DeskTime vs BiBoTracking for a 10-person remote team

If you run a 10-person remote agency and you are looking for a DeskTime alternative, the real question is not which dashboard looks nicer. It is whether you want software that grades your team on a 0-100% scale, or software that just shows you what happened and leaves the judging to you. DeskTime is built around the first idea. BiBoTracking, which I build, is built around the second. That one difference changes almost everything else about how the two tools feel day to day.

I am the founder of BiBoTracking, so treat this as a biased but specific comparison. I will tell you exactly what DeskTime does better.

What productivity scoring actually does

DeskTime's core feature is the productivity bar. Every app and URL your team touches gets classified as productive, unproductive, or neutral. Figma is productive. YouTube is unproductive. The system settings app is neutral. DeskTime then rolls that up into a single percentage per person per day, and that percentage is what you see first when you log in.

The appeal is obvious. One number per person, sorted descending. For a 10-person team that is 10 numbers, which you can read in 20 seconds.

The problem is what sits underneath the number. You get the default classification for a few thousand common apps and sites, and you fix the rest yourself. For an agency that means real work:

The classification backlog

Our own work involves maybe 40 tools. Some of them are genuinely ambiguous. Is YouTube unproductive when your video editor is on it for three hours watching reference cuts? Is Twitter/X unproductive when your social media person lives there? Is ChatGPT productive? Reddit?

With scoring turned on, every one of those is a decision you have to make and then maintain. You end up with a per-role override list, because "productive" for the designer is different from "productive" for the account manager. DeskTime supports per-group settings, so this is possible — it is just ongoing admin work that nobody budgets for.

The number drifts from reality

Once a score exists, it gets gamed. Not maliciously, usually. People just learn which apps count. A developer who does deep thinking in a notebook with the laptop idle scores badly. A junior who keeps the IDE open while they are stuck scores well. If you start running 1-on-1s off the percentage, you teach your team to optimise for the percentage.

That is not a DeskTime bug. It is what happens to any single metric you make visible and consequential. I decided not to build it for exactly that reason, and I wrote up the broader thinking in time tracking that does not destroy team morale.

Where DeskTime wins

I would rather you pick the right tool than my tool, so here is the honest list.

It has been around far longer. DeskTime launched in 2011. That means more integrations, more documented edge cases, and a support team instead of one person in a different timezone.

Private time is a real feature. DeskTime lets an employee flip a "private time" switch that stops tracking for a period. If you have people doing personal admin on a work laptop, that single toggle removes a lot of friction. It is a good design.

Offline time attribution. When DeskTime sees a gap, it can prompt the person to label it — client call, offsite meeting, planning. For an agency with lots of meetings, that fills in the parts the computer cannot see.

Project profitability. DeskTime has hourly rates and project costing built out properly. If you bill clients by the hour and want margin per project in the same tool, that is a strong reason to choose it.

Pomodoro and absence calendars. Small things, but they are there and polished.

If the productivity score is what you actually want — if you want to open one screen, see 10 percentages, and act on the bottom two — DeskTime is the better buy. I am not going to talk you out of a feature I deliberately did not build.

What BiBoTracking does instead

BiBoTracking records four things: work time, periodic screenshots, which apps were in the foreground, and browser activity. There is no score. The admin view shows a timeline per person per day, and you look at it.

For a 10-person agency, here is what the difference means in practice.

Setup is shorter

There is no classification list to build, because nothing is being classified. You install the desktop app on each machine, people sign in, and the data starts arriving. Realistically an afternoon for 10 people including the conversation with the team, which I walked through step by step in how to set up employee time tracking in one afternoon.

Review takes longer

This is the real tradeoff and I want to be blunt about it. Reading a timeline with screenshots takes longer than reading a percentage. Maybe two or three minutes per person if you actually look, versus 20 seconds for 10 scores.

At 10 people that is fine — call it half an hour a week, and you only need to do it properly when something looks off. At 60 people it stops being fine. Scoring exists because it scales and eyeballing does not. If you are planning to be 60 people next year, factor that in.

Screenshots are evidence, not a metric

Screenshots in BiBoTracking are there so you can answer a specific question: what was this person doing between 2pm and 4pm on Tuesday. They are not fed into a score. That makes them useful for the two cases that actually come up in a small agency — a client disputing billed hours, and a contractor whose output does not match their logged time — and useless for ranking people, which is on purpose.

Tracking only runs while the app is running, and the app shows the person it is recording. There is no hidden mode. If you need covert monitoring, BiBoTracking is the wrong choice and you should look at ActivTrak or similar.

Automatic, not manual

Both tools track automatically rather than asking people to start and stop timers, which matters more than most comparison pages admit. I went into why in automatic time tracking vs starting a timer by hand.

Picking one for a 10-person team

Here is how I would decide if I were you.

Choose DeskTime if: you bill hourly and want project profitability in the same tool; you want one number per person; you have someone who will own the app classification list; or you need the private-time toggle to make the rollout politically possible.

Choose a simpler DeskTime alternative if: you do not trust a single productivity percentage; you want the screenshot and activity record without the grading layer; you would rather spend half an hour a week looking at timelines than maintain a classification list; or you want the cheapest honest thing that answers "did the work happen".

Choose neither if: your team is 5 people you talk to every day. At that size you already know who is working. Monitoring software solves a visibility problem you do not have yet, and installing it will cost you more in trust than it returns in information.

One more thing worth checking before you commit: export. Ask whichever vendor you pick how you get your raw time and activity data out, in what format, and whether it covers the full history or just the last 90 days. Two years in, that answer matters.

If the no-scoring approach is what you are after, bibotracker is the desktop app and web admin I described above — work time, periodic screenshots, app and browser activity, for macOS and Windows, with a timeline you read yourself instead of a percentage that reads your team for you. There is a free tier, so you can put it on two machines for a week and see whether the timeline tells you anything you did not already know.