Time Doctor is the tracker built for exactly our kind of business: remote teams, outsourcing firms, VA agencies, the companies whose clients want to know what they paid for. It is good at that job and it prices accordingly. This is a comparison from inside one of those agencies, with the numbers, the part of Time Doctor we chose not to replicate, and the things it does that our own tool does not.
Time Doctor does not print its prices on the pricing page in a way we could quote directly; the widely reported 2026 figures, per user per month billed annually, are Basic $6.70, Standard $11.70, Premium $16.70, with an Enterprise tier on request and a 14-day trial of Premium for new accounts. Check the page before you rely on them.
What Time Doctor is good at
Screenshots on every tier, including Basic. Web and application usage reporting from Standard up, which is the feature most of its customers buy it for: a per-person breakdown of which sites and programs were open and for how long. Payroll on Standard and above. Inactivity alerts on Premium. Client access, so the people you bill can see the hours. Native apps on every desktop and phone.
For an agency that has promised clients transparency down to the browser tab, that is the product, and nothing else on the market does the tab-level view as thoroughly.
The cost in practice
Basic leaves out web and app tracking, payroll and integrations, so most agencies land on Standard. Ten VAs on Standard is $117 a month, on Premium $167, billed for the year. A twenty-five person agency on Premium is over $5,000 a year. That is a line item worth a decision rather than a default, especially when much of what you are paying for is the usage report.
The usage report, and why we do not have one
Here is the honest fork. Web and app usage tracking answers the question “what was this person doing at 3:15pm” with a list of windows. It is powerful, clients like it, and it changes the relationship between an agency and its VAs in a way that is hard to undo. People who know their tabs are logged behave like people whose tabs are logged. Some of that is productivity. Some of it is a good VA opening the client’s competitor to check a price and wondering whether to explain it later.
We decided our clients did not need the tab list to trust an invoice. They needed the hours to be real, the screenshots to exist when a month was disputed, and the procedures to have been read. So Tarly, the portal our VAs actually clock into, captures screenshots and activity from the same browser session the VA is signed into, shows Active, Idle and Away, and stops there. No application list, no browser history, no silent mode. What the admin sees, the VA can see about themselves. It is a narrower promise and it is the one we can make to both sides of the table.
What Tarly does that Time Doctor does not
Invoices that cannot bill an hour twice. Every invoice is raised from the entries that have never been billed, and each entry is stamped with its invoice number at the moment of creation. Time Doctor tracks the hours and hands them to payroll and to your invoicing tool; Tarly ties each hour to the invoice that billed it, inside the same record.
Procedures with proof of reading. A knowledge base inside the portal, with documents that can be marked required and that record who opened them and for how long. For an agency whose product is its process, “has the new VA read the returns SOP” is a question with a timestamp for an answer.
An assistant that acts, and takes it back. “Log two hours for Rera yesterday”, “draft this month’s invoice for Driftwood”, “who is working right now”. It reads and writes real records, logs each change with its own reversal before doing the next thing, and undoes on one click. It cannot delete, send, pay or change access.
One tool. Time, screenshots, tasks, clients, invoices, knowledge base, Slack, API, one login, so onboarding a VA is a single session.
The price question. Tarly runs on Cloudflare and costs a rounding error to operate, but it has no public price: it is what our agency runs on, offered to the clients we work with and to other agencies by arrangement. We would rather say that plainly than print a number that only applies to us.
What Time Doctor does that Tarly does not
Native apps on desktop and mobile; Tarly is a responsive web app. The web and app usage report, by our own choice. Payroll. Client login to view their hours; Tarly’s organisations are agencies, not their end clients, and a read-only client view is on our list rather than in the product. Inactivity alerts that act on the timer; Tarly shows idle and keeps the clock running, our first open item. Integrations beyond Slack and a REST API. If any of these is a daily need, Time Doctor Standard is the right call.
How to decide
If your clients have been sold tab-level transparency, or payroll has to come out of the tracker, or the team lives on phones, stay with Time Doctor. If what you need is an honest record of hours, screenshots that exist when they are needed, invoices that reconcile themselves, and a knowledge base your team has demonstrably read, without paying for or imposing the usage report, Tarly was built for that and nothing else.
The demo opens a seeded workspace for an hour, no sign-up, no card. If it fits, ask for access. The Clockify and Hubstaff comparisons cover the other two trackers most agencies weigh against it.
