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Time Tracking & Attendance

Hubstaff

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Panel rating · 6 judges · How to read the stars

Category median

Sovereignty: not determined

0–5 in half steps. 5 means the rubric's top anchor is met on the evidence.

by Hubstaff · hubstaff.com

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Hubstaff: AI-assisted analysis on whats-best.ai Hubstaff: AI-assisted analysis on whats-best.ai (dark)

Add ?theme=dark to the image address for dark backgrounds. The badge shows the category and the month of the latest evaluation, and EU-Made where that is the product’s provenance. It never shows a score.

Hubstaff at a glance

Vendor
Hubstaff
Headquarters
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 20 Oct 2026
Data hosting
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 20 Oct 2026
Free plan
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 20 Oct 2026
Panel verdict
The AI panel rates Hubstaff 2/5, the mean of 6 judges. Hubstaff scores highest on project and billing at 7-8: per-person bill rates, hour and budget limits with real-time over-budget alerts, and invoices generated from tracked time with locked line items that cannot be billed twice. how scores are made
As of
Vendor pages captured 20 Oct 2026; evaluated by the panel 21 Oct 2026. all sources

Hubstaff alternatives, European ones first →

Read this page as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.

The Agency Owner

Weighted verdict

Bills forty people's hours to clients and lives on the gap between recorded and billable. Wants project structure, rate cards that survive a mid-project change, budget warnings before the overrun, and an export the invoicing system takes. Attendance compliance is the floor, not the product.

Same scores as the panel view — this lens weights them the way this judge cares.

Scored by The Agency Owner

Panel median The Agency Owner This judge’s scores over the panel median. Each label opens its reasoning below.
Scores per criterion, in stars out of 5
Criterion Panel median The Agency Owner
Capture in the real workplace 2 of 5 2 of 5
Working-time law & audit record 1.5 of 5 1.5 of 5
Absence & shift planning 2 of 5 2 of 5
Project, cost-centre & billing 4 of 5 4 of 5
Payroll handoff 3 of 5 3 of 5
European sovereignty 0.5 of 5 0 of 5
Pricing transparency 0 of 5 0 of 5

Capture in the real workplace

How this is scored

How time actually gets recorded across the workforces a buyer has — desk staff, field and site crews, shift and deskless workers — and what happens when the network is not there.

0 — One browser timer and nothing else; anyone away from a desk records nothing.

3 — Web plus a mobile app, but no offline capture, no shared terminal, and corrections are an admin task rather than a workflow.

5 — Web, mobile and at least one shared capture point (kiosk, terminal or badge), with offline capture that syncs, and a correction workflow with approval.

8 — Several capture paths including hardware terminals or badge readers, reliable offline handling, GPS or geofenced check-in where the vendor states its limits, and bulk correction with an audit trail of who changed what.

10 — Capture fits the workforce rather than the reverse: desk, deskless, field and shift models all first-class, offline as a designed state rather than a failure mode, and every correction attributable, reasoned and reversible.

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The Agency Owner

Desktop, web, mobile and browser apps are all there, and geofences that automatically start and stop the timer with reminders cover field crews properly. Timesheets can be edited and approvals lock the date range before payroll runs, which is a real workflow rather than an admin chore. We found no public information on shared terminals, offline capture that syncs, or bulk corrections with an audit trail naming who changed what. 1 3 4 11 12

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Working-time law & audit record

How this is scored

Whether the record satisfies the German recording duty (BAG 2022, § 3 ArbSchG) and the ArbZG rules around it — breaks, maximum hours, rest periods, retention — and whether it survives being inspected.

0 — Hours are summed and nothing else; no break handling, no limits, no retention statement.

3 — Break deduction exists but is a flat rule; no daily maximum or rest-period checks, and no stated retention period.

5 — Configurable break rules, warnings on the 8/10-hour daily maximum and the 11-hour rest period, and per-employee reports covering the recording duty.

8 — The ArbZG rules are modelled rather than approximated: break and rest enforcement with documented exceptions, overtime and time-account rules, the two-year retention handled by the system, and an export built for an inspection.

10 — The vendor treats the record as evidence: tamper-evident entries with full change history, retention and deletion executed per statute, documented handling of on-call, standby and travel time, and published guidance mapping features to the ArbZG sections they serve.

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The Agency Owner

Overtime is tracked automatically with configurable limits, breaks sit among the payroll policies, and every timesheet carries an approval trail backed by audit logs. But the vendor's own guidance runs to US state overtime and California law — we found no public information on the German recording duty, rest-period checks, daily maximums, or a retention period an inspector would ask for. 2 5 7 12

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Absence & shift planning

How this is scored

Vacation, sickness and the shift or duty roster — the half of attendance that decides whether the time data means anything.

0 — No absence handling; vacation lives in a separate calendar or spreadsheet.

3 — Vacation requests with approval, but entitlement is manual, carry-over is not handled and there is no rostering.

5 — Automatic entitlement and carry-over, sickness recording, an absence calendar, and basic shift planning with availability.

8 — Public-holiday calendars per location, pro-rata entitlement, substitution and swap workflows, shift templates with qualification and rest-period checks, and coverage warnings before publication.

10 — Planning and recording are one system: rosters that respect statutory rest and the works agreement, absence that reflows the plan automatically, and forecast-versus-actual reporting a team lead can act on.

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The Agency Owner

Recurring shifts with minimum hours, grace periods and attendance statuses, plus a calendar that filters by holidays and time off, mean the rostering half is genuinely built, and the schedule-versus-worked-hours comparison is what a team lead acts on. We found no public information on automatic vacation entitlement, carry-over, sickness recording, or substitution and swap workflows. 3 7 8 12

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Project, cost-centre & billing

How this is scored

Whether recorded time can carry the allocation an agency, workshop or professional-services firm needs — project, task, cost centre, billable status — through to an invoice or a client report.

0 — Attendance only; no project, task or cost-centre dimension at all.

3 — A free-text note or a single project field, with no rates, no billable flag and no per-project reporting.

5 — Projects and tasks with a billable flag and per-project reports, plus a rate per person or per project.

8 — Multi-level structure (client, project, task, cost centre), rate cards by person, role and project, budget tracking with warnings, and an invoice-ready export.

10 — Time becomes revenue without re-entry: approval before billing, rate rules that survive a rate change mid-project, client-facing reports, and a maintained handoff into named accounting or invoicing systems.

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The Agency Owner

This is the part I would buy: bill rates per team member, hour and budget limits with real-time over-budget alerts, invoices auto-generated from tracked time with locked hours that cannot be billed twice, and time export into QuickBooks and FreshBooks. The gaps are cost centres, role-based rate cards, and any statement on whether a rate change mid-project re-prices or preserves earlier hours — we found no public information on those. 1 2 3 9 10 12

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Payroll handoff

How this is scored

How the recorded month reaches payroll — DATEV, Lohn und Gehalt, an in-house system or the tax adviser — and how much of it is automated rather than retyped.

0 — No payroll path stated; the month leaves as a spreadsheet someone retypes.

3 — Generic CSV said to be usable for payroll, with no named system, no defined format and no handling of surcharges.

5 — A named payroll integration or a documented export format for at least one major system, covering hours, absences and overtime.

8 — Vendor-maintained integration with a named provider, covering night, Sunday and holiday surcharges, time accounts and mid-month changes, with a lock step before transmission.

10 — Payroll is designed for, not exported to: several named systems maintained, an auditable approval and lock, retro handling for corrections after the close, and the tax adviser given their own scoped access.

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The Agency Owner

Named gateways (Wise, PayPal, Payoneer, Bitwage, Deel, Gusto, Remote), an export of payment calculations for paying outside the system, approvals switched on by default, and payroll locked until setup is confirmed give a genuine lock step before transmission. The timesheet export itself is PDF or CSV, and we found no public information on DATEV or any German payroll format, or on night, Sunday and holiday surcharges. 10 11 12

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European sovereignty

How this is scored

Where the data lives, who the contracting entity is, who the subprocessors are, and whether that is documented rather than assumed. Independently sourced by the sovereignty pipeline; scored here as this buyer weighs it.

0 — Non-EU vendor and contracting entity, hosting region unstated or non-EU, subprocessors not named.

3 — EU hosting offered as an option, but the contracting entity is non-EU or the subprocessor list is absent.

5 — EU hosting as standard and an EU contracting entity, but the subprocessor chain includes non-EU providers without an explained safeguard.

8 — EU or DACH hosting with a named data-centre provider, EU contracting entity, full subprocessor list published, and any non-EU processing named with its legal basis.

10 — Sovereign end to end and evidenced: vendor, entity, hosting and every subprocessor in the EU, data-centre certification published, and an on-premises or private-cloud option for buyers who need it.

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The Agency Owner

The vendor states that customer data is retained in the United States under the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, and the contracting entity named on the pages is Netsoft Holdings, LLC. We found no public information on an EU hosting option or any subprocessor list — for German employee time data that is a conversation with legal before anything else. 2 8 11

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Pricing transparency

How this is scored

Whether a buyer can compute the real annual invoice for their headcount — including terminals, modules and minimums — from public pages alone.

0 — No public prices at all; every tier is a sales conversation.

3 — A per-user headline exists, but hardware, modules or a minimum seat count are unpriced or unmentioned.

5 — Per-user prices public for the main tiers with the billing period stated, but at least one commonly needed piece (terminal hardware, planning module, payroll export) sits in an unpriced bundle.

8 — Every tier and module priced publicly with per-user maths, billing period, minimum term and VAT treatment stated; only genuinely custom work lacks a number.

10 — Complete price computability: a calculator or table producing the annual invoice for a given headcount and module selection, including hardware, setup and renewal terms.

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The Agency Owner

We found no public information on prices for any plan — not per-user rates, not the billing period, not VAT treatment. What is public is a 14-day trial without credit card, which features sit on which plan, and a one-time $100 credit, and none of it lets me compute an annual invoice for forty people. 4 8 9 12

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European sovereignty — proven facts

0 of 4 dimensions proven

Built only from facts shown on the vendor's own pages. A dimension we could not prove is left open, not scored as zero.

Ownership Not determined — uncited Report an error
Data residency Not determined ⚠ unverified — uncited Report an error
Subprocessors Not determined — uncited Report an error

Questions about Hubstaff

Is Hubstaff European?

Not determined: the vendor’s pages as captured do not say where Hubstaff is based.

Where does Hubstaff store data?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 20 Oct 2026.

Does Hubstaff have a free plan?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 20 Oct 2026.

What are the best alternatives to Hubstaff?

As of 21 Oct 2026, the panel rates TimeTac (3.5/5), clockodo (3/5) and ZEP (3/5) highest among the other 25 Time Tracking & Attendance products evaluated. Ratings that look equal are rounded to half stars; the order uses the unrounded rating, then the name. The highest-rated European alternative is TimeTac (EU-Made). Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made. The full list, with European products first: Hubstaff alternatives.

Where this could be wrong

What we left out

A claim that does not survive our checks costs us the claim, not the page. This is what was taken off this one.

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Sources (12)

The pages every claim on this page was read from — each one checked, dated, and kept verifiable.

  1. 1 Vendor page hubstaff.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  2. 2 Security / trust page — found from the homepage hubstaff.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  3. 3 Capture in the real workplace — found from sitemap hubstaff.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  4. 4 Capture in the real workplace — found from sitemap hubstaff.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  5. 5 Working-time law & audit record — found from sitemap hubstaff.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  6. 6 Working-time law & audit record — found from sitemap support.hubstaff.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  7. 7 Absence & shift planning — found from sitemap support.hubstaff.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  8. 8 Absence & shift planning — found from sitemap hubstaff.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  9. 9 Project, cost-centre & billing — found from sitemap support.hubstaff.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  10. 10 Project, cost-centre & billing — found from sitemap hubstaff.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  11. 11 Payroll handoff — found from sitemap support.hubstaff.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  12. 12 Payroll handoff — found from sitemap support.hubstaff.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →