Free Alternatives to Toggl Track for Freelancers (2026)
Toggl Track's free plan will follow you around for years without ever asking for a card. It tracks on the web, on your phone and on your desktop. It pulls your Google and Outlook calendar into a view you can drag events out of, and it puts no cap on how many projects or clients you set up. Then you finish a month of client work, open the reports page to write your invoice, and find there's no money column anywhere. Billable rates are a Starter feature at £9 per license per month on the annual plan.
The rate is the reason most freelancers count hours in the first place, so that's an awkward thing to be missing. Toggl is a good product and the timer is probably the nicest one in the category. Whether it's worth £108 a year for permission to multiply your hours by a number is a separate question, and the answer depends a lot on how you work.
What Toggl's free plan actually gives you
Quite a lot, and it's worth being fair about that before picking holes. You get time tracking across web, desktop and mobile apps, a browser extension that puts a start button inside 100+ other tools, Google and Outlook calendar integration, unlimited projects and clients, the Summary and Detailed reports, and CSV and PDF export. Nothing expires. Toggl calls it free forever and means it.
The user limit is five, though you won't learn that from the pricing page any more, which now says only that the free plan is "free for a limited number of users" and invites you to "invite a limited number of people for free". For a solo freelancer none of that matters. One person, one workspace, no bill.
Where the free plan stops
Billable rates are the headline omission. They're a Starter feature, and everything downstream of them goes with them. Toggl's own plan comparison spells out which metrics each tier can put in a report: the free plan gets Time. Starter adds Revenue, Billable % and Non-Billable %. Premium adds labor cost, profit and profitability. So on the free plan you can't produce a revenue figure, and you can't produce a utilization percentage either, because the billable share of your week is a paid metric.
Report grouping is thinner too. Free tops out at two grouping levels and lets you group by member, client, project and description. Grouping by billable, task or tag arrives with Starter. Rounding, tasks (Toggl's name for sub-projects), saved reports and project time estimates are all Starter as well. Timesheet approvals, locked time entries, required fields and historical billable rates sit up on Premium.
Invoicing is the odd one. You can create an invoice on the free plan, from the Export menu on a Summary or Detailed report, and download it as a PDF. What you can't do is put your own branding on it. Toggl's support documentation is blunt about this: "Invoices created by users on the Free plan will have the Toggl logo on the downloaded PDF file. To remove the logo and include your own, you need to be on a paid plan." Since the amounts on that invoice come from billable rates you don't have, you'd also be typing the money in by hand. An invoice with another company's logo on it, carrying numbers you calculated somewhere else, is a strange thing to send a client.
A few smaller edges that catch people out:
- No mark-as-paid. Toggl has no built-in way to flag invoiced time as settled. Its support article suggests tagging the entries "paid" and filtering them out of the next report, which works and is exactly as manual as it sounds.
- Fixed invoice layout. The template, layout and font can't be changed, and edits you make to one invoice (terms, invoice ID) don't carry forward to the next one.
- API and webhooks are throttled. 30 requests an hour and one webhook on free, against 240 and two on Starter. Enough to sync a side project, not enough to run anything.
- Free accounts get deleted. Under Toggl's inactive account policy, free accounts with no new time entry data in the last six months are removed. Paid plans keep inactive data indefinitely.
That last one deserves a moment. If you track a project, finish it, and come back eight months later wanting the hours for a dispute or a tax question, the account may not be there. Export anything you might need before you go quiet.
What it costs to unlock the money column
Starter is £9 per license per month billed annually, and more if you pay monthly. Premium is advertised at £14, with a footnote worth reading: that price applies to your first year of Premium annual, after which it renews at £18 per license per month. So a solo freelancer on Premium pays about £168 in year one and £216 a year after that. Enterprise is quote-only.
Starter is the tier that matters for most freelancers, because billable rates are the thing they're actually short of. £108 a year is not a scandal. It's roughly one billable hour for a lot of people. But it's a subscription for arithmetic, and there are tools that do the arithmetic for nothing.
When paying Toggl is the right call
Sometimes it is, and pretending otherwise would be daft. Toggl's timer is genuinely excellent: the desktop activity tracking, the idle detection that catches you leaving a timer running through lunch, the autotracker that nudges you when a keyword appears on screen. If you bill in six-minute increments and live inside a stopwatch, that machinery is worth money and no free tool matches it.
The same goes if you're in a team that needs Jira or Salesforce sync, single sign-on, locked time entries or timesheet approvals with a real audit trail. Those are Premium features for a reason, and rebuilding them out of spreadsheets costs more than £18 a month in wasted evenings.
Where Toggl stops making sense is the freelancer who forgets to start the timer. If half your entries are typed in on Friday from memory, you're paying for a stopwatch you don't use and going without the billing math you do need.
The free alternatives worth a look
Four tools keep some version of billable tracking free in 2026, and they draw the line in different places.
My Hours
The closest like-for-like swap. My Hours keeps billable rates and billable amounts on its free plan for up to five users, with unlimited projects and clients. It's a traditional timer plus timesheet, so the daily habit is the same as Toggl's, and the money column is there without paying. Detailed reporting and some team controls step up to its paid tier. If your only complaint about Toggl is the rate paywall, start here.
Clockify
Clockify used to be the automatic answer to this question, and in April 2026 it stopped being one. Billable hours, exports and shared reports moved to the paid plans, and free workspaces were capped at five users. Unlimited free tracking survives, so as a stopwatch it's still strong, but on billing it now has the same gap Toggl does. Our breakdown of what changed in Clockify's free plan has the full list.
Harvest
Harvest goes the other way and includes invoicing on its free plan, then rations everything else: one seat, two active projects. Fine for a single client, outgrown the moment you sign a third. Harvest also spent 2026 rewriting its pricing under new ownership, with some renewal quotes jumping by four figures, which is worth understanding before you build a workflow on it. We wrote up what happened to Harvest's pricing separately.
VibaCloud
Ours, so read this with the appropriate squint. VibaCloud keeps billable tracking, rates, totals and export free, and builds the week from your Outlook or Google calendar instead of from a timer you have to remember to start. Each project carries its own hourly rate, each line can be marked billable or not, and the week exports to Excel or PDF. There's also a free invoice generator that needs no account at all.
Why calendar-native changes the trade
Every tool in the list above asks you to remember something. A timer asks you to start it. A spreadsheet asks you to fill it in. Both fail in the same way, quietly, on a busy Thursday when a client calls unexpectedly and you're twenty minutes into the conversation before you think about tracking it.
Your calendar doesn't have that problem, because you were already using it for a different reason. The meetings, the calls, the blocked-out focus time are sitting there with real start and end times, recorded by a version of you who wasn't thinking about billing at all. Turning that into a draft timesheet means you start the week's admin with most of the record already written, then confirm and tag rather than reconstruct. If you've never tried it, the guides on turning an Outlook calendar into a timesheet and doing the same with Google Calendar walk through what it looks like in practice.
It won't suit everyone. Deep-work freelancers whose calendars are empty by design get very little out of it, and they should use a timer. But if your week is mostly meetings and calls, the calendar is already a better record of it than anything you'd type in later.
Getting your data out of Toggl
Export is on the free plan, which is more than can be said for some competitors. Open the Detailed report, set the date range to cover everything, and export to CSV or XLS. Do the same for the Summary report if you want per-project totals in a form you can read without a pivot table.
Keep the date, description, project, client, duration and tags. Those five or six columns rebuild your history in any other tool, and they're what you'd need if a client ever queries an invoice from two years ago. Most tools, VibaCloud included, care about clients, projects and rates when you arrive rather than your historic entries, so the export is mainly for your own records. Do it before the six-month inactivity clock matters.
The bottom line
Toggl hasn't done anything underhand here. Billable rates have never been on its free plan, so nobody woke up to a feature disappearing, which is more than Clockify and Harvest users can say about 2026. What's changed is the surrounding market: there are now free tools that total billable value, and once one exists, "the timer is lovely" has to carry the whole £108 by itself. For a freelancer who bills by the hour and forgets to press start, it usually can't.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free alternative to Toggl Track?
Several, though fewer than there were. My Hours keeps billable rates free for up to five users, Harvest includes invoicing free within a one-seat, two-project cap, and VibaCloud keeps billable tracking and export free while building the timesheet from your calendar. Clockify is still free to track with, but moved billable hours to paid plans in April 2026.
Does Toggl Track's free plan include billable rates?
No. Billable rates start on the Starter plan at £9 per license per month billed annually. On the free plan the only metric a report can show is Time, so there is no revenue figure and no billable percentage either.
Can you send invoices from Toggl's free plan?
You can create and download a PDF invoice from a Summary or Detailed report, but Toggl's own documentation says free-plan invoices carry the Toggl logo, and removing it requires a paid plan. The amounts come from billable rates, which the free plan doesn't have, so you would be entering the money yourself.
Will Toggl delete my free account if I stop using it?
It can. Toggl's inactive account policy removes free accounts with no new time entry data in the last six months, while paid plans keep inactive data indefinitely. Export your history before you go quiet on a project.
How do I move my data out of Toggl Track?
Open the Detailed report, set the date range to cover everything, and export to CSV or XLS from the Export menu. Keep the date, description, project, client, duration and tag columns. Export is included on the free plan.
