Best Self Hosted Alternatives to RescueTime

ActivityWatch is an automated time tracking and lifelogging suite that records how you spend time on your devices. It stores data locally under your control and provides a web interface to explore and analyze your activity.

Key Features

• Automatic tracking via “watchers” (active app/window, AFK status, browser tab activity, and more)
• Local, user-controlled data storage with a REST API and query engine
• Web dashboard to visualize time usage and breakdowns
• Categorization to group and summarize activity for better overviews
• Cross-platform support (Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android)
• Extensible ecosystem with browser extensions and editor plugins

Use Cases

• Personal productivity and work-life balance tracking
• Understanding time spent across apps, websites, and projects
• Quantified-self lifelogging and behavioral research datasets

Limitations and Considerations

• Activity synchronization across devices is still a work in progress

ActivityWatch is a strong fit for individuals and teams who want detailed, automatic time tracking without giving up data ownership. Its modular watchers and API make it adaptable to many workflows and research needs.

solidtime is a modern open-source time tracking application built for freelancers, agencies, and teams. It combines time entry tracking with project organization, client management, and billing workflows in a single web app.

Key Features

• Time tracking with a fast, modern interface
• Projects, tasks, and client management
• Billable rates per project, member, organization, and more
• Roles and permissions for team collaboration
• Multiple organizations per user account
• Import from other trackers (including Toggl and Clockify)
• Billing, reporting, and PDF invoice generation
• Progressive Web App (PWA) experience for mobile devices

Use Cases

• Freelancers tracking billable hours per client and generating invoices
• Agencies managing projects, team access, and rates across multiple clients
• Teams centralizing time entry reporting for internal or client-facing summaries

Limitations and Considerations

• Some announced features may be marked as “coming soon” depending on the version (for example offline support and certain client templating features)

solidtime is a good fit for organizations that want a modern UX and strong core time-tracking features while keeping control via an open-source, deployable product. It is especially well-suited when projects, client billing, and permissions need to live in the same system.

Wakapi is a minimalist backend for collecting and visualizing coding activity, compatible with the WakaTime client ecosystem. It helps individuals or teams track time spent across projects, languages, editors, machines, and operating systems.

Key Features

• WakaTime-compatible API to ingest editor “heartbeats”
• Dashboards with statistics for projects, languages, editors, hosts, and operating systems
• Public leaderboards (configurable scope and access restrictions)
• Shareable badges for profiles and repositories
• Weekly email reports
• REST API for integrating and exporting data
• Prometheus-compatible metrics export
• Multiple database options (SQLite by default, with support for MySQL and PostgreSQL)

Use Cases

• Personal developer productivity tracking without relying on third-party SaaS
• Team-wide coding activity dashboards and friendly competitions via leaderboards
• Feeding coding-time metrics into monitoring/analytics stacks via API or Prometheus

Limitations and Considerations

• Data collection depends on WakaTime-compatible editor plugins and correct client configuration
• WakaTime compatibility is partial, so not every upstream feature or endpoint may be supported

Wakapi provides a lightweight, fast way to own your coding-time statistics while remaining compatible with widely used WakaTime tooling. It’s well-suited for privacy-conscious users who want dashboards, reports, and automation-friendly exports.

Traggo is a tag-based time tracking application that records time as tagged time spans rather than tasks. It provides a web UI with configurable dashboards, list and calendar views, and user management, and is distributed as open-source software for self-hosting.

Key Features

• Tag-based time tracking where each tracked interval is annotated with flexible tags (e.g., project, type).
• Customizable dashboards and diagrams for visualizing tracked time and tag-based statistics.
• List and calendar views for browsing and managing tracked time spans.
• The web UI includes multiple themes and simple user management.
• Provides a GraphQL schema/API and is implemented in Go; official distribution includes multi-architecture Docker images and a default SQLite database file.

(traggo.net)

Use Cases

• Freelancers or contractors who want flexible, tag-centric tracking across multiple projects and activity types.
• Small teams needing lightweight time-tracking with visual dashboards and exportable data for reporting.
• Privacy-conscious users or organizations that prefer to self-host an open-source time tracker and keep data under their control.

(traggo.net)

Traggo is focused on simplicity and flexibility for time recording via tags and suits users who want a lightweight, open-source, self-hosted tracking solution. It is implemented primarily in Go and is packaged for easy deployment with Docker and Docker Compose.

(github.com)