Modge Review (2026)$4 a Seat, Screenshots Off by Default

The numbers on Modge's own pages do not agree with each other.

Visit Modge → Affiliate link — the rest of this page is the honest version, including who should skip it.

Pricing (2026)

✓ Pricing re-verified 3 Sep 2026

Per-seat plans with a full-feature 14-day trial and no card. Basic is $5 per seat per month billed monthly or $4 billed annually: app and URL tracking with AI productivity classification, workforce dashboards, automatic time tracking with optional screenshots, timesheets, approvals and payroll exports, invoice creation, email and chat support. Pro is $7 monthly or $5.50 annually and adds shifts, scheduling and adherence, leave, breaks and overtime, client billing through Stripe, on-demand screenshots with 12-month retention, and custom roles, teams and project budgets.

Premium, marked popular, is $9 monthly or $7 annually and adds automated project and task time tracking, workflow analysis, suspicious-activity and mouse-jiggler detection, burnout-risk and profitability insights, contract signing, 24-month screenshot retention and a dedicated account manager. Enterprise is custom, on annual billing with volume pricing, custom retention, customised onboarding and an SLA. Two add-ons are priced per seat: More Screenshots at $2 a month lifts capture from 18 to 60 an hour on Basic, Pro and Premium; Extended Data Retention at $2 a month or $1.67 annually keeps records for six years on every tier.

The comparison table lists screenshot retention as 3 months on Basic, 12 on Pro and 24 on Premium, and marks SSO (SAML 2.0), SOC 2 Type II and ISO 9001 as soon. Plans change — always verify the live price on their site.

What the pricing page doesn’t say

The catch

The homepage says trusted by 1,000+ teams, the affiliate page says 1,800+ teams, the pricing page says over 2,000 users; the pricing page also shows three star ratings, 4.6 from 1,500 reviews, 4.8 from 2,000 and 4.2 from 800, without naming a single platform they come from. None of that touches the product, but it is the kind of copy a buyer should not repeat in a business case. What does touch the product is the comparison table: SSO through SAML 2.0, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 9001 are all marked soon, and HIPAA compliant appears with no report behind it.

If your security review needs a document today, there is none to hand over. The desktop agent is macOS and Windows only, and the pricing page mentions no mobile app or GPS, so field teams are out of scope.

What Modge does

Desktop time tracking and workforce analytics for remote and hybrid teams: automatic hours, app and URL classification, shift adherence, leave, payroll-ready timesheets and Stripe invoicing. Basic $4 per seat per month on annual billing ($5 monthly), Pro $5.50, Premium $7; screenshots are optional and off by default. 14-day trial, no card.

Pro is the scheduling tier, Premium is the suspicion tier

The $1.50 step from Basic to Pro on annual billing buys the operational layer: shifts and adherence, leave and break policies, overtime flags, client billing through your own Stripe account, and screenshots you can request on demand and keep for twelve months instead of three. If you run rotas or bill clients by the hour, that is your tier. A team that only wants to know where the day went can stay on Basic.

The further $1.50 to Premium is a different kind of purchase. Its headline features are suspicious-activity and mouse-jiggler detection, burnout-risk scoring, a profitability report, 24-month screenshot retention and a named account manager. Buy it when you bill on proof of work or manage contractors you never see; do not buy it for the automated project tracking alone, because Basic already tags every session to a project. Two add-ons change the sums.

More Screenshots at $2 a seat lifts capture from 18 to 60 an hour and costs half a Basic seat on its own; Extended Data Retention at $2 keeps records for six years. On a 20-seat Basic plan, taking both doubles the bill.

How to actually use Modge

Install the desktop agent on two or three machines first, not across the company. The pricing page says it takes about two minutes on macOS or Windows and that screenshots stay off until you switch them on, so the first week can be time and app data only. Spend that week on the classification rules: every app and site is scored productive, neutral or unproductive, with an organisation default and overrides per job title, and those rules decide what the productivity score means before anyone is judged on it.

Write the screenshot policy down before you enable capture. Interval, blur, retention and how far back each role can look are all settings; the defaults let members see 30 days, managers 90 and owners everything. Then run one pay period end to end: approve it, export the CSV in generic, Wise or PayPal format, and check that approved leave landed in the right period. The trial is 14 days without a card, which is enough for exactly one cycle.

Distilled from modge.com/pricing (both billing toggles and the feature-comparison table), modge.com/employee-monitoring and modge.com/about-us, all read 3 September 2026; no hands-on test, this is synthesis from the vendor's own pages

Modge vs Hubstaff, side by side

Both columns come from the same place: each vendor’s own published pricing, read on the date shown in the sources at the foot of this page. We do not average them into a score.

Modge →

What it costs

Basic is $5 per seat per month billed monthly or $4 billed annually: app and URL tracking with AI productivity classification, workforce dashboards, automatic time tracking with optional screenshots, timesheets, approvals and payroll exports, invoice creation, email and chat support.

The catch

The numbers on Modge's own pages do not agree with each other.

Best for

desk-bound remote or hybrid teams of a few to a few hundred people who want time tracking, app classification, shift adherence, leave and payroll-ready timesheets in one seat priced between $4 and $7 a month, and who are happy to run screenshots as an opt-in rather than a default

Hubstaff →

What it costs

VIP Support is $29 a month per organisation for accounts spending $275-$400 a month and $59 above $400.

Price read on

2026-08-29

The catch

The seat definition is the whole story and they state it plainly, which deserves credit: you pay for every seat you have created, not every person actually being tracked.

Best for

agencies and distributed teams that bill clients for hours and need defensible time records — the proof is the product, and per-seat is fair when every seat is a person you invoice for

The Modge link above is an affiliate link — we may earn a commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you — and the other column is a plain link. Neither changes what this table says: both columns come straight from the vendors’ own pricing pages.

The natural comparison is Hubstaff — The obvious comparison. Hubstaff's annual column starts at $4.99 a seat with a two-seat minimum and its monthly column at $7; Modge starts at $4 annual or $5 monthly with no minimum on the page. Hubstaff has the longer record, a mobile app with GPS and a far larger integration list; Modge's pitch is shift adherence, leave policies and Stripe invoicing built into a cheaper seat, with screenshots off by default. Pick Hubstaff for field teams, Modge for desk-bound teams that also need rotas..

More on Modge

Everything we publish about Modge links back here — the review stays the honest hub:

The ex-banker filter — the same yardstick on every review (how we review): My ex-banker filter is simple: does Modge remove a real cost — time, errors, missed revenue — bigger than what it charges? If the job above is genuinely yours, it's worth a look. We never publish fake or “exclusive” prices, so always confirm the current plan on their site.

Visit Modge →

Frequently asked questions

How much does Modge cost?

Per seat, per month: Basic $4 on annual billing or $5 monthly, Pro $5.50 or $7, Premium $7 or $9, Enterprise on quote. Every plan has a 14-day trial without a card, and two $2-a-seat add-ons cover extra screenshots and six-year data retention (read 3 September 2026).

Does Modge take screenshots of employees?

Only if you turn it on. The pricing page states screenshots are optional, enabled per organisation or per person, only during tracked sessions, with configurable interval and blur. Default capture is up to 18 an hour; the More Screenshots add-on raises that to 60. Retention is 3, 12 or 24 months by tier.

Is Modge a keylogger?

The comparison table says keyboard and mouse activity is recorded as aggregated intensity counts only, never what was typed, and calls that out explicitly as not a keylogger. App and URL tracking does record the exact URL open in the browser during a tracked session.

Does Modge work on mobile or track GPS?

Not according to its pricing page. The agent is described as a desktop app for macOS and Windows; mobile tracking and GPS are not mentioned, so hourly field teams should look at Hubstaff or a time-clock product instead.

What should I weigh before buying HR & People software?

Compliance is country by country, so the honest answer is: only where the vendor says it is, and only for the entity type you actually have. Ask which countries are covered by its own entities versus a local partner, who carries the liability if something is filed wrong, and how changes in local law reach you. Get those answers in the contract rather than the sales deck.

Is this a hands-on review of Modge?

This is a researched assessment, not a hands-on test — where we've used a tool ourselves, we say so explicitly. We name what each tool is genuinely good and bad at, and we earn a commission only if you sign up, at no cost to you.

Others in this category

The hr & people tools closest to Modge that we have also reviewed. They overlap rather than match:

HubstaffPlandayInsightfulJibbleLeavoall 17 reviews →

This is our researched assessment — not a paid placement. The “Visit” links on this page are affiliate links: we may earn a commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you, and it never changes our take. How we review →

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