Toggl 2.0 tracks your capacity, your profitability, and what to take on next. It does not track what your billable hours cost you to work. The EMRALD extension for Toggl adds that missing number: rate each session in about fifteen seconds inside your existing Toggl workflow, and see which billable hours are quietly draining you before the invoice tells you they were fine.
If you run Toggl 2.0 for planning and billing, this page is about the one number its dashboards were never built to show.
Toggl 2.0 launched June 8, 2026, at focus.toggl.com, built on the Toggl Track foundation. Track is still supported. Toggl 2.0 is the forward direction: a planning and capacity tool layered on top of time tracking, what the company calls "time intelligence." Its own launch announcement frames the pitch directly: making time data answer harder questions, capacity, profitability, what to take on next.
Pricing: Free covers up to 3 users, with manual and real-time timers, focus mode, calendar integrations, simple task and board planning, and personal-level reports. Starter runs $9 per license per month. Premium runs $16 per license per month and adds labor cost and profitability reports, utilization and workload reports, project dashboards with time actuals against estimates and smart forecasts, plus Jira sync and Asana integration. All paid plans include a 30-day trial. Toggl reports 600k active users across its product line as of its own about page.
The capacity view shows who's overbooked, who's free, PTO, holidays, and flexible hours. The profitability reports show billable rates, fixed fees, and labor costs. Toggl's own product copy even names the risk directly: its task management page talks about spotting imbalances early, adjusting "before deadlines slip or burnout hits." That line sits inside a scheduling feature. It describes a risk. It doesn't measure it.
Toggl's blog goes further than its product does. A post on project time management states plainly that "some clients, services, or deliverables take significantly more effort than they're worth." Its RAFT philosophy post says the company doesn't believe in "getting the work done at the cost of your mental and physical health and wellbeing," and that time tracking is how it defends against overwork. Both are honest observations about a real problem. Neither is a feature. Toggl 2.0's dashboards show capacity, budget, and schedule. None of them show what any of those hours actually took out of the person working them.
EMRALD is a measurement layer, the effort ledger for the tools you already use. It doesn't plan your capacity and doesn't compete with Toggl's scheduling or billing. You start a session tied to a project, do your work, and then stop it. Stopping triggers a short effort receipt, five questions, roughly ten to fifteen seconds, rated against one of four built-in effort levels (E1 through E4). Those receipts, collected over time, build your personally calibrated effort-cost model.
Twenty metrics sit across four categories: Effort, Calibration, Productivity, and Energy. The free tier includes the first eight, plus burnout warnings. The Burnout Monitor runs free on every plan with no paywall, identical math whether you pay or not. Pro, at $5 a month or $42 a year, opens the rest: twelve more metrics, custom effort levels, and the full insight engine.
The EMRALD extension for Toggl connects the two directly. It puts the effort receipt inside your existing Toggl session, so rating a block of billable work doesn't mean leaving Toggl to do it. The extension's Trends view charts the combined numbers over time, right in the popup: how much of your tracked time is billable, what a point of your effort earns, and how heavy this week is against your normal. EMRALD only ever sees session data, never the content of your notes or work.
A question list, because Toggl 2.0 and EMRALD are answering different questions rather than competing in the same category.
| Question | Toggl 2.0 | EMRALD |
|---|---|---|
| What's my capacity this week? | Capacity view: overbooked, free, PTO, flexible hours | — |
| Is the project on budget and on schedule? | Project dashboards, forecasts, actuals vs. estimates | — |
| Which hours are billable? | Billable/non-billable, profitability and utilization reports | — |
| What did those billable hours cost me in effort? | — | Calibrated effort rating, E1 to E4, via the Toggl extension |
| Am I heading toward burnout? | Not measured, but named as a risk in scheduling copy | Burnout Monitor, free on every plan |
| What's my flow quality? | Pomodoro timer only | Flow tracking and scoring |
| What tools does it sit inside? | Web, desktop, mobile, Jira sync, Asana and calendar integrations | Obsidian plugin, web app, and the EMRALD extension for Toggl |
Toggl 2.0 owns the schedule, the budget, and the invoice. EMRALD owns what running that schedule costs the person running it. The two tables don't overlap.
Choose Toggl 2.0 if your problem is capacity and budget. If you need to know who's overbooked, whether a project is tracking to schedule, and which hours you can invoice, Toggl 2.0's dashboards are built exactly for that, and its profitability reports do real work for a team or a solo operator managing client load.
Choose EMRALD if the budget question is already answered and a different one keeps showing up: a week that hits every capacity target and stays on budget can still leave you running on empty, with nothing in Toggl's reports explaining why. That gap is structural. A capacity view measures scheduling pressure. It was never built to measure how the work felt to do.
Combine them if you want the complete number. Plan and bill in Toggl 2.0. Rate each session's effort through the EMRALD extension as you work. At the end of the week, compare Toggl's billable-hour and profitability breakdown against EMRALD's effort and recovery data, and ask which clients or project types cost the most effort per billable hour. That comparison doesn't exist inside either tool alone.
Toggl 2.0's own framing is fair: capacity, profitability, what to take on next. Agreed, as far as it goes. What that framing leaves out is what your billable hours cost you to produce. A fully booked, fully profitable week and a week that quietly wrecked you can look identical on a Toggl dashboard, because neither capacity nor profitability was built to record the weight of felt effort.
Toggl's own writing already names the underlying problem. Its blog says some clients cost more in effort than they're worth, and its RAFT philosophy explicitly argues against paying for results with health. Those are the right instincts. The product just has nowhere to put them. EMRALD is that place: a second ledger that runs alongside Toggl's planning and billing and tracks the side of the work Toggl's own dashboards were never built to show.
Install the EMRALD extension for Toggl and see the two ledgers side by side. Details and setup on the integrations page.
No. Toggl 2.0 measures capacity, schedule, and billable hours through its planning and profitability reports. It has no calibrated effort measurement and no felt-cost metric. The EMRALD extension for Toggl adds that number directly inside your Toggl workflow.
A capacity view shows scheduling pressure: who's overbooked, who's free, whether a project is on budget. An effort ledger shows what the work actually cost the person doing it, rated session by session and calibrated over time. Two billable hours can look identical on a capacity view and cost completely different amounts of effort.
Not as a measured feature. Toggl 2.0's scheduling copy names burnout as a risk to watch for, but there's no burnout score, recovery tracking, or cumulative load detection in the product. EMRALD's Burnout Monitor runs on sustained-effort patterns across its metrics and is free on every plan.
It adds the EMRALD effort receipt to your existing Toggl session. When you stop a tracked block, you answer five short questions, about ten to fifteen seconds, without leaving your Toggl workflow. Those receipts build your personally calibrated effort-cost model over time.
No. Billable and non-billable are billing categories: which hours you can invoice to a client and which you can't. Effort tracking measures how hard any hour felt, billable or not. A billable hour of focused work and a billable hour of stressful firefighting can cost you very different amounts even though both are billable.
Toggl 2.0 answers what you can bill for and whether the project is on track. EMRALD answers what doing that work cost you, with a calibrated model tracking session-level effort, recovery, and burnout risk. Most people who already track capacity and billing find they also want to know what the billable hours are taking out of them.
No. They measure different things. Toggl 2.0 plans capacity, tracks schedule, and manages billing. EMRALD measures what running that plan costs in effort. The extension runs both together.
