ActivTrak and Teramind are two workforce analytics platforms that can help businesses boost their workforce productivity and enhance data security. Both offer somewhat similar capabilities, but there are some stark differences between the two that organizations should know.
ActivTrak enhances productivity through workflow optimization and performance visibility, while Teramind combines productivity tracking with insider threat detection and behavioral analytics.
In this guide, we explain both software in detail, covering their main features, pros and cons, pricing, and more to help you understand which platform best fits your team’s productivity and security needs.
ActivTrak is a workforce analytics software that offers solutions for employee monitoring, workforce planning, and productivity management. It does so with the help of numerous features, such as real-time visibility, activity logs, website blocking, screenshots, and more. Managers and team leaders needing assistance with finance, operations, and IT can use this platform to identify workflow inefficiencies, boost employee productivity, and cut costs.
Unique Features Of ActivTrak
Capacity And Headcount Planning: Provides managers with data to make informed headcount decisions.
Impact Analysis: Enables organizations to conduct before-and-after analysis and A/B tests to see how changes affect their teams.
Workload Balance: Allows managers to avoid burnout by re-engaging quiet-quitters and utilizing under-worked employees.
Benchmarks And Goals: Lets employers create goals to encourage and motivate their employees to perform better.
Pros And Cons Of ActivTrak
Pros:
Gives clear visibility into how employees are spending their time.
Helps employers spot productivity patterns and any issues employees are facing.
Reports are easy to understand and share, making performance efficient.
Cons:
Can be overwhelming for some users due to the massive amount of data.
It only shows the activity of an employee, not the purpose behind that activity.
What Is Teramind?
Teramind is also a workforce analytics platform that offers tools for enhancing productivity, but its main differentiator is that it leans more into dealing with insider risk. It offers solutions for employee monitoring, productivity, cybersecurity, and business process optimization. Organizations that operate in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare and banking, can benefit from it as it offers some unique features, like advanced behavior analytics and sentiment analysis. These features can significantly reduce the chances of data breaches.
Unique Features Of Teramind
Keystroke Logging: Enables managers to track and log employee keystrokes, providing them with an indexed, searchable content.
Hidden Agent: Silently runs in the background to monitor employees when they log in to their systems.
Sentiment Analysis: Helps administrators detect toxic and harmful language, enabling them to be proactive and take necessary action.
Data Loss Prevention: Allows businesses to prevent data exfiltration by monitoring employee behavior.
Pros And Cons Of Teramind
Pros:
It makes it easy to track and analyze employee activity.
Users can watch live and recorded feeds to see what employees are doing or what they were doing earlier.
Its behavior alerts and customizable policies help managers track potential risky behavior and monitor employee communication.
Cons:
Features are limited on macOS, which can be an issue for organizations using these devices.
It’s hard to see exactly when an app was opened, used, or closed.
ActivTrak Vs Teramind – Key Features Comparison
Employee Monitoring
ActivTrak’s monitoring tools are primarily aimed at maintaining schedule adherence and ensuring shift coverage. The software lets managers detect behavior patterns, like late departures, extended breaks, and late starts, helping them boost productivity while ensuring the workload is fairly divided among employees.
Moreover, the software also helps identify if any employee is using mouse jigglers or any tool to mimic being active. This allows administration to pinpoint employees who try to misrepresent active time during their working hours.
Teramind, on the other hand, focuses more on eliminating insider risks. The platform offers time-stamped screen recordings that provide clear forensic evidence during investigations, helping organizations maintain compliance and strengthen data protection protocols.
Administrators can also view an employee’s usage of different websites and applications. They can also have control over who can use these websites and to what extent, further ensuring data security.
Our Verdict: Teramind wins as it delivers deeper security controls, forensic evidence, and stronger insider threat protection.
Time Tracking
ActivTrak offers a live report of employee working hours. Employers can use this report to view a number of metrics, such as screen time, passive time, productive time, and more. With its ‘Activity Alignment’ feature, managers can also gain insights into core and non-core activities by the hour of the day. This provides them with pinpoint data about how their employees spend their time while on the job.
Teramind automatically tracks work hours, idle time, and breaks, giving managers essential data without them having to track employees manually. Businesses can also compare the time spent on different projects against project estimates to analyze total cost and resources spent on a project.
Managers can also create detailed reports on time utilization, helping them identify areas that can be improved. These reports can even be categorized by department or team, which further boosts the impact of these reports.
Our Verdict: Teramind wins since it allows users to not only track time but also help them tie time data to project estimates and costs.
Productivity Management
ActivTrak equips organizations with a range of productivity dashboards that show live data on the number of employees who are active, inactive, and passive. This shows managers when their employees are the most productive and what factors contribute to it. The dashboards also show if all the departments in a company have achieved the productivity organizational goal for a day, allowing managers to keep track of improvements daily and see if their initiatives are driving results.
Moreover, the software offers ‘Productivity Coaching’, which helps managers become more effective coaches in helping employees be more productive and empowers employees to work on their professional development.
Teramind helps managers identify top-performers and model their work patterns for other employees to boost overall workforce productivity.
It also automatically generates reports and metrics on team productivity and efficiency, allowing them to make better decisions for increasing employee output. Additionally, its behavior analytics tool helps identify productivity trends and minimize wasted efforts, ultimately leading to more efficient processes.
Our Verdict: ActivTrak wins due to its dedicated productivity dashboards and built-in ‘Productivity Coaching’ go beyond reporting.
Location Adherence
ActivTrak offers a single report to help businesses ensure their employees adhere to location-specific policies without needing GPS. Managers can get access to metrics, like location breakdown by week, productivity by location, and average start and end of the day by location. These metrics help administrators analyze productivity trends across environments and make informed hybrid work and return-to-office decisions.
This report also presents separate sections for employees who are working in a remote, hybrid, or on-site setting, allowing managers to be more precise when tracking employees and their compliance with the company’s policies.
Teramind lets organizations turn on geolocation for all or some employees, helping them track employee engagement and productivity, which allows them to analyze factors that contribute to more efficiency.
Organizations can also gather and utilize data from these tools to decide if they should go with a hybrid, totally remote, or an on-site model.
Our Verdict: ActivTrak takes the lead here as it provides detailed location-based productivity insights without requiring GPS tracking, making it less intrusive.
Alerts And Alarms
ActivTrak offers a simple alert mechanism for when an employee tries to mimic being active by using tools like mouse jigglers. By getting an instant alert, managers can respond quickly to ensure their productivity metrics are accurate and operations are efficient. On top of that, it also sends alerts when assigned shifts aren’t covered for any reason, enabling teams to fill the gap in time and avoid a dip in team productivity.
Teramind couples alerts with smart rules to enhance platform security rather than focusing more on boosting productivity. Managers can create rules to block, notify, log out, redirect, or even lock out an employee when they take actions that are considered big offenses or are in violation of company policies.
Administrators can use Teramind’s rule templates for automated compliance-related dataset rules and alerts that can help them configure rules faster. These alerts can be set for a number of user behaviors, such as adding the company’s field data in custom apps, using restricted applications for communication, and attempting to use blocked websites.
Our Verdict: It’s a tie as both software offer reliable alerts and alarm features for different requirements. ActivTrak focuses more on notifying employers when certain actions reduce team productivity. Whereas Teramind notifies employers when certain actions pose a threat to company data and security.
Pricing Comparison
ActivTrak Pricing
ActivTrak offers four plans, which are billed annually, along with a 14-day free trial. Here are the details:
Free - $0/user/month
Essentials - $10/user/month
Essentials Plus - $15/user/month
Professional - $19/user/month
Disclaimer: The pricing is subject to change.
Teramind Pricing
Teramind offers four plans, all with a requirement of a minimum of 5 seats and a free trial. Here are the plan details:
Starter - $15/seat/month
UAM - $30/seat/month
DLP - $35/seat/month
Enterprise – Custom pricing
Disclaimer: The pricing is subject to change.
Final Verdict – Which HR Software Is Better?
It depends on what you want out of the software. Both platforms are great at what they are designed for. We recommend you identify the exact problems you want solved and then compare both software to see which one solves them the best.
In general, ActivTrak could be a good option for you if you just want to improve overall workforce productivity and efficiency with strong employee monitoring tools. Teramind could be a good option if you want to boost employee productivity, but also want a strong platform to ensure compliance, strengthen data security, and prevent system breaches.
