Which time tracking software do AI answer engines actually recommend?

When an SMB buyer asks an AI assistant which time tracking software to buy, a shortlist comes back. We asked 44 different phrasings of that question across 2 engines, 88 answers in total, and counted every product named. This is the result. Nobody paid to be on it, and no vendor list was written in advance — the 103 vendors below are simply everyone the engines named.

Run 3 August 2026 Questions 44 Answers 88 Vendors named 103 Top-10 repeatability 9/10

Free to read, raw data included.

Is one of these time tracking tools and timesheet software yours?

The board is re-measured every month. For $9.99 a month you get one email when your own row moves — your rank and answer count, who took the mentions you were absent from, and which of the 44 questions started or stopped naming you. Leave your address and I reply by hand with what your row reads today. What is in it, and the $29.99 one-off report →

Nothing is charged and nothing starts — I reply by email. Your address is used to answer you and to set up billing; it does not go on a list.

Two conditions on every number below

These 44 questions are one family of phrasings — time tracking software — and every number below is conditional on them. A differently worded family about the same products — a different size of buyer, a different budget, a different constraint — is a different measurement and can come back naming a different set of products. All 44 questions are printed in full below, so you can see exactly what was asked before you read what came back. We have measured how big that can get, on two of our own boards: SuiteCRM is named in 83 of the 132 answers on /c/crmctx/ and in none of the 132 on /c/crm/ — same products, same day, same extraction, asked differently.
The engine columns below are not one instrument. Perplexity (sonar) searches the web while it answers and returned the sources used beside every one of those 44 answers — that column is what gets retrieved. Gemini (gemini-flash-latest) was called through its API with no tools and the near-empty system prompt quoted in the method below, so it answers out of the model’s own weights — not one of those 44 answers came back with a source. That column is what the model already remembers. Both are worth counting and they are not the same measurement: a product can be named often by what the models remember and rarely by what they retrieve, or the reverse, and the totals in the Answers column add the two together.

The leaderboard

“Answers” is how many of the 88 answers named that product. Share is the same number as a percentage. The two right-hand columns split it by engine. Every row has its own link — the # beside a vendor name gives you something like connexion.me/c/timetracking/#clockify. Click a vendor's name to see which of the 44 questions named them, and click one of those to read the answer it was counted from, word for word.

#VendorAnswers ShareGeminiPerplexity
1Clockify#6776.1%3235
2Toggl Track#5259.1%3121
3Harvest#5158.0%3219
4Hubstaff#2022.7%119
5QuickBooks Time#
Named together with TSheets in 5 of the 18 answers that name either. Gemini’s answer to question 17 writes the two as one product renamed: “QuickBooks Time (formerly TSheets)”. Counted as separate rows — how names are counted.
1820.5%99
6Everhour#1314.8%49
7Timely#1112.5%38
8Connecteam#1011.4%37
9Jibble#1011.4%37
10TMetric#1011.4%010
11Time Doctor#910.2%27
12RescueTime#78.0%43
13Rize#66.8%51
14Teamwork#66.8%06
15ClockShark#55.7%32
16Float#55.7%41
17Homebase#55.7%41
18My Hours#55.7%05
19Paymo#55.7%05
20Productive#55.7%32
21TimeCamp#55.7%05
22TSheets#
Named together with QuickBooks Time in 5 of the 18 answers that name either. Gemini’s answer to question 17 writes the two as one product renamed: “QuickBooks Time (formerly TSheets)”. Counted as separate rows — how names are counted.
55.7%50
23ShiftFlow#44.5%04
24Apploye#33.4%03
25BigTime#33.4%12
26ClickUp#33.4%21
27Workyard#33.4%03
28BQE CORE#22.3%11
29Buddy Punch#22.3%02
30BusyBusy#22.3%11
31Clio#22.3%11
32Clio Manage#22.3%11
33DeskTime#22.3%20
34ExakTime#22.3%11
35Financial Cents#22.3%02
36FreshBooks#22.3%20
37Insightful#22.3%11
38Jobber#22.3%11
39ManicTime#22.3%11
40Milient Project Flow#22.3%02
41Monday.com#22.3%20
42Monograph#22.3%11
43MyCase#22.3%11
44Raken#22.3%11
45Replicon#22.3%11
46When I Work#22.3%11
47WorkTime#22.3%02
48actiTIME#11.1%01
49Agiled#11.1%01
50Asana#11.1%10
51ATracker#11.1%10
52Autotask#11.1%10
53Bill4Time#11.1%01
54Bonsai#11.1%01
55Buildertrend#11.1%10
56Canopy#11.1%01
57ClearCare#
Named together with WellSky Personal Care in 1 of the 1 answers that name either. Gemini’s answer to question 38 writes the two as one product renamed: “WellSky Personal Care (formerly ClearCare)”. Counted as separate rows — how names are counted.
11.1%10
58Clientary#11.1%01
59CoConstruct#11.1%10
60ConnectWise#11.1%10
61ConnectWise ScreenConnect/Manage#11.1%10
62Datto Autotask PSA#11.1%10
63Dayflow#11.1%01
64Deltek Vantagepoint#11.1%10
65Deputy#11.1%10
66Desklog#11.1%01
67ezClocker#11.1%01
68HaloPSA#11.1%10
69HCSS HeavyJob#11.1%10
70HHAeXchange#11.1%10
71Insighful/Insightful#11.1%01
72Jira Work Management#11.1%01
73Kantata#11.1%01
74Keito#11.1%01
75Knowify#11.1%01
76LeanLaw#11.1%10
77Memtime#11.1%01
78MSPbots.ai#11.1%10
79OneSuite#11.1%01
80OnTheClock#11.1%01
81Plutio#11.1%01
82Procore#11.1%10
83QGenda#11.1%01
84Rocketlane#11.1%01
85Runn#11.1%10
86Scoro#11.1%01
87StudioHero#11.1%01
88Super Productivity#11.1%01
89Syncro#11.1%10
90TaxDome#11.1%01
91Teramind#11.1%10
92TimeSolv#11.1%10
93Timing#11.1%01
94Toggl#11.1%10
95TopTracker#11.1%10
96TrackingTime#11.1%01
97WakaTime#11.1%10
98WebWork#11.1%01
99WellSky Personal Care#
Named together with ClearCare in 1 of the 1 answers that name either. Gemini’s answer to question 38 writes the two as one product renamed: “WellSky Personal Care (formerly ClearCare)”. Counted as separate rows — how names are counted.
11.1%10
100Workamajig#11.1%01
101WorkMax#11.1%10
102Wrapbook#11.1%10
103Yamdu#11.1%10

What is free, and what is for sale

Everything above is free and stays free — the leaderboard, the method, all 88 raw answers and the machine-readable ranking, published in full at the bottom of this page. No vendor paid to be listed, no vendor can pay to move, and nothing here goes behind a login later.

What is for sale is one vendor's row, watched: $9.99 a month to be told when your rank moves, who took your mentions, and which phrasings started or stopped naming you — the board is re-run monthly and you get what changed. A one-off $29.99 deep report on a single row is the other option. What is in each →

Method

Every claim on this page is reproducible from the files linked at the bottom.

The engines

Gemini (gemini-flash-latest), Perplexity (sonar). Each was called through its public API with a near-empty system prompt — “answer the user's question directly and concisely” — and nothing else. The engines were not asked to produce a list, rank anything, or name vendors. Steering them toward a list would have manufactured the thing being measured.

The questions

44 distinct phrasings of one purchase decision, written before any measurement was run. No vendor name appears in any of them.

These 44 questions are one phrasing family, not every way this market gets asked about. The family is time tracking software — that is the wording they were written from, and it is counted back against them here: 40 of them contain “time”; 32 of them contain “tracking”; 22 of them contain “software”, and 43 of the 44 contain at least one. A different family about the same products — a different size of buyer, a different budget, a different constraint, different words — is a different measurement, and it can come back naming a different set of vendors. This board is this family, measured. It is not the whole market.
  1. What is the best time tracking software for a 50-person company?
  2. Best time tracking app for freelancers
  3. We're a 30 person creative agency and billable hours are slipping through the cracks. What time tracking software should we buy?
  4. Recommend a time tracking tool for a team with under 100 employees.
  5. affordable time tracking software for SMB
  6. What time tracking software do small marketing agencies actually use?
  7. Best software to track billable hours for client invoicing
  8. What is the best employee time tracking tool for remote teams?
  9. We are a law firm with 15 attorneys needing to track time by client and matter. What software should we use?
  10. best time tracking software for software developers
  11. Which time tracking app is best for tracking contractor hours?
  12. What software should a small consulting firm use to track employee project hours?
  13. time tracking tools with automatic activity tracking
  14. We are an engineering firm of 20 people moving off Excel timesheets. What time tracking tool should we get?
  15. best employee time tracking software with mobile GPS clock in
  16. What is the most accurate billable hours tracker for freelancers?
  17. What time tracking app works best for managing field service worker timesheets?
  18. affordable time tracker for small business payroll
  19. What is the best time tracking tool for design agencies?
  20. We run an accounting firm with 10 employees. What time tracking software should we buy?
  21. best time tracking software for enterprise teams
  22. What software should we buy to track team time across multiple client projects?
  23. best timesheet app for small business
  24. We have 40 remote workers in different time zones. What is the best time tracking tool?
  25. What time tracking tool integrates best with accounting and invoicing software?
  26. best simple time tracker for sole proprietors
  27. What is the best time tracking software for architectural firms?
  28. We are a digital agency struggling with project profitability. What time tracking app do you recommend?
  29. best time tracking app with screenshot monitoring
  30. What software do construction companies use for crew time tracking?
  31. simple non-intrusive time tracking software for employees
  32. What is the best free or cheap time tracking software for a startup?
  33. best time tracker for Mac and Windows
  34. We need a timesheet software that tracks billable vs non-billable hours. What should we buy?
  35. What time tracking tools are best for managing agency capacity and utilization?
  36. best time tracking software for IT service providers and MSPs
  37. What is the easiest time tracking software for non-tech-savvy employees?
  38. best time tracking software for healthcare and home care workers
  39. We are a 5-person agency. What time tracker should we buy for client billing?
  40. best time tracking app for Android and iPhone
  41. What software should a video production company use to track crew hours and project budgets?
  42. What is the best automated time tracking app that runs in the background?
  43. best time tracking tools for remote team management
  44. We are losing money on fixed-fee projects because we don't track hours. What time tracking app should we buy?

How the vendor list was built

Each of the 88 answers was read back and every named product extracted. The vendor list is discovered: a product appears here if and only if an engine named it. Counted are standalone time trackers, timesheet apps, billable hours tracking tools, employee time tracking platforms, and broader project management, accounting, or HR suites whose time tracking module was named. Excluded, even when named: project management and task tools without native time tracking, accounting and bookkeeping packages, payroll systems, invoice-only tools, website blockers and personal Pomodoro timers, physical punch clock hardware, calendar tools, and companies named only as an example user.

Spelling variants of one product are folded together, and a trailing “by company” is dropped. This run collapsed 14 spellings onto 7 of the rows below: “Clockify” and “Clockify (Auto-Tracker Feature)” are one row — the one the table prints as Clockify. An edition name is folded into its product when it is that product’s name followed by a further word, and the plain name is at least three times as common. This run folded one such name: “Harvest + Forecast” counts as Harvest. A name that merely begins with the same letters is a different product and keeps its own row. No pair was merged by hand in this category: every fold above is the rule applied mechanically, with no human judgement about who is who.

Beyond those folds a product is counted as the engines spelled it, and two rows in the table are never merged into one. When a product has been renamed or acquired and the engines still answer with both names, both names keep their own row: this page carries no hand-maintained list of who is now who, because that list would be a human claim about a mechanical count and nothing here could check it. What it has instead is the answers. Where an answer itself writes two of the rows below as one product renamed — the construction “X (formerly Y)” — the line beside those rows quotes that sentence and gives the overlap and the total, so the union is on the page. Nothing else produces that line. Two rows being named in the same answers does not, however often: the engines answer in shortlists, so the leaders of a category are named together whatever they are called. 2 pairs of rows below carry that line in this run: QuickBooks Time and TSheets, ClearCare and WellSky Personal Care. What each one quotes is what an engine wrote, not a judgement of ours about who owns what.

A product is counted once per answer, however many times that answer mentions it.

Is this stable, or is it noise?

The entire run was repeated a second time, same 44 questions, same engines, independent calls. The top ten came back 9/10 identical. What moved: Jibble (9 in run A) dropped out of run B's ten and Time Doctor (7 in run B) took that place. by position, Hubstaff was 4 in run A and 5 in run B; QuickBooks Time was 5 in run A and 4 in run B; Timely was 7 in run A and 9 in run B. Run B named 97 vendors over 88 answers against run A's 103. The tail moves; the head does not.

A leaderboard whose top ten reshuffles between runs would not be worth publishing, so this check was run before the page was, and the page ships only because it passed.

What this is not

This measures what two answer engines said on 3 August 2026, in response to these questions, through their APIs. It is not a quality ranking, not a review, and not advice on which time tracking software to buy. A product can be excellent and rank low here — that gap is the point.

The raw data

All 88 answers, verbatim, one JSON object per line: run A · run B. The per-answer extracted product names: run A · run B. Machine-readable ranking: ranking.json.

What Perplexity was reading. It is the only one of these engines that returns a source list, and the markers in its answers above — [1], [2] — point into it. Every URL it cited, with the title, date and the excerpt it actually retrieved, one JSON object per answer: run A · run B. Join on index to the answers file, and read [n] as citations[n-1]. Perplexity returned a source list on 44 of its 44 answers. Gemini returned no sources at all — no citation, grounding or search-result field of any kind appears anywhere in its API response, on any of the 44 answers it gave. That is a fact about the engine, not a gap in this page.

The sources behind the answers

Run A's 44 Perplexity answers cited 864 URLs across 200 distinct domains. Below are the 65 that were cited in three or more separate answers. Citations counts every URL from that domain, so a domain cited three times in one answer counts three times; Answers is how many of the 44 answers cited it at all.

DomainCitationsAnswers
reddit.com7341
clockify.me4734
youtube.com4528
myhours.com4435
zapier.com3129
apploye.com2322
thedigitalprojectmanager.com2222
paymoapp.com2217
toggl.com2119
teamwork.com2017
gitnux.org1515
memtime.com1514
tmetric.com1513
g2.com1311
shiftflow.app139
worktime.com138
everhour.com1212
getharvest.com1212
hubstaff.com1210
wifitalents.com1110
connecteam.com119
quickbooks.intuit.com99
timedoctor.com99
productive.io77
timesheet.io77
play.google.com74
agiled.app66
chronoid.app66
jibble.io66
techradar.com66
timecamp.com66
wrike.com66
apps.apple.com55
capterra.com55
float.com55
swydo.com55
timesheets.com55
forbes.com54
workyard.com54
actitime.com44
buddypunch.com44
desklog.io44
ntaskmanager.com44
peopleopsmanager.net44
rocketlane.com44
timely.com44
worldmetrics.org44
timeclick.com43
blog.tmetric.com33
clickup.com33
community.spiceworks.com33
desktime.com33
fitsmallbusiness.com33
getapp.com33
hivedesk.com33
manyrequests.com33
medium.com33
mycase.com33
ontheclock.com33
spica.com33
viasocket.com33
waveapps.com33
webwork-tracker.com33
worksbuddy.ai33
zipdo.co33

A domain missing from this table was cited in fewer than three answers, or was never cited at all — the run A file linked above is the complete list either way, and it is the only way to tell those two apart. Cited is not endorsed: a page the engine retrieved is not a page that recommended anyone, and this counts what was read, not what it said.

The answer a vendor panel shows you is read straight out of the run A file linked above — the page fetches the one line it needs and displays it unaltered, so what you read there and what you get by downloading the file are the same bytes.

What one line of each file holds, and the terms you may re-use them under — the raw answers may be re-used in any medium, commercially and inside open-source software, with attribution.