Switching from Toggl, Harvest or Clockify

Should you switch at all?

Toggl Track, Harvest and Clockify run on more platforms than Hourbrook does. If you need Windows, phone apps or a free plan for a team today, stay where you are. (The Toggl, Harvest and Clockify comparisons have the details.)

Switching makes sense if you work on a Mac and one of these is true:

• You forget to start and stop timers, and rebuild your week from memory on Friday.
• You'd like the tracker to notice what you worked on, without screenshots and without that record leaving your Mac.
• You work with Claude Code or Codex and want agent waits counted as work.

Hourbrook records the app, window title and web page in front every two seconds, keeps that on your Mac, and drafts entries from your own history. You still have a timer and manual entry for anything the Mac didn't see.

What changes in your day

With a timer-first tool, the work is remembering to press start. With Hourbrook it moves to the end of the day: open the Day, look at the brook (one stream per app), pick the stretches that belong together, and log them. You can still start a timer from the menu bar, a keyboard shortcut or Shortcuts.

Fair warning: the first days take longer. Drafts come from a small model on your Mac that learns which repositories, sites, issue keys and words go with which project, and they get better as you log. Importing your history means your projects and clients are there from the first day.

Before you start

• A Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 14 or later.
• Hourbrook installed. The beta isn't notarized yet, so macOS asks you to allow it once (how to install), and during the beta it asks you to sign in.
• The import is in Settings › Privacy › Your data › Import from Toggl, Harvest or Clockify. There are two buttons: From Toggl or Harvest… (your whole history, with a token) and Import CSV… (a detailed export file).

Either way, you see what will change before anything is written: how many entries, over which dates, how many projects and clients, and what's new. Then you press Import, or Cancel.

From Toggl Track

With a token (your whole history)

1. In Toggl, open your profile and find your API token at the bottom. Hourbrook links to the page.
2. In Hourbrook, choose From Toggl or Harvest…, pick Toggl Track and paste the token.
3. Under Go back to, pick the year to start from, then Check.
4. Read the preview: whose token it is, the number of entries and hours, projects and clients, and how many are new. Press Import.

Hourbrook reads your projects, clients, tags and every finished entry. Nothing is changed or deleted at Toggl. The token is used for that one fetch, kept only in memory, and forgotten when the window closes. It asks about once a second, as Toggl's limits require, so a long history takes a little while.

With a CSV

Export a detailed report from Toggl Track as CSV and choose Import CSV….

From Harvest

With a token

1. In Harvest's developer settings, create a personal access token and note the Account ID next to it.
2. In Hourbrook, choose From Toggl or Harvest…, pick Harvest, and paste the token and account ID.
3. Pick how far back to go, Check, read the preview, Import.

Hourbrook reads your clients, projects and every finished entry. Nothing is changed at Harvest.

With a CSV

Export your detailed time report and choose Import CSV…. If the dates could be month first or day first, you're asked which.

One Harvest quirk: Harvest often keeps hours per day rather than start and end times. Those entries are placed one after another from 9:00 on their day, so the totals are right but the clock times aren't real.

From Clockify

1. In Clockify, open a detailed report for the period you want and export it as CSV.
2. In Hourbrook, choose Import CSV… and pick the file.
3. Check the date order (Clockify writes dates the way your account is set), read the preview, Import.

If you used Clockify's desktop auto tracker, that activity isn't in the export and stays on that computer. Only your time entries come over.

Coming from a spreadsheet instead? The free timesheet template uses Clockify's columns, so the same Import CSV… reads it.

What comes over, and what doesn't

• From a CSV (all three): each entry's description, start and end, project and client, and the billable rate if the export has that column (it becomes the project's rate). Rows Hourbrook can't read, such as no end time or longer than a day, are skipped and listed.
• With a Toggl token: the same, plus tags and whether each entry was billable.
• With a Harvest token: the same as a CSV, plus whether each entry was billable.

Good to know:

• Times are read in your Mac's time zone. If your old account used another one, change it, or the export's, before importing.
• Running timers aren't imported, only finished entries.
• Importing again is safe. Rows imported before are recognised, so an overlapping export doesn't make duplicates. If you edited an imported entry in Hourbrook, or put it on an invoice, your edit wins. An entry you deleted isn't brought back.
• Toggl and Harvest stay as they were. The import only reads.
• No Timely or Timing import yet.

Running both for a week

You don't have to switch in one go:

1. Import your history so projects and clients match.
2. For a week, keep your timer habits and let Hourbrook record in the background.
3. Each evening, log the day in Hourbrook from what it saw, and compare with your timers.
4. If Hourbrook's day matches or beats your timers with less effort, stop the timers.

You'll probably notice one difference. Hourbrook counts short breaks inside a stretch of work and time spent waiting on an agent or a build, and rounds a picked stretch out to the quarter hour, showing you how much was rounding. That's on purpose; here's why.

Leaving again

You shouldn't have to trust a tool you can't leave. From Reports you can export entries as CSV in Toggl Track, Harvest or Clockify format (and Jira Tempo, for entries with an issue key), and each format says where to import it on the other side. Settings › Privacy also exports everything as JSON.