TopTracker

TopTracker is a very attractive time tracking web app that allows you to accurately track your performance and the time spent on various projects and tasks, making it especially useful to freelancers aiming at hourly-paid jobs.

Even though TopTracker is by no means the most feature-packed service of this sort out there, it does have one major advantage over some of its competition, namely it does not require synchronization with any freelance platform in order to work.

The basic concept behind TopTracker is quite simple: create projects, add team members if you like, and track your work. Of course, monitoring progress while working online is all fine and dandy (it's capable of recording keystrokes and mouse clicks, for example), however, it can also help you track your activity on your computer's desktop thanks to clients for Windows, macOS, Debian, and RPM.

We'll be focusing on the Windows desktop application and, straight off the bat, we'll state that this is a very well-designed product indeed. Featuring a compact, clear-cut, and intuitive GUI, working with TopTracker is hardly a challenge as there are two main sections one for housing and managing the projects, and one for manual time entry purposes.

The app does not disappoint in terms of features either. Head over to the desktop app's Preferences section, and you can choose the tracking interval, the idle timeout period, as well as control the frequency at which the app should automatically take screenshots of your activity.

You can configure the utility to blur both the screenshots and the camerashots before the upload. The last section within the Preferences window displays a couple of useful keyboard shortcuts which can also be changed, of course.

Naturally, all the collected data is neatly centralized and can be accessed from the web app. The web app itself is also pretty nifty, and it indexes information in four main sections, Projects, Reports, My Activities, and Web Tracker.

By far the best feature of TopTracker is the detailed productivity reports which can also be exported to CSV or PDF if you wish.

Even though it's mainly built with the needs of freelancers in mind, TopTracker is actually a much more extensive tool than you might be initially lead to believe. Alongside with its desktop Windows client, TopTracker promises enough flexibility to be of use to both individuals and small teams, and, let's not forget, real-time tracking capabilities smoothly backed up by comprehensive reporting features.