Actual Size of the Employee Monitoring Software Market

Preface

In this article, we will attempt to estimate the actual size of the employee monitoring software global market using data from public sources only. We couldn't find any detailed and credible research material on the web, so we are confident that this study will be of great importance and usefulness.

Now, what is the actual size of the employee monitoring software market? We won't be able to provide you with the exact figures, but we will estimate them with a margin of error of approximately 15%.

What research is out there, and why is it lacking in credibility?

The Internet is full of studies of the employee monitoring software market, the main purpose of which is to encourage the interested party to commission a detailed report after seeing a brief description. We strongly believe that none of these researches conveys real figures, and we are going to explain the reasoning behind it now.

Adroit Market Research claims that the employee monitoring software market size will be $1,739 million in 2029 at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 16.89%. Therefore, it is relatively easy to estimate the market size to be approximately $578 million in 2023.

However, this study for some reason considers InterGuard, ActivTrak, FairTrak, IMonitor Software, Micro Focus, Splunk, Forcepoint, Securonix, ObserveIT, Imperia, One Identity, LogRhythm, SolarWinds Worldwide as key industry players. 

Let's just say that the first 4 products indeed fall into the Employee Monitoring category, while the rest of the software does not qualify as such. For example, Forcepoint, Splunk, and SolarWinds develop products for cyber security, which can only be considered employee monitoring with a big stretch. Thus, the experts who worked on the case study didn't even have a clear understanding of the specifics of the industry.

Spherical Insights estimates the market size in 2021 to be $1.12 billion at a CAGR of 7.2%. 

The list of key players listed in this research study includes Teramind Inc, Veriato Inc, Workpuls, Inc, Awareness Technologies, BIRCH GROVE SOFTWARE, INC., Parasol Software Trading L.L.C, Nandini Infosys Pvt. Ltd. Ltd, NetVizor, NesterSoft Inc, Time Doctor, LLC, Toggl Inc, EfficientLab LLC., SentryPC, Fair Trak, Wangya Computer Co., Ltd.

Well, it's getting a little better, but it still doesn't include all the key players (since they missed the most important one, for sure). Besides, Parasol Software Trading L.L.C is not a vendor, but a distributor of Staffcop software, and Toggl is more of Time Tracking Software rather than Employee Monitoring. 

Moreover, if we take the revenue of all these companies for 2021 from public sources, it is unlikely to reach even 1/4 of the reported market size, which we find implausible. Key players should cover at least 80% of the market. In conclusion the report cannot be trusted either.

Reports and Data is our favorite report because it lists Kickidler as a key player right after Microsoft (which is a questionable choice at best). Other key players include Ekran System, ActivTrak, Hubstaff, Teramind, VeriClock, Monitask, and InterGuard, Veriato 360. CAGR stands at 22.90%.

This report is from the pre-pandemic year of 2019, so it doesn't reflect the real growth of the industry. According to Top10VPN, there was a 75% increase in demand for such software in 2019.

On top of that, for some reason this report also includes Microsoft, a company that isn't even remotely close to being involved in the Employee Monitoring category of products. Sure, they do have a product that sort of shows insights about what employees did during the working day (), still, it would be a stretch to call it either employee monitoring or time tracking software.

We're, of course, talking about Microsoft Viva Insights, which could be considered to be a failed product for them. While it does monitor employee activity, it provides data that is very aggregated and limited. It can hardly be categorized as being 100% employee monitoring software, and the demand for it is extremely small, given that it is a Microsoft product.

What is our estimation method?

To determine the real size of the employee monitoring software market, we will round up all known vendors, obtain information about their revenue from public sources and sum it up, adding the 20% hypothetical revenue share of little-known startup vendors, as well as the revenue share of vendors from other industries whose products include an additional employee monitoring feature. 

We'll also go beyond the U.S. and European markets and look at vendors based in Eastern Europe and Asia. 

Top players in the Employee Monitoring market that we've singled out include Hubstaff, Activtrak, Time Doctor, Insightful, Veriato, Yaware, Desktime, Traqq, Kickidler, Flowace, iMonitorSoft, Monitask, SoftActivity, Ekran, Staffcop, Stakhanovets.

Employee Monitoring Software has a lot in common with the Time Tracking Software, and we have previously covered the differences between employee monitoring and time tracking software. For example, industry heavy hitters such as Hubstaff and Time Doctor cover both categories of software.

Therefore, it is only fair to include the major Time Tracking market participants in this report as well.

These include Deputy, Toggl, Clockify, Harvest, RescueTime, Flowace, TimeCamp, ClickTime, Time Champ, Paymo, Tick, VeriClock.

There are also HR tools that have built-in employee monitoring features, such as Crossover and BambooHR. It is virtually impossible to calculate the proportion of revenue that employee monitoring tools bring in for these giants, however, it still accounts for a few percent of the market. We'll be taking that into consideration as well.

Where and how did we review the revenue of the companies?

American and other Western vendors are not obliged to publish their revenue in open sources, but there are services like growjo that conduct special interviews with vendor representatives and publish data based on these interviews. We decided not to believe this source at face value and tested its data using the example of the market leader – Hubstaff software.

According to growjo, Hubstaff earned $42.6 million dollars in 2022. We could not find any other data on Hubstaff's revenue for that year, however, Hubstaff has published data for 2019 and 2020 in its blog – $5.8 million and $9 million, respectively. Given the nearly 100% (75%) annual growth rate, the company could very well come in at that number in 2022. So let’s trust growjo (but with a slight stretch, of course). Plus, this number coincides with the growth estimate reported by Top10VPN.

What is the actual size of the employee monitoring software market?

Well, let's do the math! To make it more convenient for you, we are going to present the data in the tables, in which we will list the main players, whom we, unlike the aforementioned experts, know pretty well.

Employee Monitoring Software Market

*according to Skolkovo

**according to our own data. The growjo data is incorrect, seeing how our software is sold in many countries over the world through different distributors

*** according to Skolkovo

Who did we leave out? Many other various solutions, including the region-specific ones: Russian Crocotime and Bitcop, Brazilian Monitoo, Canadian Bergun, and about 100 more products.  

The Chinese employee monitoring market is quite developed and is represented by a number of vendors, such as Super eye, Sangfor, WGJ7, ZQA, Dikang, Tip Ray, Spyrix, Workwin.

It is simply not feasible to calculate the revenue of these companies (seeing how it is not listed in public sources), so we will simply add the % of China's GDP to the total. It won't be completely accurate, but it will be relatively close to the truth.

Employee Time Tracking Software Market

Who did we leave out? According to G2, there are about 600 more solutions. However, in that case there would be a lot of excessive numbers. We will stick to the hypothesis that the leaders cover 80% of the market.

TOTAL: The employee monitoring and time tracking software market size is ~$400,000,000.

What is the CAGR of the employee monitoring software market?

The section is in development, but we estimate that at least in pandemic years it was around 75%.

Types of companies utilizing employee monitoring software

The section is in development.

In lieu of a conclusion

The market for employee monitoring software is not as large as the market for cyber security software, for example. Still, it's booming and has been especially boosted by the 2019 pandemic. Currently (for 2022), the employee monitoring software market is worth $227 million, and when time tracking software is included, it is worth $400 million.

Our research disproves the well-known and widely quotable Gartner prediction that by 2020, 80% of companies were to utilize employee monitoring software. Most likely, this number is less than 10%, even in 2022. Alternatively, companies could be using such software on a very limited number of employees. For example, Atlassian Corporation, which develops enterprise software solutions, earned $2.8 billion in subscriptions in 2022, which is 10 times the size of the entire employee monitoring software market. At the same time, we assume that their products (Jira, Confluence, Trello, and the already mentioned here Bamboo) don't cover the entire B2B services market either.

The conclusion, therefore, is ambiguous at best. We can certainly see on the one hand that the employee monitoring software market is not that big, and it definitely has room to grow. We have seen its growth approaching 75% during the pandemic years (our in-house data also confirms it). However, it is still too early to judge the future of the market. Will such software become a must-have? Who will become its undisputed leader (it's a bit too early to say it's Hubstaff)? Will large corporations like Atlassian take over the market with their products? It truly is up in the air for now.

If you have any data to supplement or maybe correct our report in any way, don't hesitate to email us at marketing@kickidler.com.