Real time monitoring is a live dashboard for your company’s digital pulse. Instead of waiting for weekly reports to tell you what happened, you see what’s happening with your software and workflows right now. This means you can react to issues immediately, not days later.
Your labour turnover rate is a number showing how fast people are leaving your company. A high rate suggests employees are exiting frequently, pointing to problems with retention or workplace culture.
It tells you how leaky your employee bucket is.
Software planning software helps companies manage the software they own, from purchase to retirement. Its job is to align technology spending with actual business needs. This prevents overspending on unused software licenses while making sure teams have the tools to do their work.
It helps IT, finance, and engineering teams stop guessing and start making decisions based on data.
This isn't a simple choice between two time tracking tools. It's about deciding on a philosophy for how you measure work. Do you need to track time for billing, or do you need to understand how work gets done?
The answer to that question puts Harvest and WhatPulse Professional in two different categories. Harvest is built for billing clients. It logs hours against projects to create invoices. WhatPulse is built to give you a clear picture of your team's digital activity, helping you find workflow friction and optimize how you use software.
Your choice comes down to one question: is your goal to invoice customers or to improve your internal operations?
The core difference between these two platforms is their data model. One is active, requiring people to tell it what they're doing. The other is passive, capturing what's happening in the background without user input.
This single distinction drives everything else.
With Harvest, your team is responsible for starting and stopping timers or filling out timesheets after the fact. It’s a manual process that directly links a block of time to a specific project or task. The data is clean, explicit, and ready for an invoice because a person has already assigned it meaning.
WhatPulse works differently. It runs a lightweight application on each computer that passively captures endpoint activity—like which applications are open and for how long. It doesn't know why you were using Photoshop, only that you were. This creates an objective, minute-by-minute log of digital work without anyone needing to do anything.
This table breaks down the core differences in their approach and the business problems they solve.
| Criterion | Harvest | WhatPulse Professional |
|---|---|---|
| Data Model | Manual Entry (Active) | Passive Capture (Automated) |
| Primary Goal | Billing & Invoicing | Operational Analytics |
| Key Question Answered | "How many billable hours did we work on Project X?" | "How is our team's time actually being spent?" |
| Strength | Financial Accuracy for Clients | Internal Process Optimisation |
They aren't really competitors. They're designed to answer completely different business questions.
The entire Harvest experience is built around its manual, project-centric model, with a focus on timesheets and budgets.
This setup is ideal for seeing where billable hours are going and keeping projects on budget. The workflow is designed to translate an employee's time into a line item on an invoice. If you want a deeper dive into these concepts, you can explore the difference between tracking vs measuring in our guide.
The 'best' tool depends on the question you need to answer. If your question is about invoicing, Harvest is the direct answer. If it's about workflow efficiency or software spend, you need a different dataset.
Cold Turkey Blocker is a focus tool for Windows and macOS that takes a hard-line approach to blocking digital distractions. Instead of working in your browser, it changes your computer’s operating system settings to make websites and apps unreachable for a set time. Its main selling point is that it’s difficult to bypass, forcing you to stick to your commitment to focus.