A Hubstaff alternative that cannot take a screenshot.
Hubstaff is a time tracker. It bills clients, runs payroll, follows field staff by GPS, and can be configured to capture the screen. MunkiSee does one narrower thing: it reports whether a device is active, idle or offline, and it has no capability to look at what is on the screen at all.
Which is better depends entirely on the question you are trying to answer, so this page starts by telling you when to buy the other one.
- You pay people, or bill clients, directly from tracked hours.
- You need time attributed to projects and tasks, not just to a working day.
- You manage field or mobile staff and need location, not desk presence.
- Your fleet includes Macs, Linux machines or phones.
- You have decided you want screenshots, and your workforce has accepted that.
- The question is "is this person at their machine and working", not "how many hours do I owe them".
- You want an answer you can defend to staff, a union, or a privacy officer.
- Your fleet is Windows, including shared kiosks and terminals nobody logs hours against.
- You need the data to stay on your own infrastructure.
- You want a rollout that does not require a company-wide meeting first.
What each one records
This is the whole difference, so it goes first. Hubstaff's more invasive capabilities are configurable and many teams switch them off — but they exist, which means someone has to keep deciding, and your staff have to believe the decision.
| Capability | MunkiSee | Hubstaff |
|---|---|---|
| Screen capture | Not possible The agent has no screen-reading code in it. There is no setting to turn on. |
Optional Screenshots at configurable intervals; can be blurred or disabled per team. |
| Keystroke content | Never | Not captured Keyboard and mouse rates feed an activity percentage; the keys themselves are not logged. |
| Which apps and websites a person uses | Not recorded MunkiSee does not know what is open. It knows the machine is being used. |
Optional App and URL tracking, reportable per person. |
| Location tracking | No | Yes GPS and geofencing on mobile — a real strength for field teams. |
| Per-person productivity score | No Deliberate. A percentage invites a manager to act on a number that cannot tell thinking from idling. |
Yes Activity levels derived from input rates. |
| Real-time presence | Yes Active, idle or offline across the fleet, refreshed every 5 minutes. |
Yes |
| Tracking limited to defined hours | Yes Set at organisation, team or individual level. Outside them nothing is recorded at all. |
Via schedules |
| Visible status to the person being measured | Always A tray icon that reflects the real state, permanently. It cannot be hidden. |
Depends on install mode |
| Timesheets, invoicing and payroll | No Export CSV or PDF and take it to your payroll system. |
Yes The core of the product. |
| Platforms | Windows only | Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android |
| Self-hosting | Yes, on Enterprise Activity data never leaves your infrastructure. Offline builds for air-gapped sites. |
Cloud only |
| Multi-tenant management for MSPs | Professional and above | Organisations, not true tenancy |
The activity percentage is the real difference
Hubstaff's headline number is an activity level: how often the keyboard and mouse moved during a tracked interval, expressed as a percentage. It is a reasonable proxy for typing, and a poor one for working. Reading a contract, thinking about an architecture, being on a call with a customer and taking no notes — all of it scores badly.
Once that number exists, someone will manage to it. MunkiSee deliberately has no equivalent. It reports presence and idle time against hours you defined, and it says plainly when time is unexplained rather than guessing at a score. What you do with that is a conversation, not a ranking.
Devices nobody logs hours against
A time tracker assumes a person who starts a timer. Half of a typical fleet does not work that way: reception kiosks, warehouse terminals, meeting-room machines, shift PCs shared by twelve people. MunkiSee licences a device, not a timesheet, so those machines are measured the same as everything else — which is also how you find the six terminals nobody has touched in a month.
Where Hubstaff wins, honestly
If money flows out of the tracked hours — contractor invoices, client billing, payroll — Hubstaff does that end to end and MunkiSee does not do it at all. If your team is on Macs, MunkiSee is not a candidate today. If you manage people who are not at a desk, GPS is the feature you actually need and we do not have it.
Switching to us to save a dollar a seat while losing your billing pipeline would be a bad trade, and we would rather say so here than three weeks into a trial.
Retention, by plan
Old activity is rolled into hourly summaries and the raw events are deleted, so trends survive and the detail does not linger.
Try it against your own fleet
30 days, up to 10 seats, silent install through Intune, SCCM or one command line. No card.
Start a free trialQuestions people ask before switching
Can I import my Hubstaff history?
No. The two products measure different things, so a merged history would imply a continuity that is not real. Run both for a fortnight if you need the overlap, then keep your Hubstaff export as an archive.
Will staff know MunkiSee is installed?
Yes, permanently — the tray icon shows the real tracking state and cannot be hidden by an administrator. That is a design decision, not an oversight. Covert monitoring is also restricted by law in several Australian states.
Can I still catch mouse jigglers?
Yes. Standard and above flag the input signatures typical of jigglers and auto-clickers — the case where "active" may not mean a person. It is raised as a signal to look into, not an accusation on a dashboard.
What does it cost?
Per seat, per month, in Australian dollars, with every plan on the pricing page. One seat is one monitored device. We do not publish other vendors' prices here — check theirs directly, they change.
Comparison reviewed August 2026 against Hubstaff's publicly available product documentation. Hubstaff is a trademark of its owner and is used here only to identify the product being compared; MunkiSee is not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Products change — verify anything that matters to your decision on the vendor's own site, and tell us if something here has gone out of date.
See your fleet without watching your staff.
Install it on ten machines this afternoon and decide from your own data.