Maybe you’ve tracked projects in EARLY for years. Maybe your team works with TimeTac. Or maybe you’re simply looking for the right time tracking tool. Either way, here’s what happened, why the two fit together, and what it means for you.
The short version, depending on where you’re coming from.
You use EARLY: Right now, nothing changes. Same app, same login at product.early.app, same features, same price, and your Tracker keeps working. The whole EARLY team moved over to TimeTac, support included, so you’ll hear from the same people as before.
You use TimeTac: Nothing changes for you either. Your account, your plan and your contacts stay exactly as they are. What’s new is a bigger team behind the product, including people who have spent years expanding what project time tracking can do.
You’re new here: Welcome, glad you found us. Start with TimeTac. You get employee time tracking, project time tracking with all EARLY features and leave management in one place. Try TimeTac free for 30 days.
When anything about your account does changes, you’ll hear it from us directly by email, with plenty of notice. Not from a banner, and not from a blog post.
What actually happened.
It sounds like the classic acquisition story: a bigger company acquires a smaller one, the product gets integrated, and eventually, not much is left of the original company.
With TimeTac and EARLY, the story is a little different. Both were founded in Graz, Austria – just a few kilometres apart – and spent years approaching the same question from different angles: Where does our working time actually go, and how can we track it without turning time tracking into a chore?
Along the way, they built two very different solutions. And that’s exactly what makes the combination so interesting.
The entire EARLY team has since joined TimeTac, bringing us to just over 100 people. And now, that change is becoming more visible: new EARLY sign-ups start at TimeTac, and early.app now leads to our website.
Two products, two sides of time tracking.
The two products complement each other because they solve different problems.
EARLY is built for project time tracking. It tracks automatically in the background, captures billable hours you can defend in front of a client, and shows you where a project quietly lost its margin.
TimeTac focuses on employee time tracking and leave management. Legally compliant working-time records, clocking in and out for teams in the office, on site or in the field, leave approvals that don’t live in a spreadsheet. TimeTac is particularly strong where things get complex: collective agreements, custom working-time models, overtime rules and premium rates for night, weekend or public holiday work – rules that vary by country, industry and sometimes even from one employee to the next.
Many growing companies need both: reliable employee time tracking and a way to understand where that time goes across projects. Until now, that often meant buying two separate tools and trying to make them work together. That’s the gap the combination of EARLY and TimeTac is designed to close.
TimeTac has been doing this since 2009 and is used daily by around 150,000 people at more than 10,000 companies across 30+ countries. That’s a lot of working hours – and a lot of edge cases we’ve already learned how to handle.
Shared values matter more than a shared feature list.
Products are easy to compare. Values take longer to spot, and they matter more. Neither company ever built surveillance software, and neither was going to start. We both believe tracking time should take seconds a day, that people should be able to see their own numbers, and that the point of measuring time is to spend it better, not to police it.
That’s what made this feel less like an acquisition and more like an obvious fit.
“Our strengths fit together like two pieces of a puzzle: we spent years making project time tracking effortless, TimeTac spent even longer making employee time tracking reliable. Together, that’s a platform that supports the way people actually work today and manages to stay simple while doing it.”
Manuel Zoderer, Co-founder of EARLY
Where we go from here.
EARLY set out to make tracking time so easy that people would actually do it. TimeTac set out to make working-time records reliable, compliant and fair, even when the rules get complicated. Neither goal has changed, and neither has the team behind them.
What’s new is the shared foundation: EARLY’s knack for effortless project time tracking meets more than fifteen years of experience in the parts of time tracking nobody finds glamorous but every business needs. Both flow into TimeTac, the platform we’re continuing to develop together.
Already with EARLY or TimeTac? There’s nothing you need to do. Keep tracking.
New here? Start where the whole picture lives: Try TimeTac free.
