Leaving Harvest for Clockify? Its new Activity monitoring sorts your apps into Productive and Unproductive and takes screenshots

Harvest has a page about time tracking with screenshots, and its answer is that Harvest "does not include screenshot monitoring." If Harvest's renewal has you pricing Clockify, that's now a difference between the two. On September 2, 2026, Clockify announced Activity monitoring, and its pricing page lists it on the Pro plan, marked "New." This post covers what the feature collects, what it turns into a score, who can see the results, and how to tell whether your Harvest setup puts you on that plan.

What Clockify announced

The announcement is on CAKE.com's updates page, filed under Clockify, with the headline "Introducing Activity Monitoring: Track Employee Performance & Productivity." It says the feature lets managers track productivity across apps and websites "by automatically detecting employee locations, their active and idle time, and collecting screenshots."

One line in it explains the idea: "Get rid of subjective self-reporting," it says, "by letting the Clockify Agent run in the background on every team member's device." A timesheet is self-reporting. So is Harvest. Clockify's feature page for it is titled "Optimize processes with Clockify’s employee monitoring software."

What the agent collects

The feature page says the agent "tracks telemetry (visited websites and apps, keyboard and mouse activity, screenshots)." The row on the pricing page is shorter: "Set up an agent that monitors activity on company devices." Clockify's help pages fill in the settings.

• Every app and website gets a label. Productive is "Used for work-related activities," Neutral is "Used for context-dependent activities," Unproductive is "Used for non-work activities," and Undefined means "No rule for this app/website yet."
• Activity means keyboard and mouse. "By default, using your mouse and keyboard counts as Active time." An inactivity threshold, set "between 1 and 30 minutes," decides when someone is flagged as idle.
• Screenshots run on an interval "ranging from a minimum of 30 seconds up to a maximum of 30 minutes." The "Blur Screenshots setting is enabled by default," and the feature page says the admin decides "whether they’re blurred." No screenshots are taken while someone is idle.
• Location is in it too. The announcement offers to "Define office locations and keep track of where employees are working from."

Clockify does draw a line, and it's worth quoting. Its guide for team members says the agent "only measures the physical volume of your keyboard typing and mouse movements to ensure you are active," and "It absolutely does not capture any keystrokes, typed text, or private messages." Screenshots are deleted after 60 days. Activity logs are kept up to 90 days.

Then it becomes a percentage

Clockify's basics article says "Utilization is a calculated score that displays an employee's amount of productive time." The announcement puts it as "Compare productive time with a team member's work capacity." The dashboard shows, for each person, "total Productive hours, total Unproductive hours, and their overall Utilization percentage." It also has a list called "Top unproductive members," which "Lists users with the lowest utilization percentages."

The labels behind that percentage are set by admins for the whole workspace and by team managers for their own teams. When someone's groups disagree about an app, "Productive overrides Neutral, and Neutral overrides Unproductive." The person being measured doesn't set any of it.

What the person being measured can see

Clockify's roles page has one line for the default role: "Members currently have no access or permissions for Activity monitoring, as this is the default workspace role." Its FAQ asks whether regular members can see their own data and answers that they can't, "meaning they cannot view their own activity, screenshots, or logs."

The screenshots page says who the pictures are for: "Screenshots provide Workspace Admins or Team Managers an additional layer of verification." So with the roles as Clockify sets them, a manager whose team you're on can open a screenshot of your screen from last month, and you can't.