Insightful Review | My Honest Opinion (2026)

After testing more than 25 time tracking and employee monitoring apps, I wanted to take a closer look at Insightful & how it stacks up against them, and whether it is among the top ones.

In this honest Insightful review, I will guide you through its key features, pricing, my experience, its pros & cons, and ultimately answer one question: is it the best time tracking or employee monitoring app for you, or should you check other options?

Scroll down, because I will answer this question and help you save time and money.

Let’s dive in!

What is Insightful?

Insightful is a time tracking and employee monitoring software for teams. It captures daily work in real time and offers numerous productivity tools to help your team maximize time. You can download it to Windows, Mac, and Linux devices to track your time spent.

Insightful helps over 210,000 people globally track time and promises productivity gains of up to 92%. Sounds impressive, right?

It’s time to dig into Insightful’s key features and see what it can actually deliver.

Insightful key features

Here, I summarize the key features I tried throughout my Insightful review.

Time tracking software

While you can find all the features on the web app, you and your employees can clock in only with the desktop app. That said, you have to download the Insightful app on your desktop before using it for activity tracking.

The installation takes 10-15 seconds, and you only need to log in to start tracking your time. The time tracking is quite simple. If you open the Insightful app, a small widget will appear. After you select the project and task, you can clock in.

Furthermore, you can easily switch between tasks, projects, or stop the time tracking. The overall experience felt smooth when capturing my time spent on tasks.

Now, let’s see Insightful’s employee monitoring features!

Employee monitoring

Insightful is an excellent tool for remote employee monitoring. And I personally loved the personalization features. Let me give you a sneak peek into this.

If you select the employee, you can customize whether Insightful should take screenshots, set up break and idle time, and permissions.

I will be honest. I am not a big fan of screenshots while using a time tracking app, as it can be invasive. While Insightful allows you to take screenshots, I was glad that I could choose not take a screenshot at all.

But this wide range of personalization options applies to all functions. There are numerous customization options for each employee, which allow you to personalize the time tracking in a way that aligns with your company culture.

When one of my team members told me she couldn’t add new tasks during our test, I was a bit worried, as it would be burdensome to add them for all my team members.

However, I just found the option in her settings, from my admin account, to allow her to add tasks, so I only need to check the reports. Just a quick note here: I did not find the option to let her add new projects for herself, which would be helpful.

Insightful lets you create teams for more effective time tracking, project delegation, and data analysis. With this feature, you can compare key metrics across your teams and keep a close eye on how they perform.

Nonetheless, for employee monitoring, there are two additional crucial features: productivity trends and real-time insights.

Let’s start with the productivity trends!

Productivity trends

This feature provides a clear view of work hours, idle time, utilization, and more for all your team members during the selected period. Essentially, it works as a dashboard for productivity tracking and monitoring across your organization.

You can select reference and comparison periods, add filters, check top employees and teams, break down by categories, and more.

Ultimately, I found it to be a valuable feature during my Insightful review, particularly for remote employee time tracking.

Real-time insights

With this feature, Insightful allows real-time monitoring of your employees. It shows active and inactive employees, along with the apps and websites they are currently using.

Although it is a helpful feature for remote employee monitoring, I felt it was a bit too much. Therefore, I configured the tracking rules not see the apps and websites they use in real-time to avoid “spying” into their activity.

Insightful also lets you export the data with a single click. Before exporting, you can also add further columns such as job title, job description, and more. So, it is a useful feature if you want to extract the data and send it via email.

Projects and tasks

In the course of my Insightful review, I discovered that you can create projects and tasks for your team members. As mentioned, while you can allow your team members to create new tasks, I did not find the same option for projects.

Adding new projects and tasks is super easy. You have to add the name, due date, status, priority, assignees, and description. After this, you or your team members can clock in and track time.

The one thing I missed here is assigning clients to projects and tasks, which would be a useful addition for agencies or client-facing teams. However, I noticed that Inisghtful’s focus is more on productivity tracking and remote work, which is completely fine.

Time and attendance

Using Insightful’s time and attendance functions lets you track employee work hours, gain clear visibility into attendance, and see how they spend their time.

Your team members can also add manual time entries to log and track any work-related activities that happen offline, and you can check them here.

From this panel, you can take a look at your team members’ timesheets, activities, schedules, and projects as well.

Activity tracking

The activity tracking provides a timeline view for all the employees in one place to see their work hours, break times, and more. It gives you a good picture of how much time your team members worked today, and you can filter on employees, teams, and scheduled work.

In addition, you can find here the logs feature. It provides detailed logs for the active and idle teams of your team members. You can see what websites or apps they used, but you can change the privacy settings to limit this visibility.

Ultimately, I discovered during my Insightful review that it is a powerful employee-monitoring feature for remote teams as well. Personally, I mostly used productivity trends and real-time insights for employee monitoring, but if you want to go into more detail, you will love this feature.

Reports

Insightful offers an easy-to-use reporting tool to track both unproductive and productive time of your remote employees.

This feature helps you to achieve better workload balance based on clear, actionable insights without guessing. Using the live data, you can spot overloaded employees or teams and reallocate tasks or projects to reduce overwhelm.

Moreover, the reports provide some insights into work types, locations, schedules, and app and website usage.

What I extremely appreciated was the ease of use of the reporting features. It is fast, visualizes numerous metrics beautifully, and you can export the data with one click. This is exactly the kind of reporting tools I would use if I were to run a larger business.

Insightful user interface

Insightful has an appealing and user-friendly interface. It is easy to navigate its pages and find the feature you are looking for.

If you are not an admin or a manager, it’s even easier to clock in and use the app since you have fewer options and functions. Therefore, it is an ideal time-tracking app for non-tech-savvy people as well.

Insightful integrations

Inisightful offers plenty of direct integrations with third-party apps. You can connect it with Asana, Wrike, Deel, GitHub, and more. One integration I miss, though, is Zapier.

Insightful pricing plans

Insightful offers four paid plans for businesses. Just a heads-up: you can try Insightful for free with its 7-day trial without adding your credit card details.

Productivity Management Plan

If you want to get started with Insightful, its Productivity Management Plan could be an excellent choice for you. It is $6.40 per seat per month with annual billing, and there is no user cap.

This plan includes apps & web activity analysis, employee activity analysis, screenshots, stealth mode, reports, and more.

Time Tracking Plan

If you want to utilize its time tracking features for your projects and tasks, and integrate Insightful with project management, invoicing, and customer service apps, the Time Tracking Plan is ideal for you.

It starts at $8 per seat per month with annual billing, and there is no user limit.

Process Improvement Plan

Over 50 users, you can go for the Process Improvement Plan at $12 per seat per month, billed annually. Choosing this plan, you will get automated project & task time tracking, workflow analysis, and industry-specific process optimization.

Enterprise Plan

Organizations with over 100 users can ask for a tailored solution at custom pricing. With the Enterprise Plan, you will access features for license management, capacity analysis, and more.

Finally, Insightful offers some add-ons for screen recording, on-demand screenshots, increased screenshot frequency, security, and data warehouse integrations.

My experience with Insightful

What really surprised me is how effectively Insightful integrates ease of use and an extensive feature set. While it is packed with features, it remains a user-friendly time tracking app.

When it comes to the features, Insightful stands out in employee monitoring and spotting unproductive time patterns. It’s important to highlight that it offers many customization options for employee monitoring, so you can find the right balance between helping improve your employees’ productivity and spying on them.

It was great to see that the live dashboard includes all the key metrics you need and automatically compares the results with the previous period. I felt great when I saw the improvement compared to the previous week.

Where I felt that Insightful has room for improvement is in two areas: first, it is not ideal for businesses managing clients, invoicing, and more. This time tracking platform was designed for improving your team’s productivity.

Secondly, since it does not offer a mobile app, you can only use it in an office, remote, or hybrid environment with an internet connection.

To summarize, I had a great experience in the course of my Insightful review. After testing numerous time tracking apps, I see it currently as the best employee monitoring platform for remote and hybrid teams.

Pros and cons I found during my Insightful review

Let’s see the pros and cons I discovered throughout my Insightful review!

Pros of Insightful

Cons of Insightful

Insightful alternatives

If you are not sure whether Insightful is the best time-tracking software for you, here are some alternatives:

• Rize: It is an AI-powered time tracker that has helped me a lot with focus and building more sustainable working habits. Works great for solo entrepreneurs, business owners, and professionals.
• Toggl Track: It offers automated time tracking, project management, invoicing, and reporting features to help you maximize productivity and revenue.
• TimeBee: A productivity and time-tracking tool that automatically records daily activities. It tracks app and website usage, detects idle time, generates detailed reports, and provides focus insights. Ideal for individuals and teams looking to improve productivity and manage work hours efficiently.
• ClockShark: It is a cloud-based time-tracking and employee scheduling software built for field service businesses with crews working outside the office.
• Clockify: A time tracking app with an extensive feature set that offers a mobile, desktop, and web app for users.
• Time Doctor: An app with robust time-tracking features and advanced analytics tools. It has employee monitoring, workforce, and productivity analytics features.
• Harvest: A popular time-tracking app with massive invoicing and reporting capabilities.
• Hubstaff: A time-tracking and productivity-monitoring app with in-depth reporting features.
• Jibble: A user-friendly time tracking solution ideal for teams with one of the best free plans.

Wrap-up: Insightful review

Insightful was a pleasant surprise for me with its advanced feature set for hybrid and remote work. After my Insightful review and test, I can safely state that I was satisfied with this time-tracking app and find it a great tool for businesses that need a reliable tool for employee monitoring & productivity boost.

Related posts:

• 9 Best Time Tracking Apps In 2026 | 20+ Personally Tested Tools
• 6 Best Clockify Alternatives: My Personal Picks (2026)
• 6 Best Hubstaff Alternatives After 500+ Hours Tracked

As always, I will update this Insightful review over time so you guys have the latest information on this time-tracking tool.

If you still have questions about which time-tracking app to choose, check out our library here, where we reviewed all the popular time-tracking software one by one and spent at least 10+ hours with each.

Why you can trust our reviews

At thebusinessdive.com, our team tests, reviews, and compares hundreds of productivity apps every year — from project management tools to note-taking apps. We dive deep into real-world use cases to help you find the right tools that actually improve your workflow, not just add noise.

Every month, 35,000–50,000 people trust us to find the best productivity apps at the best price.

Our mission? No fluff, no shortcuts—just honest, hands-on insights from productivity pros, so you can make an easier decision.

Have a question or suggestion? I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out anytime at aronkantor@thebusinessdive.com.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Insightful app legit?

Yes, completely. Insightful offers a unique mix of a user-friendly interface & massive feature set for hybrid and remote teams.

Does Insightful record your screen?

To use the screen recording feature, you have to purchase its add-on. If you have the add-on, you only need to click on the start of the project/task on the widget, and the screen recording begins simultaneously.

Is Insightful ideal for remote employee time tracking?

Yes, Insightful is probably the best employee tracking app for managing remote employees. It offers numerous employee monitoring and productivity tools for businesses. All these features make Insightful a great choice for remote work.

Can Insightful detect mouse jigglers?

Yes, Insightful can detect mouse jigglers.

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