Time tracking in Asana: a community built comparison

My organization tasked me with comparing some of the products to track time, with the specific requirement that it integrates with Asana. I just finished a month using and comparing EverHour and Clockify, testing the web experience, the use of the Chrome browser extension, and the mobile app. Our organization has not yet chosen which one to use (the decision is a broad one and not up to just me), but id like to share some of the pros and cons I noticed during my testing to hopefully help out others in the future:

Note that at the time of writing, the free-version of Clockify is enough to satisfy our organizations needs for time tracking, while EverHour does not offer a free plan outside of its 2 week trial.

Benefits of EverHour:
Better UI and UX. It felt like an overall more polished product across all 3 ways of tracking time (website, extension, and app). I didn’t notice any lag when starting and stopping the timer on web or with the browser extension (slight lag with the app), and the integration with Asana and its project structure was automatic (didn’t require any extra setup) and worked very well.

Cons of EverHour:
The biggest issue I ran into is that you cannot track time of a task that solely exists in the My Tasks section of Asana (This is because EverHour integrates with Asana Projects to organize your time, and in Asana, tasks that are only in My Tasks are actually not associated with a project.) EverHour rounds time to the nearest minute every time you start and stop (you could argue this as a pro or con, and I realize this is super nit-picky, but for my analysis im considering it as slightly less accurate). Finally, the cost of EverHour is more for our organizations needs. (Keep in mind, that was just for us at this time, and the pricing structure may change at a later date.)

Benefits of Clockify:
For our organization, the cost is going to be one of the top ‘Pros’ for Clockify (but that may vary for your needs). I thought it was interesting to be able to track time based on practically anything, (even by highlighting a section of text on a website) and thus it doesn’t have the same issue when tracking time with Tasks that are only in My Tasks. The Clockify phone app has the ability to store data locally and force ‘offline mode’, so you can track time on tasks when you don’t have a wifi or cellular connection (useful for if you are working on long flights like I do, or in remote areas where a stable connection is not always available. Note EverHours app needs an internet connection to load).

Cons of Clockify:
The whole experience felt a bit more clunky, the UI is more like a mid-2000s table, and (especially with the Chrome extension) it would take a few seconds for the clock to start showing that time was tracking. Clockify does not automatically recognize projects in Asana so you do need to go into the settings and toggle a switch, but once you do that it actually works quite well, (Just an extra step that we would have to walk all of our staff through when setting it up, which is not always easy as many of them are remote, and not all are super tech-savvy.) but it will not automatically refresh or pull new data from Asana, meaning if you change a project name or task name in Asana it will register it as a new entry rather than recognizing and associating it with the prior work on that task/project.

Hopefully this gloss over of these two options is helpful to others! It was definitely interesting to play around and see the differences between how these two products approached integrating with Asana and tracked time!

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