Timescanner vs Toggl: which one gets used?

Most freelancers who try Toggl stop using it within a few months. Not because it’s broken — Toggl is a well-made tool. Because the habit it requires turns out to be harder than it sounds.

Start the timer before every task. Stop it when you switch. Restart when you come back. Do this 10 to 20 times a day, while also doing client work.

Some freelancers manage it. Most don’t — and the ones who don’t pay for it in unbilled hours.

Why the timer breaks down

The Toggl workflow is simple in theory: select a project, click Start, work, click Stop.

The failure happens at the edges. You pick up a client call without clicking anything. You spend 40 minutes on emails without switching the project. You finish a session and realize the timer has been running on the wrong client for an hour.

Timers fail structurally for most freelancers because they demand a deliberate action at the worst possible moment — when you’re mid-thought, switching tasks, or just starting a call. That’s not a discipline problem. It’s a design mismatch.

The math: one forgotten 90-minute session per week, at €80/h, adds up to €5,760 over a working year. Not because the work didn’t happen — because Start was never clicked.

With multiple clients, it compounds. You’re three hours into client A’s project when a message arrives from client B — 15 minutes to handle properly. Most people don’t switch the timer. They absorb the time into whatever was running and move on. Client B doesn’t get invoiced for those 15 minutes. Twice a day, three clients, four weeks — that’s a meaningful gap.

How calendar tracking works differently

Timescanner doesn’t ask you to start anything. It reads the calendar you’re already using.

If you block time for client work in your calendar, that block is your billing record. The only thing you add is a naming convention: [ClientName] at the start of each billable event.

[Acme] Strategy call — 1h, billable to Acme [Acme][Website] Design review — 2h, project Website [NordCo][O] Revision call — 45min, offered, not invoiced

The bracket naming method takes 5 seconds per event. Timescanner reads your iCal feed — from Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar, Proton Calendar, or any calendar that exports iCal — and generates a billing summary per client per month.

No timer running in the background. No app to switch mid-task. No habit that collapses under a busy week.

The data is more accurate than reconstructed timer logs because the event exists before the work starts — created when you planned, not pieced together from memory an hour later.

Where Toggl holds up

A comparison that only picks a winner isn’t useful.

Toggl is genuinely better for teams. If you bill through a shared dashboard, manage subcontractors, or need integrations with Asana, Jira, or Linear, Toggl’s team infrastructure is solid. Its tagging system is also more granular than calendar naming — useful when you need to separate client-facing work from internal work within the same project.

For freelancers who’ve built the timer habit over years and work at a fixed desk with a dedicated screen showing the Toggl timer, the tool works reliably. Consistent entries, clean exports, a free tier to get started.

Toggl also handles retrospective logging better. If you routinely add entries at end of day from memory, Toggl’s interface is designed for that.

The question that actually matters

Which one will you still be using in six months?

If your workday is: open Toggl, select project, click Start, work, click Stop — reliably, every day — then Toggl works.

If your workday is: jump between clients, take calls you didn’t calendar, handle async threads at odd hours, and try to reconstruct what happened on Friday afternoon — Toggl leaves gaps. You estimate. You under-invoice. Turning end-of-month into a 15-minute invoice only works when the tracking is continuous and doesn’t require a separate habit to maintain.

Timescanner is for freelancers who already use a calendar to plan client work. The billing data is a byproduct of the planning. Nothing extra to maintain.

Pricing

Toggl Track: free plan (limited features), Starter at $10/user/month billed annually.

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

Solo freelancer math: $120/year for Toggl Starter vs €79/year for Timescanner. The price difference is secondary. The workflow difference is what determines whether either tool actually gets used.

If you’re still weighing multiple options: Toggl alternatives for freelancers who forget to track.

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