Table of Contents
Harvest earned its position honestly. Entering time takes a couple of seconds and the path from tracked hours to a sent invoice is about as short as this category offers. Teams leaving it are rarely leaving because it’s bad.
They’re leaving because of structure and cost. Two features most growing firms eventually need, timesheet approvals and profitability reporting, sit on Harvest’s Enterprise tier, which its pricing page lists at $14 per seat per month billed annually, or $17.50 monthly. And beyond the seat rate, that page states that “additional invoices, projects, clients, and tasks are billed based on what you use”, so the figure is a floor rather than a total.
If you’re evaluating a move, here’s how the pieces map onto actiTIME specifically.
The structural difference that decides it
Harvest is flat by design: clients and projects, with entry friction stripped almost to nothing, on the assumption that Asana, Jira or Trello holds the structure of the work.
actiTIME is hierarchical. Work is organised as client, project and task, with deadlines, priorities and workflow statuses attached. That’s the whole trade. You accept a slightly heavier entry step and you get a tool that absorbs the lightweight project tracking you were doing in a second system.
For a team happy with its project management platform, that’s redundancy. For a team running a timer plus a spreadsheet plus a task board, it’s the reason to switch.
Approvals, without a tier upgrade
This is the single clearest difference for a firm of ten or twenty people.
In actiTIME, team members submit timesheets, managers review and approve them, and approved records can be locked so they can’t be altered afterwards. Invoices are produced from reviewed data rather than raw entries.
The practical value shows up the first time a client queries a line and the entry turns out to have been checked rather than assumed. Correcting an invoice costs considerably more goodwill than reviewing a timesheet. On Harvest’s structure, that review step is an Enterprise feature; in actiTIME it’s part of the paid product, which starts from $5 per user per month.
Rates that match how you actually bill
Harvest sets rates per client or per person. If a project contains strategy at one rate and production at another, you split projects artificially or accept approximate billing.
actiTIME sets billing rates by type of work, so consultation, production and documentation can each carry their own figure inside the same project, applied automatically as hours are logged. Billable and non billable work stay separated at the point of entry, which matters because a meaningful share of any services week goes to internal review, proposals and admin that no client is billed for.
For consultancies and agencies with genuine rate differentiation, this is usually the feature that makes the business case rather than the price.
Profitability, not just revenue
actiTIME’s reporting includes profit and loss by client and project, setting billable revenue against labour cost, plus estimated against actual hours by task or work type, cost of work, and billing summaries.
The second of those compounds. After a handful of projects you can see which kinds of work consistently run over the hours the fee assumed, which turns pricing from memory into analysis. Most firms have never produced a list of clients ranked by margin, and the ranking rarely matches the revenue ranking.
Predictable billing and a deployment choice
Two differences that aren’t features exactly.
actiTIME prices per user with no usage layer, so the bill is headcount times rate. For a firm with many clients and many small projects relative to its headcount, that’s a materially different cost shape from a model that charges by projects, clients, tasks and invoices.
And a self hosted deployment is available for teams that need data on their own infrastructure, which a cloud only product can’t offer. That matters to a minority of firms and matters absolutely to those it does.
What you give up
Worth being straight about this, because a one sided comparison is useless for making a decision.
Harvest’s entry experience is genuinely faster, and if your only real problem is that people don’t log hours consistently, a tool with lower friction may serve you better than a tool with better reporting. Harvest also has a large integration library and a polished payments path, with Stripe and other payment integrations on its paid tiers.
actiTIME integrates with QuickBooks Online, connects to other systems through Zapier, and offers an open API, which covers most needs but isn’t the same as a native integration with every tool you use. Check your specific stack rather than assuming.
How to run the switch
Four steps, in order.
Export from Harvest first, while the account is active. Raw time entries with dates, people, clients, projects and billable status, not a summary report. Keep that archive regardless of what you import, because historical hours are what make your next estimate accurate.
Import structure, not necessarily history. Clients, projects, tasks and users move cleanly from CSV. Most teams start fresh on entries and keep the export for reference, which is far less painful than reconciling two data models.
Test with one team for a month on the free version, which covers up to three users permanently, before committing anyone else. Judge whether entries are being made the same day rather than how the feature list reads.
Set up rates and approvals before you invoice from it. These are the two things that need configuring properly once rather than fixed later.
For a wider view of what else is in the market, this overview of Harvest alternatives covers the field and what each option handles differently.
One thing to settle before you choose anything
The most expensive mistake in this category isn’t overpaying. It’s buying a tool built around a method that doesn’t suit your working day.
Weekly timesheets, one click timers, calendar style logging and kiosk entry each fit different kinds of team, and picking the wrong one is why first attempts at time tracking collapse in week three. This guide to time tracking methods and setup sets out which approach suits which pattern of work.
Get that right and the vendor question gets considerably simpler. Get it wrong and no amount of reporting depth will save the rollout.