Workyard vs TradesTimer
What Workyard is
Construction-focused GPS time tracking with labor cost attribution to jobs and cost codes.
Best for: Small-to-midsize construction contractors with W-2 employees who need defensible labor cost data for fixed-price bids.
Pricing at a glance
$6 PER USER / MO (MIN)
Workforce Management plan starts around $6 per user per month; time tracking plan $8 per user per month plus a company fee.
Verified 2026-04-15
$0 FREE — FULL APP
Where Workyard is strong
- Accurate labor-cost attribution per job and cost code
- Automatic time capture triggered by jobsite arrival
- Solid reporting for bidding and post-job profitability
Where Workyard falls short for trades
- Auto time capture requires jobsites to be predefined with geofences before your crew arrives
- Workflow assumes W-2 employees clocking in against assigned jobs, not a solo operator recovering their day
- Reports are built around payroll and job costing, not around a one-person invoice
- Location trails are uploaded and retained on Workyard's servers for attribution
Workyard problems, in users' own words
These aren't our words — they're from public threads written by people using Workyard (or shopping for a way out). Each quote links to the original discussion.
we currently use workyard for employee timecards but we're open to something that also handles that with GPS timestamps.
Even Workyard shops keep shopping — the per-user bill has to keep justifying itself. For a solo operator, $0 with automatic GPS-stamped stops is a different conversation.
Why I built a Workyard alternative
In the back office of an electrical contractor, my recurring nightmare wasn't guys inventing hours — it was hours landing in the wrong place. Clocked into the wrong job, billed to the wrong customer, caught (hopefully) by me at invoice time. GPS verification helps an employer audit that after the fact. Capturing stops automatically prevents it from happening at all: the location picks the job, not a 7 a.m. dropdown choice.
Workyard's GPS-verified timecards solve an employer problem: proving where employees were. Solo, you don't need to prove anything to yourself — you need the hours captured when your mind is on the work. That's a logging problem, not a verification problem, and it doesn't need seat pricing to solve.
What TradesTimer does differently
- Free — the full automatic time-tracking loop has no price tag
- No jobsites to predefine — stops are detected and labeled automatically as you work
- No employees required; the product is designed primarily around one person
- Location history stays on the phone; there is no employer-facing trail view
- Invoice preview is a share sheet, not an export pipeline into another accounting system
- All your data stays on your phone — no cloud account required
The verdict
Workyard is a strong choice for a construction contractor who lives and dies by job cost accuracy and has W-2 employees to account for. TradesTimer is a better fit for a self-employed tradesperson who mainly wants to stop forgetting how long they were at each address — and the core app is free, so there is no cost to trying it for a week to see if it fits your workflow.
Page last verified 2026-04-15. If Workyard 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.