DeskTime Pro (which begins at $7 per user per month, with volume discounts) is a solid time tracking tool that offers productivity-focused employee monitoring. This simple user activity and application tracking software offers app and URL tracking, screenshots, custom reports, and solid productivity monitoring that you can map to specific projects and tasks.
DeskTime is not as dynamic a team behavior analytics platform as Editors’ Choice ActivTrak (Free at ActivTrak) , or as powerful a full-blown monitoring tool as Editors’ Choice Teramind. However, if your business is looking for a good automated time tracker with a useful collection of monitoring features and productivity reporting, DeskTime Pro will get the job done.
Pricing and Setup
DeskTime is free for a single user with the DeskTime Lite plan, which includes basic time tracking, application tracking, and access to the DeskTime Android and iOS apps. The paid DeskTime Pro plan starts at $7 per month for a single user, and scales down per-user with volume-based pricing, which you can gauge using the slider on the company’s website. For example, DeskTime Pro costs $18 per month for three users, $30 per month for five users, $60 per month for 10 users, $119 per month for 20 users, and $228 per month for 50 users. DeskTime also has an Unlimited plan, with pricing is calculated on a custom basis based on the user count.
The DeskTime Pro plan, which we tested, comes with access to the cloud-based control panel, tracking of URLs and window titles on an employee’s screen, reports, projects, screenshots, and data history, as well as billing rates and vacation/absence tracking. All paid plans also come with a 14-day free trial.
DeskTime setup was quick and easy. You can connect your login credentials with Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn when you sign up. After starting my free trial and logging into the control panel, I clicked the big green button on the top right to download the DeskTime agent onto my Windows 10 ($139.00 at Microsoft Store) machine. The dashboard shows you straightforward step-by-step instructions, but all I really had to do was open the installer, go through the installation wizard, and within a minute my agent was installed and data from my machine began populating the DeskTime control panel.
Time Tracking
Desktime Pro falls somewhere between some of the pure-play time trackers in this roundup and middle tier of productivity-focused monitoring solutions. On the time tracking front, DeskTime is similar to Time Doctor (Visit Site at Time Doctor) and Hubstaff in that it can track time in relation to particular projects and tasks. The Projects tab of the DeskTime dashboard can filter time tracking and productivity data by project status, groups, or project owners, and lists project time and productivity percentages related to particular tasks and project members.
As far as time tracking goes, the main My DeskTime dashboard shows arrival time and time at work, and a few custom metrics such as DeskTime Time (online time spent on your machine) versus Productive Time. There’s also an Absence Calendar tab that can track weekly and monthly time with absence categories such as a business trip, conference, parental leave, sick day, vacation, etc. DeskTime can also integrate with Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook to sync calendar events in DeskTime and vice versa.
Employee Monitoring
For the purposes of this review, we focused on the employee monitoring features of the platform. In particular, we looked at how DeskTime Pro stacks up to the other productivity-focused tools in this roundup, ActivTrak and and Work Examiner (60.00 Per Perpetual License. Pricing Scales Based on User Volume at Work Examiner) . The main widget dashboard in the My DeskTime tab, which can be filtered by custom time intervals, gives you a good looking at-a-glance view of employee productivity. Beyond the time tracking stats, the dashboard also shows effectiveness and productivity percentages based on the time you’ve spent using various applications and websites.
Below this is the productivity bar, a nifty data visualization mapping productive, unproductive, and neutral activity in five-minute intervals throughout the workday. There’s a projects bar below that to map the same data in relation to particular tasks, followed by lists of productive, unproductive, and neutral apps and websites sorted by time spent. Finally, there’s a Category breakdown chart showing time spent in email, social media, office apps, entertainment news, etc, and at the bottom of the MyDeskTime dashboard a look at employee screenshots if that feature is enabled. While the interactive charts and productivity metrics in the main dashboard aren’t as robust as ActivTrak, the user interface (UI) in smooth and DeskTime makes it easy to track efficiency, even showing employees their productivity rank within their company or team.
The monitoring functionality in DeskTime is only as useful as the degree to which you customize the main data vectors: productive and unproductive apps, categories, and screenshots. The interface is also completely customizable based on what the admin makes visible.
Screenshots, for instance, can only be enabled by going to Settings > Company and scrolling down to check the box labeled “allow screen capture.” You can then set screen capture to take shots every 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes, and DeskTime offers an additional check box to blur screenshots for additional privacy, as you can in Hubstaff and Time Doctor. In contrast to enterprise monitoring solutions such as Teramind, InterGuard, and Veriato 360 , the goal with screenshots in DeskTime Pro is to track work, not directly scan and log what’s on a user’s screen.
Before I checked that box, the screenshots tab was not visible in my left-hand navigation menu. After I set the parameters and saved changes, the tab appeared and allowed me to view regular or blurred screenshots by employee or by particular departments including the Finance, HR, and Sales groups I created. The screenshot viewer itself is simply a still image, as opposed to the slideshow viewer found in ActivTrak or full-blown live video and historical playback available in tools such as Teramind (60.00 Per Month for Up to 5 Users for the Starter Edition at Teramind) .
The same customization is true for app classification and categories. In the Settings tab, I was able to not only check, uncheck, and sort apps into productive, unproductive, and neutral. More importantly, DeskTime lets you classify app productivity based on user groups, also configured in settings. An app that’s productive for one department might be unproductive for another, for instance classifying Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc as productive for your social media department (social media apps are classified as unproductive by default). The Groups and Categories tabs in Settings work the same way, allowing you to check, uncheck, and sort apps and users to fit your organization’s unique criteria.
Once you’ve configured all your monitoring and categorization settings, the Reports tab is where you can do a deeper dive, albeit a limited one. The Overview tab gives you the same metrics as the MyDeskTime dashboard, but there are tabs to compare apps and employees by time and productivity, as well as any extra hours worked and the option to export reports in XLS format. You can, however, filter reports by specific employee groups.
Admins can also follow activity in an Employees tab, which breaks data down by departments and shows graphs of productivity peaks throughout a custom date range. There are tabs for different departments and teams, that overall looks a lot like Google Analytics. ActivTrak gives you far more information and reporting options, but it’s a useful view.
Overall, DeskTime Pro uses computer vision to scan open apps, website tabs, and browsers on a user’s screen, though you can configure settings to disable the capture of window titles. There’s also a Settings tab for adding IP address restrictions to specific groups or employees. DeskTime Pro lacks any sort of deeper alerting or automation beyond that, aside from email reports that can be sent daily, weekly, or monthly. The tool also doesn’t track keywords, log keystrokes, or track files and documents on a machine as you can do with the enterprise monitoring tools and Work Examiner, although DeskTime Pro will track email subject lines.
A Solid Productivity Tracker
The software also sports a couple of employee privacy features that are worth noting. In addition to blurred screenshots, the tool also lets employees use a Private Time button to turn off tracking if, for instance, they need to go to their online banking website or pull up other sensitive personal or financial data. This option can also be disabled by the admin but, along with blurred screenshots, it provides some useful privacy safeguards.
DeskTime Pro is an easy-to-use hybrid between a time tracking tool and an employee monitoring platform. While its gathering and reporting are limited compared to Editors’ Choice Teramind, and it doesn’t provide the depth of productivity metrics as does Editors’ Choice ActivTrak, DeskTime Pro does have a solid core of app tracking and screenshot features to complement its time and project tracking. If that combination is what your company’s looking for, then DeskTime Pro is an affordable, capable choice for you.
