Most people reading this did not wake up wanting new software. They opened a renewal notice.
Harvest was repriced during 2026, after Bending Spoons closed its acquisition of Harvest's parent company on 31 July 2025, and the change is not a percentage on the old bill. Alongside a per-seat rate, one of the two billing modes now meters active projects, active clients, active tasks and invoicing, counted from your previous period. The reported jumps run from roughly eight times the old bill to about seventeen. A UK consultancy told the BBC it went from $130 a month to $2,110.
We have written the mechanics up separately, because most of what is currently published about them is wrong: see what actually changed in Harvest's 2026 pricing. The short version is that Flex and Unlimited are billing modes rather than tiers, Unlimited is the fixed-price one, and the allowances and overage rates are published nowhere. You cannot model your own bill from outside a paying account.
That is why this roundup exists in the form it does. If you are shopping for a Harvest alternative for consultancies, the thing that just went wrong was not the price. It was that the price stopped being computable. So every figure below was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 7 September 2026, in the currency that page prints to a reader in the UK, with the renewal price rather than the introductory one wherever the two differ.
The eight, compared
Prices are per user per month unless stated. Annual first, then monthly.
| Tool | Entry price | Free option | Timesheet approval | Approver blocked from seeing rates | Invoicing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TimeSubmit | $42/mo covering 3 people | No, two months included then billed | Every plan | Yes, documented | Yes, from approved hours |
| Toggl Track | $9 annual, $12 monthly | Yes, user count not published | Premium and above | Not documented | No |
| Clockify | €3.99 annual, €4.99 monthly | Yes, to 5 users | Standard and above | Not documented | Add-on |
| Everhour | $8.50 annual, $10 monthly | Yes, to 5 seats | Yes, plan not published | Not documented | Yes |
| Timely | $9 annual, $11 monthly | No, 14-day trial | Not published | Not documented | No |
| Productive | $10 annual, $12 monthly | No, 14-day trial | Professional and above | Not documented | Yes |
| Scoro | £13 annual, minimum 5 users | No, 14-day trial | Yes, plan not published | Not documented | Yes |
| Hubstaff | $4.99 annual, $7 monthly | No, 14-day trial | Team and above | Not documented | Yes |
| Harvest, for reference | $9 annual, $11 monthly, plus usage | Yes, 1 seat and 2 projects | Enterprise, $14 annual | Not documented | Yes |
Two of those cells need a sentence rather than a cell, and both are the sort of thing this article is complaining about, so they go here rather than in a footnote.
Toggl's Premium tier is $14 for your first year and $18 after that. The footnote on the pricing page says so plainly: "$14 per license per month applies to your first year of Premium annual, then renews at $18 per license per month." Quoting the $14 on its own would be the same trick that put you in this article.
Clockify prints euros and Scoro prints pounds when read from the UK. The numerals in Clockify's dollar and euro pages are identical and only the symbol changes, which is its own small trap. Converting either into dollars would quote you a figure nobody was actually shown.
How we judged them, and the one criterion we changed our minds about
The criteria are the ones a consultancy actually buys on: can a consultant submit a timesheet covering several projects at once, can somebody formally sign it off before it turns into an invoice, does the invoice come out of the approved hours rather than being retyped, and is the whole price visible before you sign up.
Earlier versions of this article carried a fifth criterion, and it was wrong. We held up client-side approval, meaning a client of yours signing off the hours you are about to bill them for, as a thing to shop on. We do not sell it, so it read as a point against us, which at least made it look like an honest inclusion.
It was not honest, it was imprecise, and it misled in both directions, because the phrase runs two different products together.
The first is: can somebody outside your consultancy be the person who approves the timesheet? Yes, in most of these tools and in ours. You give them an account, they review, they approve or reject, and in our case they cannot see billing rates or invoice totals, which is what makes it workable when the approver sits on the client side.
The second is: can they do it without an account of their own, through a portal? Different product, and here is the finding that made us rewrite the section. No vendor in this comparison documents it. We checked ten vendors' own pages. Productive and Accelo have client portals, and both are explicit that what the client does there is view approved time, or sign off files and accept quotes. Productive's documentation puts the direction the other way round: the approver approves each entry before it becomes visible to the client. Harvest's client dashboard is invoices and payments.
So the old criterion implied competitors offered something they do not, and implied we were behind when the whole field is in the same place. Both halves were false.
We have split it in two instead and printed both answers, including ours. Somebody outside your firm can approve hours in TimeSubmit, holding an account that counts towards your plan like anyone else. There is no client portal. If one is genuinely a requirement, none of the eight below will satisfy it, and you should be looking at professional services automation suites and asking hard questions about what "client sign-off" means on each.
The table's fourth column says "not documented" rather than "no", deliberately. We could not find a vendor page stating that its approver role is blocked from seeing bill or cost rates, which is not the same as those roles being able to see them. The claim is ours to evidence, not theirs to deny.
1. TimeSubmit
We build this one, so read the rest with that in mind.
TimeSubmit is built around one sequence: a consultant submits a structured weekly or monthly timesheet covering several projects at once, somebody approves it, and the invoice is generated from what was approved. There is no running timer. If your team logs time by remembering what they did, rather than by clocking in and out, that is the right shape. If they clock in and out, it is the wrong one.
Approval is on every plan rather than at the top of the ladder. A project can have more than one approver, and all of them must approve, in any order or, on Margin and Enterprise, in a set order. Rejections require a reason, and approvers hold their own accounts without sight of billing rates or invoice totals. They count towards your plan as members, the same as everyone else.
Invoices are built from approved timesheets, singly or in batches, with your logo, terms, tax details and bank fields including sort code, IBAN and SWIFT, across seven currencies.
Pricing is a base fee covering a block of people, then a fixed rate above it. Core is $42 a month covering 3 members, $33 a month billed annually, and $14 a month for each member beyond the block. Margin is $110 covering 5, or $90 annually, and $22 for each further member. Practice is $39 a month for up to 5 people with 1 client and 1 project, with the first two months at no cost and a card required to begin. Enterprise starts at $800 a month covering 25 and goes through sales.
What it does not have: single sign-on, an API, Xero or QuickBooks sync, a client portal, expenses, or a mobile app. Any one of those being on your list is a good reason to stop reading here.
Best for: consultancies that will not raise an invoice until somebody has signed off the hours behind it.
2. Toggl Track
The timer everybody has tried. Reporting is strong, the interface is quick, and for understanding where time actually goes it is hard to beat.
Two gaps matter for a consultancy replacing Harvest. There is no invoicing at all, so billing moves to a second system. And approvals start at Premium, the tier with the introductory rate: $14 for a year, $18 after. Budget the $18.
The free option is real, but the pricing page says only "free for a limited number of users" and prints no number, so establish the cap before planning around it. Starter is $9 annual and $12 monthly.
Best for: teams that want the best timer in the list and are content to invoice elsewhere.
3. Clockify
The most generous entry price here by a distance, and the free tier covers up to five users properly rather than as a demonstration.
Approval arrives at Standard, €5.49 annual and €6.99 monthly, which is earlier than Toggl and considerably earlier than Harvest. Team managers and project managers can approve and reject. Invoicing exists on the higher plans but sits alongside the timesheet rather than being generated out of an approval.
Read from the UK the page prints euros: Basic €3.99, Standard €5.49, Pro €7.99 and Enterprise €11.99 annually, or €4.99, €6.99, €9.99 and €14.99 monthly. Served to a US reader the same page shows identical numerals with a dollar sign.
Best for: cost-sensitive teams who want an approval step without paying enterprise rates for it.
4. Everhour
The closest thing here to a straight swap for Harvest at a lower price, and it says so bluntly on its own pricing page: "Everhour doesn't hide features behind higher tiers or growing limits."
There is one paid plan. Team is $8.50 per seat annually and $10 monthly, minimum five seats, with a free option up to five seats. Time approval exists, and its own documentation describes it as an administrator function rather than a separate role, so if the person signing off must not be an administrator, check that first.
Best for: small consultancies that want one plan, one price and no tier ladder to reason about.
5. Timely
Timely's angle is automatic capture: it records what you worked on and drafts the timesheet from it, rather than asking people to remember. If your problem is that time goes unlogged rather than unapproved, that is a genuinely different answer.
The pricing page publishes user maximums rather than minimums, which is easy to miss. Starter at $9 annual and $11 monthly caps at 5 users and 20 projects; Premium at $16 and $20 caps at 50; Unlimited is $22 and $28. The trial is 14 days. We found no timesheet approval workflow named anywhere on the pricing page, so if sign-off is what you are buying, this is not it. Note that timelyapp.com now redirects to timely.com.
Best for: teams losing billable hours to unlogged time, where approval is not the constraint.
6. Productive
A full professional services platform: budgets, resourcing, profitability, time, invoicing. If you are replacing Harvest and three other things at once, this is the entry that does it.
Billable time approvals arrive on Professional, $25 per user annually and $29 monthly, a real step up from Essential at $10 and $12. Client access is on Professional too, and is worth reading precisely: clients see approved time, they do not approve it.
Best for: consultancies over about twenty-five people who want project profitability in the same system as the timesheet.
7. Scoro
Scoro is the one that does not fit the shape of this table.
It does not sell tiers. It sells combinations of eight applications, and you can build your own. The relevant one here is Time-billing, at £13 per user per month with a minimum of five users. There is no monthly and annual toggle on the page at all, so the £13 has no stated billing basis; an FAQ answer says annual billing gives a discount of 13 to 17 percent, which implies £13 is the annual figure, and that is our inference rather than something the page states.
Timesheets can be approved. The page does not say on which combinations, and since combinations are assembled rather than picked from a ladder, that question goes to their sales team.
Best for: larger consultancies buying an operating system for the firm rather than a timesheet.
8. Hubstaff
The cheapest entry here and the one whose assumptions differ most from a consultancy's. Hubstaff's centre of gravity is workforce monitoring: activity levels, screenshots, GPS. Plenty of consultancies find that a poor cultural fit, and it is better to know before the trial than during it.
Approvals arrive on Team, $10 per seat annually and $12 monthly. Starter is $4.99 and $7, Grow is $7.50 and $9, Enterprise is $25, and all three named plans carry a two-seat minimum. The trial is 14 days. Hubstaff's own FAQ text elsewhere on the site quotes Starter at $5.83, contradicting the pricing table; the table is the current figure.
Best for: firms with field or shift staff where monitoring is expected, not consultancies billing professional time.
What survives a migration from Harvest
This is the section people ask for after they have decided, and it is the one nobody writes. What actually comes across, and what quietly does not.
Your time entries come across, and they are the only thing that must. Dates, people, clients, projects, tasks, hours, notes. Export the full history before you cancel anything, not after, and export it as a file you can open rather than a report you can view. Everything else in your Harvest account can be rebuilt from this plus a couple of afternoons.
Your rate card almost certainly does not. Billable rates by person, by project and by client, and cost rates if you use them, are usually the least documented thing in any time-tracking system and the most tedious to reconstruct. Write them out by hand before you start. Consultancies that skip this step are the ones still finding wrong rates on invoices three months later.
Your invoices come across as data, not as documents. A CSV row is not the PDF a client received. If you might need the actual document during an audit or a payment dispute, download the PDFs.
Approval history does not travel, and mostly does not need to. Who approved what, and when, stays in the old system, so keep the account readable rather than trying to import the trail. What does need writing down is the arrangement itself, which was never in the software: which manager signs off which team, what happens when they are on leave, whether a client contact sees it first. That is the single most useful hour of the migration, and it is what a new tool asks you to configure on day one.
Anything downstream of Harvest is the real work. Accounting sync, payroll, reporting spreadsheets. The timesheet migration is a weekend. Rebuilding what fed off it is the project, and it is what makes teams abandon a move halfway.
On timing: cut over at a period boundary, because running two systems across half a month means reconciling two partial timesheets for every person and somebody will get it wrong. Keep Harvest readable until you have raised and been paid on one full set of invoices from the new system. Harvest told the BBC that customers get 30 days' notice and then a further 10 days before renewal, so work backwards from your renewal date rather than the notice.
Three we looked at and left off
FreshBooks is accounting software with time tracking attached, and it prices like it. Read from the UK it lists Lite at £16, Plus at £30 and Premium at £42 a month, currently halved for three months, with team members at £8 each. The headline you see is the promotional price, not the one you pay in April. We found no timesheet approval workflow. For a sole consultant who mainly needs to invoice, it answers a different question well.
QuickBooks Time still exists as its own product in the UK, at £16 a month base plus £6 per user for Premium and £30 plus £8 for Elite, both excluding VAT. In the US it has been folded into QuickBooks Workforce. Its approval model is employee and line manager, which assumes a workforce rather than a consultancy and its clients.
Accelo has a genuine timesheet approval workflow with its own permission set, and a client portal, though the portal signs off files and accepts quotes rather than approving time. It is off the list for one reason: it publishes no prices at all, in any currency, behind a "get your custom quote" form. An article whose argument is that you should be able to compute your bill before you buy cannot then recommend a vendor that will not tell you what it costs.
A correction while we are here. This article previously described Accelo as "now part of the Accelo by ConnectWise family". That is wrong and we should not have printed it. Accelo's own about page says it was acquired by Bow River Capital in 2024, its 2026 copyright line reads Accelo, Inc., and the only ConnectWise material on its site is an integration and a competitive comparison.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best Harvest alternative for a UK consultancy?
It depends which half of Harvest you were using. As a timer with invoicing elsewhere, Toggl Track or Clockify cost less and do that job at least as well. If the approval step was the point, look at Clockify, Everhour or TimeSubmit, where approval sits at or near the entry plan rather than at the top. If you are also replacing project accounting, Productive or Scoro. Check currency too: Clockify bills UK readers in euros and Scoro in pounds, and both are quoted in dollars almost everywhere else online.
Why are consultancies leaving Harvest specifically?
Because the bill stopped being predictable. Almost nobody in the public complaints says the software got worse. They say a metered model counting active projects, clients, tasks and invoices, with the rates visible only inside a paying account, is not something a finance director can forecast. Documented increases run from about eight to about seventeen times the previous bill.
Is there a genuinely free Harvest alternative?
For time tracking, yes. Clockify covers up to five users and Everhour up to five seats, both properly rather than as a demonstration, and Toggl Track has a free option whose user cap it does not publish. None of them includes an approval step at that level. TimeSubmit includes two months at no cost with a card required to begin, after which the smallest plan is $39 a month. If you need somewhere to log hours, take the free option. If you need somebody to sign them off, you are buying software.
Do any of these let my client approve the timesheet?
Someone on your client's side can be an approver in most of these tools, including ours, by holding an account. What none of the vendors in this comparison documents is a client approving time through a portal without an account of their own. Productive and Accelo have client portals; those portals show approved time, sign off files and accept quotes. If a true client approval portal is a hard requirement, ask each vendor directly and ask them to show it, because no pricing or feature page in this set claims it.
Will my Harvest data come out?
Yes, and get it out before you cancel rather than after. Time entries are the asset. Take the invoice PDFs as documents as well as data, and write your rate card out by hand, because that is never in the export in the form you need.
How does TimeSubmit compare with Harvest directly?
We keep a head-to-head comparison and a page on switching, which covers cost at 5, 10, 25 and 50 people and is honest about where Harvest is the better answer.
Competitor prices were read from each vendor's own pricing page on 7 September 2026, in the currency shown to a UK reader, at the renewal rate rather than the introductory one. Software pricing changes quickly. Check the vendor before acting on any figure here.
Weighing a Harvest renewal quote? See what TimeSubmit costs at your team size, or read what actually changed in Harvest's pricing first.