Miru vs Harvest: Which Time Tracker is Right for Your Team?

Harvest has been around since 2006. It’s reliable, well-designed, and used by thousands of teams. We respect that.

But here’s the thing: Harvest charges $10.80 per user per month. For a 20-person team, that’s $2,592 per year — just to track time and send invoices. That’s a lot of money for a relatively simple job.

Miru does the same thing for $1 per member per month. Same 20-person team? $240 per year. That’s a 90% savings. And if your team has 5 or fewer people, Miru is completely free.

Let’s break it down.

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Pricing: No contest

Harvest has one plan at $10.80/user/month. Simple, but expensive. Every new hire costs you another $130/year in time-tracking fees.

Miru has three tiers:

• Free: Up to 5 users. Full features. No credit card.
• Pro: $1/member/month. Unlimited users. Advanced reports and API.
• Enterprise: $1K+/year. Self-hosted with SLA support.

For most teams, the math is obvious.

Features: Miru does more

Both tools track time and send invoices. But Miru ships with six report types, five team roles with leave tracking, a full CLI for terminal-based workflows, dark mode, and a REST API you can actually automate against.

Harvest has a solid timer and basic reporting. It doesn’t have a CLI. It doesn’t have dark mode. It doesn’t have leave management.

If you’re a developer, Miru was built for how you work. Track time from your terminal. Script your invoicing. Automate with cron jobs. Harvest doesn’t support any of this.

The open source difference

This is the big one. Harvest is closed source. You can’t see the code, you can’t self-host it, and if they raise prices or shut down, you’re stuck.

Miru is MIT licensed and fully open source. The entire codebase is on GitHub. You can:

• Self-host on your own infrastructure — no monthly fees
• Audit the code for security and compliance
• Customize it to fit your exact workflow
• Fork it if you ever need to

Your data, your servers, your rules.

Who should choose Harvest?

If your team is already deeply integrated with Harvest’s ecosystem and the budget doesn’t matter, stick with it. It’s a good product.

Who should choose Miru?

Everyone else. Especially if you:

• Care about cost (most teams do)
• Want to self-host for security or compliance
• Have developers who prefer CLI workflows
• Believe your tools should be open source

The bottom line: Harvest is a $10.80/user tax on time tracking. Miru gives you more features for $1/member — or free for small teams. Start free today and see the difference.