Toggl has the nicest timer of anything I tried. It's just not actually built to run the billing side of a small consultancy. Here's the honest, single-user comparison.
Rated against the things a small consultancy with occasional subcontractors actually needs day to day. "Full" means a real, dedicated mechanic built for that purpose.
| Differentiator | Toggl Track | Bizily |
|---|---|---|
| Bill client / pay worker independently, worker price-blind | ||
| Client portal with a real, logged-in delegate account | ||
| Custom / non-USD currency, non-monetary compensation | ||
| Proactive budget alert | ||
| Flexible billing: fixed / retainer / rolling balance with overage | ||
| Worker payroll statements (draft → finalized → paid) |
Budget alerts are the one place Toggl matches Bizily outright: time-estimate threshold alerts ship on every paid plan, fixed-fee alerts from Premium up. No exaggeration there.
Toggl is strictly per-seat: there's no flat-org option at any tier, and every role, including a client if one existed, would consume a paid license. Here's what a single consultant actually gets.
Toggl Free
Up to 5 users but only 1 full admin, no billable rates, no custom or saved reports, no time rounding.
Bizily Free
1 client, 2 projects, unlimited users on the business, and every feature Bizily has: client portal, bill/pay split, flexible billing structures, all included. The free plan is capacity-limited, never capability-limited.
Nothing. Toggl's cheapest paid tier, Starter, is $9/user/mo billed annually ($11.35/mo billed monthly), and that's per seat, not per business. There's no plan between Free and $9/user.
$9/mo minimum for one seat on Starter, more than double Bizily's Unlimited price, and it still doesn't buy you a billing system. Toggl's own support docs confirm generated invoices aren't even saved inside the app, and recurring invoices and payment reminders are explicitly listed as missing, at every tier including Enterprise.
Timeline auto-tracking of app/browser activity, calendar integration, scheduled report delivery, and consistently the fastest, simplest timer UX of anything reviewed. And to be upfront about where Bizily is still catching up:
Toggl does let you generate an invoice from a tracked-hours report, even on the free plan, and it's a genuinely pleasant export flow. But that's the whole feature. Toggl's own current support documentation states plainly that generated invoices "are not saved within the Track app." There's no persisted invoice record, no recurring invoices, no payment reminders, and nothing to track whether a client has actually paid or how much they still owe. It's a report export with an invoice template, not a place to run billing from.
Toggl models six internal roles, and every one of them consumes a paid seat. There's no free, view-only, or client-facing role anywhere in the product. If a client wants to check an invoice status themselves, there's simply no account for them to log into. Bizily's client portal is free on every plan, and any contact on the client record can be linked to a login by email.
Toggl's cost-rate field (Premium and up) is internal profitability math, not a worker-facing pay object. There's no dedicated payroll workflow, no draft/finalized/paid lifecycle, and no worker price-blindness guarantee. Same wall as everywhere else Toggl's pricing model stops at time tracking and reporting.
Free for your first client, flat per-business pricing after that. No per-seat math.
