Toggl Track vs Nexa The Real Comparison for Whiteboard Animators
Toggl Track
$12/mo ($144/yr)
VS
Nexa
$279 once — own forever
or 3 payments of $99
Break even: 23.3 months at Toggl Track's current price.
Does Toggl Track Fit Whiteboard Animators? Our Read
What whiteboard animators need from their software, from sources outside Toggl Track and outside Nexa:
Cancellation (kill) fees need to be tracked per project. The Graphic Artists Guild gives a standard kill-fee schedule of 25% on assignment, 50% after sketch, and 100% after completion of final art. For whiteboard animators, the stages most likely map to script, storyboard and final animation. Billing software has to handle milestone or staged invoices. (graphicartistsguild.org)
Each job needs its own record of who owns the work and what the client may do with it. The Guild tells artists to check whether a contract is specifically stated to be 'work for hire'. It says that phrase 'has a specific meaning that is not immediately obvious just by reading the words'. It also lists client requests such as unlimited reuse and re-licensing to others. It suggests asking whether a re-licensing fee is paid, whether there is a time limit, and whether there is an exclusivity period. (graphicartistsguild.org)
Client approvals and payment terms should be recorded for each job. The Guild's pre-contract checklist says to get client sign-off during production and final approval, and that 'final signature approval is required in your contract'. It lists advance payment, progress payments, and payment by invoice (30 days) as options. It also suggests adding interest or a late charge to balances more than 30 days past due. Revisions appear on the checklist as a production item. (graphicartistsguild.org)
Animators who work for themselves have to pay their own taxes, which affects bookkeeping. The IRS says self-employed individuals use estimated tax to pay Social Security, Medicare and income taxes, with Form 1040-ES used to calculate the payments, generally made quarterly. It also says self-employment (SE) tax is a Social Security and Medicare tax primarily for people who work for themselves, paid in addition to income tax. Software should set aside tax and track quarterly payments from project income. (irs.gov)
Toggl Track covers the time side of the trade well. It tracks time by project and client, and it compares estimated and actual time. It also has profitability reports, billable rates and invoicing, with a free tier and a 30-day trial. That helps a whiteboard animator see whether a script, storyboard or final-animation stage ran over. It does not give you a per-job record of who owns the work, what the client may reuse or re-license, or whether the contract says work for hire. It has no kill-fee schedule (25% on assignment, 50% after sketch, 100% after final art) and no client sign-off record. Nothing in its feature list sets aside self-employment tax or tracks quarterly 1040-ES payments.
Nexa covers more of the billing and paperwork side. Quotes, estimates and proposals convert to invoices, and payment plans can handle staged or milestone billing. Clients can sign estimates and pay by card in a portal through your own Stripe account. Nexa also tracks time, tracks cost and profit per job, and does bookkeeping: expenses, profit and loss, and 1099 summaries. It has no field for ownership or licensing terms, no kill-fee schedule, and no estimated-tax set-aside or quarterly payment tracking. It runs on one device unless you add optional Cloud Sync. It has no QuickBooks or Xero sync and no integration library, so it can't replace Toggl Track's Jira, Asana, Notion or Slack connections. Any automated emails it sends go out only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. It is software you run yourself, with no vendor-run onboarding.
Over three years Toggl Track at $12 a month costs $432. Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 with Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month. Without sync, Nexa costs less. With sync, it costs a little more than Toggl Track. If you only need to log hours and already invoice elsewhere, stay on Toggl Track. If you want staged invoices, client sign-off, and bookkeeping in one place, try Nexa. Either way, keep ownership terms, kill fees and quarterly tax in your contract files or a spreadsheet.
Our read for whiteboard animators: Neither tool tracks rights, kill fees or quarterly tax, so keep Toggl Track for time tracking or pick Nexa for staged invoicing and bookkeeping, and handle those three items separately.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Bottom Line
Toggl Track costs whiteboard animators $144/year at today's list price. Nexa is $279 once for invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking and accounting in one suite — so after 23.3 months it has cost less than Toggl Track, and you own it after that. What it is not: hosted-for-you software with a support desk and a roadmap you can lobby. That is the trade, and the rest of this page is the detail behind it.
Can it pay for itself?
Nexa is $279 once, about $23 a month over its first year. Its Drain Guard reads your expenses (from a linked bank, an imported statement, or ones you type in), finds the charges that repeat, and adds them up by the month. Keep or Cut then walks you through them one at a time. Cancel $23 a month of charges you'd forgotten about and Nexa has paid for itself inside the first year, before you count the Toggl Track bill you'd stop paying.
It depends on what you find and what you cancel, so we don't promise a number. In our demo data, Drain Guard finds 5 subscriptions adding up to $110.13 a month. That is sample data, not a customer's.
The verdict for whiteboard animators: Either can do the job, for the reasons in our read above. On price alone, that is $279 once against $432 for Toggl Track over three years.
Choose Nexa if:
You're done paying monthly forever
You're a solo operator or small team (1-5)
You need time tracker, invoicing and connect crm in one tool
You're tired of price increases
You want to own your tools like you own your equipment
Choose Toggl Track if:
You have a large team (10+) needing enterprise features
You're deeply invested in Toggl Track's specific workflow
You need a feature Nexa doesn't have yet
Sound Familiar?
Whiteboard animation lives or dies on timing, because the whole charm is the hand drawing the exact thing the narrator is talking about at the exact moment they say it. So the day usually starts with the script and the voiceover audio side by side, marking where each visual needs to land. You break the script into beats, then build the canvas in VideoScribe or Doodly, choosing or drawing each doodle and setting its draw time so the marker finishes the lightbulb right as the narrator says 'idea.' Custom assets are the slow part: a client's specific product or logo doesn't exist in the stock library, so you hand-draw it, convert it to a path so the software can 'draw' it on screen, and that one icon can eat an hour. Midday you do a timing pass, scrubbing through to catch every spot where the hand lags the audio or rushes ahead, because a half-second of drift makes the whole thing feel off. You preview for the client, and the dreaded note is 'we re-recorded the voiceover, it's a little longer now,' which means re-timing every single element. By evening you're tightening transitions, exporting a draft, and updating your project notes so the three videos in your queue don't lose their place.
Syncing the drawing-hand reveal precisely to a voiceover script so the line appears exactly as the narrator says the word
Clients who supply a 400-word script for a 60-second video and won't trim it
Custom hand-drawn assets taking far longer than the 'just use the library' clients assume
Re-timing the entire animation when a client swaps the voiceover or edits the script after the draw is done
Time tracking, invoicing, client records and scheduling are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot and carry their own booking link, with no per-appointment cut. The sections below price both routes honestly.
None of that is a software problem you can buy your way out of in one click — it is why the tool you pick matters more than what it costs. Toggl Track solves some of it. So does Nexa. The difference is what you are left holding in three years.
What Toggl Track Actually Costs Whiteboard Animators
Today's list price is $12/month — $144 a year, from Toggl Track's own pricing page. Every figure below is that price, multiplied. Nothing is projected.
Three years at today's price
Year 1$144
Year 2$144
Year 3$144
Three years of Toggl Track$432
Nexa: $279 once (or 3 × $99). Over the same three years, that is $153 less.
If Toggl Track raises its price, the three-year cost goes up; if it cuts it, the cost comes down. We don't guess which. Add-ons, extra seats and card-processing fees are not included, on either side.
Feature-by-Feature
Feature
Toggl Track
Nexa
Invoicing
✗
✓
Scheduling
✗
✓
CRM
✗
✓
Time Tracking
✓
✓
Full Accounting
✗
✓ (SIMPL)
Task Management
✗
✓
Works offline
—
✓
Price
$12/mo
$279 once or 3 × $99
3-Year Total
$432
$279
You own it?
No — stop paying, lose access
Yes — forever
✓ and ✗ for Toggl Track come from its own published feature list. — means the feature isn't in that list, which is not the same as Toggl Track lacking it: check with them. Three years is at today's price.
What "$279 Once" Does And Doesn't Buy
It buys the software, not a service contract. You install Nexa and it runs on your machine. There is no seat count, and nothing stops working if you stop paying, because there is nothing to stop paying.
Toggl Track's monthly fee is not only rent. It pays for their hosting, their support desk, and their engineers shipping changes every week. If those matter to how you work, that is a real thing you would be giving up.
Cross-device sync is the one optional extra — $4.99/month if you want your data mirrored between machines. Skip it and Nexa still works; you just sync manually.
The honest risk of buying once: you are betting on us still being here to improve it. The honest risk of renting: the price is theirs to raise, and the graveyard section below is a record of tools that did exactly that.
What Toggl Track Does Better
Straight from Toggl Track's own feature set. If one of these is the reason you pay them, that reason does not disappear because Nexa is cheaper.
Simple time tracking
Desktop and mobile apps
Pomodoro timer
Project-based tracking
Good free tier
A free plan to start on (with limits), so you can use Toggl Track before paying anything.
Toggl Track is the better call if you need simple time tracking specifically, or if your team is large enough that per-seat pricing still beats buying software outright.
What Toggl Track Is Built For
Toggl Track's product page lists agencies and professional services teams, software and IT teams, law firms, and accounting and finance teams. It also names three sizes of customer: freelancers and solo users, growing teams, and large organizations. (toggl.com)
The product page lists cross-platform tracking on web, desktop (Windows, Mac), mobile (iOS, Android) and browser extensions. It also lists automated background tracking and a one-click timer. (toggl.com)
The product page lists timesheet and detailed time reports grouped by project, client or team. It also lists financial reports on project, client and team profitability, and estimated vs. actual time tracking. (toggl.com)
The product page lists billable rates, including 6-minute increments for law firms, and invoicing. (toggl.com)
The product page lists Boards, Gantt charts and a calendar planner. It also lists utilization and workload reports, and automatic planning around PTO and public holidays. (toggl.com)
The product page lists integrations with Jira, Asana, Notion and Slack, among others. It also lists an API and an MCP server, which can connect to Claude, Cursor and Codex. (toggl.com)
The pricing page shows a Free plan, with a stated limit of up to 3 users in its FAQ. Starter is $9 per user per month on annual billing, and Premium is $16 per user per month on annual billing. Enterprise is priced through sales. Paid plans and add-ons come with a 30-day trial. (toggl.com)
The product page says it does no screenshots, keystroke logging or webcam monitoring. It also states SOC Type 2 and ISO 27001 compliance and 99.99% uptime. It offers a free 30-day trial of all features with no credit card required. (toggl.com)
What people outside Toggl Track and outside Nexa say:
The Business Dive gives Toggl Track 4.4/5. It calls the interface "beautiful and straightforward" and says offline time tracking is supported. It also says the free version "includes all the basic features they need" for individuals and freelancers, and that invoicing is "quite valuable for agencies and consultancies." (thebusinessdive.com)
The Business Dive criticises the lack of GPS tracking, which it says rules Toggl Track out for construction, real estate and other location-dependent work. It also says "some advanced reporting and analytics tools are locked behind the more expensive plans." (thebusinessdive.com)
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Where business tools fit — for a whiteboard animator
Software doesn't do the creative work — it automates the business around it. And that part is the same for every whiteboard animator: find the work, manage it, bill for it, get paid. Each step has a tool — and the right single tool runs the whole loop, so the handoffs are automatic and you get back to the creative work. Tap a step to see what gets automated.
1
Find the work
Land the project
↓
An inquiry becomes a proposal becomes a signed project — with the scope and the deposit locked in.
CRM / contacts
Estimates & proposals
Booking / scheduling
then ↓
2
Manage the work
Do the work
↓
The work itself — tracked against the project: hours, milestones, revisions, and expenses, so nothing bills late or goes uncounted.
Job / project tracking
Time tracking
Expenses, materials & add-ons
then ↓
3
Bill for it
Send the bill
↓
The work becomes the invoice — the hours, the add-ons, the materials, the deposit credited — totaled and sent, instead of re-typed at 9pm.
Invoicing
Deposits & credits
then ↓
4
Get paid
Collect payment
↓
Paid by card or link, the deposit credited, and what's overdue chased — without you doing it by hand.
Card / online payments
Automatic reminders
You can stitch four separate subscriptions across these four steps, or run one tool that does the whole flow so a booking becomes a job becomes an invoice becomes a payment without re-typing. Either way the goal is the same: less time on the business of the business, more on the creative work. (Nexa is built to be the one — but the honest options for each step are above and below.)
Calculate Your Full Stack
Toggl Track plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
Switching from Toggl Track
1
Export your data — Go to Reports → Detailed → Export as CSV. Download your full time entry history.
2
Set up Nexa — 10-minute setup. Import your client list by CSV, then set up your projects.
3
Start tracking in Nexa — Use Nexa time tracker for new entries. Import historical data if needed.
4
Cancel Toggl — Cancel subscription. Download a final export for your records.
✓ 30-day money-back guarantee. Zero risk.
What This Means for Whiteboard Animators
The median Whiteboard Animator earns $45,000/year. At $144/year, Toggl Track is a recurring slice of that — paid again every year, whether the year was good or not. Owning the same jobs outright is $279 once, and the slice stops.
Nexa is $279 once. Invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, accounting — all connected, built for whiteboard animators. You own it like you own your VideoScribe or Doodly whiteboard software.
Is Nexa actually right for a whiteboard animator?
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
Right for you if
You run solo or a small team — like the 25,000 whiteboard animators in the US who do, and you wear every hat.
You're tired of paying every month for a monthly subscription stack and a pile of apps that don't talk to each other.
You want invoicing, scheduling, and client tracking in one place — not scattered across five apps.
You'd rather own your software once, the way you own your VideoScribe or Doodly whiteboard software.
Look elsewhere if
You have a large team that needs enterprise seats, granular roles, and dedicated admin staff — Nexa is built for solo and small operators (1–5), and a bigger platform will serve you better.
You need full payroll for a large team or deep, SKU-level inventory — that's not what Nexa is for.
You're genuinely happy paying monthly and don't mind stitching tools together. No tool fixes a workflow you already like.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small whiteboard animators business that owns its tools and is sick of renting software, Nexa replaces your whole stack for $279 once. If you're scaling into a large team with dedicated admin staff, a bigger platform may fit better — and we'd rather tell you that now than sell you the wrong thing.
Time tracking, invoicing, client records and scheduling are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot and carry their own booking link, with no per-appointment cut. The sections below price both routes honestly.
What whiteboard animators actually deal with
Syncing the drawing-hand reveal precisely to a voiceover script so the line appears exactly as the narrator says the word
Clients who supply a 400-word script for a 60-second video and won't trim it
Custom hand-drawn assets taking far longer than the 'just use the library' clients assume
Re-timing the entire animation when a client swaps the voiceover or edits the script after the draw is done
A day in the life of a whiteboard animator
Whiteboard animation lives or dies on timing, because the whole charm is the hand drawing the exact thing the narrator is talking about at the exact moment they say it. So the day usually starts with the script and the voiceover audio side by side, marking where each visual needs to land. You break the script into beats, then build the canvas in VideoScribe or Doodly, choosing or drawing each doodle and setting its draw time so the marker finishes the lightbulb right as the narrator says 'idea.' Custom assets are the slow part: a client's specific product or logo doesn't exist in the stock library, so you hand-draw it, convert it to a path so the software can 'draw' it on screen, and that one icon can eat an hour. Midday you do a timing pass, scrubbing through to catch every spot where the hand lags the audio or rushes ahead, because a half-second of drift makes the whole thing feel off. You preview for the client, and the dreaded note is 'we re-recorded the voiceover, it's a little longer now,' which means re-timing every single element. By evening you're tightening transitions, exporting a draft, and updating your project notes so the three videos in your queue don't lose their place.
The tools a working whiteboard animator actually owns
VideoScribe or Doodly whiteboard software
drawing tablet for custom hand-drawn assets
a USB microphone for scratch voiceover timing
an audio editor for syncing narration
a library of vector doodle assets
screen-capture and export software
Local whiteboard animators on Nexa
Real whiteboard animators near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee.
Are you a whiteboard animator? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time.
Or browse every whiteboard animator on Nexa →
The kit a working whiteboard animator owns
The tools of the trade — each a one-time buy that earns its keep for years.
VideoScribe or Doodly whiteboard software
drawing tablet for custom hand-drawn assets
a USB microphone for scratch voiceover timing
an audio editor for syncing narration
a library of vector doodle assets
screen-capture and export software
You paid for these once because good tools last. That's the bar your software should clear too — priced like a tool you own, $279 once, not a subscription that costs more than your kit every year.
How To Read This Page
We make Nexa. It is one of the two options compared here, so read this with that in mind. We have tried to make Toggl Track's case the way we would want ours made — their strengths above are their own published feature list, not our summary of it.
The prices are Toggl Track's published list prices, checked on the date shown in the sources below. Plans change; check theirs before you decide.
No customer quotes appear on this page because we do not have any from whiteboard animators we can verify. For user testimony, read the independent reviews — Toggl Track on G2 and on Capterra — where the reviewers are not selling you anything.
Check the price yourself:Toggl Track's own pricing page is the source for every figure above, read on the date shown in the sources section below.
We are not neutral about subscriptions, and that is the argument, not a hidden assumption: software you pay for once is cheaper over three years than software you rent, unless you need something only the rented one does.
How we put this guide together
We build a whiteboard animator's guide the same way every time, and we'd rather you trust it than take it on faith. Nexa is our product, so the test we hold ourselves to is simple: a tool only "wins" a job here when it genuinely does that job better for a whiteboard animator — and where something free, open-source, or buy-once does it better, we say so and link you to it. Where Nexa falls short (payroll is the honest example), we name the alternative outright.
Where the numbers come from
Vendor pricingHoneyBook $432/yr, FreshBooks $516/yr, Toggl Track $144/yr, Harvest $132/yr — taken from each company's published plans, last verified September 2026. Pricing moves; each name above links straight to that vendor’s own pricing page so you can confirm it before you decide.
Income contextThe $45,000 median we cite for the typical whiteboard animator is occupational median annual pay from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Occupational Employment & Wage Statistics), compiled April 2026. We use it only to show software spend as a share of real income — your own numbers will differ.
Three-year mathMulti-year totals are today's list price multiplied by the number of years. No price rise is projected, so the figure can be checked against the vendor's own pricing page; if they raise it, the real cost is higher.
Found something out of date? Prices change and we don't catch every move the day it happens. This guide is published and maintained by the Nexa team; if a figure here is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it — getting it right matters more to us than the sale.
FAQ
Is Nexa really a Toggl Track replacement?
For solo whiteboard animators and small teams, yes. invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, task management, and full accounting — all for $279 once. Toggl Track may be better if you have a large team (10+) or need enterprise-specific features.
What does Toggl Track do that Nexa doesn't?
Toggl Track has features like Simple time tracking and Desktop and mobile apps that some businesses rely on. For most solo whiteboard animators, these aren't dealbreakers.
How fast does Nexa pay for itself?
At $12/month, Nexa pays for itself in 23.3 months. After that: $144 saved every year.
Can I pay in installments?
Yes. Nexa is $279 as a one-time payment, or 3 payments of $99 ($297 total). Either way it's a one-time purchase — no subscription, no recurring fees ever.