Sumhour vs Harvest: a Harvest alternative for agencies

What will approvals and margin reports cost an agency of 8? Billed monthly, Harvest Enterprise starts at $140 a month. Sumhour Studio is $79 a month and includes timesheet approvals and profitability reports. That is $61 a month less, before taxes or Harvest’s usage charges. Try Sumhour free for 30 days, no card.

Harvest’s prices checked on its own pricing page on November 5, 2026. Harvest Teams is cheaper, $88 a month for 8 people, and already connects to accounting and payment apps, but it has no timesheet approvals or profitability reports; that is why Enterprise is the plan compared here.

Harvest is a well-known tool for tracking time and sending invoices, and a good one. If you are looking for a Harvest alternative for an agency, two things on its pricing page matter. Timesheet approvals, profitability reports, the activity log and required notes on time entries are only on its Enterprise plan, which is priced per seat. They all work during a Harvest trial, so a team can come to rely on them before it sees which plan they need. On top of the seat price, extra invoices, projects, clients and tasks are billed by use, and the pricing page does not list what those cost.

Sumhour charges one price for the workspace, set by team size, with every feature in every plan. Here is how the two compare for an agency of 5 to 20 people.

What you pay at your team size

Harvest Enterprise is the plan with what every Sumhour plan has (approvals, profitability, the activity log), so it is the one to compare. Harvest Teams costs less and leaves those out.

Per month, in USD. Harvest Enterprise: $17.50 per seat billed monthly, $14 billed annually, plus usage charges for additional invoices, projects, clients and tasks. Harvest Teams is $11 per seat ($9 annually). Sumhour: Studio covers up to 10 people, Agency up to 25; nothing is billed by use.

See what comes over from Harvest · Start a free trial, no card

Which plan has which feature

* From Harvest’s help center, read through search results because its help pages block automated reading; check with Harvest if you rely on one of these. "Not documented" means we found nothing on Harvest’s own pages, not that it cannot be done.

Where Harvest is ahead

• Phone and desktop apps in the app stores. Sumhour runs in the browser and installs as an app on phones and computers; its extension is in the Chrome Web Store.
• More integrations, ready today. Harvest Teams already connects to QuickBooks Online, Xero, Stripe and PayPal. Sumhour Cloud connects to 11 payment providers, Slack, webhooks and AI apps today; QuickBooks Online, Xero, Google Calendar, GitHub, Zapier, Make and n8n open on Sumhour Cloud at launch (what is ready when).
• More reporting and planning: dashboards with charts, a custom report builder, recurring time entries, a calendar view and time-off tracking. Harvest also has its own Claude connector and a ChatGPT app.
• A free plan for one person. Sumhour’s smallest plan, Solo, is $19 a month after a 30-day trial.
• Many years in use. Sumhour is new, so you will meet rough edges sooner, and you can write to the person who builds it.

Where Sumhour is different

• The price follows your team size, not each seat and each invoice, so the bill stays the same when you send more invoices or open more projects.
• Approvals, the activity log and required notes are in every plan, so what you set up in the trial keeps working when you start paying.
• Margin is in every plan: each client and project shows revenue against what the time cost (profitability).
• Agency billing in one place: retainers with rollover and overage, fixed fees with a deposit and milestones, change orders the client accepts online, and a month-end page that drafts every invoice at once.
• Clients pay into your own account through Stripe, PayPal, Mollie, GoCardless, Razorpay, Paystack, Flutterwave, SSLCommerz and others, with no Sumhour fee (online payments).
• The licence is AGPL-3.0, and the code goes public with the launch; self-hosting opens then. See open-source options.

Moving from Harvest

Sumhour imports your Harvest clients, projects, tasks, people, time, expenses and invoices through Harvest’s API, each entry at the rate Harvest recorded on it. A dry run counts everything first, running the import again adds nothing twice, and work Harvest already billed stays billed. See importing from Harvest. You can run both side by side during the 30-day trial before you move any billing.

Some things are set up again in Sumhour: retainers, since Harvest’s retainer definitions do not come across, and the approval history, since weeks arrive open (locked entries stay locked). Harvest’s roles, departments and employee ids are left out, and current rates start on the import date because Harvest keeps no rate history.

Other comparisons

• Sumhour vs Toggl Track
• Open-source options: Kimai, solidtime, Invoice Ninja

Sources

• Harvest plans, prices, usage charges and plan features: getharvest.com/pricing, read November 5, 2026.
• Harvest e-invoicing: getharvest.com/e-invoicing, read November 5, 2026.
• Harvest help center, read through search results on November 5, 2026: milestone payments, fixed fee and hourly, retainers, uninvoiced report, write-offs, transaction fees, QuickBooks Online, Xero, MCP.
• Harvest change order template: getharvest.com/contracts/change-order-template.
• Sumhour plans: sumhour.com pricing.