eHour vs Toggl

Toggl is one of the most recognised names in time tracking, and for good reason. It's well-designed, has a generous free tier, and you can start logging hours within minutes. If we were freelancers tracking our own time, we'd probably use it.

But once those hours feed into client invoices, payroll runs, or project budget decisions, you need more than a record of time spent. You need the data to be consistent and reviewed before anyone acts on it.

Timer entries vs weekly timesheets

In Toggl, you start a timer, type a description, pick a project (or create one on the fly), and stop the timer when you're done. Each person decides how to label and organise their entries.

In eHour, users open a weekly timesheet and log hours against projects and tasks they've been assigned to. The structure - projects, tasks, budgets, approval flows - is already in place before anyone enters a single hour.

Data entry: flexibility vs consistency

We've seen this with our own customers before they switched. An agency has 40 consultants on a large account. Some log time to "Unilever", others to "Unilever.", one person uses "Unilever - phase 2", and someone has an entry that just says "website stuff". Now try invoicing that client. Someone on the finance team has to open a spreadsheet, figure out which entries belong together, and hope they didn't miss one. Every. Single. Month.

In eHour, users only see the projects and tasks they've been assigned to. There's nothing to reconcile because the data is structured from the moment it's entered.

At scale, time tracking isn't about capturing time. It's about not creating a cleanup job for someone else every month.

Control: who owns the truth?

We had a customer tell us they once invoiced a client for 12 hours on a project that had already wrapped up the month before. Nobody caught it because there was no approval step. The client caught it. That's not a great conversation to have.

In eHour, timesheets go through an approval workflow before the data is used for anything. Once hours are approved, they're trusted for billing, payroll, and reporting. Approval workflows, reviewer roles, and audit trails (who approved what and when) are included, not locked behind a higher tier.

In Toggl, timesheet approvals and SSO are available on the Premium plan ($18/user/month). They work, but they're not central to how the product is designed - Toggl's strength is the tracking experience itself.

The reporting gap nobody talks about

Here's a question that comes up in every growing team: which projects went over budget last quarter? If your time data is freeform, answering that means exporting a CSV, deduplicating project names, and building a pivot table. We've talked to teams that spend half a day on this every month. With structured data, you just pull the report.

eHour's reporting is designed around the questions teams actually deal with:

• Are we over or under budget on this project?
• Who is over or under utilised?
• Are timesheets submitted and approved on time?

Because time is tracked against predefined assignments with rates and budgets attached, the reports reflect project health without extra cleanup.

Toggl's reporting works well for billable-vs-non-billable breakdowns and individual productivity dashboards. Where it gets harder is when the underlying data isn't consistent across the team.

What happens when your team grows

In eHour, approvals, SSO, SCIM, and reporting are all included ($4.99/user/month, one plan, everything in it). In Toggl, the jump from Starter ($9) to Premium ($18) is significant, and that's the tier you need for approvals and SSO.

If you're managing a 50-person team and need timesheet approvals, that's the difference between roughly $250/month and $900/month. That's an extra $650/month for approvals and SSO alone.

Teams with leavers or contractors cycling through also benefit from SCIM provisioning. Users are automatically created and deactivated through your identity provider, which cuts most of the manual account cleanup.

A quick comparison

So which one?

If you're a freelancer or a small team that just needs to know where the hours went, use Toggl. Seriously. It's great at that, and the free tier is generous enough that you might never need to pay.

But if you're the person who has to make sure the hours are correct before they hit an invoice or a payroll run, that's a different problem. Toggl wasn't really built for that. eHour was. The trade-off is that you need to set up your projects and assignments before people start tracking, which takes a bit more work upfront. We think that pays for itself the first time you skip the month-end cleanup.

Full disclosure: we build eHour, so take this with the appropriate grain of salt. We've tried to be fair, but we're not pretending to be neutral. Your call.