Productivity

20 Free Open-source Time Tracking Solutions For Windows, Linux, and macOS

Hazem Abbas

Sep 13, 2021 — 9 min read

Photo by Mailchimp / Unsplash

Tracking your time, tasks, and progress is a necessity. Some project management tools have built-in time tracker and time management tools, but what if you want the time management and tracking as a separate software package?

There are many commercial packages for all popular operating systems, while it is hard to reach the open-source free ones for everyone.

In this article, we present you a collection of free and open source time management and tracking tools for individuals, freelancers, and teams.

1- Timetagger

Timetagger is a free open-source time-tracker app with an intuitive user-interface. It has a built-in Pomodoro tool, PDF/ CSV reporting, a command-line CLI tool and a developer-friendly web API.

The app's responsive allows it to run smoothly on mobile, tablet as well as big screens.

2- Kimai

Kimai is an open-soure time-tracker for freelancers. It is built to help developers and UI/UX designers manage their time, clients, project, and tasks in one package.

Kimai offers a rich customizable informative dashboard and advanced time-tracking features with a powerful reporting features.

Another great feature Kimai offers which is invoices management and export in many formats.

All these features combined alongside other features (check here) are the primary reason we recommend it for freelancers.

3- Pendulums

Pendulums is a free-open-source multi-platform time management solution for creative people.

Pendulums has an offline-first mode. It works through the offline browser and sync data as the connection returns.

Pendulums has installation packages for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and web self-hosted edition.

Pendulums features include Team support, tracking daily activities, unlimited projects support, charts, reporting, notes and customizable desktop notifications.

4- Titra

Titra is a self-hosted open-source project and time tracking solution for freelancers and small teams.

It features time-tracking, project management, project's tasks management, dark theme mode, reporting, graphs, and more.

5- Cattr

Cattr is a free open-source time tracking solution for freelancers, teams, small companies and creative people.

With Cattr's clean dashboard, you can manage multiple projects, team members. It helps you track project, your progress, and activities, automate screenshot recording, automate reports generation, and more.

Cattr features a modular system for developers who want to extend its basic functionalities to fit their work requirements.

The community edition is released under SSPL license.

7- Kapow

Kapow is a desktop clock program with a timed-tasks manager. It helps the user keep track of time, either working on one or many projects.

Kapow is available for Linux: Ubuntu and as a Flatpak package. It also offers two other download options for Windows; an installable package (Windows 7,8,10) and a Windows portable package.

8- openTimetool

openTimetool is a web-based time recording and tracking application. It features time sheets creation and management, performance records, mobile support and more.

openTimetool helps uses to create custom tasks, and reports. Reports also can be exported to various formats like PDF, CSV.

8- Toggl

Toggl is a desktop time-tracking app for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Its features include idle detection, reminders, a Pomodoro timer, daily time tracking and a simple interface.

Currently, the project is in maintenance mode as its developers are doing a massive rewrite.

9- ActivityWatch

ActivityWatch is a free and open-source cross-platform activity tracking app.

It is an idea solution for busy managers or developers who work on multiple projects. Its features include activity tracking, timeline preview, raw data preview, advanced search, data query, charts, categories, browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome.

ActivityWatch is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android.

10- Anuko

Anuko Time Tracker is an open-source web-based project time-tracking app which is built with PHP and uses MySQL database.

Anuko is designed for freelancers and teams. It has a simple user interface to manage time, calendar, reports, projects, users, user groups, and system plugins.

Anuko offers 3 tracking modes:
Time mode; tracks time without linking projects and tasks, projects; tracks time against projects, projects, and tasks; tracks against every project tasks and progress.

You can switch to any mode according to your current workflow or production plan.

11. myAgilePomodoro

myAgilePmodoro or mAP (for short), is a free open-source (GPLv3) a time-tracking and managing desktop apps.

The application is built with Java and supports multi-languages, and works as a portable application (without installation).

myAgilePomodoro combines Pomodoro technique with Agile method. It features a full Pomodoro and task management integration, time tracking, tasks and sub-tasks management, backlog management, story points, charts and custom themes.

The app works on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

12- TimeSlotTracker

TimeSlotTracker is a simple cross-platform time-tracking apps that support tasks with hierarchical tasks' tree view. It offers iCalendar support, native Ubuntu/ Debian Linux packages and time planning.

With TimeSlotTracker, you can export your custom pre-defined reports in different formats: CSV, TXT, and HTML.

The app supports 7 different languages for the user-interface, you can add your language if it's missing and re-build the app.

13- TimeTrex

TimeTrex is a web-based time management for employee payroll. It aims to manage invoicing and payroll management against time and attendance.

TimeTrex is a time-tracking solution for human resources departments, small companies and teams.

The main features of TimeTrex include: scheduling, timeclock, timesheet management, job costing, workforce management, HRM (Human Resources Management), recruitment, applicant tracking.

TimeTrex community edition is a web-based time tracking solution for companies to track their employee progress.

The community edition offers scheduling, employee leave management, several human resources management options and payroll management.

It may look limited than the enterprise, professional and corporate editions, but it works well for small companies.

TimeTrex is distributed and released as an open-source under Affero GNU Public license.

14- todoyu

The todoyu is a web-based project management app with advanced time-tracking settings for teams.

the todoyu primary features include: task and project management, personal portal, time-tracking, calendar, contact management, billing, resources planning, documents management, feedback manager and more.

With todoyu you can manage multiple projects with ease. It is an ideal solution for independent freelancers who work on multiple projects.

todoyu is released under BSD license.

15- TimeFinder

TimeFinder is a cross-platform desktop app to automate timetables and schedules management.

TimeFinder comes in a tabbed interface and features a time planner, timetable management, events planner, location/ events preview and a future planer.

Because it was built with Java, it runs seamlessly on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

16- Tiny Time Tracker

Tiny Time Tracker is a personal time tracker application for individuals. It tracks user time and export the time card data in Excel or CSV file formats.

It comes with a tiny window which can be positioned anywhere in the screen, and it features a tasks activity and history review and tasks autocomplete.

17- TimeCollect

TimeCollect is a desktop app that helps you to track you work activity on your development work. It has an automatic uptime detection, activity recording, Trac integration and tray support.

It uses MySQL and Derby to store the collected records and data.

18- TEMS

TEMS (Time and Expanse Management System) as its name suggests, it tracks time and expenses for multiple projects and user as it helps admins to bill and invoice.

19- Time Limit

Time Limit is a free countdown application, with fancy features like warnings, notification, progress bar and rich hotkeys (shortcuts) support.

It is a useful solution if you want to track your speech, lecture, presentation, or work.

Time Limit supports windowed and full-screen modes, and it offers several customization options like progress bar, fonts, count-down, background colors, text color, translucent clock0face and a switch between remaining time and elapsed time. Configuration can be exported and restored easily.

Time Limit is released as an open-source project under GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3).

20- Timestrap

Timestrap is a free self-hosted open-source time tracking program for freelancers. It helps you track the time you spent on certain tasks/ projects and organize them accordingly.

Timestrap offers mail notifications, multi-user accounts, docker install, reporting, clients management, charts, notes, a quick task runner and more.

It is a web application that uses Django web framework, which allows it to support a single and multiple sites install with one package.

Final thought

Here, as our article comes to an end, we reviewed briefly about 20 free open-source time tracking software solutions for individuals, freelancers, teams and small companies. Some of them are packed with project management tools and others focus on time and activity tracking.

We highly recommend going through all features and tryout to choose the best one for your workflow.

If you think we miss any other time-tracking solution, please let us know in the comments blew.