Desktime vs Timely
An alternative to DeskTime’s manual timers and Big Brother mindset
“Timely offers more detailed data than DeskTime, and I enjoy not having to set timers on each project.”
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Capture every billable second in your business
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What makes Timely the best DeskTime alternative?
Offering automatic time tracking, Timely is quite a step up from DeskTime’s manual reporting. Instead of making you track time on every task and plug in notes, Timely captures everything you work on down to the second! Crucially, it actually protects employee privacy and is 100% free of dystopian spying features. Here are a few reasons why DeskTime users switch to Timely.
An alternative to DeskTime’s manual timers and Big Brother mindset
Feel Carla’s pain? You’re not alone. Almost every time tracking app currently on the market shares TimeCamp’s essential design error: manual timer input.
Constantly starting and stopping timers is an unnatural and inefficient way to track time — particularly if you regularly hop between projects or responsibilities. You only log the activities you remember working on, leading to incomplete timesheets . This subjectivity itself breeds striking inaccuracy — even if you remember to log your hours every day, studies show that timesheets that rely on manual input are only ever 67% accurate.
DeskTime is also notorious for its flagrant violation of employee privacy . It gives managers the ability to take interval-based screenshots of employee screens to see what programs and apps they are using — which it proudly markets as functionality to “track problematic workers”.
In this context, DeskTime’s broad feature set and free plan matter relatively little. Ultimately, a robust time tracking solution should satisfy a very basic purpose: capturing hours accurately without destroying team trust and culture.
