Three months ago, you told yourself the productivity issues would sort themselves out. They haven’t. Instead, the questions have multiplied:
- Why is project X consistently behind schedule?
- How are some team members crushing targets while others struggle?
- Is your top performer really clocking 60-hour weeks or just working harder than everyone else?
And the big one: how do you get answers without becoming the boss nobody wants to work for?
ActivTrak promises to answer all of it. A window into workforce analytics that reveals productivity patterns, identifies burnout risks, and optimizes workflows—all while respecting employee privacy (or so they claim).
But behind the marketing buzz, the reality of active customers set a different tone. From rigid pricing structures and lack of multi-tenant management to inefficient blacklisting policies and messy renewal processes [*].
ActivTrak’s biggest selling point—’ease and visibility’—comes with trade-offs that many teams didn’t anticipate. And this isn’t just a one-off complaint. As we dug deeper into reviews and user stories, a pattern emerged:
- Too much effort spent navigating licensing and billing.
- Not enough flexibility in how environments and devices are managed.
- Ongoing frustration during account renewals, especially for long-term users and resellers.
So, is ActivTrak still worth it when the reality looks like this? Let’s break it down: the pros, the pitfalls, the cost, and perhaps some alternatives you’ve not considered.
ActivTrak Review: Products, Key Features, Functionalities, Pros, Cons, and Pricing
ActivTrak is a cloud-based workforce analytics and employee monitoring software designed to help organizations monitor, analyze, and optimize employee performance and operational efficiency using actionable insights derived from employee data.
The platform functions by deploying the ActivTrak agent on user endpoints on endpoints running any desktop operating system like Windows or macOS. It runs silently in the background, capturing useful data such as app usage, visited websites, idle time, active time, and even resource utilization insights like context switching and focus trends.
For example, with the Activity Classification feature, managers can label applications and websites as productive or unproductive based on roles or departments. They can also refine these classifications to match their specific business content.
Related → The Top 11 ActivTrak Alternatives & Competitors
ActivTrak Products
ActivTrak offers three main products: Employee Monitoring, Productivity Management, and Workforce Planning.
Employee Monitoring
This product provides real-time visibility into employee activity across endpoints to help organizations understand digital behavior, ensure policy compliance, and mitigate risk.
Key features include:
- Activity Log. Provides a detailed, timestamped record of every user interaction, including application usage, website visits, USB connections, and idle time.
- User Activity Screenshots. Captures configurable screenshots at intervals or based on triggers (e.g., opening an unapproved application).
- Real-Time User Activity View. Offers a live view of current activity across the workforce. Admins can filter by top users, teams, or activity categories.
- Risk Level Analysis. Categorizes users into low, medium, or high risk based on behavior such as access to crucial data, usage of unproductive tools, or after-hours work.
- USB Activity Monitoring. Tracks when and where USB devices are connected or removed. Helps detect potential data exfiltration or unauthorized file transfers.
- Alarm Triggers & Notifications. Custom rules that automatically generate alerts or take action (e.g., capture screenshots or notify admins) when suspicious or policy-violating activity occurs.
Productivity Management
This product is designed to help leaders and teams analyze how work gets done, identify distractions or inefficiencies, and drive improvements in employee focus and performance.
It provides visibility into digital workflows, focus time, context switching, and workload distribution across individuals and teams.
Key features include:
- Focus Time Reports. Measures blocks of uninterrupted productive work, identifying how much deep work is possible during the day. Helps understand how multitasking or distractions impact work quality.
- Workload Balance. Analyzes how many hours worked, productive time, and break patterns across users to detect burnout risks or underutilization. This informs workload redistribution decisions.
- Team Pulse. Real-time dashboard showing team productivity, availability, and focus metrics.
- Productivity Trends Dashboard. Visualizes changes in productivity levels, and app usage over days, weeks, or months.
- Goal Setting & Tracking. Allows teams to set measurable productivity goals based on benchmarks and track progress using live data. Managers can assess goal achievement and adjust strategy.
- ActivTrak Coach. An AI-powered assistant that delivers personalized insights and coaching nudges to users and managers. It suggests behavior changes like reducing distractions, adjusting break schedules, or improving focus habits.
Workforce Planning
Workforce Planning helps organizations assess capacity, allocate resources effectively, and plan for future operational needs.
It supports data-driven decisions around staffing, team performance, and process optimization by analyzing how time is spent relative to roles, goals, and workloads.
Key features include:
- Capacity Planning Dashboard. Aggregates team-wide productivity and active hours data to determine whether teams are working at, above, or below capacity.
- Work Efficiency Analysis. Measures output relative to effort—based on active time, productive app usage, and context switching.
- Benchmarks & Productivity Lab. Uses anonymized industry-wide data to provide benchmark comparisons, helping teams understand how they stack up against similar organizations. It also provides ongoing research, best practices, and templates to guide strategic planning.
- Team Comparison Reports. Side-by-side comparisons of productivity, focus time, and workload across different teams or departments.
- Operational Capacity Modeling. Visual models that simulate different scenarios—like shifting responsibilities or adding headcount—to see how changes might affect overall performance and capacity.
- Persona-Based Dashboards. Custom dashboards tailored to specific roles (e.g., HR, Operations, IT) that display relevant KPIs for workforce planning, such as attrition risk, burnout indicators, or system adoption.
Cost of ActivTrak
ActivTrak offers four distinct pricing tiers: Free, Essentials, Essentials Plus, and Professional. While the pricing starts at $10/user/month (billed annually), the value you get per tier varies dramatically depending on your company’s size and monitoring needs.
Free Plan
- Price: $0/month
- User Limit: Up to 3 users
- Data History: 30 days
What You Get:
- Basic activity monitoring and classification
- Basic dashboards and reports
- No app integrations or data exports
The Catch:
There are limitations; once you hit 4 users, you’re required to upgrade. Even for small teams, the lack of historical data and collaboration metrics makes it useful only for short-term evaluation, not long-term impact.
Essentials Plan
- Price: $10/user/month
- User Limit: Minimum of 5 users
- Data History: 6 months
What You Get:
- All features in the Free Plan
- Unlimited users
- Screenshots (configurable and manual)
- Risk alerts and basic rule-setting
- Access to exports (up to 10,000 rows)
- Team summaries and group analytics
- Productivity reports
The Catch:
The 3-month data limit is restrictive for spotting seasonal or long-term trends. Many growing teams find themselves forced to upgrade quickly.
Also, some advanced features are available only as add-ons at additional costs, such as ActivConnect ($3 per user/month) and Screen Details ($2 per user/month).
Essentials Plus Plan
- Price: $15 per user/month
- User Limit: Minimum of 5 users.
- Data History: 6 months
What You Get:
- All features included in the Essentials plan
- Advanced activity trend analyses by user and team
- Optional full URL and title bar visibility
- Productivity goal-setting and tracking
- Up to 50,000 rows for data export
The Catch:
Features like AI-powered coaching, team comparison analysis, personal insights for employees, and team performance dashboard are still locked behind advanced paid plans.
Professional Plan
- Price: $19 per user/ month.
- User Limit: Minimum of 5 users.
- Data History: 12 months
What You Get:
- All features included in the Essentials Plus Plan.
- Team pulse dashboard
- Audit log.
- Classification by groups
- SSO & MFA
- Support tickets
The Catch:
The plan includes 12 months of data history. Organizations requiring long-term data analysis may find this duration insufficient and might need to purchase the Data History add-on to extend data retention.
Furthermore, the base Professional Plan does not include certain advanced functionalities, such as detailed activity tracking (including screenshots, screen views, and detailed URLs). Accessing these features requires purchasing the Screen Details add-on at an additional cost.
ActivTrak Pros
- Accurate Time Tracking. Especially useful for hourly employees, ActivTrak logs hours, breaks, and tasks, ensuring compliance and simplifying payroll [*].
- Full-Day Visibility. ActivTrak offers a 360° view of employee activity—useful for coaching, identifying inefficiencies, and recognizing top performers [*].
- Productivity Monitoring for WFH Teams. Managers can quickly assess productivity through dashboards, ensuring accountability for remote workers [*].
- Custom Alerts & Alarms. Users can set real-time alarms to flag specific behaviors, giving IT or HR teams instant awareness of potential issues [*].
- In-depth Employee Activity View. Enables managers to monitor detailed actions, categorize sites, and view workflows—even for employees working off-hours or remotely [*].
ActivTrak Cons
- Installation & Tracking Bugs. IT admins report installation inconsistencies and unexplained data loss when users are moved to the “Do Not Track” list. The UI is also confusing for both admins and managers [*].
- Limited Blocking Controls. Blocking websites on a per-user basis isn’t straightforward. The rollout can also be difficult for non-technical users [*].
- Complicated Licensing Model. License management is confusing, often leading to duplicate users and administrative errors [*].
- No Multi-Platform Activity Tracking. Simultaneous usage of multiple applications isn’t captured, limiting true activity visibility [*].
- Slow Performance & Setup Overload. The platform can be very slow to use and requires heavy configuration, making it frustrating to set up without a dedicated technical account manager [*].
- Misleading Productivity Scoring. The tool misclassifies productive activity, so relying solely on the data for performance management can be misleading without deeper context [*].
- Poor Customer Service & Shady Practices. Users describe long delays in support, poor responsiveness post-sale, upselling tactics, and being locked into rigid contracts. Attempts to leave honest reviews are also allegedly restricted, making trust in the brand questionable [*].
When ActivTrak is Worth It
ActivTrak is worth it for:
Remote and Hybrid Teams Needing Visibility
For companies operating fully remote or hybrid environments, ActivTrak offers a powerful, non-invasive way to understand how employees work.
- You get real-time visibility into productivity patterns, focus time, and collaboration behavior without damaging trust. It helps leaders manage outcomes, not just attendance.
Ideal For: Startups, remote-first software companies, and agencies with distributed teams.
Organizations Managing High-Volume Support or Operations Teams
Operations-heavy roles like customer support, service desks, and back-office processing require a clear understanding of efficiency, shift planning, and workload distribution.
- ActivTrak helps identify how team time is spent, whether the right tools are being used, and which workflows lead to wasted time or inefficiency.
Ideal For: BPOs, customer support departments, logistics firms, healthcare back offices.
Mid-Sized Teams Focused on Improving Productivity
Companies with 50–300 employees often struggle with scaling productivity systems and keeping employees engaged without constant manual intervention.
- ActivTrak’s behavior analytics, workload balancing, and burnout risk detection tools help managers proactively support team members.
Ideal For: Human resources and Ops leaders in growing mid-sized firms, especially in tech, marketing, and customer service.
When ActivTrak is NOT Worth It
ActivTrak is NOT worth it for:
Teams That Only Need Lightweight Time Tracking
If you’re a small team or freelancer simply trying to log work hours for clients or calculate billable time, ActivTrak is overkill.
- ActivTrak is built for organizational insights, not individual task timers or billing exports. It lacks project-based time logging, manual entry, and client invoicing features found in traditional time trackers.
Companies Expecting Highly Customizable or Flexible Reporting
ActivTrak’s out-of-the-box reports are limited in what they display. However, custom reporting is limited unless you’re on the Enterprise plan and willing to build external dashboards through APIs or data warehouses.
- Mid-tier plans don’t offer raw data exports or advanced filtering. If you want granular data control, like correlating productivity with sales performance or building custom BI dashboards, you’ll feel constrained.
Organizations with Highly Fluid, Creative, or Non-Digital Workflows
If most of your team’s work is offline, creative, or nonlinear, ActivTrak might misclassify their productivity or produce misleading insights.
- The platform heavily relies on app and website usage. For roles like designers sketching on paper, sales reps attending in-person meetings, or engineers doing R&D work offline, ActivTrak may flag these as unproductive tasks.
Budget-Conscious Startups
ActivTrak’s pricing structure nudges users into the Professional tier for features like focus time, integrations, or burnout tracking. If your company only needs one of those features, the rest of the platform may feel like unnecessary overhead.
- You end up paying for coaching features, benchmarking tools, and dashboards you won’t use. There’s no flexible pay-as-you-go or per-feature plan.
7 Popular ActivTrak Alternatives
1. Teramind
Teramind is a productivity monitoring and behavior analytics platform that gives organizations full visibility into user activity.
It captures valuable data such as keystrokes, screen recordings, application usage, email and file transfers, web activity, and user logins. Then, it uses this data to detect productivity levels, policy violations, suspicious behavior, and potential security breaches.
The platform also supports both rule-based and behavior-based anomaly detection to flag insider threats before they escalate.
Complementing this is Teramind DLP (Data Loss Prevention), which integrates content-based and contextual analysis to prevent sensitive data leakage via email, cloud uploads, printing, and more.
Key Features:
- Screen Recording & Playback. Records every user action with timestamped screen captures or continuous video, depending on policy. Admins can search, filter, and replay sessions to see exactly what occurred before, during, or after an incident.
- Keystroke Logging & Clipboard Monitoring. Captures all user keystrokes, including text typed into secure applications and browser forms. It also logs clipboard activity, helping detect attempts to copy sensitive data.
- Live Session View. Lets administrators view user screens in real time and, when necessary, take remote control of the session. It’s particularly useful during incident investigations or while intervening in real-time policy violations.
- File Tracking: Tracks all file operations (creation, deletion, modification, transfer, uploads) and inspects the contents of documents using OCR (optical character recognition) and keyword scanning.
- Third-Party Vendor Monitoring. Enables organizations to monitor the behavior of external users (contractors, freelancers, MSPs) who access internal systems. It ensures third-party risk is minimized with the same level of behavioral oversight as internal employees.
Who is Teramind best for?
Teramind is best suited for organizations where productivity, data protection, and risk mitigation are top priorities. It’s a go-to solution for:
- Any company focused on tracking and improving productivity
- Financial institutions handling regulated data (e.g., PCI-DSS, SOX).
- Healthcare providers needing HIPAA compliance and patient data safeguards.
- Legal firms or government agencies with strict access controls and audit requirements.
- Enterprises managing third-party vendors or contractors who pose additional insider risk.
- IT and security teams that need real-time visibility and response to prevent breaches.
Compare ActivTrak and Teramind.
2. Hubstaff
Hubstaff is a time tracking and workforce management platform built specifically for remote, hybrid, and field-based teams. It offers a suite of tools that help businesses monitor employee productivity, manage projects, and streamline payroll.
For businesses looking to oversee distributed workforces, Hubstaff’s Activity Monitoring and Proof of Work features provide visibility into what team members are doing in real-time. Employers can view activity percentages, see which apps and URLs were accessed, and even schedule optional screen captures at set intervals.
On the project management side, the platform includes Hubstaff Tasks, an Agile project management tool that integrates with time tracking, enabling users to assign tasks, automate workflows, and measure time spent per project or client. The platform also supports integrations with over 30 third-party tools including Trello, Asana, Jira, QuickBooks, and PayPal.
Who’s Hubstaff best for?
Hubstaff is best for remote-first companies, freelancers, agencies, and field service teams that need to track productivity and manage time efficiently without micromanaging.
Related → ActivTrak vs Hubstaff: Features, Pros, Cons & Pricing
3. Insightful
Insightful (formerly Workpuls) is an employee productivity and workforce analytics tool built for modern businesses managing hybrid, remote, or in-office teams.
It uses an Automatic Time Mapping engine to categorize employee activities by project, app or website. This gives managers a clear picture of how work unfolds across the organization, enabling accurate project budgeting, resource planning, and operational forecasting.
The platform also offers Productivity Labeling, a feature that automatically classifies apps and websites as productive, unproductive, or neutral based on team roles. This context-aware approach ensures that analysis reflects the actual nature of the work being done. For example, social media might be productive for a marketing team but not for accounting.
💡Who’s Insightful best for?
Insightful is designed for operations, HR, and IT leaders in mid-sized to enterprise organizations who want to optimize performance and drive accountability without crossing into micromanagement.
Related → ActivTrak vs. Insightful: Features, Pros, Cons & Pricing
4. Veriato
Veriato is an advanced insider threat detection and user behavior analytics platform tailored for organizations that prioritize data security, compliance, and investigative capabilities.
It offers deep visibility into user actions through its proprietary Veriato Cerebral solution, which continuously records and analyzes user activity across endpoints. This includes keystrokes, file access, emails, chat logs, and screen captures.
Veriato also features a User & Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) engine, which uses artificial intelligence to build behavioral baselines for each employee and flags deviations in real-time.
In addition, small to mid-sized teams that need visibility without full enterprise-level deployment can enjoy ‘Veriato Vision’, a lightweight cloud-based user monitoring solution. Both tools support alerting, recording, and reporting features that integrate into existing security frameworks and compliance workflows.
Who’s Veriato best for?
Veriato is great for teams managing sensitive data who require both real-time alerts and historical context to respond to breaches, audit employee actions, or support legal proceedings.
Related → Veriato vs. ActivTrak: Features, Pros & Cons Compared
5. Time Doctor
Time Doctor is a time tracking and productivity management platform built for remote teams, agencies, and enterprises.
It tracks time spent on tasks, applications, websites, and breaks—while also enabling teams to log manual time for offline activities like meetings or calls.
Furthermore, Time Doctor’s Productivity Analytics dashboard provides a centralized view of activity levels, project timelines, and performance trends across teams and departments. Managers can quickly identify productivity bottlenecks, spot patterns of overwork, or measure output against client expectations.
For companies that bill by the hour, Client View offers shareable reports and visibility into project timelines, while the Payroll Integration feature automatically calculates payments based on hours worked and pre-set rates.
Who’s Time Doctor best for?
Time Doctor is ideal for digital agencies, consulting firms, and any business that relies heavily on hourly billing or client work.
Related → ActivTrak vs. Time Doctor: Features, Pros, Cons & Pricing
6. DeskTime
DeskTime is an automatic time-tracking and productivity analysis tool built to help teams optimize workflows and boost efficiency with minimal manual input.
It features a Project Time Tracking option that lets teams log hours against specific assignments or clients, while Shift Scheduling and Absence Calendar features support workforce planning and attendance tracking.
For those managing freelancers or global teams, DeskTime’s Cost Calculation tool helps automate payroll by linking tracked hours to hourly rates, ensuring accurate compensation.
Also, all insights are centralized in a visual dashboard, giving managers and team leads a quick snapshot of who’s working, what they’re working on, and how effectively they’re performing.
Related → Employee Productivity Monitoring Software – Teramind
Who’s DeskTime best for?
DeskTime is best suited for organizations looking to minimize time leakage, identify inefficiencies, and understand daily work habits at scale.
7. Monitask
Monitask is a lightweight time tracking and employee monitoring solution that helps small to mid-sized businesses maintain productivity and accountability across remote or hybrid teams.
It records active work hours through desktop apps, capturing real-time user activity, including application and website usage.
The platform also features an Employee Monitoring Dashboard, which unifies tracked time, activity levels, and productivity metrics into an easy-to-navigate interface.
Managers can view project progress, analyze trends in idle versus active time, and assess how much time is being spent on specific applications. Monitask also offers Project and Task Management capabilities that allow you to assign work, track time per task, and generate detailed reports to aid in billing or resource planning.
Who’s Monitask best for?
Monitask is a good option for small businesses, startups, and agencies looking for a cost-effective monitoring tool to manage remote or distributed teams.
Related → ActivTrak vs. Monitask: Features, Pros, Cons & Pricing
Visibility Shouldn’t Come with a Headache
(Or a 2-week argument over license renewals).
We get it, ActivTrak’s marketing hype has you hooked. The promises just seem to ‘click’ — and tick all your boxes. But if using ActivTrak leaves your team confused, your workflows tangled, and your IT lead in a back-and-forth email thread just to renew a contract…it’s time to ask: is that really a tool you want to invest in?
And all for what? A dashboard that tells you someone’s active—but not why they’re struggling, distracted, or burning out.
Teramind was built by people who understand these frustrations because we’ve heard them from countless ex-ActivTrak users.
Embed → Teramind Overview: Employee Monitoring & Productivity
We’ve designed our solution specifically to eliminate the pain points you’re experiencing:
- Flexible licensing that lets you monitor exactly what you need—no arbitrary minimums
- Whitelist capabilities so you can target specific devices instead of playing whack-a-mole with blacklists
- Purpose-built MSP portal for seamless multi-tenant management
- Account history that actually works, so you never have to re-explain who you are
- Renewal processes that respect your time, with no drama and no surprises
The insights you get from monitoring shouldn’t cost you your sanity. The visibility you need shouldn’t come with a side of frustration. And the partner you choose shouldn’t make you feel like a transaction.
It’s time for a change. Make the switch.
There’s Seeing—and Then There’s Understanding
Guess which one your team really needs.
Switch from ActivTrak to Teramind →
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and reflects the opinions and research of the authors and their teams at the time of publication. It is not intended to provide legal advice or to serve as an official product endorsement or criticism. All product names, logos, and brands are property of their respective owners. We encourage all readers to conduct their own evaluations based on individual needs and requirements.
