you to minimize the possibility of projects and tasks falling through the cracks. The platform also comes with a shared calendar feature that consolidates all upcoming and ongoing tasks. This allows your team to stay on the same page and improves collaboration within your organization.

Price Range: Pricing plans of Apploye range from $2/user/month to $3.50/user/month.

Detailed Apploye Review

Apploye’s web tracking tool only records domain names and not the full URL of the websites that your employees visit.
It provides weekly and daily timesheets to help you calculate billable employee hours.
Its task management tools help you monitor the progress of tasks assigned to employees in real-time.

18. Kickidler

Kickidler is a computer monitoring software designed to help you analyze employee performance as they work on their PCs. It allows you to visually monitor what remote and on-site employees are doing at their work computers without disrupting their workflows. It also automates time tracking of work hours, making it easier for your employees to clock in and out of their shifts. With the solution’s reports and timesheets, you can access a detailed analysis of your employees’ activities throughout the workday.

Additionally, Kickidler serves as a powerful computer surveillance tool that automatically sends you alerts when employee violations occur. It also has a computer idle timer that displays exactly the amount of time that an employee has been absent from the workplace. Additional features such as screen recording, violation control, automatic notifications, and keylogger further help you track suspicious activities and anomalies in employee behavior.

Price Range: Kickidler has a free plan as well as paid plans that range from $3/month/user to $6/month/user.

Detailed Kickidler Review

It has a productivity analysis tool that provides reports on the efficiency of your employees.
It automatically captures the websites and running programs and apps on your employees’ computers.
It allows you to view the screen of any employee at any given time.

19. Zoho BackToWork

Zoho BackToWork is a workplace management software that helps you adhere to compliance guidelines and employee safety. It allows you to take control of the safety protocols in your workplace to ensure safe entry for employees and visitors. With its admin control center module, you can track the status of your facilities, view individual employee health statuses, and assess the safety and preparedness of your facilities.

Moreover, Zoho BackToWork provides an employee self-service portal that helps you manage different types of service requests from your employees. This makes it easier for you to address their office needs, whether it’s supplies, office space maintenance, sanitizing materials, or other assets. The platform also has a native mobile app that employees can use to make their workplace requests.

Price Range: Pricing plans of Zoho BackToWork start at $37/user/month.

Detailed Zoho BackToWork Review

It is a comprehensive app that helps you handle facilities and capacity-related resources.
It enables you to comply with safety requirements without compromising the overall productivity of your business.
It is compatible with multiple devices, allowing you to monitor your facilities whether from your desktop or smartphone devices.

20. TMetric Time Tracker

TMetric Time Tracker is an employee monitoring tool built to help you track employee hours, manage tasks, and measure productivity and activity levels. It helps you manage your employees’ working hours, attendances, breaks, and leaves. The solution is also packed with billing and invoicing tools, enabling you to manage payroll more efficiently. This helps you pay your employees more accurately and on time based on tracked time and expenses.

Additionally, the platform has a time tracking tool that allows you to closely monitor time on tasks and projects, create time entries, and capture billable hours. It provides task and activity summary reports, giving you a detailed overview of the overall time utilization within your organization. The platform also allows you to monitor activity and productivity levels for each of your employees.

Price Range: TMetric Time Tracker offers pricing plans that range from $5/month to $7/month.

Detailed TMetric Time Tracker Review

It has an offline mode that allows you to keep track of working hours even without an Internet connection.
It provides a detailed activity analysis that gives you insights into improving productivity.
It has invoicing tools that you can use to bill your clients and get paid on time.

Which employee monitoring system is right for you?

The most ideal employee monitoring system is the one that can handle and meet the specific requirements of your organization. Aside from core employee monitoring tools like time tracking and activity monitoring, a good system should also be able to provide you with detailed analytics and reports that can help you improve productivity.

Based on our product research and analysis, Connecteam emerges as the best employee monitoring system that can do all those things and even more. On top of tracking employee hours and computer activities, the solution provides an array of workforce management tools to help you streamline employee engagement, reduce turnover, and ensure compliance. To try out the software and experience these features firsthand, you may want to sign up for a free trial of Connecteam offered by the vendor.

To know more about managing work-from-home employees, you can also check out our guide to remote team management.

By Jenny Chang

Jenny Chang is a senior writer specializing in SaaS and B2B software solutions. Her decision to focus on these two industries was spurred by their explosive growth in the last decade, much of it she attributes to the emergence of disruptive technologies and the quick adoption by businesses that were quick to recognize their values to their organizations. She has covered all the major developments in SaaS and B2B software solutions, from the introduction of massive ERPs to small business platforms to help startups on their way to success.