DoneThat vs Hubstaff

The short answer

Hubstaff is bought by employers. DoneThat is bought by the person being tracked. Almost everything else follows from that.

Hubstaff's job is to produce evidence about someone's work that somebody else can inspect: screenshots, activity percentages, app and URL logs, GPS on mobile. DoneThat's job is to tell you where your own week went and coach you on it. Both watch a screen. They are answering to different people.

When Hubstaff is genuinely the right tool

Worth saying properly, because "surveillance" is used as a slur in this category and there are legitimate reasons to buy this.

You are paying hourly for work you cannot see. Contractors, offshore teams, agency subcontractors. If you are paying by the hour and have no other verification, proof-of-work evidence is a reasonable thing to want, and Hubstaff provides it well.

Payroll runs off the hours. Hubstaff's payroll integrations are mature. If tracked time turns directly into payments, that pipeline is the product.

Field teams. GPS and mobile tracking cover work that never happens at a desk. DoneThat has no mobile app and no location tracking at all.

Compliance requires records. Some contracts and some regulators require documentation of who worked when. That is not a preference, it is a requirement.

You need one system. Time, invoicing, scheduling, budgets and payroll in one place is genuinely simpler than assembling it.

How the tracking works

Hubstaff captures automatically once installed — apps, URLs, activity levels and screenshots on a schedule — and also offers manual timers for work you want to attribute deliberately. In practice most deployments run the automatic capture continuously, because the point is that it does not depend on the tracked person remembering.

DoneThat has no timer at all. Capture runs and the day is reconstructed for you to review.

What that design costs the tracked person

Screenshots and activity percentages measure presence, not value. An activity level is derived from input frequency: it rewards someone typing steadily in a document over someone staring at a whiteboard solving the actual problem. Everyone tracked by these metrics learns this quickly, and the well-documented result is that people optimise for the metric.

The second cost is that the data is not for you. A tracked employee gets a dashboard of their own compliance. They do not get "you spent nine hours this week in a recurring meeting that produces nothing" — that is not the question the product is asking.

The teams-without-surveillance alternative

If what you actually want is a team that shares signal — not evidence — that is the case DoneThat is built for:

• Dashboards on high-level summaries, not raw screenshot feeds.
• Relative trends shareable instead of absolute per-person hours, so the data supports a conversation rather than a ranking.
• Visibility chosen per summary by the person it belongs to — private, team, org or public. Nobody is recorded into a manager's dashboard by default.
• Optional mood tracking, so what a lead sees is burnout risk rather than activity volume.
• Screenshots are never stored. Processed in real time, immediately deleted; only derived structured activity persists. Excluded apps are redacted on your machine before anything is sent. Bring your own Gemini or OpenAI-compatible model and raw activity never reaches our servers. The desktop app is open source.

The honest boundary: if you need to prove to a third party what someone did, this model cannot do that, by design. Hubstaff can. Pick accordingly.

Pricing

Hubstaff pricing, as of 11 August 2026:

14-day trial, no card, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee.

The detail that catches people: paid plans bill a minimum of 2 seats. A solo user pays for two, so the practical floor is around $11.66 a month billed annually rather than $5.83. Some capabilities are also add-ons on lower tiers rather than included, so price the tier against the specific feature you need.

DoneThat is subscription-based with a 14-day free trial; current prices are on the DoneThat download page.

Platform support

Where Hubstaff is the better choice

• You pay by the hour for work you cannot observe.
• Payroll or invoicing runs off tracked time.
• You manage field or mobile teams and need location data.
• Compliance requires documented records.
• You want one system for time, scheduling, budgets and payroll.

Where DoneThat is the better choice

• You are tracking yourself. The 2-seat minimum alone makes Hubstaff an odd fit, and the feature set is aimed elsewhere.
• You want to understand your work, not document it.
• You want coaching. Don nudges you onto goals, blocks calendar time, flags low-value work while you can still fix it, checks your mood, reminds you of meetings, suggests breaks.
• Your team wants shared signal without surveillance, on the model described above.
• You want AI tools to have your work history through MCP and an API.
• You want peer accountability rather than management oversight. Follow others, share summaries, Slack and Discord, accountability groups — all opt-in.
• You do not want screenshots to exist.

How we compared these

Everything stated about Hubstaff comes from its public pricing pages, read on 11 August 2026 and linked below. Claims about DoneThat are first-hand: we build it, which is the bias to read this with.

We have tried to describe Hubstaff's monitoring features as what they are — capabilities employers deliberately buy — rather than as a scandal. It is cheaper at entry than we are, covers more platforms, and does things we cannot: those are stated plainly. The disagreement is about who the tool is for, not about whether it works.

Questions people ask about Hubstaff

Does Hubstaff take screenshots of my screen?

Yes, screenshots are a core Hubstaff feature, along with activity levels, app and URL tracking, and GPS on mobile. They are configured by whoever administers the account, not by the person being recorded. DoneThat never stores screenshots — they are processed in real time and immediately deleted.

How much does Hubstaff cost?

As of 11 August 2026: Starter $5.83 per user per month billed annually ($7 monthly), Grow $7.50 ($9), Team $10 ($12), Enterprise $25 annual-only. Note the 2-seat minimum on paid plans, so the practical floor for one person is roughly $11.66 a month annually.

Is Hubstaff good for freelancers?

It works, but you pay for two seats regardless, and most of what you are buying — screenshots, activity levels, team dashboards, payroll — exists so somebody can verify somebody else's work. For a solo user with nobody to prove anything to, that is a lot of product you will not use.

What is the alternative to employee monitoring?

For teams that want shared signal without surveillance: DoneThat's dashboards run on high-level summaries rather than raw feeds, teams can share relative trends instead of absolute per-person hours, each person sets visibility on their own summaries, and optional mood tracking makes the signal burnout risk rather than activity volume. If you specifically need proof-of-work evidence, Hubstaff is the right tool and we are not.