ActivTrak and Teramind are employee monitoring tools that offer workforce analytics, time tracking, and keystroke logging features.
But only Teramind offers comprehensive user activity monitoring, user behavior analytics, insider threat detection, data loss prevention (DLP), business process optimization (BPO), and more.
The main differences between these solutions are that:
- ActivTrak prioritizes workforce analytics and works well for companies that need basic employee productivity monitoring and time tracking. Typical customers include small business owners who want to track their employees.
- Teramind is best for companies that need more than workforce analytics – especially if real-time employee activity monitoring, insider threats detection, and data loss prevention are the main problems you’re solving. Typical customers include mid-size businesses and large enterprises that want to protect their organizations.
This teardown will look at each provider’s available functionality, pricing, user experience, user reviews, and more.
ActivTrak vs. Teramind: Functionality Review
| Feature | ActivTrak | Teramind |
| Screen Video Recording | ✓ | ✓ |
| Application Monitoring | ✓ | ✓ |
| Productivity Analytics | ✓ | ✓ |
| Built-in Reports | ✓ | ✓ |
| Time Clock | ✓ | ✓ |
| Website Monitoring | ✓ | ✓ |
| Cloud Deployment | ✓ | ✓ |
| Network Monitoring | X | ✓ |
| Email Monitoring | X | ✓ |
| Clipboard Monitoring | X | ✓ |
| IM Monitoring (Slack, Teams, Skype, etc.) | X | ✓ |
| File Transfer Monitoring | X | ✓ |
| OCR Detection | X | ✓ |
| Custom Reports | X | ✓ |
| Geolocation Monitoring | X | ✓ |
| On-premise deployment | X | ✓ |
| Private cloud deployment | X | ✓ |
Functionality Recap:
- ActivTrak offers great workforce analytics — and provides an advantage if you are trying to measure employee productivity.
- Teramind is the best for employee productivity optimization, insider threat detection, and data loss prevention. It’s ideal for use cases like employee activity monitoring, employee performance monitoring, employee email monitoring, remote work management, insider fraud detection, forensic investigations, and more.
Teramind Overview: Features, Use Cases, Pros & Cons
Here’s what you get with Teramind:
Most comprehensive employee productivity management and workforce analytics features
Teramind’s employee monitoring solution, which integrates time tracking, behavior analytics, and Business Intelligence (BI) features, helps you measure employee active time, idle time, focus time, productive/unproductive tasks, employee engagement, performance impacts, app interactions, resource utilization, payroll, and more.
Compare productivity trends between remote and onsite employees, freelancers, departments, or individuals. Identify the most productive employees. Spot suspicious activity, workforce harassment, dishonest employees, and risky behaviors.
Integrated insider threat detection and endpoint data loss prevention
Protect sensitive and confidential company data and IPs from loss caused by malicious, accidental, negligent, or compromised insiders with insider threat detection fueled by data-driven endpoint monitoring. DLP policies and rules, real-time notifications and alerts, advanced OCR, automated data discovery and classification, fingerprinting, forensics, and more detect and block file downloads and data exfiltration attempts.
Easy to use with customization functionalities
Use the built-in reports and dashboards to prioritize the most sought-after metrics such as employee productivity, employee engagement, insider threats, data risks, and more. Build your own custom BI reports with drag-and-drop widgets. Simplify report generation with automated ranking, filters, and built-in formulas that produce the most needed metrics.
Visualize KPIs by choosing from hundreds of data points and plotting them with graphs, charts, heatmaps, and grids. Create complex behavior policies and rules with a visual policy editor and hundreds of templates to address productivity, security, and HR use cases.
Teramind’s Main Use Cases
Optimizing Employee Productivity, Enable Transparency and Accountability
Teramind’s in-depth time tracking, user activity monitoring, and employee productivity analytics help small businesses and large enterprises gain comprehensive business insights into organizational workflows, identify process gaps and anomalies, flag wastage and inefficiencies, and performance bottlenecks. Letting employees access their reports enables self-evaluation, employee engagement, and transparency. Or, you can monitor them silently for objective analysis of employee productivity and accountability.
Learn more about Teramind UAM here.
However, Teramind is more than workforce analytics. You can create automated policies and rules to encourage productive behavior and steer employees away from unproductive, disruptive, or risky behaviors. If you want to track and optimize the productivity of your onsite, remote, or hybrid workforce, then Teramind offers the best solution in its class.
Insider Threat Detection & Protection
Teramind also offers advanced insider threat management and data loss prevention benefits. Behavior analytics help identify compromised and flight-risk users and dangerous activities. Create policies and rules to get real-time alerts or proactively take actions to prevent insider threats on their tracks.
Conduct forensic analysis and investigate security incidents. Collect solid evidence through screen and audio recordings, session logs, and other case management features.
Privacy & Compliance
As a privacy-friendly employee monitoring solution, Teramind helps compliance teams protect sensitive data such as PII, PHI, and PFI, and meet compliance regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and FedRAMP while honoring employee rights and privacy. Features such as granular monitoring profiles, data masking, role-based permissions (RBAC), and more are built into Teramind to promote user privacy and compliance standards.
Pros of Teramind
Most comprehensive and granular surveillance – monitor all employee activities
Track virtually all employee activities across 17+ channels, such as apps, websites, file transfers, keystrokes, email, social media, chats, external drives, networks, printers, the cloud, and others—more than any other solution in the market.
Enterprise-grade business intelligence (BI) – Turn data into actionable insights
Turn monitoring data into actionable insights and easily measure employee productivity, performance, and insider risks. Customize reports according to your own needs.
Powerful policy and rule engine – Automatically optimize productivity and prevent insider threats according to many functionalities and reports on company policies.
You can use hundreds of pre-built policies and rules for common productivity and security anomalies, or create your own rules with an easy-to-use visual Rules Editor.
Easy Deployment – Get started in minutes
Teramind is a SaaS solution that can be deployed on the Cloud, On-Premise, or Private Cloud. The non-intrusive, lightweight agent can be installed on Windows and Mac endpoints in minutes to monitor employee productivity and security from day 1!
Cons of Teramind
Pricing
Pricing packages could be better: The pricing structure is a bit on the higher side compared to some alternatives such as ActivTrak, Hubstaff, Time Doctor, etc.
Feature Overload
Teramind offers many features and reports on so many data points that it can overwhelm first-time users.
AI/ML Features Not Ready Yet
Lagging AI/ML features: Teramind has only recently beta-tested Omni – its AI/machine learning features. However, it’s not ready for prime time yet.
Other
There is no Linux, iPhone, or Android support, and Mac features aren’t on par with Windows. However, the company has been adding Mac features quickly.
ActivTrak Overview: Features, Use Cases, Pros & Cons
Here’s what you get with ActivTrak:
Productivity Reports
You can see how employees spend their time, whether active, passive, or offline. You can compare the performance of remote and in-office employees, understand workload balance, and identify sources of inefficiencies such as applications and websites that cause distractions.
Applications & Websites Usage
Automatically classify over 80% of apps and websites by category and productivity. Block access to unproductive/dangerous websites and ensure employees spend time on approved websites and applications.
Impact Analysis
Understand how organizational change impacts your workforce. For example, you can A/B test new technology or programs. You can quickly assess what influences productivity such as changing workdays and breaks, onsite vs. offsite work, change of resources, etc. You can also measure the effect of strategic changes such as leadership changes, layoffs, mergers and acquisitions, etc.
ActivTrak’s Main Use Cases
Productivity Management & Measurement
Identify patterns in your workforce and identify process gaps and technology factors so that you can optimize team engagement and boost productivity.
Workforce & Technology Planning
Identify where to redistribute workloads. Compare productivity – remote and onsite — to make data-driven decisions. Reduce costs and optimize your workforce.
Coaching & Performance Management
The Virtual Productivity Coach can analyze productivity data and provide personalized recommendations to employees to improve their workload balance, work habits, and focus.
Pros of ActivTrak
Pre-Built Productivity Reports
Teramind comes with detailed productivity dashboards such as productivity reports, team productivity, workload management, location insights, impact analysis, benchmarks & goals, meeting insights, etc. This makes it easy for most organizations to use the solution without many custom configurations and make informed decisions about their organization.
Ease of Use
The intuitive dashboards provide executive summaries of individual and team productivity with visuals and graphs. Clutter-free activity classification, privacy controls, and configurations make it easy for new, non-technical users to get started in minutes.
Freemium and Inexpensive Packages
ActivTrak is one of the few employee monitoring and workforce analytics solutions that offer a free version (with limited functionalities). This can be useful for freelancers and small businesses. The standard packages are also reasonably priced with the option for additional add-ons at an extra premium as you scale up and need additional functionalities.
Cons of ActivTrak
Limited Employee Monitoring Capabilities
Unlike Teramind, ActivTrak has limited user activity monitoring capabilities. While Teramind lets you monitor 15+ channels, ActivTrak mostly focuses on app and website monitoring. It also lacks granular controls over the monitoring features and metadata collection, making it more of a workforce analytics solution than an employee monitoring solution.
No Insider Threat Detection or Data Loss Prevention Features
There are no insider threat management or data loss prevention features. Though it offers limited website classifications, that’s limited to the productivity use case only. It’s far inferior to Teramind’s data discovery and classification capabilities. There are no risk alerts or anomaly detection features. It can only block websites, whereas Teramind supports many security-enhancing features like blocking file transfers or taking automatic screenshots.
Limited Customization
ActivTrak reports and dashboards are mostly static and provide little opportunity for configurations or customizations. There are no drag-and-drop widgets or advanced filtering options. In contrast, in Teramind, users can configure the reports and dashboards according to their preferences and needs (e.g., different metrics for different roles/teams).
How To Choose an Employee Monitoring Solution For Your Enterprise
How comprehensive are its employee monitoring capabilities?
Choose employee monitoring software that provides maximum real-time coverage for apps, websites, uploads/downloads, keystroke logging, social media, instant messengers/chats, emails, files, cloud drives, webcam usage, geolocation, removable media, screen recording, and audio.
The more the better because you can monitor virtually all employee activities for the most accurate reports on employee engagement, productivity, and performance. If you have a distributed team, make sure the solution can track remote work activities with a built-in RDP that works for both Windows and Mac.
How user-friendly is it according to independent user reviews?
Many employee monitoring software products offer advanced monitoring features. However, if the interface isn’t intuitive, it becomes useless. Choose an employee monitoring software that’s easy to use and requires minimum training especially if you plan on giving access to department managers, HR, and other non-security professionals.
Also, consider how flexible and customizable the solution is. Check out user reviews and see what others are saying about the software:
- Assess the vendor’s customer support policies.
- What’s their SLA?
- Can they help you build out your specific use cases?
- Does it work for tracking remote employees?
Can it help improve employee productivity?
Most employee monitoring software provides a set of productivity metrics and workforce analytics. However, only a few can help you actively drive workforce productivity, improve employee engagement, and boost workplace performance. They do it by offering automation and behavior rules.
For example, automatically warn an employee if they are idling for too long, identify time thefts and frauds, conduct psychometric analysis – warn HR if it detects discontent in communications channels, etc.
Can it help you address insider threats and data loss?
Employee productivity and security go hand in hand. Numerous studies have found that most insider threats occur from disgruntled and unproductive employees. Consider an employee monitoring solution that offers workforce analytics and can also help you prevent insider threats and data leaks—a direct byproduct of an unproductive workplace.
FAQs
What is Teramind and what does it do?
Teramind is a suite of solutions that incorporates employee monitoring, user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA), workforce analytics, insider threats detection, data loss prevention, and business process optimization (BPO) features into a single, unified platform.
What is ActivTrak and what does it do?
ActivTrak is first and foremost a workforce analytics solution. It doesn’t have or cater to other employee monitoring needs/use cases such as insider threat detection, data loss prevention, or business process optimization.
Does Teramind take screenshots of employees’ screens?
Teramind’s screen recording capabilities go beyond ActivTrak’s periodic screenshot feature. Teramind can record video and audio of a user’s desktop even on multi-screen setups and virtual desktops. Teramind’s Session Player has a built-in remote desktop control (RDP). The video timeline flags critical incidents and highlights user activities on keyframes. It can also analyze captured video and detect any text with patented OCR features.
How does ActivTrak compare to Teramind in terms of user activity monitoring features?
Teramind has the most coverage in terms of user activity monitoring. Many of these aren’t covered by ActivTrak such as keystrokes, clipboard copy/paste, file transfers, network, cloud storage, printers, geolocation, Windows Registry, OS events, etc. Additionally, Teramind offers extensive reporting, customization, integrations, and automation features.
What are the key differences between ActivTrak and Teramind in terms of features and pricing?
ActivTrak offers workforce analytics and basic employee monitoring features such as website and app monitoring, time tracking, and productivity coaching. Teramind offers workforce analytics, in-depth employee monitoring, insider threat detection, and data loss prevention solutions.
Teramind’s starts at $11.25/user/month, slightly higher than ActivTrak’s Essential offering at $10/user/month but offers more bang for the buck. ActivTrak also offers a free tier with very limited features for small teams.
What kinds of companies use Teramind and ActivTrak?
Small businesses, medium to large enterprises, and government organizations use Teramind and ActivTrak. However, Teramind offers enterprise customers an Enterprise SLA, dedicated CSM, and 24/7 free premium support. Government customers can also use AWS GovCloud or Azure Government for FedRAMP compliance.
What’s so great about Teramind?
- Ranked #1 by users and reviewers on PC Mag, TechRadar, Capterra, and others.
- The most feature-rich solution that delivers user activity monitoring, insider threat prevention, time tracking & productivity benefits.
- Powerful yet intuitive and easy-to-use interface – requires no additional training or resources.
In what scenario would it make sense to choose Teramind over ActivTrak?
- You want the most comprehensive employee monitoring solution that covers virtually all user activities not just applications and websites.
- You want a next-generation productivity optimization solution that can help you actively improve the performance of your workforce rather than remain reactive with a past-generation workforce analytics solution.
- You want to improve your organization’s security posture by detecting insider threats and preventing data leaks while achieving productivity goals with a single, unified solution.
How does pricing for Teramind compare to ActivTrak?
Teramind and ActivTrak offer multiple pricing tiers. Teramind starts at $11.25/user per month, the same as ActivTrak’s Essential offering, but offers more features. ActivTrak also offers a free tier with very limited key features for small teams.
For more information:
What about Time Doctor? Are they any good?
Time Doctor is another workforce analytics solution that offers time tracking, employee scheduling, timesheets, attendance tracking, and payroll features. It also has some productivity reporting and employee monitoring capabilities but that’s not their key area of focus.
Compared to Teramind, Time Doctor has some limitations.
The Big Question: Which Employee Monitoring Software Will You Choose?
Monitoring employee behavior and employee efficiency is vital to driving an organization’s long-term success. Teramind and ActivTrak are solid options for companies that want to monitor employee productivity.
While ActivTrak is a good option for basic employee monitoring, Teramind is the only solution offering your organization advanced employee monitoring, protection from insider threats, and data loss prevention.
