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by SEMW 4435 days ago
Looks nice, but I actually moved which time-tracker I use only a week ago, to Toggl[1]. Might be missing something, but at a glance I can't see anything obvious this does better to justify $5 a month (I'm on Toggl's free tier, which afaics does everything I need). User interface looks almost identical.

[1] https://www.toggl.com/tour/web

3 comments

I’ve been using Toggl for the past month and a bit (that being the tool that the agency that I’m working with at present use). I have found it surprisingly unpleasant.

When I started, they were just switching from their old site to their new site; in view of this, some issues are to be grudgingly accepted as not unexpected (though I will boldly say that it is not acceptable, and I would not consider it acceptable in a product of my own), and poor support@ response times are in consequence unsurprising also.

I was unable to log in for almost a week as their sign up with Google functionality was broken—when I tried to sign up, it complained that I had been invited. When it was finally fixed up, it still didn’t work, for it let me create an account but then not to log in. I got fed up with that and so gained access via “forgot password”. This worked as a temporary workaround. I got my first response back from their support email address after I had resolved it all myself, about a week after the enquiry.

Just about every time I log out, my session is dropped, and I need to log in again. If I tell it to “remember me” and then click on “sign in with Google”, then after going through oAuth, it tries to sign up instead, and complains that I already have an account.

Keyboard accessibility is dodgy; if you get to any form of entering times afterwards, don’t even bother trying to use the keyboard for navigation. It doesn’t understand most date formats either, and is excessively frustrating about its handling of times, showing no intelligence in AM/PM guessing whatsoever.

Bulk editing is very buggy—it normally makes a mess of the day that a task was done on, shifting it to the day before or the day after—and it doesn’t let you work with more than one day’s results at a time, which makes it not very much of a bulk edit. Certain other things in bulk editing are broken also.

My boss said to me last week that he was strongly considering replacing Toggl altogether, because it’s just keeping on getting worse, rather than better. (The general opinion around me seems to be that, despite there being certain improvements in the new one, the old one was distinctly better and less buggy.)

One thing I find myself wanting Toggl to do is allow for entering a second activity while the app is tracking my current activity. As it stands right now, at least with the iOS app, if I want to enter older activities while a timer is running, first I need stop my current activity, enter the second activity, then restart the first activity.
The difference is Freelancy has native versions for OS X, Windows and Linux. Many people still prefer desktop apps to web services, because they give them the feeling ‘it's my own’ and works in any internet conditions, also it could be more convenient to work with a desktop app rather than with a tab in a browser.
Toggl also has native apps - https://www.toggl.com/tour/desktop
Toggl has native desktop apps also.
Yes, it has, but they keep focus on a web version, so Freelancy can be an option for someone. :)