Hubstaff is the tracker agencies move to when Clockify starts to feel light, and it is the most complete monitoring product on the market: screenshots, activity levels, application and URL tracking, payroll, scheduling, locations. If you want to see everything a remote worker does, Hubstaff will show it to you. This post is about whether a VA agency needs all of that, what it costs once the add-ons are counted, and what we run instead.
Prices are from Hubstaff’s own pricing guide as of September 2026, per user per month, billed annually; monthly billing is roughly two dollars more per plan, and third-party guides note a two-seat minimum.
What you get, and at which price
Starter, $4.99. Time tracking, timesheets, activity levels, and a cap of 500 screenshots and 500 app-and-URL records per user per month. At a ten-minute interval, 500 screenshots is about ten eight-hour days. A full-time VA runs out in the second week.
Grow, $7.50. The cap rises to 1,500 per user per month, and you get project budgets, expenses and one integration. 1,500 screenshots at ten minutes is about 31 working days, which covers a month with nothing to spare.
Team, $10. Unlimited screenshots and integrations, scheduling, attendance, payroll automation and the workforce analytics.
Enterprise, $25. Single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, HIPAA and SOC 2 support, an account rep.
Then the add-ons: Insights from $2.50, Locations (GPS) from $3.33, Silent App from $2.50, extended Data Retention from $1.67, Tasks from $2.50, each per user per month. A ten-VA agency on Team with Insights and Tasks is $150 a month before tax. Not expensive for what it does. Worth knowing before the trial ends.
The thing to decide before the plan
Hubstaff’s depth is about surveillance, and the word is not an insult; it is the product category. Application and URL tracking tells you which windows a person had open. Activity levels score their keyboard and mouse. The Silent App add-on runs without the person seeing it. Some businesses need this. A VA agency should decide, on purpose, whether it is one of them, because the choice shapes how the team feels about the tool and how clients feel about the agency.
Our answer was no. We wanted enough evidence to settle an invoice dispute and to notice when someone had gone quiet, and nothing that read as a camera in the room. That is the design line Tarly is built on, and it is why some of Hubstaff’s features are missing from it deliberately rather than not yet.
What Tarly does instead
Tarly is the portal our own VAs use, built for an agency that bills clients for hours and nothing else.
Screenshots without a monthly cap. The interval is set per organisation, from five minutes up, and can be switched off per member. There is no per-user quota to run out of in week two, because the number of screenshots is not the product.
Activity you can see, and the VA can see too. Mouse and keyboard events, tab focus and window time are sampled by the same browser session the VA is signed into. The monitoring page shows Active, Idle and Away bands from a heartbeat. There is no silent mode, no application list, no browser history. Everything the admin can see, the person being watched can see about themselves.
Privacy as a default rather than a setting. Screenshots are private objects served only through a signed-in admin route; nobody outside the organisation can reach an image by guessing its address. Retention is set per organisation from one day to a year and purged nightly, so evidence does not accumulate forever by accident.
Hours to invoice, once. An invoice is built from the entries that have never been billed, and each entry is stamped with its invoice the moment the invoice exists. Hubstaff invoices too, and well; this is a structural guarantee against double billing rather than a report.
The knowledge base with read receipts, the Slack commands, the REST API, and the assistant that acts on records with a one-click undo, all covered in the Clockify comparison and not repeated here.
What Hubstaff does that Tarly does not
Plenty, and it decides the question for many teams. Native mobile and desktop apps; Tarly is a web app. Idle timeout that stops the clock; Tarly shows idle and keeps the timer running, which is the first item on our list. Payroll, payments on invoices, expenses, scheduling and attendance, time off, GPS, fifty-plus integrations, SSO. If your agency runs payroll through the tracker or has field staff, Hubstaff Team is the right tool and Tarly is not a candidate.
Tarly also has no public price and no card-and-go sign-up. It is offered to the clients we work with and to other agencies by arrangement.
How to decide
Choose Hubstaff if you need to know which applications people used, if payroll must come out of the same system, or if the team is on phones and in the field. Consider Tarly if what you actually need is a fair record of hours with enough evidence to settle a dispute, invoices that cannot bill an hour twice, procedures your team has demonstrably read, and a tool the team does not resent. Those were our needs; the product is the shape of them.
The demo is a seeded workspace that opens in one tap and lasts an hour, no sign-up. If it fits, ask for access.
