20 Best Employee Productivity Monitoring Software and Tools for 2024

As the world explores new ways to work without human contact, the remote workforce is also experiencing a total makeover. Companies must deal with both in-office and remote workers who are performing their jobs at home or anywhere else. Now, the question is: Could this alternative work arrangement actually be more productive? This is where leveraging employee monitoring software plays an important role.

These tools enable managers to keep a close eye on employee performance and productivity wherever they may be. It comes equipped with tools that track time spent, computer activity, as well as browsing patterns so that managers can verify if work hours are well spent. However, not all monitoring software applications are created equal.

To help you find the right platform for your operations, we weigh this year’s best employee productivity monitoring software and tools, taking into account their key features, pricing plans, requirements, and more.

The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly turned offices upside down. From traditional face-to-face operations, many were forced to implement remote or hybrid work environments in order to stay afloat. Many have also increased the number of freelancers in their rosters. To their surprise, this work setup has worked to their advantage and enabled both employees and employers to reap benefits.

For instance, a 2021 report by Owl Labs revealed that 70% of remote employees claimed that virtual meetings are less stressful, while 64% would rather have hybrid meetings. Meanwhile, Great Place to Work’s two-year analysis of the impact of remote work on 800,000 employees echoed this sentiment. According to their findings, companies reported stable or increased productivity levels upon implementing work-from-home policies. Data from Flexjobs reveals that among the reasons why employees feel productive while working remotely are fewer interruptions (68%), more focused time (63%), or the absence of office politics (55%).

However, just because work-from-home productivity is skyrocketing does not mean that it will stay that way. In 2020, the New York Times reported that some companies are witnessing how employees battle with the lack of human interaction. Sooner or later, their work will take its toll on their mental health and interrupt their productivity. This is why many companies are now resorting to adopting employee productivity monitoring tools like the ones outlined below.

Best Employee Productivity Monitoring Software and Tools in 2025

1. Connecteam

Connecteam is the go-to employee productivity monitoring software for many companies as it comes with both job scheduling and time tracking capabilities. This all-in-one, user-friendly, and highly configurable employee management system has three major business functions: operations, training, and communication. Its principal employee monitoring software features are modules for employee scheduling, employee communication, time tracking, task management, people management, and checklists and forms. These functionalities are also improved to easily communicate with employees who are on the field.

Connecteam also offers an event management module for company activities, including training or onboarding, HR appointments, and team meeting schedules. Moreover, it has a knowledge base feature to help employees come up with solutions to common issues. In this way, they can lessen organizational knowledge loss.

Connecteam’s premium plans start at $39 per month yearly for its first 50 users. It also offers a free trial and a plan that is free forever.

Connecteam

Try out Connecteam with their free trial

VISIT WEBSITE FREE TRIAL

Why choose Connecteam?

1. A neat kiosk station feature. You can set up a kiosk station feature through any device that your employees can use to log in and out. As a result, you can minimize paper costs and do away with physical time cards.
2. Feedback mechanisms. Polls, surveys, and quiz tools help you communicate with the other integral part of your company—your internal community members. These feedback mechanisms help you know their sentiments toward a policy, project, or some other relevant matters.
3. Avoid process siloes. You can bring supposedly dissimilar processes together under one lens and oversee them from a unified, digital command center.

2. Insightful

Previously branded as Workpuls, Insightful is a remote employee productivity monitoring software that provides companies with time tracking and time mapping features. It aids in assessing and optimizing overall employee productivity.

Insightful can track computer activity and automatically capture screenshots to promote productivity during office hours. For added accuracy and to help employees maintain focus on their work, it also allows for the tracking time at the task and project levels. Plus, it boasts built-in reporting functionalities for monitoring project progress and honing productivity. It can be integrated with any application to streamline workflows as well.

Insightful offers flexible, per-employee subscription plans, ranging from $8 to $15. It is available on-premise or in the cloud.

Insightful

Try out Insightful with their free trial

Why choose Insightful?

1. Manual addition of time entries. If needed, you can add time entries manually here, like for tasks fulfilled away from an employee’s workstation. You can also approve or decline offline activities.
2. Precise productivity tracking for teams. With Insightful, you can easily keep an eye on the productivity levels of your teams. During work hours, it tracks website and app usage and takes screenshots of workers’ screens.
3. Project management features. You can add new projects and assign tasks to team members. You can also set deadlines and urgency levels to help them prioritize the most important tasks.

3. Time Doctor

As an accurate tool for time tracking, Time Doctor best suits freelancers who aim to improve their productivity levels. It is also ideal for business owners who need to monitor the activity of both their in-office and remote workforce. It gives an overview and information on the apps used and websites visited during work hours.

Time Doctor has a silent and interactive version that caters to different office settings. It also alerts employees whenever they start doing activities that are not related to work. Additionally, it enables the company’s clients to access it to check reports and screenshots relevant to the work provided by them.

Time Doctor comes in three various plans: free but with limited features; a solo plan at $5 per month; and the standard plan at $9.99 per month.

Why choose Time Doctor?

1. Screenshots. At a custom interval, Time Doctor takes a screenshot of your employees’ monitors. It also goes with a keyboard and mouse activity indicator. This feature is optional.
2. Time use alerts. A popup will appear if employees are taking too much time on non-work-related websites or apps. It also shows when they have been idling for a long period.
3. Works with project management tools. Time Doctor works well with top project management tools, such as Asana, Trello, WorkflowMax, and more. It can also be integrated with several CRM solutions. On top of that, its API allows it to interact directly with other applications.

4. FlexiServer

Developed by NCH, FlexiServer is an attendance and productivity solution that tracks the computer usage and work hours of employees. It works in two ways: running in the background of a computer it is installed to automatically record employee work hours, and monitoring website visits and program usage made by an employee on his or her official computer. These features help managers guarantee quality control, legal compliance, and security throughout the workplace.

FlexiServer’s data can be kept by managers and bookkeepers for reporting purposes. They just need to log on to the system from their browser, use the control panel, and pick the information that they should retrieve for productivity or attendance reports.

FlexiServer’s one-time payment plans range from $159 to $640.

Why choose FlexiServer?

1. Establishes a productive work environment. You can monitor the attendance of your in-office, work-from-home, or field employees as long as they have FlexiServer on their computers.
2. Reviews attendance anywhere, anytime. FlexiServer’s online portal allows authorized personnel to improve productivity using payroll and attendance software functionalities. It can check attendance from any location at any given time, allowing HR staff to perform their duties wherever they may be.
3. Comprehensive tools. Its comprehensive tools log computer activities and keep track of how much time is spent on each document or project. These tools can also prevent employees from visiting illegal websites and downloading non-work-related files.

5. Pivotal Tracker

Pivotal Tracker is a story-based project management software. This user-friendly tool allows software development professionals to work together and come up with timely solutions to diverse feedback. It is designed on effective agile methods that have risen from experience on several huge-scale commercial software development initiatives.

Pivotal Tracker provides everyone with access to unified, real-time updates on their tasks and projects. They can access and share even the most intimate details of their work, letting developers pay attention to performing their jobs instead of working on other time-consuming tasks.

Pivotal Tracker offers a free trial, a free version for three collaborators, and a $10- to $300-plan for 10 to 50 collaborators. For businesses with 50+ collaborators, contact the vendor for more pricing details.

Why choose Pivotal Tracker?

1. Helps you design better software. Pivotal Tracker simplifies the collaboration process and helps teams quickly set priorities for them to be able to design better software.
2. Seamless communication line. Pivotal Tracker’s seamless communication line helps employees raise their concerns and share any type of document with their colleagues.
3. Timesaving workflows. These are refined for productive, synchronized story estimating, and adopting and applying agile processes.

6. RescueTime

RescueTime analyzes employee productivity by monitoring computer activities. This time management software can track active windows, websites browsed, and programs used so that managers can gauge how their employees make use of their time throughout the day.

Besides its basic time monitoring feature, RescueTime’s more premium plan carries out sophisticated features, which include measuring meetings, breaks, and phone calls. Detailed information or summarized overviews can also be viewed. It can graph data stemming from everyday monitoring as well. When it comes to keeping employees focused on their tasks, it has on-screen reminders and a website blocking feature.

RescueTime’s premium plan is priced at $9 per user per month. It also offers a free trial and a free version.

Why choose RescueTime?

1. Gives a clear picture of how an employee or team performs daily. RescueTime’s activity-tracking functionalities monitor the exact amount of time an employee spent on a document, website, or application. In turn, employees determine their working habits, figure out how they can be more productive, and plan how to enhance workflows.
2. Measures each employee’s activities. You can find out if an employee is spending time doing unimportant tasks and not doing his or her part to contribute to the team.
3. Goal-setting properties and task-tracking features. These features help employees keep their focus on their deliverables. Some websites can be banned to stop idle internet browsing. You can also set alarms for each task so that you will know if a certain activity is taking too much time.

7. Hubstaff

Hubstaff is an employee performance monitoring software that can be used either on a mobile device or on a desktop, which makes it more convenient to track time. Its time tracking feature enables companies to pay employees, invoice clients, view extensive reporting, and more.

Hubstaff plays well with companies employing freelancers or remote teams. On top of its central function of time tracking, it allows managers in on employee activity levels, URL and app tracking, and even scheduling. It also offers novel functionalities, such as online timesheets, invoicing, automatic payroll, weekly limits, GPS and location, and API.

Hubstaff offers a free trial and a free version. It also has paid plans: the Basic plan at $5 per user per month and the Premium plan at $9 per user per month.

Why choose Hubstaff?

1. Provides actionable insights. Hubstaff’s extensive reporting capabilities give you actionable insights and other necessary data to help you make fast and smart business decisions.
2. Integration with a variety of project management platforms. Hubstaff accounts for the specific amount of time your employees use. Hence, you can better manage their time and track their productivity across platforms.
3. Gives you a view of  applications that are mostly used. You will know which applications are used the most, as well as when these applications are being used.

8. Deputy

Deputy helps maintain allotments for teams. This task, schedule, and time management software offers multi-department scheduling to make team management simpler and more efficient. Its SMS or email notifications make sure that no employee is going to miss out on their schedules. It logs employee hours and collates them for payroll purposes. It is also packed with tools, such as dashboards and workload delegation, to guide teams in finishing their assignments.

Deputy can be synchronized with leading HR, payroll, and POS systems that allow companies to save time and money, as well as gain updated insights into their performance. These systems include Xero, QuickBooks, Zapier, Epos Now, Kounta, and more.

Deputy is available in various packages, which start at $2.50 per month. It offers a monthly plan that you can unsubscribe to whenever you want and a yearly plan that lets you save up to 11%. It also offers a free trial.

Why choose Deputy?

1. Auto-schedule functionality. Its auto-schedule functionality lets you make new schedules for each department or schedule tasks. You can also publish schedules and inform teams via SMS, email, or push notifications.
2. Newsfeed integration. Aside from getting timely updates from Deputy Newsfeed, it also allows team collaborations and keeping select individuals or the entire company posted about important company matters.
3. Features for task completion. With personal tasking, you can delegate tasks more efficiently. Make workloads and assign them to yourself or to other team members. Its built-in dashboard also lets you monitor any status.

9. ActiveCollab

ActiveCollab is an integrated collaboration and project management system that merges time tracking, task management, and billing into one reliable app. It helps in organizing files, tasks, and projects in a single venue. At the same time, teams can communicate, get updated, and identify what needs to be accomplished next. Here, they can share files, talk about essential topics, brainstorm ideas, and more. They can also talk to clients here without compromising the confidentiality and security of sensitive data.

ActiveCollab enables the checking of time allocated on tasks, monitoring time across projects, and sending of time records to the system. This setup also allows for the creation of invoices and faster and more accurate estimation. It has an invoice designer and tools for reminders, payment status tracking, and recurring invoices.

ActiveCollab is available as a web-hosted version for $7 per month and as a self-hosted version for a $999 one-time payment. It also offers a free trial.

Why choose ActiveCollab?

1. A complete task and project management tool. ActiveCollab can be tailored for workflows. Its features include task lists, Kanban boards, batch editing, timeline view, and recurring tasks that consist of automatic rescheduling and task dependencies.
2. Improved communication and collaboration. Keep your teams focused at hand and all project communication unified. In ActiveCollab, you no longer have to look for that one piece of information across long email threads.
3. Tracks time on all your tasks across various projects. ActiveCollab can be used as time records to improve the creation of invoices and enhance your estimates. To ensure you do not waste productivity, it allows you to see how much time is being used on a task, track time on various assignments, and send time records to its system.

10. Monitask

By Louie Andre

B2B & SaaS market analyst and senior writer for FinancesOnline. He is most interested in project management solutions, believing all businesses are a work in progress. From pitch deck to exit strategy, he is no stranger to project business hiccups and essentials. He has been involved in a few internet startups including a digital route planner for a triple A affiliate. His advice to vendors and users alike? "Think of benefits, not features."