Compare
Kairos and Harvest, side by side
Harvest is the tool most freelancers mean when they say “track time and invoice it”. Kairos does that job for one person or a small team, from $0.99 a month at a founding price and with no price per seat.
Kairos and Harvest compared
| Feature | Kairos | Harvest |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0.99 a month for Basic, $1.99 for Pro: founding prices, locked for life for the first 500 workspaces. Pro covers up to five members; nothing per seat. | $9 per seat per month on Teams billed annually, $11 month to month. Every seat is paid. |
| Invoicing | Built in, on every plan. Unbilled hours and expenses become an invoice with your tax line, due date and logo. The client gets a PDF and a page to read and pay it, through your own Stripe account or your bank details. Monthly retainers draft themselves, and invoices sync to QuickBooks Online and Xero. | Built in, on every plan. Invoices from tracked time and expenses, paid through Stripe or PayPal. QuickBooks Online and Xero integrations on Teams. |
| Free tier | No free plan. Every workspace starts with 14 days of Pro, no card, and a sample workspace can be tried without signing up. | A free plan for one person with two projects. |
| Monitoring | None. No screenshots, activity scores or location. Just the hours you track. | None. |
| iPhone app | Yes, on Pro. Works offline; entries sync when you are back online. | Yes. |
| Assistant and API | Yes. Claude connects to Kairos as a connector, signed in with OAuth, and can start, stop and log time and draft invoices. A token-scoped API does the same for scripts. | A REST API for developers. |
Harvest prices checked October 19, 2026, per user per month on annual billing, from public pricing pages and comparison guides. They are rounded and they change; Harvest’s own site has the current figures.
The difference, in plain terms
Harvest has been around since 2006 and does a great deal: time, expenses, deep reporting, and integrations with most of the project tools a studio might already run. For a team that bills through all of that, it is a sensible default, and its price reflects the breadth.
Kairos covers the same ground for a smaller team. There is a timer and a weekly timesheet, reports by client, project and person, project budgets that warn you at 80% and at 100%, expenses with receipts, and invoices built from the hours you have not billed yet, with your tax line, due date and logo. Basic is for one person on the web; Pro adds the iPhone app and up to five members, covered by the one subscription rather than a price per seat. Both are founding prices, locked for life for the first 500 workspaces.
Getting paid works either way: through your own Stripe account, where Kairos takes nothing from what your clients pay, or with your bank details printed on the invoice. There is no monitoring in Kairos and never will be, and the app tries to stay out of the way: start, stop, write a line about the work, invoice on Friday.
If you want timesheet approvals or an Asana integration, Harvest is the better fit today.
Fourteen days on us. Then a dollar.
Every workspace starts on a full Pro trial, no card. If it isn’t for you, nothing was charged.