Timing alternative

The best Timing alternative in 2026

  • Timing is macOS-only and excellent. The main reasons to leave: cross-platform need, team features, or invoicing.
  • Memtime and Temporal.ist are the closest cross-platform options.
  • Solo Mac freelancers should usually stay.

Timing's macOS polish is hard to beat. People look for alternatives when they outgrow solo-Mac usage.

Start tracking time, free No credit card. Free during early access.

Why people look for a Timing alternative

  • Your team includes Windows or Linux machines.
  • You need teams, organisations, and per-client roll-ups.
  • You want invoicing inside the tracker.

Timing alternatives compared

Temporal.ist That's us

Free during early access

Automatic tracking from file edits and URLs with invoicing built in — idle time and PC sleep deducted on their own, offline-first desktop apps plus a headless Linux CLI. No screenshots.

Best for: Freelancers and small teams who forget timers and bill hourly.

Memtime

From ≈ €11/mo

Visual day-timeline tracker (Mac/Win/Linux) with strong professional-services traction.

Best for: Teams that want a horizontal timeline reconstruction of the day.

Toggl Track

Free up to 5 users; paid plans from ≈ $9/user/mo

The polished manual stopwatch. 100+ integrations and best-in-class team reporting.

Best for: Teams that reliably hit start/stop and depend on integrations.

Harvest

≈ $12/user/mo (Pro)

Manual timer + mature invoicing with deep QuickBooks/Xero integration.

Best for: Agencies running their billing on QuickBooks/Xero today.

Rize

≈ $9.99/mo

Beautifully designed macOS focus app with timesheet exports.

Best for: Mac-only individuals who want a focus coach.

ActivityWatch

Free, open source

Open-source, fully local automatic tracker. No SaaS.

Best for: People who'll only run open-source software they can audit.

Why teams pick Temporal.ist

Temporal.ist is cross-platform, has team and organisation features, and ships invoicing: per-client hourly rates, line items built from unbilled sessions, auto-numbered invoices. The capture stays automatic on every OS — file saves and visited URLs, sessions closed on idle, PC sleep deducted — and the headless Linux CLI tracks work on the servers a macOS app will never run on. On macOS specifically, Timing is more polished — that's still its moat.

What you get when you switch

The pitch above, made concrete — this is what's in the box.

Tracking that starts itself

A file save or a visited URL starts the session and files it under the right project. No timers, no screenshots, no activity scores.

Invoices from tracked time

Projects link to clients with per-client hourly rates. Unbilled sessions become line items on auto-numbered invoices — nothing re-typed.

Hours that stay honest

Sessions close by themselves after 15 idle minutes, time your PC spends asleep is deducted automatically, and you can pause with one click.

Sessions or whole days

Think in days, not sessions? Optional day-span mode shows one session per project per day, first save to last — reversible, and applies to your whole history.

Everywhere you work

Apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux, a headless CLI for servers over SSH, and extensions for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari. Offline-first, syncs later.

Teams without surveillance

Organisation and team roll-ups with a live dashboard. Managers see project totals — never screenshots or keystroke records.

Flow diagram: a saved file and a visited URL are captured automatically, become a tracked session on the DMI project totalling 2 hours 30 minutes, and land two clicks later as a 2.50-hour line item at 90 dollars an hour on invoice DMI-202607-0012 totalling 225 dollars
From a file save to an invoice line — attribution and billing happen on their own.
Three panels: a session closes itself after 15 minutes without a save; 41 minutes of PC sleep between 12:31 and 13:12 are recorded as a break and deducted from the day's total; a session paused at 15:04 and resumed at 15:26 with the gap not billed
Idle timeout, sleep deduction, and one-click pause keep the hours something a client can trust.
Four panels showing where Temporal.ist tracks: desktop apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux that work offline and sync later; browser extensions for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari that only see sites you add; a headless Linux CLI running temporal watch on a server; and one-click manual sessions for meetings and calls
One account across desktop, browser, and servers — with manual sessions for the rest.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Mac client as polished as Timing?

Honestly, no. Timing has spent a decade on macOS-specific polish. We're broader, not deeper.

Can I import from Timing?

Via CSV today.

Ready to stop reconstructing your week?

Track time automatically. Bill clients in the same tool. No surveillance, ever.

Start tracking time, free