Cronus vs Timing

Timing is the tool we get asked about most, and with good reason: it has been doing automatic time tracking on the Mac since before most of this category existed, it is genuinely well built, and it does one thing nothing else on this list can do.

It also asks you to describe your work as a set of keyword rules, and that single design decision is what this comparison is about.

Short version: Timing records what happened and asks you to tell it what things mean. Cronus works out what things mean. If your work maps cleanly onto stable projects, Timing is excellent. If it does not, you will spend your life reassigning entries.

At a glance

| | Cronus | Timing | |---|---|---| | Price | $6/mo after a three-day trial | From ~$10/mo, up to $168/yr on Connect | | Free trial | 3 days | 30 days, no card | | Categorization | AI infers from context | Keyword and rule based | | Goal-aware | Yes | No, project-aware | | Manual reassignment | None | Expected, ongoing | | iPhone / iPad time | No | Yes, via Apple Screen Time | | Data storage | Metadata to our servers, redacted on device | Local, with optional sync and cloud backup | | Invoicing | No | Yes | | Platforms | macOS, Windows in progress | macOS only |

Where Timing genuinely beats us

Worth putting first, because two of these are not close.

The 30-day trial. No credit card. That is the most generous trial in this category by a wide margin, and it tells you something about how confident they are that you will keep it. Ours is three days.

iPhone and iPad time. Timing is the only third-party Mac tracker that pulls Apple Screen Time data and layers it into your timeline. If you take client calls on your phone or read on an iPad mid-workday, Timing sees hours that every other tool on the Mac, including ours, simply does not know exist. That is a real and largely unmatched capability.

Local-first storage. Your data lives on your Mac, with sync and cloud backup as an option rather than a requirement. Cronus sends redacted metadata to our servers, because that is what the AI categorization needs. If nothing may leave your machine, Timing wins and you should stop reading.

Invoicing and billing. Timing does document-level detail and invoiceable reports. Cronus does none of that.

Maturity. It is a long-standing indie Mac app with a real track record. We are a year old.

The keyword rule problem

Here is the actual difference.

In Timing, you create projects and then teach it which activities belong to them, largely through keyword and rule associations. Set that up well and it files your time automatically and reviewing your week takes minutes.

Two things go wrong, and both are structural rather than bugs.

One app, many projects. If you do most of your work in the same few applications, which describes most knowledge workers, VS Code is not a project. Neither is Chrome, nor Notion, nor your terminal. The rule engine has nothing to distinguish this hour in VS Code from that one, so you end up reassigning entries by hand, and the volume of reassignment scales with how much of your work happens in the same tools.

One keyword, several meanings. This is the sharper version. A rule matches a string, and the same string legitimately belongs to different projects depending on what you were doing. Users describe exactly this: a word that fits multiple projects and maps to the wrong one in certain situations. There is no rule you can write to fix it, because the information needed to decide is not in the string.

Cronus takes the other approach. It reads the app, the window title and the browser URL, and a model infers what the activity was and whether it served the goals you set. There is no ruleset to maintain, so there is nothing to reassign when your work changes shape.

The concrete version: you tell Cronus you are shipping a migration this week. Time in the same editor, the same terminal and the same three documentation sites is read against that. Next week you are writing a proposal, and the same tools resolve differently, with no rules touched.

Setup cost

Timing needs upfront work: create projects, configure keyword and task associations, then keep tuning as the rules meet cases you did not anticipate. Reviewers consistently mention both the setup and that the interface takes some getting used to.

Cronus needs you to say what you are working on. That is the setup.

This cuts both ways, and we should be honest about it. Timing's rules are inspectable and deterministic: you can read them, and you know why something was filed where it was. Cronus's judgments are a model's, so when it is wrong you correct it rather than debug it. If you want to be able to audit the logic, Timing gives you that and we do not.

Price

Timing starts around $10/mo for Professional on one Mac, with Expert and Connect above it, up to $168 a year.

Cronus is $6 a month after a three-day free trial, one price, no tiers.

We are cheaper. Timing's trial is ten times longer. Depending on how you weigh those, that is close to a wash for a first-time buyer.

Who should use which

Use Timing if:

• You want your iPhone and iPad time in the same timeline. Nothing else does this.
• You bill clients and need document-level detail.
• Your data must stay on your machine.
• Your work maps onto a stable set of projects that keyword rules can describe.
• You want to be able to inspect exactly why an entry was filed somewhere.

Use Cronus if:

• Most of your work happens in the same few apps, so app-level rules cannot tell your projects apart.
• You do not want to maintain a ruleset, or to reassign entries at the end of each week.
• What you want is not a billing record but an honest answer about where the week went.
• You want goal awareness: the same site meaning different things in different weeks.

The honest summary

Timing is a better product than most of the tools people compare us to, and if the Screen Time integration matters to you, this comparison is already over.

The question is what you want the tool to do. Timing is a superb recorder with a filing system you configure. Cronus is an interpreter that decides for you and is occasionally wrong.

If you have tried automatic tracking before and abandoned it, it is worth asking what actually killed it. In our experience it is rarely the recording, which every tool does well. It is the ongoing maintenance: the reassigning, the rule tweaking, the weekly tidy-up that quietly stops happening in week three.

Try Cronus, three days free, then $6 a month. And if you want the longest look before deciding, Timing's 30-day trial is genuinely the most generous offer in this category.