Teramind Review 2024: Features, Pros And Cons

Teramind is an advanced employee compliance and productivity monitoring software companies can use to:

• Increase team performance
• Identify workflow bottlenecks
• Limit unproductive activity
• Detect and block malicious employee actions
• Safeguard data
• Collect video screen recordings, screenshots and keystroke logs to monitor human processes and build compliance burden of proof
• Monitor only the endpoints you require to improve productivity and stay compliant without violating employees’ privacy around their personal lives or data

Teramind landed on our best employee monitoring software guide for its advanced compliance monitoring capabilities, including its employee screen video recording feature. It helps companies ensure employees are using their time productively while complying with company policies and industry protocols or regulatory requirements.

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1

Teramind

Starting price

$11.25 per seat, per month (minimum of five users)

Keylogging

Yes

Stealth or visible mode

Both

1

Teramind

Learn More

On Teramind's Website

Teramind is an employee monitoring software that specializes in helping companies stay compliant with legal regulations and protect sensitive data. It begins by gathering data on your employees’ performance and activities. Data is gathered through:

• Tracking employees’ keystrokes, printing actions, instant messaging activity, online meetings, file transfers, anomalous behavior, copy and paste activity, application and website usage and email
• Recording employees’ screens through continuous recording or recordings of specific events
• Taking screenshots of employees’ screens every 10 minutes or as specified

Once this data has been gathered, it is aggregated into reports. From these reports, you can detect whether employees are compliant with company and legal requirements, if they are sufficiently productive and if their actions could lead to risks such as data breaches. In turn, you can create automated alerts that tell you when such circumstances are taking place based on the gathered data.

If you detect policy or regulation protocol violations, the software allows you to take actions to remedy them. You can create smart rules to respond by, for example:

• Automatically warning employees of violations and limiting the nonproductive websites employees can access
• Taking remote control over the computer or disabling the keyboard and mouse to ensure compliance violations cease
• Blocking sensitive data that appears on the screen, whether in text, videos or images
• Collecting detailed reports as burden-of-proof to satisfy breach regulations
• Applying stricter monitoring around sensitive or critical data

We tested Teramind on a Mac laptop computer using the Safari browser.

Teramind dashboard

Video Screen Recording

Teramind can record all employee screen activity. Company administrators can view the content in real time or sift through recording histories to discover trends or investigate past actions. In addition, companies can opt in to audio recording to capture audio inputs and outputs from users’ speakers and connected microphones.

Video screen recording in Teramind

To protect users’ personal data, administrators can also opt to block personal information from playback sessions. In addition, they can disable continuous screen recording and instead opt to only record when an incident that signifies a policy or compliance violation occurs.

Time and Productivity Tracking

Teramind comes with a built-in employee time tracker. It captures employees’ clock-in and clock-out activity and generates reports of working hours and employees’ activities, task reports, idle time versus productive time and cost reports. It offers both automated and manual clock-in and clock-out methods.

This feature also offers:

• Employee scheduling
• PTO management
• Payroll processing
• A Web Kiosk
• Timesheet generation
• Employee activity tracking across projects and tasks
• Employee productivity and performance reports
• Integrations with Jira, Trello, Basecamp, Redmine and other project management software

Keystroke Tracking

Teramind tracks the keystroke activity of all employees and adds the resulting logs to productivity and other analytics reports within the software. Employers can opt in and out of this feature or choose certain applications to track keystrokes while excluding others.

They can also create rules around certain words users type or the schedule by which the system turns on and off keystroke tracking. For example, they can create a rule that a video screen recording is initiated if an employee types the word “lawsuit.”

Teramind complements this feature by capturing all copy and paste actions performed by employees. Some additional capabilities within this feature include:

• The ability to lock out a user when certain keystrokes are used
• Anti-logging rules that protect users’ keystrokes from being captured when they are
  performing personal actions online, such as checking their bank accounts
• Capturing invisible and hidden characters

App and Website Usage Tracking

Using Teramind, you can access website- and app-usage reports to identify the interactions that improve productivity. In doing so, you can see whether employees are accessing websites or using social media sites that hinder work completion. The software labels websites and apps as productive and unproductive to aid in this investigation.

Teramind website and app usage reporting

It also alerts you when this data indicates employees are violating company internet policies by visiting unproductive or risky sites and, in turn, allows you to block or restrict their usage.

	Starter	UAM	DLP	Enterprise
Starting Monthly Price per Seat	$15	$30	$35	Custom
Minimum Member	Five	Five	Five	Five
Free Trial	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Attendance Tracking	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Keystroke Tracking	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Video Screen Recording	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Screenshots	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Active and Idle Time Tracking	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Activity Alerts	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
App and Website Usage Tracking	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Third-Party Integrations	No	No	No	Yes
Customer Support	Installation assistance, ticket support, live chat 24/5 and weekend support from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET	Installation assistance, ticket support, live chat 24/5 and weekend support from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET	Installation assistance, ticket support, live chat 24/5 and weekend support from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET	Installation assistance, ticket support, live chat 24/5 and weekend support from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET
Mobile app	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

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Starter

Teramind’s Starter plan is $15 per user per month with a five-user minimum. It is designed to offer quick and easy screen recording and website and app tracking. It includes:

• Web pages and applications
• Remote control tools
• Activity blocking tools
• Insider threat detection
• Abusive and malicious behavior analytics
• Workforce productivity analysis
• Active versus idle time analysis
• Interactive productivity reporting
• A visual rule editor
• Video recording of all user activity
• Audio recording (optional)
• Instant messaging and social media activity monitoring
• Installation assistance
• Data encryption
• 24/5 ticket and live chat customer support with partial weekend support
• Screenshots

UAM

Starting at $30 per user per month (with a five-user minimum), the UAM plan is designed to offer full monitoring, auditing, forensic and user rules features and capabilities. It includes all of the features in the Starter plan, plus:

• Advanced search options and technologies
• Email monitoring
• File transfer monitoring
• Printing monitoring
• Dynamic risk scoring
• Anomaly detection (on-premises)
• Out-of-the-box rule templates
• The option to record during violations only

DLP

Teramind’s DLP plan starts at $35 per user per month (with a five-user minimum requirement) and is designed to offer data exfiltration prevention and activity monitoring for forensics. In addition to the features offered in the UAM plan, it includes:

• The tools to protect all data types and IP addresses
• The ability to define content-based rules to prevent data breaches
• The ability to define operation rules for data-leak prevention
• Access to pre-defined data categories
• Document- and data-fingerprinting tools to protect data
• Tools to ensure regulatory compliance around HIPAA, GDPR and other laws

Enterprise

Teramind’s Enterprise plan requires users to obtain a custom price quote. Its purpose is to serve complex and large enterprises and government entities with added support and customization capabilities. Its unique features include:

• Custom website and app field capture tools
• In-app fraud detection
• Tailored deployment assistance
• Custom behavior rules configurations and third-party integration options
• An enterprise service-level agreement (SLA)
• Availability in AWS GovCloud and Azure Government

Teramind’s pricing page offers vague information about its customer service options for each plan. For example, it states that all plans offer 24/7 follow-the-sun support. With little details on what follow-the-sun support entails, we contacted the company using its live chat option.

We received an immediate response from Teramind’s customer support representative, Anton. He said that each plan includes installation assistance, ticket support and live chat support 24/5. It also offers some live chat support over the weekend, including from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET on Saturdays and Sundays.

In addition, we attended a product demo with sales representative, Paolo Diosinio. He was friendly, knowledgeable and concerned with catering our experience to our needs. He added that customers are assigned a customer success manager who helps to set up and customize Teramind to each business’s needs. When we expressed a technical difficulty with the product, he immediately connected us with an attentive tech support representative who proactively helped us resolve the issue.

Customization Options

Here are some customization options available in Teramind:

Widget organization/editing
Teramind’s reporting dashboards are highly customizable. You can, for example, filter data by period of time or types of actions. You can also arrange widgets to create your own reports with select data points. In addition, you can choose how data points are displayed by, for example, selecting a bar, area or column graph or heat map.

Login screen
Teramind allows you to customize the login screen with your branding. You can upload your own logo and background image and change the screen’s button colors to match your company palette. Along with alert warning customizations, this is a unique customization option that many competitors do not offer.

You can also add widgets to your dashboard to ensure that key data points are visible from the moment you log in. Many competitors only offer out-of-the-box dashboard widgets with little customization options.

Alerts
Ways you can customize your alerts include by warning, blocking or locking out users who violate company rules. You can also create a custom warning message to individuals who perform such actions before the software takes consequential actions. Warning messages can be customized to match your company branding in color and with a link to your company policies.

Access control
You can control the access level individuals within your organization have to the software and its data. For example, if you identify an employee as an infrastructure administrator, they can track time and configure shared lists but not browse recordings or view monitoring data. Other control levels include department manager/supervisor, administrator and operational administrator, all of which have their own accessible features and limitations.

Compliance Management

This Teramind feature is designed to ensure that company employees engage in behaviors that comply with regulatory requirements such as those set forth by HIPAA. Its automations allow you to detect and prevent risky behavior, identify anomalies that could signify a compliance violation, detect unprotected data and track access to data and its usage to prevent breaches. Its other useful features include the ability to:

• Pinpoint sensitive data in session recordings
• Receive alerts when data is misused
• Adhere to PCI DSS compliance to ensure credit card data is protected according to industry best practices
• Generate reports to assist in audits
• Develop employee compliance training programs
• Take control of remote company computers to stop, prevent or investigate violations

In our testing, we found this feature to be easy to employ. Teramind offers a long list of pre-defined rules you can toggle on and off based on your needs. Or, you can create your own rules by filling out a simple form.

	Hubstaff	ActivTrak	Insightful	Controlio
Rating
Starting Paid Monthly Price	$7	$10 per user (billed annually)	$8 per user	$7.99
Highest-Tier Monthly Pricing	$25	$17 per user (billed annually)	$15 per user	Custom quote
Free Trial	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Free Plan	Yes	Yes	No	No
Time Tracking	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Screenshots	No	Add-on available	Yes	Yes
Video Screen Recording	No	No	Coming in Q2 of 2024	Yes
Remote Workforce Management	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Attendance Reporting	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Clock-In and Clock-Out Tracking	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
App and Website Usage Monitoring	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Productivity Alerts	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Task-Based Time Tracking	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Role-Based Monitoring	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Mobile App	Yes	No	No	No

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Read our best employee monitoring software guide.

Teramind vs. Hubstaff

Both Hubstaff and Teramind are time and productivity monitoring software. However, while Hubstaff does not record employees’ screens, Teramind does. By default, its video recording functionality is continuous, meaning all employee actions are captured on video from the moment they sign in. However, users can opt out of this feature or limit its implementation.

For some companies that need to ensure strict compliance with HIPAA and other regulatory laws, this type of monitoring is useful. For others, it may be viewed as intrusive by employees who don’t understand its value.

As such, Teramind may be a better fit for companies that need to strictly adhere to and prove regulatory compliance while Hubstaff may be a better option for companies simply needing to improve overall employee productivity.

Teramind vs. ActivTrak

Teramind starts at $15 per user per month with a five-user minimum requirement (or $11.25 per seat per month if billed annually). This means that companies must pay at least $56.25 per seat month (if billed annually) to access the software’s most basic features. For many startups, it is cost-prohibitive.

For companies with little budget to get started with employee monitoring software, ActivTrak may be a better option. It offers a robust free plan with an activity dashboard, reports (such as top applications and websites used, top users, working hours, top categories and productivity reports) and website blocking to keep employees productive during working hours.

In addition, AcrtivTrak’s Essentials plan (its first-tier paid plan) is $10 per user per month with a five-user minimum. This equals $50 per month, which falls short of Teramind’s starting price by $25.

For this reason, startups may find ActivTrak to be more accessible in terms of budget and its ability to grow with their needs even as they struggle through growing pain expenses.

Teramind vs. Controlio

While Teramind offers basic features for managing a distributed workforce, including remote control of company devices and activity and productivity reports, Controlio goes a bit deeper with advanced features for creating distributed workforce teams, ensuring compliance with company policies and working toward work/life balance for remote team members. These features include the ability to:

• Discern who is and is not online
• Get a complete view of work processes across your distributed teams without manually checking in with team members
• Clock employees in or out of the system remotely
• Access an attendance report that shows times your distributed team works and the breaks they take
• Calculate a productivity score for your distributed team
• Create teams within your distributed teams based on their location or roles
• Turn on GDPR mode to stay compliant with EU-based talent data protection laws
• Remotely block categories of websites on company devices that are not work-related

Setup

You can set up Teramind to operate in stealth or visible mode on employees’ screens. Because visible mode offers the ability to generate more reports and payroll capabilities, we will focus on this mode for our look at how to set up Teramind.

To set up Teramind in visible mode, follow these steps:

1. Create a Teramind account by inputting basic information such as your name, email, phone number and number of employees you’ll be monitoring. When creating an account, also choose whether you want on-premises or cloud implementation of Teramind and choose a password.

2. Next, choose whether you will be using the software primarily to monitor your employees’ activity or for security purposes. Continue to answer questions as prompted, such as whether you want your employees to know they’re being monitored.

3. Choose the invitation method you’d like to employ to invite employees to your account. You can choose from Dashboard invite, which invites users by creating a profile within the Teramind dashboard and sending them an invite email. Or, you can opt to send them an invitation link they can use to download the agent on their device.

4. If you’ve chosen to invite users via the Dashboard Invite method, fill out the simple form with your employee’s information, including their full name and email address. Click “Add user and send invitation.”

5. Users will be prompted to download the agent onto their computers once they receive the invitation and will be walked through the short process through a guided setup process.

For more information about how to download the revealed or stealth mode Teramind agents on premises or on remote devices, read Teramind’s setup guide.

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1

Teramind

Starting price

$11.25 per seat, per month (minimum of five users)

Keylogging

Yes

Stealth or visible mode

Both

1

Teramind

Learn More

On Teramind's Website

When testing Teramind, we found the platform to be feature-rich. However, its straightforward user interface cuts down on the learning curve, despite so many features. We also appreciated that its customer support was responsive and proactive, always willing to step in and help with technical difficulties we encountered. They even followed up with a phone call after issue resolution to ensure no other roadblocks were hindering our productivity.

Ease of Use

Teramind offers many features that lend to the product’s ease of use, such as a list of customization options to build your own reporting widgets. You must simply check the data points you want in your report.

In our testing, we especially liked that it offers toggle buttons so you can opt in to and out of features in a split second each. In addition, simple forms, pre-defined common rules and drop-down menus further lend to the product’s ease of use.

However, this product is feature-rich, meaning that just the sheer number of features can overwhelm small less-tech-savvy business owners. For this reason, learning all of the features it offers and their functionalities can take time. For many small businesses, this time investment may outweigh the software’s benefits because they don’t need advanced employee monitoring features, such as the ability to track employees’ copy and paste activity, generate data breach reporting in the event of an audit or take remote control of a computer in the event of a compliance violation.

However, keep in mind that Teramind offers a customer success manager who can help you decide what features you want and opt out of those you do not. It also can assist in configuring custom rules to help you manage your compliance and monitoring needs. Its dedicated customer service representatives and detailed online guides (with screenshots and videos) further make troubleshooting easier.

Teramind offers micro-monitoring features to ensure employee compliance with company policies and industry regulations. Its advanced employee monitoring features come with a premium price tag compared to some competitors. As such, it is best for companies that must comply with legal or industry standards around security or data but is not best for companies with small budgets or those that don’t handle sensitive data.

Teramind is best for:

• Companies that belong to highly regulated industries or those that frequently handle sensitive or critical data, such as government or healthcare agencies
• Companies with a moderate budget to pay for advanced data protection and security features in an employee monitoring solution
• Companies needing to track employees’ actions—with a high level of granularity—through monitoring features many competitors don’t offer, such as continuous video screen recording and keystroke logging

Teramind is not recommended for:

• Startups or sole-proprietorship companies with fewer than five employees
• Companies that put a premium on improving workforce productivity while steering clear of making employees feel they are being micromanaged using screen recordings and keystroke logging instead of periodic screenshots and overall productivity scoring
• Small businesses with little budget to invest in employee monitoring software
• Businesses that don’t handle overly sensitive data