RescueTime Review: What Is It & How It Works | RescueTime vs Everhour

Many organizations now apply the best time tracking practices to monitor employee activity and measure team performance to improve business operations. Thanks to time tracking tools, such as RescueTime, monitoring and improving productivity has never been easier. This article will shed light on RescueTime – its main features, pricing, pros & cons, tips and tricks, and compare two popular tools to determine which time tracker will be on top: RescueTime vs Everhour.

What Is RescueTime?

We’ll begin by exploring RescueTime. The tool was created to tackle some of the problems present in the modern workplace, namely, stress, reduced productivity, and burnout. One of the best ways to improve your productivity is to understand how you spend your time, so you can make necessary adjustments. RescueTime tracks your activity on a computer or mobile device and then provides you with insights into how you spend your time. 

RescueTime Features

Rescue time provides users with a variety of useful features, which we’ll explore in more detail.

🚜 Activity tracking

One of RescueTime’s best features is its activity-tracking feature. It lets users see exactly what their team members have been doing each day. The feature tracks the time a user spends on a particular website, app, or even a specific document, allowing management to review their team members’ working habits and make adjustments if necessary.

🔖 Activity labeling

Once RescueTime has collected the necessary data about how you use your time, it will categorize it into how productive it is on a scale with five different productivity levels. Some websites may be deemed as distracting in some roles and productive in others. For example, scrolling through your company’s news website is part of your job if you’re a journalist. As a result, you can mark certain websites as productive rather than distracting. 

❗ Work goals and distraction blockers

RescueTime enables you to set a personal daily work goal and allows you to block distractions when necessary during what the platform calls a ‘focus session’. The app tracks what you’re working on and will alert you when you’re beginning to lose focus or trying to work on too many tasks at one time.

📊 Dashboard

This data is then presented on a dashboard. It gives you a productivity pulse and measures your productivity compared to the previous day. Additionally, the dashboard presents your activities by color: blue being productive, grey as neither productive nor distracted, and red as distracted. Finally, a table of each hour that you’ve worked that day will be populated with the color corresponding to the activity you did during that time. 

Once you’ve used the app for a while, it will give you more detailed insights into how you use your time. For example, if you use the app for a couple of months, you may find that you’re particularly productive on certain days.

📃 Reporting

The data recorded in the dashboard can be converted into a report, which you can download and share with whoever you like by emailing them a copy within the platform. With a premium subscription, users can view a wealth of information in reports. This includes:

– Detailed activity reporting
– Trends within your activity to show how you work overtime
– A breakdown of your activities by an input source
– The ability to view your data based on customized time filters
– Exporting your data to CSV and filtering data based on specific keywords

🔏 Privacy

RescueTime allows you to disable the platform for certain apps and websites, giving you control over what information is recorded. You can pause the RescueTime app at any time. The app allows you to pause all RescueTime activity for 15 minutes, an hour, or until tomorrow to give you privacy.

Plus, you can schedule the app to only record your activity at certain times of day, outside of these times, the app will not track your activity. That’s not all—you can also restrict which websites RescueTime logs by creating a white list of websites you would like RescueTime to track. 

🔁 Integrations

You can allow other apps to use your RescueTime data. The app can be integrated with several platforms, including but not limited to

Slack, Google Calendar, Microsoft Office, Zapier, Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare.

These integrations enable you to get the most out of the platform. You can also export reports to a CSV file, but only if you have a premium subscription.

🔧 Support and platforms

RescueTime offers various support options if you encounter problems. The first port of call is the RescueTime knowledge base, where you’ll find informative articles about the platform, troubleshooting information, and FAQs. Suppose these pages do not help you fix a problem. In that case, you can contact the RescueTime team on the company website using the contact form, leave a phone message or email the team at contact@rescuetime.com. 

RescueTime is a web-based platform, but it also has a mobile app that lets you track mobile phone usage. The RescueTime app is available on Android and IOS.

💲 Pricing

RescueTime offers a free version of the app with limited features. The RescueTime premium plan, which includes all the outlined features, costs $6.50 a month per user when billed yearly.

❓ Alternatives

RescueTime is a great app if your main goal is to track your productivity. However, it does not offer the same billing and invoicing features as other time tracking and productivity apps on the market. If you’re looking for an alternative app to increase your productivity, consider Todoist.

The app is used by millions of people to plan and collaborate on projects of all sizes. You can write to-do lists, create labels, set priority levels to highlight your most pressing tasks, set reminders, highlight favorites, and delegate tasks to team members. Additionally, you can see tangible progress through productivity visualizations, which, by week and month, help you stay on track to achieve set goals.

✅❌ Pros and cons of RescueTime

Why users might be looking for a RescueTime alternative?

While RescueTime is fully functional and can take care of most of your needs, it’s worth taking a look at some of the drawbacks users might encounter when using it.

1️⃣ Occasionally, it can be challenging to allocate a recorded activity to a specific project, particularly when managing multiple concurrent projects that require the same tools.

Everhour simplifies the process of allocating recorded activities to specific projects, even when managing numerous concurrent projects with similar tool requirements. Its intuitive interface and project-centric organization make it easy to accurately track time and assign activities, ensuring precise project management and streamlined workflow.

2️⃣ Learning how to navigate the platform may require a bit of a learning curve initially, but once mastered, its robust features enhance productivity significantly. Compared to other options, the pricing might seem a bit higher, but the value it brings in terms of features and efficiency outweighs the cost. Also, managing time-tracking offline could present some challenges.

Everhour offers comprehensive tutorials, onboarding assistance, and a user-friendly interface to ease the learning curve for new users. Additionally, its efficient time-tracking features ultimately save time and enhance productivity, offsetting any initial learning investments.

While Everhour’s pricing may appear slightly higher, its value lies in its extensive features, customizable options, and reliable customer support, making it a worthwhile investment for businesses seeking top-tier time-tracking solutions.

With Everhour’s mobile app and offline time tracking capabilities, users can seamlessly track their time from anywhere, ensuring accurate records even when internet connectivity is limited. This flexibility enables users to stay productive and organized regardless of their location or connectivity status.

3️⃣ The user interface might be perceived as outdated and subpar by some users.

Everhour offers a modern and intuitive user interface, providing users with a seamless and pleasant experience when tracking their time and managing projects. With its sleek design and user-friendly layout, Everhour can address concerns about outdated interfaces, offering a more enjoyable and efficient time-tracking solution.

4️⃣ Users may find that the API capabilities of RescueTime are very limited, and updates to the platform may sometimes result in a less satisfactory experience rather than improvements.

Everhour offers a robust and flexible API that allows for seamless integration with other tools and platforms. Additionally, Everhour continuously enhances its features based on user feedback, ensuring that updates improve the user experience rather than detract from it.

As you can see, Everhour is an intuitive attendance tracker that enables users to track time, estimate tasks, set budgets for projects, and build detailed reports to distribute internally or send to clients. Additionally, Everhour provides dozens of integrations, allowing users to use all of the above features in their chosen project management tool, such as Basecamp or Asana. It’s a great alternative to RescueTime as we can explore more in further sections.

Everhour Features

Everhour provides users with a variety of helpful features, which we’ll explore in more detail.

🕜 Time tracking

First, Everhour offers easy-to-use employee time tracking tools. Use a native timer or enter the time you worked on a task manually. Plus, you can set time estimates so you can see how much time you’ve got left to spend on a chosen task. You can also set reminders, so you receive notifications about long-running timers.

If that wasn’t enough, with Everhour, managers can review and approve timesheets (via a timesheet app) for their team members, allowing them to easily keep track of the hours their team is working. 

Everhour is the top choice for small businesses and small to mid-size teams of 5 to 50 members, including professionals like software developers, marketers, designers, consultants, lawyers, you name it!

Seamlessly integrating with popular project management tools like Asana, Trello, and Jira, its user-friendly interface and customizable reports make it the ultimate time tracking solution for small and mid-size teams.

With dedicated support ensuring you receive timely assistance, our team is here to help you promptly and with a smile!

📚 Task management

Task management has never been easier because of Everhour. The platform enables you to quickly create new tasks, determine work priorities, set deadlines, and assign tasks to specific team members. Additionally, you can use sections and tags to organize and add context to your tasks, meaning there’s less room for confusion.

Another key task management feature of Everhour is choosing between board and list views for your project task—Everhour gives you the option to choose the view that makes the most sense to you. With all your tasks laid out in front of you, it’s easy to know what you should be working on.

🧮 Billing and invoicing

One of Everhour’s key strengths is its billing and invoicing capabilities. You can create new invoices based on tracked time and relevant expenses, use dynamic variables that will be replaced with real data in invoice line items, translate invoice labels, apply online invoice generator, and connect with accounting platforms such as QuickBooks, FreshBooks, or Xero to sync your clients, and copy invoices.

Additionally, Everhour enables you to track work-related expenses attach receipts to expenses, and use unit pricing per expense category. 

📃 Reporting

Everhour provides in-depth reporting, allowing you to access analytics to increase productivity and show your clients exactly what they are paying for. You can create custom reports using filters to arrange columns and add certain conditions to create the reports you require. Plus, you can gain a deeper understanding of tasks using metadata such as tags, task types, or specific milestones.

Once you’ve created a report, you can share it with your team members or download it to send to a client. To save time, you can schedule reports to send to a list of email addresses on a specified day, on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

🌟 Project management

One thing that makes Everhour different from other time tracking software is the project management capabilities the platform offers. Everhour offers users real integration by injecting time management controls into your chosen project management platform, be it Trello, Jira, or ClickUp (or Monday project management), and enjoy their PM features with time tracking controls, so you and your team members don’t need to duplicate information on two different platforms. 

🔁 Integrations

Everhour integrates seamlessly into dozens of different applications, allowing you to say goodbye to tab switching once and for all! You can integrate Everhour with a wide selection of platforms, including but not limited to Asana, Basecamp, ClickUp, Jira, Trello, Monday, GitHub, and QuickBooks.

Integrating Everhour with your chosen project management or accounting platforms allows you and your team members to stay on the same page.

There’s no need to update each platform separately; once the two are integrated, all information will be automatically updated. Simple!

🔧 Support and platforms

Everhour offers support to users in various ways. The first port of call can be found on the Everhour Help Docs page, where you’ll find helpful user guides which run you through the platform’s many features. If you face problems that cannot be fixed with the help of the user guides, you can contact Everhour using the contact form on the company’s website. 

Regarding platforms, Everhour is a cloud-based solution. As a result, all you need to do is download Everhour’s browser extension, which is available on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Edge browsers. In addition, Evethour is currently beta testing an app, which is available to download via the Apple Store.

💲 Pricing

Everhour offers simple pricing with no extra fees. There is a Free plan with basic time tracking and reporting features. A monthly subscription to Everhour costs $5 and $8.50 per month per user if billed annually or $6 and $10 when billed monthly (Lite and Team plan respectively). Lite plan includes all the basic time tracking features along with more advanced reporting, budgeting, invoicing, and reminders. A Team plan subscription includes all features, including unlimited users, projects, integrations, and fast and responsive support should you encounter any problems.

❓ Alternatives

Everhour is an intuitive time tracking software with many excellent features. However, it may not be the best fit for all users, and it isn’t the only tool available. A great alternative to Everhour is Time Doctor. Time Doctor is a great alternative to Everhour because it offers user-friendly time tracking, distraction management, reporting, payroll, and integration features, all in one easy-to-use app.

✅❌ Pros and cons of Everhour

RescueTime vs. Everhour: Pros and Cons

RescueTime

✅ Pros:
– Runs in the background as you work, allowing you to seamlessly track productivity
– Fast and responsive support is available, should you run into issues
– Daily and weekly performance monitoring displayed in an easy-to-understand dashboard

❌ Cons:
– The user interface is not as intuitive as other platforms on the market
– Fewer integration options than other similar tools
– Limited project management capabilities compared to other time tracking platforms on the market
– Limited customization 
– No team attendance reports are available

Everhour

✅ Pros:
– Great for teams working either remotely or in the office, making collaboration easier
– Lots of project management and accounting integrations to use
– Great reporting tools that allow you to improve business operations
– Simple interface
– Affordable pricing for teams

❌ Cons:
– No offline usability option
– No Android app available at present

The Verdict: RescueTime vs Everhour

While RescueTime focuses on its key feature, activity-tracking, to increase productivity, Everhour gives users greater variety in terms of available features. So if you’re solely looking to reduce distractions in the workplace, RescueTime is the best fit for you. However, if you’re looking to improve project management processes in your organization, Everhour is more suitable. Whichever platform you choose will lead to a more productive, engaged workforce.