ClockShark vs TradesTimer
What ClockShark is
Time tracking and scheduling SaaS purpose-built for construction and field service crews.
Best for: Construction and field-service companies with a dispatcher and 5+ field employees, where crew scheduling and job costing drive the purchase.
Pricing at a glance
$40 PER USER / MO (MIN)
Standard plan $40/month base plus $8 per user; Pro plan adds scheduling and job costing at higher per-user rates.
Verified 2026-04-15
$0 FREE — FULL APP
Where ClockShark is strong
- Strong job costing and budgeting workflows
- CrewClock group clock-in for vehicles of workers arriving together
- Native integrations with QuickBooks, Xero, ADP and other payroll systems
Where ClockShark falls short for trades
- Monthly base fee plus per-user charges add up fast for sole proprietors
- Designed around 'the office' dispatching 'the crew' — single-operator flows feel tacked on
- Jobs and cost codes must be created before work starts to benefit from the reporting
- Cloud-hosted by design; location trails leave your device
ClockShark problems, in users' own words
These aren't our words — they're from public threads written by people using ClockShark (or shopping for a way out). Each quote links to the original discussion.
My employer has recently moved from paper timesheets to digital. They chose the app ClockShark. They have mandated that we put it on our personal devices which was not received well by the majority. … they then changed the rules that we must allow it to precisely track our GPS location to be able to clock in and out.
Employer-run GPS tracking on a personal phone is a real sore point. TradesTimer flips the model: it's your app on your phone, and the location history never leaves the device.
Clockshark. Won't open at all. Stays on loading screen then crashes after several minutes. … This is a crucial app for me as it clocks me into work.
When your hours depend on an app launching at 7 a.m., an update-day crash costs you money. Passive tracking keeps recording even when you never open the app.
needs help formatting the csv output from the app into something legible. Anybody else use Clockshark and have trouble with the awful output of time data to the csv?
The end product of time tracking is a number you can invoice. TradesTimer's output is a plain-text billable-hours summary you can paste anywhere.
Why I built a ClockShark alternative
At the electrical contractor where I ran the back office, nothing could be tracked until I'd set it up: job numbers created, POs entered, the guys told what to clock into. When I fell behind — busy week, new job landed mid-morning — their hours had nowhere to land and we cleaned up the mess at invoice time. Geofence systems like ClockShark bake that same dependency in: somebody has to draw the fence before the hours count.
ClockShark is a crew product: geofences drawn per jobsite, schedules, an admin dashboard. For a foreman with eight guys it earns its seat fees. For a solo operator visiting five new addresses a day, pre-drawing geofences is doing the office admin's job on top of your own. TradesTimer detects stops wherever you happen to work — no setup, no seats, free.
What TradesTimer does differently
- Free forever for the full time-tracking loop — no base fee, no per-user charge
- Zero pre-setup — the app discovers your stops and names them after you visit
- On-device location history, no employee portal, no dispatcher to maintain
- Invoice preview designed for one person sharing a quick total, not for payroll export
- No cloud account required — your location history stays on your device
The verdict
ClockShark is the right pick when you have a dispatcher scheduling a crew and you need job costing fed into payroll. TradesTimer is the right pick when you are the dispatcher, the crew, and the bookkeeper, and you just want to recover the billable hours you are currently losing to memory — the core app is free and there are no per-user fees.
Page last verified 2026-04-15. If ClockShark has changed pricing or features since then and this page is stale, email support@tradestimer.com and we'll fix it.
Free. The whole app.
The whole time-tracking app is free — no trial, no feature gate, no ads, no per-user fees. (Encrypted cloud backup is on the roadmap.)
- Automatic day reconstruction from background GPS
- Unlimited stops, drives, and days
- Review and edit any block
- Rounded billable-hours summary, shareable as plain text
- Automatic mileage log, exportable for taxes
- 7-day summary view
- All location data stays on your device
Your location history stays on your phone.
There is no TradesTimer server storing your location trails. No account. No sign-up. Your GPS history lives on the device that recorded it — for as long as you want it. The only time anything leaves your phone is when you choose to share your billable-hours summary yourself.
The app does not talk to any third-party service with your location. Nothing about where you've been is uploaded anywhere. See the privacy policy for the full detail.