The Best Time Clock Apps In 2023
How to choose the best time clock app?
Time clocks are what organisations use to keep track of the hours people spend there. Most often used by companies in order to know how much to pay people who are paid an hourly rate.
Typically you want to look for 4 key things in a timeclock:
- Do your workers travel to customer locations at the start of each day or do they work on site?
- How long will it take to clock in? If the system is too slow to use you will have a crowd waiting around the time clock waiting to punch in.
- Is the time clock reliable? Is it hard to fix when something goes wrong?
- Is it cost effective? Remember that you can always use a piece of paper to write down when they arrive and leave. Be wary of systems with free tiers to lure you in but where the cost to unlock essential features ends up being very high.
Before looking for an app that meets your expectations, consider the following:
- What kind of data are you expecting to have once you have recorded the times? Can you use this with your payroll or accounting system?
- What are the basic features your time clock app needs to have?
- Do you need a time clock for remote workers or for people who work on site? What is the size of your team?
- How much are you willing to spend on a time clock app?
What kinds of time clocks are there?
There are 3 main types of time clocks:
- Mechanical time clocks
- Electronic time clocks
- Software time clocks that don’t need vendor specific hardware
Mechanical time clocks
Mechanical time clocks, also known as punch clocks or Bundy clocks, are probably the least effective time clocks. However they are the oldest timeclock having been invented in 1888 and so therefore are still used today. They work by having a user select their timecard from a rack of cards with a card for each employee. The employee puts their card into the machine which punches a hole in the right spot.
These are fun to use but are easily manipulated by staff and are very time consuming for the administrators to then go through and transcribe each persons hours worked to calculate payroll.
Electronic time clocks
Electronic timeclocks have been in widespread use since the 1990’s. For the most part they have taken the design and usability of mechanical time clocks and added some creature comforts for administrators such as the ability to be remotely accessed over the network to fetch data and can do some simple calculations for figuring out how long people have been clocked in each day.
However the market has mostly been taken over by a handful of Chinese manufacturers who use the same hardware and rebrand it for different resellers. These clocks also have several major drawbacks.
- They still take up a lot of space as you need swipe cards on racks near the machines (otherwise employees will forget their cards)
- The software on the devices is typically poorly made with basic functions not properly implemented like TCP/IP networking that is unreliable or can only handle static IP’s and no NTP time server support.
- The server side software is typically the same rebranded Microsoft Access program that is very poorly made and unreliable.
However they are very cheap and are typically one time purchases with no ongoing cost. If you have multiple sites you will need to setup a site-to-site Wan or IPsec connection between sites to access each machine remotely.
Nowadays they also offer biometric functionality for clocking in as their big selling point, but trying to get each employee to register their fingerprint in a database without it causing a riot and then dealing with all the read failures is not worth the trouble.
Software Time Clocks
The latest generation of time clocks are made to run on modern devices like smartphones, tablets and computers with touch screens. These are a big improvement because they can rely on the work done by the big device manufacturers to have good networking, software and reliable hardware. So we will focus on which of these is the best to use.
1. Timeclock.Kiwi
Timeclock.Kiwi is our top pick because it is the most intuitive to use. In our testing we were able to hand the sign in kiosk to everyone in our office and they were able to figure out how to sign in in under a minute on their first try with no instructions.
The pricing is also far more competitive than any other system we tried as it is based on the number of punch clocks you have rather than the number of users. The price of a whole kiosk ($3.50 USD per month) would often come out as less than the price of a single user for most of the other apps we evaluated.
The web management portal was also the easiest to use, especially when correcting employee times as it was very easy to see and understand each person's shifts as it is displayed as graphs rather than tables of numbers.
In our testing Timeclock.Kiwi was one of the few apps that allowed exporting to multiple different payroll systems while also having a powerful rule set for automatic time rounding and the ability to set complex break rules for different groups of users.
On top of that we were able to get employees to track their time against specific jobs, tasks and even their material usage which would be very helpful for businesses where work is done for specific customers.
The only down side is we wish it had the ability to schedule shifts for users.
- Usability: 5/5
- Value for Money: 5/5
- Reliability: 5/5
- Features: 4/5
Score: 19/20
2. Clockify
Clockify is a very capable time clock with lot’s of interesting features. It stands out from the others because it can do most things related to time tracking for most use cases you might have. In particular it is good at allowing individual users to clock time towards the job they are working on while they are on the go.
The portal looks nice although can come across as a bit busy with lots of text and can be hard to know what you are looking at. We also felt like the kiosk, whilst fairly simple in design, has too much going on with lots of small hard to read text which made it hard to use for some of our older staff. However overall we were happy with it and it is definitely worth considering.
The biggest drawback however is the pricing which is misleading to say the least. The free tier leaves out critical features that makes it unuseable. The basic plan which is needed in order to get essential functionality is $4 USD per user per month, which is one of the most expensive we have seen. And at scale that is a lot of money for a time clock even if this is the most fully featured one we have looked at.
- Usability: 3/5
- Value for Money: 2/5
- Reliability: 5/5
- Features: 5/5
Score: 15/20
3. Homebase
Homebase stands out by being much more than a Timeclock. It is a complete HR and Payroll solution although notably it is not an accounting solution. So even though it is expensive you get many other tools when you buy Homebase.
We found the kiosk to be lacking as it requires each user to memorise a 6 digit PIN to sign in. In practice we think this won’t really work as most employees who would be using a time clock have trouble remembering a 6 digit number (which is longer than the 4 digits of their credit card pin). We also found that due to the time it takes to clock in queues would form around the kiosk when the shift started and ended.
However the pricing is reasonable at $20 per location per month.
- Usability: 2/5
- Value for Money: 4/5
- Reliability: 4/5
- Features: 4/5
Score: 14/20
4. QuickBooks
QuickBooks is another big software solution that can provide you with all your accounting needs. However they price their time clock offering separately so we can evaluate that package on it’s own.
What we liked about QuickBooks is that their kiosk allows for tracking time against a job which can then be passed into their accounting software so you can see how much time has been allocated to a job.
Their kiosk design is easy to understand once you have selected the person which happens through a 4 digit PIN. While this is not ideal it certainly is better than others that have a 6 digit PIN. However in practice we think users will often end up wanting the same PIN. We found the facial recognition feature to be rather gimmicky and caused people to play around with it rather than actually just clocking in.
The price is the really prohibitive part of this solution however with the base plan starting at $8 per month per user and a $25 base fee on top of that. And even at that price it still has major limitations such as only allowing one administrator to manage the whole system.
- Usability: 4/5
- Value for Money: 1/5
- Reliability: 4/5
- Features: 4/5
Score: 13/20
5. Jibble
Jibble is another app that misleads by saying that it is 100% free. They hide many critical parts of the software behind a paywall that makes it unusable unless you pay. The actual cost is $2 per user per month as long as you don’t need more than 3 kiosks, at which point it goes to $4 per user per month. So it is in fact one of the most expensive we have reviewed.
However we really liked the portal and found managing employees and users quite easy. The times are presented as a table of numbers which is quite hard to look at and understand what is happening. The kiosk only has average usability. The icons do not stand out and employees found it hard to know what to do. Also data could only be exported from the portal to one payroll system.
- Usability: 2/5
- Value for Money: 1/5
- Reliability: 5/5
- Features: 3/5
Score: 11/20
6. Buddy Punch
Buddy Punch has a mobile app that can be used on a tablet. However we were generally unimpressed by the interface of the portal and the kiosk when we set it up. Especially as the kiosk seems like it is just a web form with nothing suggesting that this is a device that employees are supposed to interact with. Clocking in was not quick or easy and even with instructions people were still getting it wrong.
Pricing is also rather expensive at $3 per user per month.
- Usability: 2/5
- Value for Money: 2/5
- Reliability: 4/5
- Features: 3/5
Score: 11/20
