Harvest charges agencies twice — once for Harvest Pro and again for Harvest Forecast — and still doesn't give you margin reporting. Tempough Team bundles forecasting + cost rates + approvals + time-off into one $11/seat plan.
Agencies live or die on three numbers: utilization, capacity, and effective hourly rate. Harvest tracks the first one acceptably but punts on the other two — capacity planning lives in a separate $5/seat product (Harvest Forecast) and effective hourly rate isn't computed at all because there's no cost-rate concept. That means agencies running Harvest typically also pay for Forecast + something like Float for resourcing + a spreadsheet for margin math. Tempough collapses that stack into one Team plan: Schedule for capacity, cost rates per person and per role for true profitability, approvals routed through the org chart, and time-off requests that decrement capacity automatically. The result: monthly close runs from one workspace, with one set of numbers, at half the per-seat cost of the Harvest + Forecast bundle.
Not a generic critique — the specific places agencies typically run into the wall.
If you want capacity planning alongside time tracking — and most agencies do — Harvest splits it into two purchases and two interfaces. Tempough's Schedule (forecasting) is built into Team at the same $11/seat with tighter integration: time-off requests deduct capacity automatically, forecast-vs-actual variance is computed without an integration step.
Harvest tracks revenue per project but has no concept of internal cost rates, so it can't tell you whether a project actually made money. For an agency, that's the single most important number you're measuring. Tempough's Margin (P&L) reports include OT-aware cost math at Team.
Harvest approvals exist but timesheets fanout to anyone with the approve permission. Tempough has a direct-manager field per user, so submissions route to the right person automatically — important when your agency has 5+ approvers across account teams.
The new usage fees on top of seat pricing mean your annual SaaS quote to the partners is suddenly a moving target. Tempough is flat per-seat with no usage layer — predictable for budgeting, no surprises at renewal.
The same surface, audience-tailored to what agencies actually need.
Apples-to-apples: Harvest Pro + Harvest Forecast = $18.75/seat/mo before any usage fee. Tempough Team is $11/seat/mo with the same combined feature set plus margin reporting Harvest doesn't have. A 15-seat agency saves $1,395/year.
Recurring monthly retainers + one-off ad-hoc charges live alongside your project-based invoicing. Each retainer can have a fixed hourly budget so you see when a client is burning through their bucket faster than expected. No bolt-on retainer tool.
A workspace-level overtime threshold (default 40h/week) and multiplier (default 1.5x) feed margin reports automatically. Per-user OT-eligibility exempts salaried-exempt staff and 1099 contractors. At approval time the OT snapshot is frozen on the timesheet, so historic margin reports stay reproducible after rate changes.
Organize staff into teams ("Acme Account", "Brand Team") and slice utilization + margin + forecast by team. A team lead role can see their own team's aggregates without seeing the full agency. Harvest has no equivalent.
The full agency surface — forecasting, cost rates, approvals, time-off, team reports. Most agencies stay on Team. Team Pro adds branded invoices, document distribution, and team groupings; pick it once you cross 15-20 seats or want the document-distribution workflow.
Why teams leave Harvest, audience-agnostic.
Audience-specific tour of the feature surface.
Step-by-step walkthrough — most teams finish in under an hour.
Two-week trial. No credit card. Full feature set.