ActivTrak - Review 2022

ActivTrak is an intuitive and affordable employee monitoring solution that's well suited to small to midsize businesses (SMBs) particularly in the electric current remote work climate. Focused on monitoring employee's time as well as productivity, ActivTrak simplifies a lot of the complexities of employee monitoring and reframes these under the banner of keeping employees, groups, and projects on rails.

This Software-equally-a-Service (SaaS) solution is served up via the Google Deject Platform and every bit such, can leverage a lot of Google'south native capabilities effectually big data analytics, bogus intelligence (AI), and security. The analytics-driven insights allow managers some latitude in making quick adjustments based on real fourth dimension employee data. ActivTrak's dashboard is among the easiest to understand even though drilling in and determining what activities are productive or non-productive can be quite tedious, specially for larger companies. Managers will appreciate ActivTrak's time-tracking functionality that complements its deep tracking feature. This 1-two dial of comprehensive time tracking and analytics earns ActivTrak an Editors' Pick nod, along with Teramind and Veriato Cognitive.

ActivTrak sports a sleek and responsive UI. It offers easy agent installation and detailed and authentic, productivity-focused reports and alerting on par with what you'd go from a business organisation intelligence (BI) tool. It consists of a solid cadre of monitoring tools and features congenital for information access command and user privacy. Because of these features, ActivTrak's approach to employee monitoring is less heavy handed towards employees. While it is just incisive and comprehensive as nearly other solutions, the focus on improving productivity is something employees tin easily get behind. It is certainly a friendly alternative to enterprise monitoring platforms such as StaffCop Enterprise and even Teramind. It is the best of the products nosotros tested, with a clear focus on employee productivity and team beliefs analytics.

Pricing and Setup

ActivTrak starts off by offer a freemium option for monitoring of up to three workstations with three gigabytes (GB) of storage. The costless plan (which does include ads in the UI) also comes with unlimited account IDs, activity log CSV export, HDD-based data storage, 1 screenshot per activity, as well as access to the existent-time view and website blocking.

The Advanced programme costs $7.20 per user per month on an annual contract and includes all the features nearly midsized to larger companies will need, like multiple screenshot alarms, unlimited information storage, the remote Windows installer, SSD-based information storage, and email back up with no ads to name merely a few. This tier can also adjust unlimited users. Other features exclusive to the advanced plan include remote install, action and user risk scoring, USB and file transfer detection, and single sign-on (SSO) functionality. You also get access to grouping-based classification and team productivity pulse analytics for measuring productivity. The focus on productivity measurement continues with productivity, working hours, and grouping reporting report options. The Advanced tier also provides integration with Slack and Microsoft Teams and improved data export options including pre-built business intelligence (BI) dashboard for Tableau and Microsoft PowerBI (which are bachelor via an add-on). The Avant-garde tier likewise provides multiple screenshots and the choice of Redaction via an add-on.

ActivTrak'south Add-on Features, for which it bills separately, include things like video playback, screenshot flagging, screenshot redaction, and raw data access. Features like these might be included in more than comprehensive employee monitoring solutions, but having them every bit an selection for ActivTrak does bring downward the toll. You'll need to discuss exact pricing with an ActivTrak rep and whatever you choose to add together will exist tacked into your annual beak as these features are just available to annual subscribers. That'southward a lilliputian less flexible than when we first looked at ActivTrak, merely it withal offers far more affordable pricing schemes for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) than the hefty enterprise pricing of a tool, such as Veriato Cerebral.

Signing up for a trial business relationship gets yous fourteen-day access to ActivTrak's premium features including 100 users and unlimited storage, productivity views by groups and team, security audit logs, activity risk assessment and integration with BI tools for deeper assessments. Assistance is easily attainable through a chatbot window at the lower correct side of the screen as well as a link to the help center. Starting time-time users are also given the option of watching a two-minute production demo video.

ActivTrak's monitoring agent was about as like shooting fish in a barrel to install every bit Teramind. The ActivTrak tracking agent is bachelor for Windows, macOS, Chrome OS, and a Chrome browser installed on any desktop operating system (OS), including FreeBSD, Linux, and others. I tested on a Windows 10 machine, I logged into my admin account and clicked the Install Agent button on the top right-manus side. When yous first prepare an account and log in, ActivTrak gives yous a pop-up with a quick YouTube video that walks you through the agent install process.

Once downloaded, the ActivTrak installation sorcerer takes around two minutes to install. The ActivTrak agent is stealthy, which means the application and file processes have incognito names so they go unnoticed and are buried deep within your PC's registry. Monitoring happens instantaneously and in real time. Compared to the multi-stride installation and compatibility issues faced when setting up the agent in tools such every bit InterGuard, ActivTrak was much easier to get up and running.

Employee Monitoring Features

ActivTrak features the nigh intuitive user interface nosotros've seen in cloud-based employee monitoring solution and does a remarkable job of organizing data and office on a single webpage. Performance is fast, besides, which is refreshing given that some of these Software-equally-a Service (SaaS) solutions can take a while to refresh pages or reflect new dashboard views. They are dealing with live and real fourth dimension data, after all, and ActivTrak serves this upwardly speedily.

ActivTrak puts fourth dimension tracking up top, showing aggregate productive and unproductive time spent in apps and websites, though yous can hands filter the results to testify specific users or groups. Scrolling down, you'll find a option of recent employee screenshots followed past a filterable productivity bar nautical chart and user chart that breaks down productive, unproductive, and idle time. Beneath that, pie charts show a breakup of top apps and websites visited. For all apps, ActivTrak records the title bar text, just for browsers, it collects an extra information field containing the full URL. Even the way data is presented is slanted more towards productivity rather than ferreting out what could be suspicious employee activity. Unlike other dashboards which light upward with incidents and potential threats, ActivTrak's arroyo is gentler and less alarming. This counts for a lot when yous're facing this interface for hours each twenty-four hours.

You tin't customize the dashboard widgets every bit you tin can in InterGuard and Veriato Cerebral. ActivTrak also doesn't have targeted views like Teramind'south Risk and Focus dashboards. But at that place is a existent-time tab to encounter what apps and websites employees are currently using (along with device, Bone, IP address info, etc.), with the option to accept a real-time screenshot past pressing the Camera icon side by side to the user. From there, admins can fifty-fifty zoom in and read an employee'southward monitor.

The dashboard'due south charts stalk from how the software handles categories. You manage categories via the Settings tab and tin can classify apps and websites by which are productive and unproductive. But that's non all: Admins can also grouping activities by blazon, including banking, email, entertainment, games, shopping, social networking, and sports. The Categories and Productivity lists in Settings let businesses create and sort their own custom categories besides equally add or delete apps and websites manually with a simple click. The listing-based management UI is elementary merely powerful and let me add and remove websites with ease. You can too see a list of currently undefined apps and websites gear up to be sorted.

Outside of the main and existent-time dashboards, most of the more than detailed monitoring data is found in the Reports tab and the Screenshots department. As far every bit screenshots go, ActivTrak lets you see the latest screenshots by user, which I was able to click in a slideshow-similar viewer through the screenshots taken of my examination machine. You tin also look at a historical view of screenshots filtered by user, date, or productivity categories.

Simply the real-time screenshot characteristic is good for capturing photo evidence of an employee'due south work (or lack thereof) at a moment'south observe. Screenshots tin be configured on a user-by-user ground and can exist snapped every 5 seconds at a minimum. As needed, you can play, pause, or download the screenshots. Plus, yous tin can bank check a box to take multiple screenshots at a fourth dimension. One missing characteristic here is the power to blur screenshots for privacy as yous tin exercise in DeskTime Pro. But if you spring for the DLP add together-on (explained later), and so ActivTrak will take extra steps to ensure privacy of sensitive data. ActivTrak also offers an alias feature to change the name of a user in the reports you create. This same allonym can be used for multiple machines. You'll find the alias feature under Settings.

ActivTrak does not log keystrokes and this is intentional. The company says employee monitoring platforms that record keylogging are sometimes classified as malicious past antivirus programs (which I experienced, annoyingly, during installation and testing of InterGuard). Instead of recording keystrokes, ActivTrak puts greater emphasis on screenshots and does track mouse and keyboard motion (only non specific keys and commands) to decide if a user session is agile or idle. Dissimilar Teramind, nevertheless, ActivTrak lacks the adequacy to run optical character recognition (OCR) on screenshots to search images for specific keywords.

Avant-garde Analytics and Insights

Avant-garde analytics within ActivTrak are useful and manage to make sense of employee data in new ways to give businesses insights they wouldn't otherwise accept. In the Knowledge Management dashboard, managers can see what searches are coming from individuals, groups, and the visitor in general. Based on employee searches, businesses can determine if employees are looking for answers in certain areas or If they don't have the correct skills needed to consummate their work. This could brand for good coaching or learning opportunities for managers to focus on for employee evolution.

Insights from ActivTrak can decide when employees and contractors are about productive by tracking activities through time. This can be done in an individual or a group level and information technology can pertain to specific projects or deliverables. By knowing acme productivity hours, it is at present possible to plan and schedule activities appropriately to ensure optimal productivity. This aspect of ActivTrak is similar to what newcomer Workpuls offers in terms of using data to hone in on productivity.

ActivTrak is determined nigh not being but another employee monitoring solution. The company wants to focus on how they value employees as more than only surveillance targets and have thus shaped the narrative of their solution to be more about helping businesses be more productive. Vendors like ActivTrak and Workpuls, which goes a bit further and involves employees in the monitoring procedure through a desktop client they can control, stand for a welcome new mode of thinking in employee monitoring. One that's not hyper-focused on whether employees are working 9-five and staying clear of not-productive activities, merely which promotes a more inclusive and collaborative approach to productivity as a whole.

ActivTrak Reporting and Alerts

Yous can navigate to specific reports by clicking into each chart on the master dashboard. However, ActivTrak also has a list of data breakdowns in the Reports tab of its navigation menu on the left-hand side. The Top Websites, Pinnacle Applications, Meridian Categories, and Top Users reports are self-explanatory. They show you tracked productive and unproductive time atop the page and then a list of websites, apps, categories, or users, with durations and usage percentages filtered past users or computers. There are too some useful breakdowns, such equally the ability to click into subpages and page titles, search for a screenshot, or create an alarm related to the activeness entry you lot've identified.

The Productivity written report provides an attainable timestamped progress bar of employee's productivity over the course of a single solar day, calendar week, month, or even yr. Finally, there'due south the Activity Log, a comprehensive study that shows every timestamped employee action across apps, websites, and other activities with corresponding screenshots if applicative. So, if an employee spent an hour on Reddit, you can then go into subpages to run into what they were looking at or await at the unproductive activity in the larger context of their workday. All reports can either be downloaded as a CSV file or saved directly to Google Drive. When sorting and exporting report data, clicking the Columns tab on the top right-paw side lets you lot check which information fields you want your report to include.

ActivTrak doesn't have OCR keyword search for screenshots still, but it does offer keyword tracking through alerts (referred to equally Alarms). In the Alarms tab, I was able to set up notifications to trigger with some automated logic, such every bit whether a description or URL contained a specific keyword or phrase (i.e. lawsuit) or if a user executes a particular action, such every bit plugging in a USB device. After the Alarm goes off, the ActivTrak agent lets you record the amount of fourth dimension a USB device was connected.

We were able to fix our test warning to have multiple screenshots every 10 seconds if the term "chore search" came up in an employee's action, and even display a custom pop-upwards bulletin to the employee to allow them know their action is not immune (for instance, if they exceeded an allotted daily time on social media websites). ActivTrak also lets you set up both email and Webhooks notifications for any alert. Email-based reports and alerts include a Weekly Digest report of all your office activity and productivity metrics.

Productivity is the Focus

ActivTrak takes pains to avert being labeled as spyware or Big Blood brother-similar, and includes a number of features to drive that indicate home. Instead it's like a "Google Analytics for your office." In the Settings tab, I was able to gear up a custom agent schedule so that ActivTrak but monitored activities during work hours, which is particularly useful for remote workers. And the software includes both Groups and Access tabs for admins to grouping users into particular teams or departments, and then only requite managers admission to view monitoring data related to the employees they directly oversee. There's also an audit log that shows all admin and managing director action within the system and, most importantly, a Do Not Rail characteristic that will cease all monitoring on a machine even if an amanuensis is installed.

The most of import privacy feature, all the same, is if your organization springs for the DLP characteristic available as an option under the Screenshots tab. Here, ActivTrak actually lets you redact items such every bit email addresses and phone numbers, passport and credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, insurance information, and other sensitive personal and financial data so that it volition non be logged or stored. This is only bachelor in the Avant-garde plan as an improver characteristic.

ActivTrak may non offer the tracking depth of Editors' Option Teramind or other enterprise players such as InterGuard and Editor'southward Selection Veriato Cerebral, and that'south by design. The focus is on productivity rather than on surveillance or threat detection. Of the three tools we tested with a focus on productivity metrics—ActivTrak, Desktime, and Workpuls, ActivTrak is the easiest to gear up and use, It also yields a wider range of useful analytics. Overall, ActivTrak is a well-balanced solution, i that tin can embrace employee monitoring but with a gamut of privacy features, solid productivity metrics, and useful reports.

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/old-employee-monitoring-software/18470/activtrak

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