Making the work
Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover creator finance. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
Open-source invoicing, free for 5 clients
Time tracking that stays free for a small team
Invoice Ninja | Toggl Track | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $14 | From $9 |
| Pricing model | Free plan, paid tiers | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Not stated |
| Free trial | Not stated | 30 days |
| API | Yes | Yes |
Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
Open-source invoicing, free for 5 clients
Invoice Ninja issues invoices, quotes and recurring bills, takes payment through a long list of gateways, and gives the whole thing away for up to five clients with no time limit and no invoice cap. The application is open source, so anybody who would rather hold their own data can run it on their own server instead of paying for the hosted version. Paying lifts the client limit and adds the branding and automation a business wants. Five clients is the ceiling that decides it, and it arrives sooner than most people expect.
Our note
Count your clients rather than your invoices, because that is the limit that actually bites and it arrives sooner than the free plan suggests. Self-host only if you were going to maintain a server anyway, since the hosted Pro plan costs less than the hours will.
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Time tracking that stays free for a small team
Toggl Track records where the hours went, across a browser extension, a desktop application and a phone, and it does the awkward part well: reminding somebody who forgot to start the timer and letting them fill the gap afterwards. The free plan covers a limited number of users with no time limit on it. Billable rates, project profitability and required fields are what the paid tiers add. It reports on time rather than turning it into an invoice, so billing still happens somewhere else.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.
| Data export | Everything, in an open format | Not stated |
|---|
| Their cut | None | None |
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| Runs on (they differ) | Web, iOS, Android | Web, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, Linux |
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| Covers | Creator Finance, Accounting & Tax | Creator Finance, Project Management |
|---|
| Works with | Nothing in particular | Nothing in particular |
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| Founded | Not listed | Not listed |
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| Reader rating | No reviews yet | No reviews yet |
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| Live deals | None right now | None right now |
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Our note
Read the Premium footnote before budgeting, because $14 is a first-year price and $18 is what it becomes, which is a 29 percent rise nobody plans for. Clockify is the cheaper paid option if the free plan runs out on user count rather than on features.
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