Timescanner vs Harvest: a workflow question

Harvest is a well-built tool. Time tracking, invoicing, project budgets — it does a lot in one place. That’s genuinely useful for some freelancers.

But after Harvest’s price increase, a lot of solo freelancers started asking whether they were paying for more than they actually used. The invoicing feature is what drew them in. The timer is what they kept forgetting to use.

What Harvest actually requires

Harvest’s core workflow is timer-based. You open the app, select a client and project, start the timer, work, stop it. Then, at billing time, it generates an invoice from those tracked entries.

The workflow is clean when the habit holds. The habit breaks at the same moments it always does — mid-call, mid-thought, switching between clients without switching the app. Harvest doesn’t solve the fundamental problem with timers for freelancers who work across multiple contexts: the friction is exactly where you need it least.

Harvest also offers manual entry and a mobile app, which helps with reconstruction. But reconstructing hours from memory — adding them back at day’s end from what you can remember — introduces its own accuracy problems. Time logs degrade fast without a real-time record.

How Timescanner handles the same problem

Timescanner doesn’t track time. It reads it.

The assumption: if you plan client work in your calendar, the calendar already contains the time data. The only step is a naming convention: [ClientName] at the start of any billable event.

[Acme] Strategy call — 1h, billable [Acme][Rebrand] Design review — 2h, project Rebrand [NordCo][O] Feedback session — 45min, offered, not billed

The bracket method takes 5 seconds per event. Timescanner reads your iCal feed — from Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar, Proton Calendar, or any iCal-compatible calendar — and generates a billing summary by client and project.

No invoicing module built in. But for freelancers who already invoice from their own template or accounting software, the output is the time data they need — accurate, extracted in minutes.

Where Harvest is the right choice

A comparison that only pushes one direction isn’t honest.

Harvest is better than Timescanner for freelancers who need invoicing built directly into the time tracking workflow — one tool that goes from tracked hours to sent invoice without leaving the app. If that matters to you, Harvest earns the extra cost.

Harvest also handles team billing better. If you’re running a small agency, need to track time across contractors, or bill clients from a shared workspace, Harvest’s team infrastructure is built for that. Timescanner is a single-user tool.

And if you’ve built a reliable timer habit — you genuinely start and stop Harvest before and after each session, every day — the workflow is consistent and the invoicing output is solid.

Where Timescanner fits

Timescanner is for freelancers who already use a calendar to plan their week.

If your client work appears in your calendar before it happens — blocked time, meetings, recurring slots — that data is your billing record. Nothing extra to maintain. The billing analysis is a byproduct of how you already work.

The edge cases Timescanner handles cleanly: calls you didn’t plan but did calendar afterward, multi-client days where context switching is fast, remote work weeks where no one timer stays open for more than 30 minutes.

Pricing

Harvest: free plan limited to 1 user and 2 projects. Pro at $12/user/month billed annually ($144/year).

Timescanner: €79/year flat. Unlimited calendars. 30-day free trial, no credit card.

Solo freelancer math: $144/year for Harvest Pro vs €79/year for Timescanner. The question isn’t the $65 gap. It’s whether the built-in invoicing module justifies the extra cost for how you actually work.

For a broader comparison of alternatives — Toggl, Clockify, and calendar-based tools: Harvest alternatives that don’t charge per seat.

Timescanner works with Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar, Proton Calendar, Notion Calendar, Fastmail, and any iCal-compatible calendar.