Harvest's price increase: your options for agency time tracking

Harvest has long been a common choice for small agencies: simple timesheets and simple invoicing. After Bending Spoons bought it in 2025, its pricing changed: Harvest now charges usage fees on top of its per-seat plans, and some customers have reported renewals many times what they paid before (Subscription Insider). If your renewal just arrived, you are probably comparing options this week.

This page is a fair comparison, including where Harvest is still the better tool.

Who this is for

• Agencies whose Harvest renewal went up and who want to understand the alternatives before signing.
• Software agencies that use Harvest for timesheets and pay, and a separate tool for tickets.
• Teams that want time tracking without screenshots or activity scores.

The options side by side

List prices, October 2026, per user (or per seat, for Tengu) per month, billed annually.

The reported renewals are individual customers' bills, not numbers we have verified. Check your own renewal.

Where Harvest is still better

• Invoicing. Harvest turns tracked time into invoices. Tengu does not send invoices. If Harvest is how you bill clients, that is a real gap.
• Simplicity. Harvest does a few things and is easy to learn. Tengu is a delivery board with time attached, which is more to take in if all you want is a timer.
• No change. Your team already knows it, and its history is all in one place.

If you only need a timer and your team likes Harvest's feel, Toggl Track is worth a look: a very good timer, and not a surveillance layer.

Where Tengu is different

Tengu is for software agencies that would rather have time, tickets and the dev loop in one place than a time tool beside a project tool.

Time on the quest

A timer on each quest, started from the board, kept on the server. Weekly timesheets that members submit and admins approve, with every edit logged and its reason. Pay periods of 1st to 15th, 16th to the end, or monthly. A payroll export per period, per person and per project. Members see only their own hours and pay.

Budgets that pause timers

Monthly budgets per client or project, in hours or dollars. Warnings at 75% and 90% show only the percentage. At 100%, a project's timers stop until an admin extends it. The admin-only Capacity Hub shows margin per client.

The rest of the job

The same board runs your tickets, with a review queue and Run in Claude Code: a quest goes to Claude Code, comes back as a PR, gets a QA run with screenshots and ships with release notes.

Still no surveillance

Tengu takes no screenshots and records no activity levels or idle time. That is not a setting an admin can turn on: it doesn't exist.

Two ways to use Tengu if you're on Harvest

1. Keep Harvest for time, move tickets. The Board plan ($7 per seat a month, annually) gives you the review queue, the inbox and Tengu Bot, with no time tracking; the importer comes with every plan. Harvest keeps doing timesheets and invoices.
2. Move time too. Studio adds the timer, timesheets, pay periods, payroll export and budgets. Keep Harvest only if you need its invoicing, or move invoicing elsewhere.

How to move time from Harvest

Tengu doesn't import from Harvest. To move time:

1. Export your Harvest timesheets and reports for past periods and keep them.
2. Pick a pay period boundary as the switch date.
3. Set up clients, projects, pay rates and budgets in Tengu.
4. Start timers in Tengu on the switch date. Run one full pay period and compare the payroll export with your Harvest numbers.

What Tengu doesn't have yet

Invoicing, a Harvest importer, a mobile app, custom fields of its own, docs, whiteboards and forms.