Tick

1. Introduction: A Time Tracker With One Job

I have tested more time tracking tools than I care to admit. Over the past four years I have run experiments with [Toggl Track](/reviews/toggl-track), Clockify, Harvest, Everhour, and Timely, plus at least a half-dozen smaller tools that launched with promise and fizzled quietly. Each time I found myself buried in feature menus, configuration screens, and dashboards that answered questions I never asked. I started looking for something simpler.

Tick caught my attention specifically because of what it does not do. There is no invoicing engine. No employee scheduling module. No AI-powered productivity insights. No Gantt charts. Instead, Tick does one thing: it tracks time against project budgets. That is the entire value proposition. You set a budget for a project, start a timer, and watch the burn rate. When you are getting close to budget, Tick tells you. When you blow past it, you know exactly when it happened.

I used Tick for seven months as my primary time tracking tool across 14 client projects, working as a solo consultant and then testing it with a small agency team of five. I tracked over 1,200 hours across those projects, tested the mobile apps on both iOS and Android, pushed the reporting to its limits, and connected it with Basecamp and several tools via Zapier. My goal was simple: could a tool this stripped-down actually handle the day-to-day reality of tracking billable time against project budgets?

The short answer is yes, with caveats that matter depending on how you work.

2. What is Tick? The Budget-First Time Tracker

Tick launched in 2009, built by Chrometa, a company that was already working in the time tracking space. The tool was born from a straightforward observation: most agencies and freelancers do not need a time tracking platform that does everything. They need to know whether a project is on budget. That founding insight has driven every product decision since, and it is the reason Tick still exists in a market crowded with feature-heavy competitors.

Tick was later acquired and is now maintained by 14 Oranges, a Canadian software company. The transition was quiet and the product stayed true to its original vision. There was no feature explosion post-acquisition, no attempt to pivot into project management or invoicing. 14 Oranges kept the tool focused, maintained the infrastructure, and continued the same pricing model. That kind of stability is rare in a market where small tools frequently get acquired and either gutted or abandoned.

The positioning is deliberately narrow. While Toggl Track markets itself as a comprehensive time tracking platform and Harvest bundles invoicing with time tracking, Tick sits in the corner of the market that says: track time, see budgets, know where you stand. If you want more than that, Tick is not pretending to be your answer. If budget visibility against tracked hours is the thing that keeps you up at night, Tick is purpose-built for exactly that problem.

The result is a tool with a learning curve measured in minutes rather than days. There is nothing to configure beyond creating projects and setting budgets. That simplicity is Tick's entire competitive advantage, and for the right user, it is enough.

3. Tick Pricing & Plans: Two Tiers, No Tricks

Tick's pricing is about as simple as software pricing gets. Two plans. No per-user fees on Pro. No hidden costs for integrations or premium features. Here is what each includes.

3.1 Free Plan: One Project, Full Features

Tick's free plan gives you one project with all features unlocked. There are no artificial limitations on the timer, reporting, or budget tracking within that single project. You get the full experience, just constrained to a single active project.

What's Included: One active project with budget tracking, the full timer interface, all reporting features for that project, mobile app access on iOS and Android, Chrome extension, and API access. There is no user limit on the free plan either, though with one project the scope is inherently limited.

Key Limitations: One project is the ceiling. For a freelancer juggling multiple clients, this is insufficient almost immediately. There is no way to compare budgets across projects because there is only one. The free plan is useful for testing whether Tick's approach works for you, but it is not designed for production use.

3.2 Pro Plan ($19/month): Unlimited Everything

At $19 per month, Pro removes all limits. Unlimited projects, unlimited users, unlimited everything. The flat-rate pricing means you are not penalized for adding team members, which is increasingly rare in SaaS.

Key Upgrades from Free: Unlimited projects let you track every client, internal project, and recurring engagement simultaneously. Unlimited users means your entire team tracks time without per-seat math. Budget tracking across all projects gives you the portfolio view that makes Tick useful, seeing at a glance which projects are healthy and which are burning hot. Full reporting across all projects allows you to slice data by project, client, team member, or date range.

What's Notable: The unlimited users model is Tick's most underrated feature. At $19/month flat, a five-person agency pays $3.80 per person. A ten-person team pays $1.90 per person. Compare that to Harvest at $12/user/month or Toggl Track at $9/user/month and the math becomes dramatic. For teams, Tick's pricing is genuinely disruptive.

Pricing Comparison Table

4. Key Features Deep Dive

4.1 Project Budgets: The Feature That Defines Tick

Budget tracking is not a feature in Tick. It is the feature. Everything else exists to serve it. When you create a project, the first thing Tick asks is how many hours you have budgeted. That number becomes the anchor for everything that follows.

Once set, the budget appears as a progress bar on every project. Green means healthy. Yellow means approaching the limit. Red means you have gone over. This traffic-light simplicity is what makes Tick work for people who have tried and abandoned more complex tools. You do not need to run a report or build a dashboard to know where you stand. You open Tick and the answer is right there.

I tracked 14 client projects over seven months, each with different budget structures. Fixed-fee projects where I needed to stay under a specific hour count. Retainer clients where I tracked monthly allocations. Internal projects where I wanted visibility without a hard cap. Tick handled all three patterns cleanly. The budget bar gave me an instant read on each project's health every time I opened the app.

The most valuable moment in my Tick experience came three months in when I noticed a project was at 78% budget with only 60% of the work complete. That visual warning, which I saw without looking for it, led to a client conversation that resulted in a scope adjustment before the project went over. In Toggl Track, I would have needed to run a report and compare numbers manually. In Tick, the answer was staring at me from the dashboard.

4.2 The Timer: Start, Stop, Done

Tick's timer is deliberately minimal. You pick a project, optionally pick a task within that project, and hit start. A running timer bar appears at the top of the screen showing you the active project, the task, and the elapsed time. When you are done, you stop the timer. The hours are logged.

There is no complex categorization during timing. No tags, no billable versus non-billable toggles during entry, no client selection beyond the project itself. You are timing work against a project. That is it.

I found this simplicity refreshing after months with Toggl Track where every time entry involved selecting a project, a client, tags, and a billable flag. In Tick, starting the timer takes two clicks. Over a full workday with 8-10 timer switches, that friction reduction adds up. I estimated I saved roughly five minutes per day compared to my Toggl workflow, which over a month is nearly two hours of recovered time.

Manual time entry is also available for when you forget to start the timer or need to log time after the fact. You select the project, enter hours and minutes, add an optional note, and save. No calendar interface, no drag-to-fill, just a simple entry form.

4.3 Recurring Projects: Handling Retainer Work

For agencies and consultants with retainer clients, recurring projects solve a real problem. You set a project to recur monthly (or at whatever interval matches your retainer cycle), and Tick automatically resets the budget at the start of each period. Historical data from previous periods is preserved for reporting, but the active budget bar resets so you get a fresh read on the current period.

I used this for three retainer clients during my testing. Each had a monthly hour allocation, and the recurring project feature meant I never had to manually create a new project or reset numbers at the start of each month. The budget bar showed current-month burn rate, and I could pull reports on any previous month to see historical patterns.

This feature is small but it eliminates a genuine pain point. In tools without recurring projects, managing retainer budgets requires either manual resets or awkward workarounds with date-filtered reports.

4.4 Reporting: Simple, Focused, Exportable

Tick's reporting answers three questions: how much time was spent on a project, who spent it, and when. That is the scope. There are no pivot tables, no custom report builders, no drag-and-drop analytics dashboards.

You can filter reports by project, client, team member, and date range. The output shows total hours alongside budget remaining, giving you the budget context that defines Tick's approach. You can view data as a summary or drill into individual time entries. CSV export is available for everything, which means you can pull data into Excel or Google Sheets for any analysis that Tick's built-in reporting does not cover.

For my seven-month test, the reporting was sufficient for client-facing work. I exported monthly CSV files for each client, formatted them in a spreadsheet template, and attached them to invoices. The process took about 15 minutes per client per month. More sophisticated tools like Harvest generate invoices directly from time data, which would have saved me that formatting step, but the Tick workflow was functional.

4.5 Integrations: Basecamp Native, Everything Else via Zapier

Tick's integration story reflects its focused philosophy. There is one deep native integration: Basecamp. If you use Basecamp for project management, Tick connects directly and pulls project structures so you are tracking time against Basecamp projects without duplication. The integration is clean and well-maintained, which makes sense given the overlapping audience of agencies that value simplicity.

Beyond Basecamp, integrations happen through Zapier. You can connect Tick to Asana, Trello, Slack, and hundreds of other tools through Zapier workflows, but these are generic webhook-style connections rather than purpose-built integrations. In practice, this means you can push time data to other tools or trigger actions based on Tick events, but you are building and maintaining those connections yourself.

There is also an API for custom integrations. The API is straightforward and well-documented, which is helpful for teams with development resources who want to pull Tick data into internal dashboards or reporting systems.

4.6 Mobile Apps: Functional, Not Fancy

Tick's mobile apps on iOS and Android deliver the core experience: start and stop timers, log manual entries, and check project budgets. The design is clean and the apps load quickly. I used the iOS app daily during my testing period, primarily for starting timers when I began client work away from my desk and for checking budget status during client calls.

The apps do not attempt to replicate the full desktop experience. Reporting is minimal on mobile, and project configuration is better handled on the web. But for the primary mobile use case, quick timer access and budget checks, they work without friction.

4.7 Chrome Extension: Timer Access From Anywhere

The Chrome extension puts Tick's timer one click away from any browser tab. Click the extension icon, select a project and task, and start timing. The running timer appears in the extension badge so you have a visual indicator without switching tabs.

For desk-based work where the browser is always open, this is the fastest way to interact with Tick. I used it more than the web app for starting and stopping timers throughout the day.

5. Tick Pros: What It Gets Genuinely Right

Budget Visibility Is Instant and Effortless

The traffic-light budget bar system means you never need to run a report to know where a project stands. Open Tick, see green or red. This instant visual feedback is Tick's killer feature, and no competitor I have tested makes budget health this immediately visible. In Toggl Track, budget tracking requires setting up a project estimate and then navigating to a report to check it. In Tick, the answer is on every screen.

Flat-Rate Pricing Scales Beautifully for Teams

At $19/month for unlimited users, Tick becomes cheaper per person as your team grows. A 20-person agency pays under $1 per user per month. This pricing model is genuinely uncommon and makes Tick an easy budget line item to justify, especially for cost-conscious agencies where per-seat pricing in other tools adds up to hundreds per month.

The Learning Curve Is Measured in Minutes

I set up Tick from scratch, created five projects with budgets, invited two team members, and was tracking time within 30 minutes. There is no configuration guide to read, no workflow to design, no permissions matrix to untangle. This is a meaningful advantage for teams that have been burned by tools that took weeks to implement.

Recurring Projects Solve Retainer Tracking Elegantly

Monthly budget resets without manual intervention is a small feature that eliminates a real annoyance. For any consultant or agency with retainer clients, this alone justifies evaluating Tick.

The Timer Bar Keeps You Honest

The persistent running timer bar across the top of the interface is a subtle but effective design choice. You always know whether a timer is running and what it is tracking. This eliminated phantom timers, those entries that run for hours because you forgot to stop them, which were a chronic problem in my Toggl Track workflow.

6. Tick Cons: The Honest Limitations

No Invoicing Means You Need a Second Tool

Tick tracks time. It does not generate invoices, calculate costs based on hourly rates, or connect to payment processors. If you bill clients based on tracked time, you are exporting CSV data and importing it into your invoicing tool. Harvest, by contrast, goes from timer to invoice to payment in one workflow. For freelancers and agencies where invoicing is tightly coupled with time tracking, this gap creates real friction.

Reporting Is Basic by Any Standard

Hours by project, by person, by date range, with CSV export. That is the reporting. No custom report builder, no saved report templates, no scheduled email reports, no visual dashboards beyond the budget bars. If your clients or management require detailed time analysis with charts and breakdowns, you are doing that work in a spreadsheet after exporting from Tick.

Integration Ecosystem Is Thin

One native integration (Basecamp) and Zapier for everything else is limiting. Teams using Asana, Monday.com, Jira, or ClickUp for project management will find no direct connection to Tick. The lack of native integrations with popular project management tools means Tick exists as an island for many teams, requiring manual data bridges or Zapier automations that add complexity and maintenance.

No Billable vs Non-Billable Distinction

Tick does not distinguish between billable and non-billable hours at the entry level. All time tracked against a project counts equally toward the budget. If you need to track internal meetings, administrative time, or non-billable work separately from client-facing hours, you need workarounds like separate projects for non-billable time. Toggl Track and Harvest both handle this natively.

Mobile Apps Feel Dated

The apps work but they lack the polish and modern design language of competitors. Animations are minimal, the interface follows older design patterns, and feature parity with the web app is incomplete. For a tool that costs $19/month, the mobile experience feels like it has not received proportional investment.

No Offline Mode on Mobile

If you lose connectivity, the mobile apps cannot log time locally for later sync. For consultants who work on-site in buildings with poor reception or travel frequently, this is a practical limitation that Toggl Track and Clockify handle better with robust offline support.

7. Setup & Implementation: Running in Under an Hour

The Real Timeline

Tick's setup is about as fast as software implementation gets. There is no onboarding wizard, no configuration period, no training materials to review. You sign up, create projects, set budgets, and start tracking.

Hour 1: Account and Projects. Create your account, add your active projects with hour budgets, and invite team members if applicable. Define tasks within each project if you want granularity beyond project-level tracking. Connect Basecamp if you use it.

Day 1-2: Team Onboarding. Walk team members through the timer and manual entry. This is a five-minute conversation for most people. Establish the convention for how tasks should be named and when timers should be started and stopped.

Week 1: Calibration. After a week of tracking, review the budget bars. Are your initial estimates accurate? Are team members logging time consistently? Adjust budgets based on actual data. This calibration step is where Tick's simplicity pays off, there is very little to adjust because there are very few settings.

Common Setup Mistakes

The most common mistake is setting budgets too tightly during initial setup. If you are transitioning from a tool without budget tracking, you may not have accurate data on how many hours projects actually consume. Set initial budgets 10-15% higher than your estimates and tighten them after a month of real data.

The second mistake is creating too many tasks within projects. Tick works best with a flat or shallow task structure. Five to eight tasks per project is a sweet spot. Twenty tasks creates clutter without proportional value.

8. Tick vs Competitors: Head-to-Head

Tick vs Toggl Track: Simplicity vs Depth

Toggl Track is the most popular time tracking tool on the market and offers dramatically more features than Tick. Detailed reporting, project templates, team dashboards, billable rates, hundreds of integrations, and a polished interface across all platforms.

Where Toggl Track Wins: Reporting depth, integration ecosystem, billable rate calculations, offline support, modern mobile apps, team analytics, and a free plan that supports up to five users with core features.

Where Tick Wins: Budget visibility is more immediate and visual. Flat-rate pricing means Tick costs $19/month for unlimited users versus Toggl Track's $9/user/month that scales linearly. Setup time is faster. The interface has less cognitive overhead for teams that only need budget tracking.

Choose Toggl Track if: You need detailed reporting, billable rate tracking, extensive integrations, or work with a large team where per-user pricing is acceptable. Choose Tick if: Budget tracking is your primary concern and flat-rate pricing matters for your team size.

Tick vs Harvest: Budget Tracking vs Full Billing

Harvest is Tick's closest philosophical competitor, a tool that values simplicity, but Harvest extends into invoicing and expense tracking where Tick stops at time tracking.

Where Harvest Wins: Native invoicing from time entries. Expense tracking. Billable vs non-billable distinction. Deeper integrations with accounting tools like QuickBooks and Xero. More polished interface overall.

Where Tick Wins: Price. Harvest charges $12/user/month. For a 10-person team, that is $120/month versus Tick's flat $19. If you handle invoicing separately and just need time-against-budget tracking, Tick's cost advantage is significant.

Choose Harvest if: You want time tracking through invoicing in one tool. Choose Tick if: You invoice separately and want the cheapest path to reliable budget tracking.

Tick vs Clockify: Free vs Focused

Clockify offers a generous free plan with unlimited users and projects, making it the go-to free time tracking tool. Its paid plans add features like invoicing, time off tracking, and advanced reports.

Where Clockify Wins: Free plan is far more generous. Feature set is broader. Integrations are more extensive. Offline mode works on mobile.

Where Tick Wins: Budget tracking is more visual and immediate. The interface is simpler with less noise. For teams that specifically need budget visibility, Tick's focused approach delivers that faster.

Choose Clockify if: Budget is your primary concern for the tool itself and you need a free option. Choose Tick if: Budget visibility for your projects is the concern and you want purpose-built tooling for it.

9. Best Use Cases: Who Thrives With Tick

Small Agencies With Fixed-Fee Projects: Perfect Fit

If your agency runs fixed-fee engagements and the question that matters most is "are we on budget," Tick was built for you. The visual budget bars across all active projects give partners and project managers an instant portfolio health check. At $19/month for the entire team, the cost is negligible relative to even a single hour of over-budget work that gets caught early.

Freelancers Tracking Multiple Client Projects

Solo consultants and freelancers who quote projects in hours and need to know where they stand benefit directly from Tick's core feature. The simplicity means you spend time doing billable work rather than administering your time tracking tool. The flat rate means you are not paying per-seat for a tool you use alone.

Basecamp-Centric Teams

If your team already lives in Basecamp for project management, Tick's native integration creates a seamless time tracking layer on top of your existing project structure. No duplication, no manual sync, just time data attached to the projects you are already managing.

10. Who Should NOT Use Tick

Teams Needing Invoicing From Time Data

If your workflow requires generating invoices directly from tracked hours, Tick forces a manual export-and-import step that Harvest eliminates. For high-volume invoicing, a freelancer billing 10+ clients monthly, that friction adds up to real time lost every billing cycle.

Organizations Needing Detailed Analytics

If your leadership team expects dashboards with utilization rates, profitability analysis, capacity planning, or trend visualization, Tick's basic reporting will not satisfy. You will end up exporting CSV files and building reports in another tool, which defeats the purpose of having a reporting feature at all.

Teams Using Asana, Jira, or ClickUp for Project Management

Without native integrations to these popular tools, Tick creates a disconnected experience. Your projects live in one tool and your time data lives in another with no automatic bridge. Everhour integrates natively with all three and is a better fit for these teams.

Remote Teams Needing Activity Monitoring

Tick does not track what applications or websites team members are using. There are no screenshots, no activity levels, no idle detection. If your time tracking needs include accountability monitoring, tools like Hubstaff or Time Doctor are designed for that purpose.

11. Security & Compliance

Tick provides baseline security appropriate for a small-team time tracking tool. Data is transmitted over HTTPS with TLS encryption. The application is hosted on reliable infrastructure with standard uptime. Password-based authentication is the primary access method.

The tool does not publish detailed compliance certifications, which is consistent with its position as a simple, focused product rather than an enterprise platform. For teams handling sensitive time data or operating in regulated industries, this may be a consideration.

Compliance Overview

12. Customer Support Reality Check

Tick's support reflects its position as a small, focused product. There is no 24/7 support operation, no dedicated account managers, and no phone line. Support is handled via email, and the team behind Tick is small.

The help documentation covers the basics clearly. Setup, timer usage, project configuration, reporting, and integrations are all documented with screenshots and step-by-step instructions. For a tool this simple, the documentation is usually sufficient to resolve questions without contacting support.

Email response times in my experience were within one to two business days. The responses were helpful and written by people who clearly understand the product. There were no scripted responses or chatbot interactions. When I had a question about recurring project budget calculations, I got a detailed, accurate answer from a real person within 24 hours.

Community resources are limited. There is no active forum, no subreddit with meaningful traffic, and no YouTube channel with tutorials. You are largely on your own for workflow optimization and creative use cases, which is a trade-off of using a niche tool versus a platform with a large user community.

13. Performance & Reliability

Seven months of daily use revealed no significant performance issues. The web application loads quickly, timer starts and stops are instantaneous, and reports generate without noticeable delay. The application is lightweight by nature, there is simply not enough complexity in the interface to create performance bottlenecks.

Sync between the web app and mobile apps was reliable throughout my testing. Time entries logged on mobile appeared on the web within seconds. I did not experience any data loss or sync conflicts during my seven-month evaluation.

The Chrome extension performed consistently, launching the timer interface quickly and maintaining connection to the active session without issues.

I experienced one brief outage during my testing period, lasting approximately 30 minutes on a weekday morning. It resolved without data loss. For a tool of this size, that level of reliability is acceptable, though teams with strict uptime requirements should note that Tick does not publish an SLA or status page.

Platform & Availability

Support Channels

14. Final Verdict & Recommendations

Overall Rating: 3.6/5

Seven months, 14 projects, and 1,200+ tracked hours later, my conclusion is that Tick earns a genuine recommendation for a specific audience and falls short for everyone else. That is not a criticism. It is a reflection of a product that knows exactly what it is and does not pretend to be more.

Tick is excellent at one thing: showing you whether your projects are on budget. The visual budget bars are the best implementation of project budget tracking I have seen in any time tracking tool. The flat-rate pricing at $19/month for unlimited users is remarkable value for teams. The setup takes minutes. The learning curve is effectively zero. Recurring projects handle retainer work elegantly.

The limitations are equally clear. No invoicing. Basic reporting. Thin integrations. No billable rate calculations. No offline mobile support. A small support team. An integration ecosystem limited to Basecamp and Zapier. These are not bugs to be fixed. They are boundaries of a product that has chosen focus over breadth.

Not Recommended For: Teams needing invoicing from time data, organizations requiring detailed analytics and reporting, teams using project management tools other than Basecamp who need native integration, or anyone who needs billable rate tracking and profitability analysis.

Making the Decision

Ask yourself two questions. First: is knowing whether your projects are on budget the primary reason you need time tracking? Second: do you handle invoicing separately or need it built into your time tracking tool?

If your answers are "yes, budget visibility is what matters" and "I invoice separately," Tick is your tool. If you need invoicing, detailed analytics, extensive integrations, or billable rate calculations, look at Harvest, Toggl Track, or Everhour instead.

ROI Assessment

Solo Freelancer ($19/month Pro plan):

• Projects saved from over-budget by early warning: estimated 2-3/year
• Conservative value of catching one over-budget project early: $500-2,000
• Annual cost: $228
• ROI: 4-17x

Small Agency, 10 users ($19/month flat):

• Replaced Toggl Track ($9/user x 10 = $90/month): savings of $71/month
• Annual savings on tool cost alone: $852
• Budget overruns prevented by visual tracking: estimated 3-5/year at $1,000+ each
• Annual cost: $228
• ROI: Significant on both cost savings and budget visibility

Agency, 20 users ($19/month flat):

• Replaced Harvest ($12/user x 20 = $240/month): savings of $221/month
• Annual savings: $2,652
• Annual cost: $228
• ROI: 11.6x on tool cost savings alone, before counting budget visibility value