MonitUp
MonitUp is employee monitoring and productivity software for Windows 10 and 11 teams. It records work hours, application and website usage, and optional screenshots, then turns that activity log into reports and AI-generated productivity suggestions — without keylogging.
What is MonitUp?
MonitUp is employee monitoring and productivity software built for Windows 10 and Windows 11 fleets. It has two parts: a desktop agent installed on company computers, and a web admin dashboard where managers read the results. The agent starts with the machine and collects in the background, so there is nothing for the employee to launch each morning.
What it records is deliberately bounded. The agent captures first login and shutdown times, active and idle periods, which applications were used and for how long, which websites and domains were visited, and — only if an administrator enables it — periodic screenshots whose frequency and quality are configurable. What it explicitly does not do is log keystrokes. That refusal is repeated on almost every page and is the product's central positioning: visibility into work patterns rather than surveillance of everything typed.
Each application and site is sorted into productive, neutral or unproductive, and the company sets those categories itself, so the reports reflect its own definition of useful work rather than a vendor's. On top of this sits the AI layer: the activity log is processed by algorithms that return personalised suggestions for working more efficiently, and on the Screen Time product the analysis runs over the previous week's data. A performance-appraisal view is presented as useful for assessing remote staff on recorded rather than impressionistic evidence.
Deployment comes in two flavours: standard cloud, or on-premise for organisations that want infrastructure and access under their own roof. Three plans are sold — Screen Time for light visibility, Premium adding screenshots, work-hour rules, alerts and deeper reporting, and Freelancer adding manual start-stop tracking with job assignment. The stated audience is teams of roughly 5 to 100 people, with law firms, project companies and outsourced teams singled out. Anonymised customer deployments cited include a 200-PC mining company running on-premise, a 55-PC law firm and a 40-PC project company. Throughout, the vendor stresses that informing employees and complying with local law remain the employer's responsibility.
What it does
- Record computer start and shutdown times, active time and idle periods across a Windows fleet
- Measure how long each application and each website or domain is actually used
- Classify applications and sites as productive, neutral or unproductive using categories the company defines itself
- Capture optional screenshots at an administrator-controlled frequency and quality
- Produce productivity reports by user, team, department and company over chosen date ranges
- Receive AI-generated suggestions for working more efficiently, based on the recorded activity log
- Flag policy risks such as unusual application use or potential unauthorised file transfers
When to use MonitUp / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if MonitUp is the right fit.
When to use MonitUp
- Managers of remote or hybrid Windows teams who want factual answers on work patterns instead of constant status check-ins
- Law firms and compliance-sensitive practices that need documented work-hour visibility and screenshot evidence on firm devices
- Project-based and outsourced companies tracking delivery patterns across distributed teams
- Organisations that require an on-premise install so infrastructure, access and retention stay under their own control
- Freelancers and contractors billing by task, who need manual start-stop tracking and job assignment
When not to use MonitUp
- Teams running macOS or Linux fleets: the agent is Windows-only, with other platforms merely described as being on the roadmap
- Buyers who want a keylogger or keystroke capture — MonitUp rules this out explicitly and by design
- Procurement teams that require an external certification such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001, since none is claimed anywhere on the site
- Companies bound by a contractual data-residency requirement, as no cloud hosting country or region is published
- IT teams expecting to pipe monitoring data into their own systems: there is no public API and no named third-party integration
- Anyone hoping a tool alone will deliver GDPR compliance — the vendor states plainly that it does not
How to use MonitUp
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create the admin account first, choose a plan and enter payment details — the dashboard is provisioned automatically
- Start the 7-day trial, keeping in mind that a card is required and nothing is charged during the first week
- Download the Windows agent and install it on the company computers to be monitored, with the necessary permissions
- Use existing device-management tooling if the IT team needs to push the install remotely rather than machine by machine
- Let the agent start automatically with each computer; only the Freelancer plan expects a manual start and stop
- Classify applications and websites as productive, neutral or unproductive so the reports match how the company defines work
- Set expected working hours and configure whether and how screenshots are captured
- Organise users into departments and teams to unlock group-level reporting
- Review the first reports from the dashboard: work hours, application and website usage, productivity categories and screenshots
- Try the live demo at any point before committing, since it opens without an account
Pros & Cons
Pros
- No keylogging, stated openly and consistently — a materially less intrusive stance than much of this category
- On-premise deployment available from the entry-level plan, with the vendor declaring no standing access to customer environments
- Low entry price at 6 USD per user per month for a tool that includes AI suggestions and reporting
- Screenshots are optional, administrator-controlled and passive by default on the consumer-facing product
- Unusually complete legal documentation for a vendor this size: privacy, terms, cookies, security and SLA, all versioned March 2026
- A published SLA with a 99.0% monthly availability target and a service-credit mechanism, rare at this price point
- Honest framing of compliance: the site refuses to claim the product makes an employer GDPR-compliant
Cons
- Windows only — no macOS, no Linux, no mobile application, with other platforms only described as being on the roadmap
- No public API, no documentation for integration, and no named third-party integrations
- No cloud hosting country or region is published, which blocks any buyer with a data-residency requirement
- No subprocessor list: the privacy policy names categories of providers rather than the providers themselves
- No external certification such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001 is claimed
- The headline prices assume annual commitment, and the monthly rate is not displayed openly; the Screen Time and AI Time Tracking subdomains show a different, conflicting price grid
- No postal address, legal form or company registration number appears anywhere on the site, and the vendor appears to be a very small structure
Pricing & Plans
There is no permanent free plan. Access begins with a 7-day free trial that requires a credit card on file, with nothing charged during those first seven days and cancellation possible at any point before the trial ends. The lowest paid entry point is 6.00 USD per user per month for the Screen Time plan. That figure, like the other published prices, already includes the 20% annual-billing discount; the undiscounted monthly rate is not shown. Subscriptions renew automatically unless cancelled before the next cycle, and fees are non-refundable except where the law requires otherwise.
- application and website tracking
- AI productivity tips
- productivity reports
- identification of productive applications
- automatic background tracking
- employee login access
- automatic tracking start
- offline database support and the on-premise setup option. Presented as best for lightweight visibility.
- Premium — 9 USD per user per month. Everything in Screen Time
- plus start and end times
- real-time session tracking
- application usage notifications
- advanced notifications
- screenshots
- task manager tracking
- department and team management
- Freelancer — 11 USD per user per month. Everything in Premium
- plus manual start-stop tracking
- job assignment and desktop application access. Presented as best for manual client-based tracking.
- All three prices are shown with the 20% annual-billing discount already applied
- a monthly billing toggle exists on the pricing page.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how MonitUp handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR treatment is documented and reasonably detailed. The privacy policy names the legal bases relied on where GDPR or UK GDPR applies — contract performance, legitimate interests, legal obligations, and consent where required — and lists rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection and portability, plus the right to complain to a supervisory authority. A separate section covers Turkey's KVKK (Law No. 6698). A cookie banner offers accept, reject non-essential, or manage, and non-essential categories stay off until a choice is recorded. Two gaps matter: no Article 27 EU representative is designated and no DPO is named, the only published contact being a general address. Most importantly, responsibility for the legal basis and employee notices covering workplace monitoring is assigned to the customer, and the vendor states the product does not make an employer compliant on its own.
Who owns the data?
MonitUp's privacy policy, updated 26 March 2026, splits ownership by context. For website visits, signup, billing and support data, MonitUp acts as the data controller. For the monitoring data generated through the service, it acts as a processor working on the customer's instructions — so the employing organisation, not MonitUp, owns and controls that record. Data subject requests are therefore routed to the customer. In on-premise deployments the separation is sharper still: the customer holds the environment, permissions, access and retention, and MonitUp states it has no standing access, reaching in only when the customer explicitly enables and authorises support access.
Reuse rights
Customers may use the activity data the service produces for their own operational purposes without asking MonitUp's permission — they are the controller of it, and the terms place configuration, access rules and retention squarely in their hands. What the terms attach to that freedom is responsibility rather than restriction: the customer must give employees the required notices, establish a lawful basis, apply its own internal monitoring policy, and ensure its use does not infringe third-party rights. MonitUp itself uses personal data to deliver and secure the service, run accounts and billing, answer support, monitor reliability and prevent abuse, and to meet legal obligations. It shares data with infrastructure, payment, analytics, security and support providers under contract, without naming them, and may disclose data under valid legal process or during a corporate transaction. Nothing in the documentation claims customer data is used to train AI models.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
No hosting country and no hosting region is published. The security page states only that MonitUp relies on hosted infrastructure and service providers for parts of the platform, without naming them, and assigns physical security of those facilities to the providers concerned. The privacy policy adds that data may be processed in jurisdictions outside the user's own country, with appropriate transfer safeguards applied where required. Transport encryption over HTTPS/TLS is confirmed, and transmission between clients and service endpoints is described as intended to use encrypted channels. In practice the on-premise deployment is the only configuration where a buyer knows the location, because the environment is the customer's own and the vendor states it has no standing access to it. Note that the public website resolves to a Cloudflare anycast address; this reflects the site's front end and says nothing about where monitoring data is actually stored.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting MonitUp.
- The employer, not the vendor, carries the legal risk: employee notices, a lawful basis, an internal policy and retention settings must be in place before the agent is deployed, not afterwards
- Screenshot capture is powerful and sits entirely in administrator hands, with no documented technical safeguard on the employee side — the fastest way to turn a visibility tool into a surveillance one
- Productivity scores reflect categories the company itself defines, so a badly configured category list will quietly produce confident-looking but misleading judgements about people
- Measuring activity is not measuring contribution: thoughtful work, reading and offline discussion register as idle, and managing to the metric penalises exactly the behaviour that is hardest to see
- A card is required from day one of the trial and the subscription rolls into a paid plan automatically, so an unmonitored trial becomes a charge
- No cloud hosting location and no subprocessor list are published, which leaves a real gap for any buyer with residency or supply-chain obligations
- Trust costs more than it is worth to lose: deploying this without telling staff first is both a legal hazard and a durable management problem
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low for a cloud rollout, higher for on-premise. Creating the account, installing the Windows agent and reading the first reports is straightforward, and the agent then starts by itself with each machine. The install does require administrator rights on each PC, though IT teams with device-management tooling can push it remotely. Expect configuration work afterwards: productivity categories, working hours, screenshot settings, departments and teams. On-premise demands an IT review and dedicated infrastructure, a different order of effort. The real prerequisite is not technical — the employee notice and internal policy must come first.
Deployment
Supported languages
Behind MonitUp
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement MonitUp.
Frequently asked questions
Which operating systems does MonitUp support?
Is a credit card required for the free trial?
Does MonitUp record keystrokes?
Which plan includes screenshots, and can they be switched off?
Can MonitUp be deployed on-premise?
Do employees have to start the application themselves?
Does MonitUp make my company GDPR-compliant?
How long is monitoring data kept?
Where is the data hosted?
Is there an API or are there integrations?
Should you pick MonitUp?
MonitUp is a deliberately narrow product, and that is the fairest way to judge it. It does one thing: it watches Windows computers and turns what it sees into readable reports. There is no macOS agent, no mobile app, no API and no integration catalogue, so anyone expecting a platform will be disappointed. Anyone wanting exactly this, on exactly this operating system, gets a coherent tool at a low entry price.
Three things distinguish it. The refusal to log keystrokes is stated plainly and repeatedly, and it shapes the whole product. On-premise deployment is available from the cheapest plan, which is unusual, and it is the only configuration where a buyer actually knows where the data sits. And the legal documentation — privacy, terms, cookies, security and a costed SLA, all versioned March 2026 — is more complete than most vendors of this size bother to produce.
The AI layer should be read for what it is: a reading aid. It processes the activity log to suggest ways of working more efficiently. It is a genuine feature, not the core of the product.
The reservations are real. Cloud hosting location is never disclosed, no subprocessors are named, no external certification is claimed, and the site publishes no postal address, legal form or registration number. The headline prices assume annual commitment, and the company's own subproduct pages contradict its main price grid.
Most of all, this is a purchase that creates legal exposure for the buyer, not the vendor — a point MonitUp itself makes more honestly than most. Employee notices, lawful basis and internal policy have to exist before the agent is installed, not after.
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