Best Self Hosted Alternatives to ZEI° by Timeular

Kimai is a professional, web-based time-tracking application for freelancers, agencies, and organizations. It helps teams record working time across customers, projects, and activities, and turns that data into reports and invoices.

Key Features

• Multi-user time tracking with roles, teams, and permission controls
• Customer, project, and activity management with budgets and hourly rates
• Time-clock mode (punch-in/punch-out) and multi-timer support
• Advanced reporting, filtering, and dashboards for time and cost analysis
• Invoicing with configurable templates and multiple export formats
• Data export options (for example CSV, PDF, and spreadsheet formats)
• Extensive JSON API for integrations and automation
• Authentication options including database login, LDAP, and SAML, plus optional TOTP-based 2FA
• Plugin system to extend features

Use Cases

• Tracking billable work and generating invoices for clients
• Company-wide timesheets and internal reporting by team, project, and period
• Integrating time tracking into existing tooling via the JSON API

Kimai is a solid fit when you need a full-featured time tracking system with strong reporting and invoicing capabilities, while supporting both small and large multi-user deployments.

TimeTagger is a web-based time-tracking application focused on tagging time entries and exploring them in an interactive timeline. It is designed for individuals and freelancers and can run locally or on a server, with optional multi-user authentication.

Key Features

• Interactive timeline UI for quickly tagging and reviewing time spent
• Tag-based workflow (instead of project-heavy structures)
• Reporting and exports, including PDF reports and CSV export
• Targets for daily/weekly/monthly goals and progress tracking
• Responsive UI for mobile and desktop, with offline use and sync
• Optional Pomodoro timer (experimental)
• Multiple authentication options, including built-in credentials or reverse-proxy header auth

Use Cases

• Personal productivity tracking and weekly review of time allocation
• Freelancer time tracking and generating client-ready PDF reports
• Lightweight team tracking when deployed with multi-user authentication

Limitations and Considerations

• Pomodoro functionality is marked as experimental
• Multi-user setups typically require explicit credential configuration or reverse-proxy integration

TimeTagger emphasizes a fast, focused tracking experience and practical reporting without heavy project management overhead. It is a strong fit for users who prefer tags, clear timelines, and straightforward exports for analysis or billing.

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)