Time Clock Wizard vs Timely

Feel Helena’s pain? You’re not alone. Almost every time tracking app currently on the market shares Time Clock Wizard’s essential design flaw: 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.

Time Clock Wizard is also notorious for its flagrant violation of employee privacy . It gives managers the ability to take screenshots of employee screens and request photo identification to clock their hours. Proudly marketing its ability to “prevent staff from using sneaky tactics” and “prevent employee time theft”, it uses a model built around employee distrust.

In this context, Time Clock Wizard’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.