Cronus vs Timely

This comparison has a clean answer, which is unusual.

Do you bill clients for your hours? If yes, use Timely. If no, use Cronus. Almost every complaint about either product traces back to somebody who answered that question one way and bought the other tool.

The rest of this post is about why the split is that sharp.

At a glance

| | Cronus | Timely | |---|---|---| | Price | $6/mo after a three-day trial | From ~$11 per user per month | | Approval required | No | Yes, on every entry | | Invoicing and billing | No | Yes, core feature | | Project budgets | No | Yes | | Team dashboards | No | Yes | | Goal-aware | Yes | No, project-aware | | Separate background app | No | Yes, Memory | | Screen captured | No | No |

The structural difference: who makes the decision

Timely's Memory app records activity in the background. Its AI reads that record and drafts timesheet entries. You review and approve them, and approved entries become invoices.

Cronus reads app, window title and URL, and a model decides what the activity was and whether it served the goals you set. Nothing waits for confirmation.

That looks like a small difference and it is the whole product.

Timely's output has to survive a client disputing a line item. A number a human signed off on is defensible; a number a model produced unsupervised is not. So the approval step is not friction Timely failed to remove, it is the thing you are paying for.

Cronus's output has to be true enough to tell you that Wednesday afternoon vanished into Slack. Nobody is going to be invoiced over it. That lower stakes bar is what lets us delete the approval queue entirely.

Same underlying technology, opposite accuracy requirements, and therefore opposite designs.

What this means day to day

With Timely, there is a moment in your day, usually at the end, where you sit down and process a queue. For a consultant, this is fifteen minutes that turns into money and it is the most valuable quarter hour you spend.

With Cronus, there is no such moment. You open it when you are curious, and the rest of the time it nudges you when you have drifted. There is nothing to process because there is nothing waiting for you.

If you do not bill anyone, that queue is pure cost. This is the single most common reason people churn off Timely, and it is not a defect in Timely.

Two apps or one

Timely's Memory runs separately from the main interface. Capture in one place, review in another. Even once you are used to it, it is two surfaces for one job.

Cronus is one app. Whether that matters much is a matter of taste, but it compounds with the approval queue: a chore is worse when it lives somewhere you have to go.

Price

Timely is per-seat, from around $11 per user per month, which is fair for what agencies get.

Cronus is $6 a month, after a three-day free trial.

For a five-person agency billing clients, Timely's cost is trivially justified by one recovered hour a month. For one person tracking their own focus, per-seat pricing on a billing product is a strange thing to be paying.

Privacy

Neither captures your screen.

Timely's Memory is cloud-backed and its data stays private to you until you choose to share it, which is a clear and reasonable position.

Cronus reads window metadata only, redacts sensitive information on your device before transmission, and is GDPR compliant. Pause or revoke permission at any time. See our privacy policy.

If you want nothing to leave the machine at all, neither of these is your answer and you should look at Memtime or ActivityWatch, both covered in our 2026 roundup.

Where Timely wins, decisively

• Invoicing and client billing. Cronus has none of it.
• Project budgets and profitability.
• Team dashboards and a manager's view.
• A defensible audit trail, because a human approved every entry.
• Integrations with project management tools.

If any of those matter, this comparison is over and Timely is your product. Do not switch to save yourself some clicks.

Where Cronus wins

• No approval queue, ever.
• Goal awareness rather than project mapping, so it judges whether the time served what you were trying to do.
• One app, not two.
• Nudges in the moment instead of a reckoning at day's end.
• $6 a month, after a three-day free trial.

The verdict

Timely is a billing product with excellent AI attached. Cronus is an awareness product. They look adjacent because both watch your desktop, and they are solving different problems for different buyers.

If your hours turn into an invoice, pay for Timely.

If your hours turn into nothing but a vague feeling that the week got away from you, that is the problem we built Cronus for.

Download Cronus. Three days free, then $6 a month, and there is nothing to approve.