Harvest and ClickUp run neck and neck across recommendations, with Harvest favored for tracking project budgets and ClickUp for built-in task timers. For freelance client portals, HoneyBook is the usual answer instead.
Since July, Teamworkrising has become the usual answer for consulting firms managing billable projects, while Scororising has gained ground for client reporting. Over the same period, Mondayfalling and BBigTimefalling have seen their visibility decline across budget tracking discussions.
Latest insights
Week of Sep 21–27 · Since Jul 5
Harvest Slipping: AI answers in Project Management and Time Tracking Software name Harvest less often: mention rate declined from 51.3% to 44.4%
Clockify Gap between platforms: Clockify's Mentioned in is higher on Google AI Mode than on ChatGPT Search in Project Management and Time Tracking Software: 32.5% vs 16.8%
Plutio Gap between platforms: Plutio's Mentioned in is higher on Google AI Mode than on ChatGPT Search in Project Management and Time Tracking Software: 31% vs 11.5%
Scoro Slipping: Scoro now trails Toggl Track in Project Management and Time Tracking Software, #9 to #7
Toggl Track Gaining: Toggl TrackMonday now trails Toggl Track in Project Management and Time Tracking Software
If your projects are consistently going over budget, I’d prioritize a tool that connects time tracking, planned versus actual labor costs, project budgets, and real-time alerts — not just one that records hours.
The biggest difference is being able to spot budget overruns while there’s still time to correct them, rather than discovering them when you invoice the client or close the project.
For a Project Manager, the best tool depends on whether you're managing billable client projects, internal teams, or complex projects with multiple phases and resource constraints.
My top 3 tools for preventing project budget overruns
(Best overall for budget control)
1. Productive
Best for agencies, consultancies, and multi-phase projects
Productive connects time tracking with project budgets, employee costs, expenses, profitability, and forecasting. You can see how much budget remains and forecast whether a project will run out of money. It also supports automated budget warnings.
Harvest lets you set budgets in hours or money, track progress against those budgets, and trigger email alerts when a project crosses a chosen threshold. It also provides project cost reports and invoicing.
Why I'd choose it: Your main problem is that people fail to log time consistently or you find out about overspending too late, and you want something relatively straightforward.
Trade-off: Less suited to advanced resource planning and profitability forecasting.
Best for project delivery plus financial management
Teamwork combines project and task management with budgeting, time tracking, resource planning, and profitability monitoring. It's particularly relevant to teams delivering projects for clients.
Why I'd choose it: You want your team to manage project schedules and tasks in the same system where you monitor financial performance.
Trade-off: Advanced financial capabilities may require a higher-tier plan.
My recommendation is to trial Productive first if budget overruns are your primary concern. Its combination of actual costs, budget consumption, and forward-looking profitability is especially relevant to your problem.
The important part: how to stop overruns
Regardless of the tool, I'd configure these four controls from day one:
Budget by phase or task, not just one overall project number.
Track actual hours against estimates every day or week.
Set warnings at 70%, 85%, and 95% of the budget, rather than waiting until 100%.
Review estimated cost at completion during a weekly project review, and require approval for scope changes.
A tool will make overruns visible, but these practices help you act on them.
One question so I can narrow this down
What kind of projects do you manage?
1. Project type
Client projects / consulting
Software / IT projects
Construction / engineering
Internal business projects
Marketing / creative projects
2. Team size
1–10 people
11–50 people
51–200 people
200+ people
3. What's causing the overruns?
We discover overruns too late
Our initial estimates are inaccurate
Scope creep and unplanned work
People don't track time accurately
We struggle with resource allocation
4. What budget do you need to track?
Labor hours
Financial costs and profitability
Both hours and financial costs
[Find my best-fit tool]
With those details, I can give you a much more targeted recommendation instead of just another generic software shortlist.
When projects constantly bleed over budget, the fix usually isn’t working harder—it’s having real-time visibility into how hours translate into dollars before the runway runs out.
The "best" tool depends on your team size and workflow, but the top contenders specifically built to marry time tracking with live project budgeting include:
Teamwork.com – Widely considered a gold standard for client-work and agency PMs. It treats budgeting as a first-class citizen, allowing you to set hourly or fixed budgets, attach billable rates to staff, and track burn rates down to the task level in real-time.
Productive.io – Built explicitly for operations and profitability tracking. It wires time tracking directly into employee cost rates and project budgets, meaning every logged hour instantly updates your financial margins, resource allocation, and forecasting.[](https://www.breeze.pm/articles/project-management-software-with-time-tracking)
Monday.com – Great if your team resists rigid systems. By combining customizable project boards with native time-tracking widgets and formula columns, you can build visual budget-vs-actual tracking dashboards that update automatically.
Harvest + Asana / ClickUp – If you already love your task manager (like Asana or ClickUp) but it lacks robust financial tracking, pairing it with Harvest provides seamless, one-click timer tracking that feeds into clean, visual budget alerts when you hit 50%, 80%, or 100% of a project cap.
To help narrow down the ideal fit, tell me:
How large is your team?
Are your budgets typically fixed-fee or hourly/T&M (Time & Materials)?
Do you need client invoicing built right into the tool?
Toggl Track: Best if your team hates logging hours. It provides an effortless timer experience, though you will need external tools or higher tiers for deep financial forecasting.[]()
If you'd like, let me know:
Your team size
Whether you bill clients hourly or on fixed-fee projects
If you need native invoicing included
I can narrow down the ideal platform for your budget.
For a freelancer sharing project updates and files securely with clients, I’d start with SuiteDash, HoneyBook, or a dedicated project portal like Copilot. The best choice depends on whether you want a simple place to share deliverables or a more complete client workspace.
My biggest recommendation: choose a tool where each client has their own private space for files, project status, feedback, and messages, rather than relying on email attachments and scattered links.
Best client portal software to consider
1. Bonsai
(Best overall for freelancers)
A strong all-around option for project updates, shared files, task progress, and client messaging. It also connects the portal with proposals, contracts, and invoices.
Pricing: Essentials starts at $19/user/month with annual billing; Premium is $29/user/month annually and adds client tasks and messaging.
Combines client portals, file exchange, secure messaging, project management, billing, and extensive branding options. It's particularly attractive if you want to consolidate several business tools.
Pricing: Starts at $19/month, with 100 GB of listed file storage and unlimited portals on the Start plan.
Gives clients a central place for shared files, messages, project details, and invoices. A good fit for creative freelancers and service providers who want a polished, straightforward client experience.
Pricing: Starts at $29/month, with a 30-day free trial advertised on its website.
Worth considering if you want clients to interact with your business through a dedicated branded portal rather than a collection of generic document links.
Pricing: Check current plans and confirm that the file-sharing and project-update features you need are included.
Offers individual client portals for project information, documents, forms, invoices, and appointments. Shared task boards can let clients track progress.
Pricing: The Starter plan is listed at $335/year; Premier is $525/year on annual billing.
For regular progress updates, deliverables, and feedback: Bonsai.
For a private, branded hub with lots of features: SuiteDash.
For sharing files while managing proposals and payments: HoneyBook.
One important security note: don't judge a platform by the word “secure” in its marketing alone. Before uploading client work, verify per-client access permissions, whether links can be revoked, file-size and storage limits, and the provider's encryption and account-security options. Use multifactor authentication where available, and avoid public links for confidential files.
Let me narrow it down
What kind of freelance work do you do? That will help me recommend the best fit rather than just the platform with the most features.
For your specific use case, Toggl Track is probably the strongest all-around fit. It connects time entries directly to project estimates, billable rates and labor costs, then calculates revenue, cost, profit and margin by project/client. It also supports fixed-fee projects and budget alerts.
A useful setup would be:
Project budget → team member cost rates → time tracked → actual cost → revenue → project margin
For example, if you quote a client $30,000 for a project, you can see whether the team's tracked hours are consuming too much of that budget and whether the project is still generating the expected margin.
Toggl has also added forecasting that projects future revenue, cost and margin based on scheduled work and estimates.
When I'd choose the others
Harvest is particularly compelling if you're running an agency or consulting business where simplicity matters. It explicitly provides project budget/cost tracking, budget alerts, billable vs. non-billable reporting and profitability reports.
Clockify is worth considering if price and flexibility are major factors. It supports monetary project budgets, time estimates, billable rates, labor cost rates and reports showing earnings, costs and profit.
One important distinction: Toggl and Harvest are more focused on giving managers financial visibility from time data, while Clockify gives you a broad set of tracking/reporting capabilities and can be particularly cost-conscious.
If you're already using QuickBooks, there's another route: QuickBooks Online + QuickBooks Time can combine time with labor, material and vendor costs for project-level job costing and profitability.
If you tell me your team size, whether projects are fixed-fee or hourly, and what you currently use for accounting (e.g. QuickBooks/Xero), I can narrow this down to the best 2–3 options and compare their current pricing.
Why it's great: It combines a fully white-labeled/branded client portal with robust project management (Kanban boards, task tracking), time tracking, contracts, and invoicing. Your clients get a single dashboard to view project progress, pay invoices, and download/upload files.
Best for: A sleek, modern, app-like client experience.
Why it's great: Copilot feels like a mini-app for your clients. It handles secure file sharing, billing, and messaging with an exceptionally polished UI. However, it lacks native task management or time tracking, meaning it works best if you just want a clean facade and plan to track actual work elsewhere.
Best for: Maximum security and heavy file transfers.
Why it's great: If your primary concern is ultra-secure cloud storage, encryption, and compliance, Sync offers a dedicated client portal add-on that lets clients securely upload and download massive files without needing a complicated account setup.[](https://www.sync.com/client-file-portal/)
If you can tell me what type of freelance work you do (e.g., design, writing, development) and whether you need invoicing and contracts included or just file sharing and project tracking , I can narrow this down to the absolute best fit for your workflow.
