Mera Work vs Hubstaff, Time Doctor, DeskTime

If you work remotely for a foreign company, sooner or later someone sends you an installer and says "please run this while you work". It is usually a time tracker that also takes screenshots. This guide compares four of them, Mera Work, Hubstaff, Time Doctor and DeskTime, from both sides: what the company pays and gets, and what the tool records about you.

Disclosure: this is a sponsored piece. Mera Work links on this page are affiliate links and we may earn a commission. Every fact below comes from the vendors' own pages, read on 25 October 2026, and the same criteria are applied to all four tools.

Which of these trackers do remote job ads actually ask for?

We searched the full descriptions of the 43,773 remote job ads in the Loker Dollar database for each tool's name (25 October 2026).

• Hubstaff: 18 ads from 8 employers named it as the tool you will track time in. These include a USD-paid AI data contributor role open to Indonesians ("jam kerja dilacak via Hubstaff"), healthcare and accounting roles at a US staffing company, and creative roles at an EU e-commerce group. Two more ads were Hubstaff hiring for itself and are not counted.
• Time Doctor: 1 employer ad asked for it. Every other mention was Time Doctor's own job ads.
• DeskTime: 0. Mera Work: 0. (Two "mera work" hits were "camera work" and are not counted.)

So if you are job hunting, Hubstaff is the tracker you are most likely to be asked to install. If you are the employer choosing one, the job-ad count tells you what candidates already know, not which tool is best for you. The rest of this guide is about that choice.

Feature comparison matrix

Same criteria for every tool. Prices are USD per user per month from each vendor's pricing page.

Mera Work: the cheapest, with every feature in one plan

Mera Work charges $4 per user per month, or $3 billed annually. That one plan includes screenshots, app and website tracking, idle detection, attendance and reports. The other three charge 1.7 to 2.2 times as much for their entry tier, and each limits screenshots or app tracking on it. For a team of 20 on annual billing, Mera Work costs about $720 a year. Hubstaff Grow costs about $1,800, and DeskTime Premium about $2,200.

Mera Work can also run on-premise or in a private cloud, which none of the other three offer on their pricing pages. That matters if a client contract forbids sending screenshots to a third party.

What to check before buying:

• The pricing page still shows a "50% discount, valid for the month of July only" banner in October. Ask whether $4 and $3 are the discounted or the regular prices.
• The feature list includes "Stealth mode" with no description, and live screen streaming. Both are legal to use only with clear notice to staff in Indonesia (see the section on UU PDP below).
• The privacy policy cites India's DPDP Act, but does not mention GDPR or any security certification. Data is stored "in India or other jurisdictions" and kept for a rolling 90 days.
• No named integrations or payroll. If you pay contractors from tracked hours, you will export and pay them elsewhere.

Best for: small teams with a tight budget who want screenshots and app tracking without paying per feature, or companies that need to host monitoring data themselves.

Hubstaff: the one workers already know

Hubstaff starts at $4.99 billed annually, with a two-seat minimum. Its main strength for teams with Indonesian contractors is that it turns approved timesheets into payouts through Wise, Payoneer, PayPal or Deel, in several currencies. Full payments are on the Team plan ($10 annual); Starter and Grow are limited. Indonesia is not named on the payroll page, so confirm your payout route works for IDR.

For the worker it is the most open of the four. Hubstaff says it never uses the webcam or records video, and workers see the same screenshots and activity as their manager. They can also delete a screenshot, which deletes the time attached to it. Starter caps screenshots and app records at 500 per seat per month.

Best for: agencies and companies paying hourly contractors abroad, and teams hiring from a pool that already uses it.

Time Doctor: the most AI and the most paperwork

Time Doctor costs $6.67 to $16.70 billed annually. It has the most developed AI layer of the four: you can ask questions about tracked time, and an agent drafts follow-ups for a manager to approve. It also holds SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 and keeps EU and UK customer data in EU and UK data centres.

It is also the only one of the four that records screen video (Premium, or a $3 add-on). Its FAQ says "advanced capture" can include "more detailed input data" without defining it, and workers can delete their own screenshots only if an admin enables it. Mobile apps are a manual timer only.

Best for: larger companies that need audit-ready compliance documents and AI reporting, and can justify the higher price.

DeskTime: EU-hosted with the gentlest defaults

DeskTime costs $6.42 or $9.17 billed annually, excluding VAT. It is run by a Latvian company and stores data in Germany and Ireland under GDPR. Screenshots are off by default and need the Premium plan. Every worker gets their own dashboard, and can mark a period as "Private time" to pause tracking. Its AI is a daily summary.

It has no payroll or payouts. It is also the only one that records document titles, which can include email subject lines.

Best for: EU companies, and teams that want time tracking first and screenshots only when needed.

What Indonesian privacy law says about tracking you

Indonesia's personal data protection law (UU No. 27/2022, UU PDP) has applied in full since 17 October 2024. Four parts matter here:

• You must be told. When monitoring relies on consent, the employer must explain what is collected, why, and for how long (Art. 21), and the consent must be written or recorded (Art. 22). Hidden or "stealth" tracking sits badly with this.
• Systematic monitoring needs an impact assessment. Art. 34(2) makes a data protection impact assessment mandatory for "pemantauan yang sistematis" (systematic monitoring) and for scoring. Productivity scores fall in scope.
• You have rights over the data. Access and a copy (Art. 7), deletion (Art. 8) and objection to decisions made only by automated processing (Art. 10). Tools that show workers their own data make these easier to honour.
• Data leaving Indonesia. All four vendors store data outside Indonesia (India, the US, several regions, or the EU). Art. 56 allows transfer only to countries with equal or higher protection, or with safeguards.

This is general information, not legal advice. The law applies to the company processing the data. If your employer is foreign, ask HR which privacy rules they follow.

Which should you pick?

• Lowest cost, all features, or self-hosting: Mera Work. Ask for the current price in writing and turn on clear notices for staff.
• Paying hourly contractors in Indonesia: Hubstaff.
• Enterprise compliance and AI reporting: Time Doctor.
• EU data residency and light-touch tracking: DeskTime.

If you are the one being tracked, ask three questions before you install anything: what does it capture, can I see it, and who stores it where. For remote roles that pay in dollars, browse Loker Dollar's job feed.

How we researched this

We read every price and feature above on each vendor's own pricing, feature, FAQ, privacy and help pages on 25 October 2026, and saved a web archive copy of each pricing page that day. Where a vendor does not say something, the matrix says "not stated" instead of guessing. G2 and Capterra pages could not be fetched, so we did not use review-site ratings. The UU PDP articles come from the official text published by JDIH BPK. The job-ad counts come from a text search of the 43,773 remote job ads in the Loker Dollar database on 25 October 2026, with every match checked by hand. Prices change, so confirm current terms with each vendor.