Free Time Tracking Apps With No Subscription
A disclosure before anything else: Cronus costs $6 a month. We are not on the free list, and this post exists partly because people search for this and deserve a straight answer rather than a bait-and-switch.
So here is the straight answer. There are genuinely free time trackers, they are good, and for a large number of people they are the correct choice. There is also a real thing they cannot do, and it is worth understanding before you pick.
Genuinely free, forever
ActivityWatch
Licence: MPL 2.0 · Platforms: macOS, Windows, Linux
The best free tracker there is, and the first one to try.
It runs a local server on your machine with watchers reporting events: active window, AFK status, browser activity via extensions, editor activity via plugins. Everything stays local in a database you can query directly. No account, no upsell, no expiry.
Genuinely good: clean and extensible data model, real browser and editor integrations, maintained for years by people who care, and nothing leaves your machine unless you make it.
Hard: dashboards are functional rather than insightful. You get time-by-app and time-by-title, and turning that into "my mornings are being eaten and I should do something" is your job. Setting up browser and editor watchers is a per-tool exercise.
Tockler
Licence: GPL 3.0 · Platforms: macOS, Windows, Linux
The minimal option. Automatically records the active window title and app, shows a timeline, stays out of the way. If you want a raw local log and nothing more, this does it with very little ceremony and no interpretation whatsoever.
Super Productivity
Licence: MIT · Platforms: macOS, Windows, Linux, web
Task manager first, tracker second. Jira, GitHub, GitLab and Open Project integrations, a Pomodoro implementation, entirely local.
The catch: it is manual. You start and stop things. If your problem is that you never remember to start a timer, this does not solve it.
Timewarrior
Licence: MIT · Platforms: anywhere with a terminal
timew start coding, timew stop, and a genuinely powerful reporting layer underneath. Scriptable, tiny, plain-text-ish storage you fully control, pairs with Taskwarrior. Completely manual, no automatic capture at all.
Kimai
Licence: AGPL 3.0 · Self-hosted
The serious option if you need multi-user tracking with invoicing and refuse to use SaaS. Customers, projects, rates, invoice generation, user management, on your own server.
You are now running a PHP application, a database and backups, forever. Manual entry throughout.
Free tiers, which are a different thing
These are not free products. They are paid products with a free entry point, and the distinction matters because the limits are placed exactly where you will hit them.
Toggl Track has the most generous free tier in the category and is the best manual tracker there is. Genuinely usable indefinitely for solo work. Still manual: you start the timer.
RescueTime has a free "Lite" tier that persists after cancellation. Rare and worth crediting. Automatic tracking, but the shallow version of the reporting.
Clockify offers unlimited free users, which is unusual. Team-shaped and manual.
Everything else in this category, ours included, is a trial rather than a tier: Rize 7 days, Memtime 14, Timing 30, Cronus 3.
The thing free trackers cannot do
This is the honest core of the post, and it is not about money.
Open-source local trackers record. They do not interpret.
You will get a very accurate answer to "which windows were in front of me and for how long". You will not get an answer to "was that time well spent", because answering that requires a language model reasoning about what PR #2420, docs.stripe.com/webhooks and youtube.com/watch?v=... mean in the context of what you were trying to do this week.
Running that locally is not impossible, but it is not free either: it means a capable model on your machine, using RAM and battery all day, and small local models are meaningfully worse at exactly this judgment. Nobody in the open-source world has shipped it well yet, which is why every free tool above stops at the log.
So the real question is not free versus paid. It is:
Do you want a record, or do you want a verdict?
Which you should pick
A record is enough, and you want ownership. ActivityWatch. Genuinely excellent, costs nothing, and you should stop reading and go install it.
You want a minimal local log. Tockler.
You already manage tasks and want timers on them. Super Productivity.
You live in a terminal. Timewarrior.
You need team billing without SaaS. Kimai, and budget for the maintenance.
You will reliably start a timer. Toggl's free tier.
You want a verdict rather than a record. That is where you have to pay somebody, and the honest reason is the model cost, not greed. Cronus is $6 a month after a three-day trial, which is the cheapest paid option in the category, and it never captures your screen: window metadata only, with sensitive information redacted on device before anything is sent.
One thing worth saying
If you are searching for a free tracker because you have tried paid ones and abandoned them, price was probably not the problem.
The usual reason people quit is that the tool asked them for something every day: start a timer, approve an entry, maintain a rule, tidy up on Friday. A free tool that asks for the same things will get abandoned the same way, and you will have saved nothing because you were not using the paid one either.
Judge whichever you pick by what it asks of you on your worst day. That is the day the record matters most, and the day you are least able to maintain one.
Comparisons of the paid options, including where each beats us, are in our 2026 roundup.
