Timescanner vs TimeNavi: billing tool or analytics layer?
TimeNavi analyses your Google Calendar. Timescanner turns any iCal into invoices. Two different jobs — here's which one you actually need.
TimeNavi is a Google Calendar analytics tool. It shows how time is spent — by category, by project, over any date range. If you use Google Calendar and want a dashboard layered on top, TimeNavi does that job.
The problem: analytics and billing are not the same job.
Knowing you spent 14 hours on client A last month is useful. But “14 hours” doesn’t tell you how many were billable, at what rate, and what the invoice total should be. That gap is where most freelancers lose money.
What TimeNavi does
TimeNavi connects to Google Calendar via OAuth and reads your events. It categorizes them, shows time-allocation charts, identifies focus time vs meeting time, and generates reports.
For a freelancer trying to understand where their week goes, it’s genuinely useful. You can see patterns — too many meetings, too little deep work, time draining into a particular client — and adjust.
What it doesn’t do: calculate billable hours by rate, separate billable from non-billable, generate per-client billing summaries, or connect to any calendar other than Google Calendar.
The two limits that matter for billing
Google Calendar only. If you use Outlook, Apple Calendar, Proton Calendar, or Fastmail, TimeNavi doesn’t connect. There’s no workaround. If your calendar isn’t Google, TimeNavi simply doesn’t apply.
No billing logic. TimeNavi doesn’t know your hourly rate. It can’t separate a billable client call from an internal meeting. It has no concept of a billing period, an invoice amount, or a client budget. To go from a TimeNavi report to an invoice, you still need to extract the hours manually and do the math yourself.
That’s not a design flaw — TimeNavi was built for time awareness, not invoicing. But it means if billing is the goal, TimeNavi adds analysis without solving the actual problem.
How Timescanner works differently
Timescanner reads your calendar too — but from any iCal-compatible source. Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar, Proton Calendar, Notion Calendar, Fastmail. If it exports iCal, Timescanner reads it.
The naming convention carries the billing logic: [ClientName] at the start of any billable event. Add a project: [ClientName][Project]. Mark something as offered: [ClientName][O]. That’s the full system.
The bracket method takes 5 seconds per event. Timescanner reads the feed and outputs: hours billable per client, hours offered, hourly rate applied, invoice total. Month end takes 15 minutes instead of three hours.
Your calendar data never leaves your calendar — Timescanner doesn’t store events server-side. It reads the iCal feed, runs the calculation, returns the result. Nothing cached. That’s the same principle behind turning end-of-month chaos into a 15-minute invoice: the record was already there.
Why timers don’t bridge this gap
Some freelancers try to solve the billing problem with a timer app instead. The structural issue is the same: timers fail most freelancers because they require a deliberate action at exactly the wrong moment — when you’re mid-call, switching tasks, or just ending a session. TimeNavi doesn’t require a timer, but it also doesn’t produce billable totals.
Calendar events solve both problems: no habit to maintain beyond planning your day, and a record that’s accurate because it was created before the work started, not reconstructed afterward.
Pricing
TimeNavi: around $30/month, Google Calendar only.
Timescanner: €79/year, any iCal calendar. 30-day free trial, no credit card.
Solo freelancer math: roughly $360/year for TimeNavi vs €79/year for Timescanner. At that price difference, the choice depends entirely on what you’re trying to do — not the budget.
Which one you actually need
If you want to understand where your time goes inside Google Calendar — meetings vs deep work, client A vs client B in aggregate — TimeNavi is built for that.
If you want to turn your calendar into invoices — billable hours per client, accurate totals, end-of-month in 15 minutes — Timescanner is built for that. And it works regardless of which calendar you use.
Most freelancers who try TimeNavi are actually looking for a billing solution. The analytics are a useful side effect, but the question was “how much do I invoice client A this month?” TimeNavi doesn’t answer that directly.
Comparing more options: best time tracking tools for freelancers.
Timescanner works with Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar, Proton Calendar, Notion Calendar, Fastmail, and any iCal-compatible calendar.
Timescanner
Your calendar already knows how much you worked.
No timers. No new habits. Timescanner reads your calendar — Google Calendar, Outlook, iCloud, and more — and generates your billing reports automatically.
Start free trial — 30 days, no credit card