When comparing Hubstaff vs Qbserve, the Slant community recommends Hubstaff for most people. In the question“What are the best time tracking apps for freelancers?” Hubstaff is ranked 3rd while Qbserve is ranked 25th. The most important reason people chose Hubstaff is:
Set up your team to automatically get paid for the hours they log using the Hubstaff app. Just input their hourly rate, the schedule you want them to be paid on (weekly, monthly, bi-weekly?), and integrate with your favorite payment service (PayPal, Payoneer, etc.)
Specs
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Pros
Pro Automatic payments and payroll
Set up your team to automatically get paid for the hours they log using the Hubstaff app. Just input their hourly rate, the schedule you want them to be paid on (weekly, monthly, bi-weekly?), and integrate with your favorite payment service (PayPal, Payoneer, etc.)
Pro Integrations
Hubstaff integrates with multiple project management tools and will automatically sync to update your task list.
Pro Screenshots
Hubstaff takes randomized screenshots while users are logging time. Frequency can be adjusted and screenshots can be blurred.
Pro Idle time indicator
Hubstaff detects when someone has been idle and will notify the user.
Pro URL tracking
View the URLs you've visited while tracking time on Hubstaff, and how long you spent on each one.
Pro Works offline
Users can track time offline. The software will upload screenshots, activity levels and time logs once the user reconnects to the Internet.
Pro Automatic time reports and timesheets
Hubstaff will generate reports based on time tracked by users. These can be filtered by user, project and date and exported as a PDF, CSV or in Quickbooks
Pro Activity levels and productivity measures
Activity levels are measured based on keystrokes and mouse movements (which keys were used are not recorded) and give an indication of how productive a user has been while their Hubstaff timer was running.
Pro Application monitoring
See which apps you've used while tracking time to Hubstaff and for how long.
Pro Work notes
Hubstaff users can attach work notes to their time entries to describe what has been done.
Pro Budgets
You can limit how many hours an individual in your organization is allowed to work per week to stay within budget.
Pro Has a free tier and trials for paid plans
Free for one user.
Pro Invoice generation
It's possible to generate PDFs with invoices based on tracked project time or create ones from scratch.
Pro Automatic project tracking
Qbserve categorizes project time automatically based on opened documents and web pages.
Pro Dynamic icons
The dock icon will change color depending on what you are currently doing, acting as a reminder to get back to work when you've become distracted. You can also set goals, and in the status bar you will see a percentage of how close you are to your daily goal.
Pro Data is stored locally
Pro Wide database
There are over 7500 apps/sites/games in the database which provides lots of data for more accurate tracking.
Pro Differentiates between work and play
Qbserve can determine the difference between productive and distractive activities. It doesn't use a static algorithm either - it will read content page-by-page to determine whether or not it is productive or not. this allows certain chats to count as work, and other chats to not count, even if you are using the same chat service for both.
Cons
Con Task Mangement
Built-in task manager is not too great, it's best to use a third party app for that. It could be much simpler to create and assign tasks, (5/18/2018).
Con Free options are fairly limited
Hubstaff has a free tier and two paid tier options with free trials. The free tier allows 1 user with time-tracking and activity levels functionality. If you want the rest of the functionality, you'll have to pay $7 or $10 per month for the basic or premium plan respectively. You can see the full comparison between the tiers on their website.
Con No synchronization
Since Qbserve is a serverless solution – you can't sync your database between multiple Macs.
Con Short free trial
While it's good that there is a 10 day free trial, 10 days isn't very long. A longer trial would allow for better judgement of how much more productive the software made you.