The 6 Best Time Tracking Apps for Engineering Managers on a Mac in 2026

Dayflow is the best fit for most engineering managers on a Mac who want to remember their own week for 1:1s and reviews, at $0. Pick Timing for structured reports, Rize to see meeting load, ActivityWatch for fully local tracking without AI, WakaTime if you still code, and Toggl (formerly Toggl Track) if your team already plans in it.

Engineering managers spend the week in pieces: 1:1s, planning, incident threads, code review, hiring loops, and the design doc you meant to read on Monday. By Friday, “what did I do this week?” usually gets a guess for an answer. That same guess then has to support a skip-level update, next week’s 1:1 agendas and, twice a year, your own self-review. This ranking is for managers on a Mac who want a record of their own week, not a dashboard of their team. You need a trail you can turn into 1:1 notes, a weekly update and review evidence, without running a timer between meetings. If you want the wider field, see our ranking of Mac time trackers.

Dayflow is our product, so weigh this ranking with that in mind. It ranks first because the criteria below favor a readable record of the whole week with no timers, which is what Dayflow produces, and because it costs $0. It does not win on meeting and calendar visibility, where Rize is stronger (Rize compared with Dayflow). It also does not win on structured reports, where Timing is the better tool (Timing compared with Dayflow).

Quick comparison

Tool	Best for	How it tracks	Price
Dayflow	Recalling your week for 1:1s and reviews	One screen frame every 10 seconds, then AI writes a timeline	$0 (MIT); optional Pro $20/month
Timing	Structured reports on your Mac time	Automatic app, website and document tracking	From $9/month billed annually, or $11/month billed monthly
Rize	Seeing meeting load and focus	Automatic app and website tracking, plus Google Calendar for meetings	From $9.99/month billed annually, or $12.99/month billed monthly
ActivityWatch (vs Dayflow)	Fully local tracking with no AI	Active app, window title and away-from-keyboard status; browser extensions add URLs	Free

Quick picks by use case

Best free: Dayflow, at $0 under the MIT license. It captures the whole screen without timers and turns each day into a timeline you can read on Friday. Pro is optional at $20 a month if you want Dayflow to handle cloud analysis.

Best fully local, no AI: ActivityWatch, which is free and open source under MPL-2.0. Its developers state that data never leaves your device. You get raw app and window data and no summaries.

Best for reports: Timing. Professional costs $9 per month billed annually or $11 billed monthly. You get detailed per-document records, customizable reports and AI activity summaries, all on a Mac-only app.

Best for seeing meeting load: Rize. Basic costs $9.99 per month billed annually or $12.99 billed monthly. It connects Google Calendar to separate meeting time from focus time.

Best if you also plan team time: Toggl (formerly Toggl Track) (Toggl on Mac compared). It is free for up to 3 users, and Starter costs $9 per user per month billed annually or $12 billed monthly. It is timer-first, with planning and capacity tools around it.

Best for your own coding time: WakaTime. The Free plan costs $0 and keeps 1 week of dashboard history. Basic costs $9 per month billed monthly, or $8.25 per month billed $99 yearly.

How we compared them

The weights reflect what an engineering manager needs from a record of their own week.

• Whole-week capture without timers (25%). Scores high if it records apps, documents and context switches with no start and stop. Scores low if it depends on you starting a timer between meetings.
• Recall for 1:1 and review prep (25%). Scores high if Friday’s output reads like a list of what happened. Scores low if you only get category totals and charts.
• Meeting and focus visibility (15%). Scores high if it separates meeting time from focus time, ideally from your calendar. Scores low if meetings blur into “browser” or “video call.”
• Privacy for sensitive management work (15%). Scores high if data stays on your Mac by default and any cloud processing is a clear choice. Scores low if everything lands in a vendor cloud, which matters when comp bands and written feedback are on your screen.
• Reports and export (10%). Scores high if you can get data out in a format you can reuse in a doc. Scores low if it stays locked in a dashboard.
• Cost for one person (10%). Scores high if one seat is free or close to it. Scores low if you face per-seat team pricing or AI credit tiers you have to manage.

Each tool was compared from its vendor’s own pricing and product pages as of October 4, 2026, and Dayflow from its 2.2.0 release facts. No benchmark was run, and the scores behind the ranking are judgments.

The 6 best time tracking apps for engineering managers on a Mac, ranked

1. Dayflow

Dayflow is a free, open-source Mac app that records your screen at one frame every 10 seconds and has AI write the day into a readable timeline. You never start or stop anything. It captures the 1:1 doc, the incident channel and the PR review the same way.

For a manager, the payoff comes on Friday. You read what you actually worked on instead of rebuilding the week from calendar invites. You can then export a date range as Markdown from Settings → Export and turn it into 1:1 notes or review evidence.

You choose where the analysis happens:

• Local AI through Ollama or LM Studio keeps screenshot analysis on your Mac.
• Your own cloud provider processes selected screenshots under its own terms.
• Dayflow Pro handles the cloud analysis for you.

The app is $0 and MIT licensed, and Pro costs $20 a month.

The limits are real. Dayflow is Mac only (macOS 14 or later). It has no team reports, invoicing, payroll approvals or website blocking. Full screen recordings stay on your Mac, so anything sensitive that was on screen is in them too. AI summaries can also miss or misread work.

Pick it if you want to remember your week, not just total it.

2. Timing

Timing is a Mac-only automatic tracker built around detailed records and reports. It records time across apps, websites and documents, down to specific URLs and Mail threads. The vendor also lists manual entries, iOS activity import and call tracking.

For a manager, that depth shows how many hours went into the hiring doc compared with the roadmap deck. All plans include AI activity summaries and AI-powered suggestions for time entries, which turn raw activity into something closer to a log. Customizable reports and plan-dependent two-way Linear and ClickUp sync help if your team’s work lives in those tools. The vendor states that tracked times stay on your Mac unless you opt into sync, and all plans list Sync & Cloud Backup.

Pricing:

• Professional: $9 per month billed annually, or $11 billed monthly.
• Expert: $11 per month billed annually, or $14 billed monthly.
• Connect: $16 per user per month billed annually, or $20 billed monthly.

A 30-day trial needs no credit card.

The limits: there is no free tier, it runs only on Mac, and Professional covers one Mac with limited web app access. Its output leans toward hours and categories. That suits reports well but is less natural for writing a 1:1 narrative.

Pick it if you want structured reports and project totals and are fine paying a subscription.

3. Rize

Rize is a cloud-based automatic tracker that uses AI to categorize your day and coach your focus. It tracks apps and websites automatically and tags them with AI. It can also connect Google Calendar to capture meeting time, which is the feature an engineering manager will lean on most: it shows how much of the week went to meetings compared with focus blocks.

AI chat and productivity and focus insights sit on top, metered in monthly AI credits. MCP server access is included on Pro and above.

Pricing:

• Basic: $9.99 per month billed annually, or $12.99 billed monthly (500 AI credits).
• Pro: $23.99 per month billed annually (1,000 credits).
• Max: $39.99 per month billed annually (3,000 credits).
• Team: $29.99 per seat per month billed annually, or $39.99 billed monthly.

For Pro and Max monthly billing, see the vendor’s pricing page at rize.io. A 7-day trial includes full features and needs no credit card.

The limits: there is no permanently free tier, and data is hosted in the cloud. The vendor states it uses Amazon Web Services with encryption at rest and in transit. Rize runs on Mac (macOS Mojave 10.14.6 or later) and Windows, but not yet Linux.

Pick it if meeting load is the problem you are trying to see.

4. ActivityWatch

ActivityWatch is a free, open-source tracker, licensed under MPL-2.0, that keeps everything on your own device. It records the active app, the window title and whether you are away from the keyboard. Browser extensions add tab titles and URLs, and editor plugins add coding activity.

For a manager, window titles carry a lot of information, such as document names, Slack channels and meeting windows. The developers state that data is never sent to any server. That is the cleanest answer if your screen regularly shows salary bands, performance notes or candidate packets.

It is free with no feature gates, and it runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android, so it can cover a Linux workstation as well. A local API and custom watchers suit managers who like to script their own weekly rollup.

The limits: no built-in AI summaries are listed, so turning a week of window titles into 1:1 notes is up to you. Sync between devices is still a work in progress, and there is no iOS support. The site mentions optional “AW Pro” patronage, but no price for it was confirmed.

Pick it if nothing is allowed to leave your machine and you are comfortable reading raw data.

5. Toggl (formerly Toggl Track)

Toggl (formerly Toggl Track) is a timer-based tracker that now combines time tracking with planning. You start and stop timers, fill in timesheets or pull entries from calendar integrations. The vendor also lists automated background tracking and a timeline in the desktop app, and states that it does not take screenshots or record keystrokes.

For a manager tracking their own week, timers are the weak point. A manager’s day is a run of short context switches that nobody remembers to log. Toggl earns its place through everything around your own time:

• Projects, tasks and capacity management.
• Timesheet approvals and profitability reports on Premium.
• Jira and Asana integrations on Premium.
• Toggl AI, which answers natural-language questions about workspace data, plus an MCP server.

Pricing:

• Free: $0 for up to 3 users.
• Starter: $9 per user per month billed annually, or $12 billed monthly.
• Premium: $16 per user per month billed annually, or $24 billed monthly.
• Enterprise: contact the vendor.

Paid plans include a 30-day trial. Data lives in Toggl’s cloud and syncs across the web, desktop and mobile apps, on Mac, Windows, iOS, Android and browser extensions.

Pick it if your team already plans in Toggl and you want your own hours in the same place.

6. WakaTime

WakaTime tracks coding time through open-source plugins for 100+ editors, IDEs and terminals and sends it to a hosted dashboard. It records time per project, language and editor. It also tracks AI coding usage: adoption, model usage and spend, and AI-generated compared with human-written lines across tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot and Codex.

For a manager, it answers one narrow question well: how much do I still code, and on what? It sees nothing outside the editor, so 1:1s, docs and Slack are invisible to it. The vendor also targets team leads with team dashboards, which is a different and more sensitive use than tracking your own week.

Pricing:

• Free: $0 with 1 week of dashboard history.
• Basic: $9 per month billed monthly, or $8.25 per month billed $99 yearly.
• Premium: $14 per month billed monthly, or $12.83 per month billed $153.96 yearly. You need Premium for full history.

The plugins are open source, but the hosted service is not, and its server location is not stated. Pair it with a whole-screen tracker rather than relying on it alone. Our developer roundup goes deeper on this.

Pick it if you still ship code and want that slice of your week measured.

Full comparison table

Tool	Price	Automatic capture	AI summaries	Where data lives	Open source	Platforms
Dayflow	$0; Pro $20/month	Yes, one screen frame every 10 seconds	Yes, an AI-written timeline (local AI, your own provider or Pro)	Recordings and timeline on your Mac; optional off-device analysis	Yes, MIT	Mac (macOS 14+)
Timing	From $9/month billed annually	Yes, apps, websites and documents	Yes, AI activity summaries	Local, with optional sync	No	Mac
Rize	From $9.99/month billed annually	Yes, apps and websites	AI categorization, chat and focus insights	Cloud (AWS)	No	Mac, Windows
ActivityWatch	Free	Yes, app, window title and away-from-keyboard status	None listed	Local	Yes, MPL-2.0	Windows, Mac, Linux, Android
Toggl (formerly Toggl Track)	Free for up to 3 users; Starter from $9/user/month billed annually	Mostly timers; vendor also lists background tracking	AI Q&A on workspace data	Cloud	No	Web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, browser extensions
WakaTime	Free; Basic $9/month billed monthly	Coding time in editors only	No; tracks AI coding usage	Cloud	Plugins only	100+ editors via plugins, web dashboard

How do you turn a tracked week into 1:1 and review prep?

The tracker is only half the system. The other half is a short pass at the end of each week that turns raw time into three outputs.

1. Notes for each direct report. Scan the week for anything tied to a person, such as a PR you reviewed, a doc you commented on or an escalation you handled. Each one becomes a line on that person’s next 1:1 agenda. “I saw the migration plan, here is what I think” lands better than “anything you want to discuss?”

2. Your update upward. Group the same week into decisions made, risks raised and things unblocked. Our weekly status report template has slots for exactly that. With Dayflow, you can export the week as Markdown and draft the update with an assistant, as in the Claude weekly report workflow. Keep in mind that a cloud assistant receives whatever Dayflow data it retrieves in the conversation, so local storage does not make that conversation local. Local and cloud processing lays out the tradeoffs.

3. A running log for your own review. Self-reviews ask about six or twelve months, and memory of that span skews toward the last few weeks. Five lines of evidence saved every Friday solve that.

One caution matters more for managers than for anyone else. An AI-written summary of your screen is a record of your attention, not evidence about someone else’s performance. Before anything from a tracker goes into a review you write about a report, check it against the actual doc, ticket or conversation.

Before you install anything, you can estimate your meeting share with the where does my week go calculator. The meeting cost calculator is useful when a recurring meeting looks overdue for cutting.

Should an engineering manager track the team’s time too?

This ranking deliberately covers your own week. Tracking your reports’ time is a different decision with different stakes. Several tools here sell team plans, including Rize Team, Toggl, WakaTime Team and Business, and Timing Connect. Dayflow does not offer team reports at all.

If your organization needs team-level time data, project totals that people log or opt into are a different thing from watching screens. Our piece on time tracking without surveillance covers where that line sits. Tracking your own week, and sharing what you learn from it, is the low-risk way to start. It also shows your reports what you mean when you ask where their time goes.

Where Dayflow is the wrong pick

Dayflow fits one job: a readable personal record on a Mac. These situations call for a different tool.

• You want meeting load from your calendar. Rize connects Google Calendar and reports meeting time against focus time. Dayflow has no calendar connection.
• You need structured reports or Linear sync. Timing has customizable reports, report rounding and plan-dependent two-way Linear and ClickUp sync. Dayflow exports Markdown, not reports.
• Your company does not allow screen recording. ActivityWatch records app and window titles only, and its developers state that the data stays local. Dayflow stores full screen recordings on your Mac.
• You work on Windows or Linux. ActivityWatch covers Windows, Linux and Android. Rize and Toggl run on Windows. Dayflow is macOS 14 or later only.
• You need team time, capacity or approvals. Toggl has team reports, capacity management and timesheet approvals on Premium. Dayflow has no team reports, invoicing, payroll approvals or website blocking.
• You only care about coding time. WakaTime measures time per project, language and editor, plus AI tool usage, which Dayflow does not break out.

How much do they cost?

Tool	Plan	Price
Dayflow	Free	$0
Dayflow	Pro	$20/month
Timing	Professional	$9/month billed annually, or $11 billed monthly
Timing	Expert	$11/month billed annually, or $14 billed monthly
Timing	Connect	$16/user/month billed annually, or $20 billed monthly
Rize	Basic	$9.99/month billed annually, or $12.99 billed monthly
Rize	Pro	$23.99/month billed annually; for monthly, see the vendor’s pricing page
Rize	Max	$39.99/month billed annually; for monthly, see the vendor’s pricing page
Rize	Team	$29.99/seat/month billed annually, or $39.99 billed monthly
Rize	Enterprise	Custom, contact the vendor
ActivityWatch	ActivityWatch	Free
Toggl (formerly Toggl Track)	Free	$0 for up to 3 users
Toggl	Starter	$9/user/month billed annually, or $12 billed monthly
Toggl	Premium	$16/user/month billed annually, or $24 billed monthly
Toggl	Enterprise	Contact the vendor
WakaTime	Free	$0
WakaTime	Basic	$9/month billed monthly, or $8.25/month billed $99 yearly
WakaTime	Premium	$14/month billed monthly, or $12.83/month billed $153.96 yearly
WakaTime	Team	$21/dev/month billed monthly, or $19.25/dev/month billed $231/dev yearly
WakaTime	Business	$24/dev/month billed monthly, or $22/dev/month billed $264/dev yearly

The cheapest sensible setup costs $0. Use Dayflow’s free app with local AI, which runs on your own hardware, and add WakaTime Free if you still code. If you later want a reports layer, Timing Professional at $9 per month billed annually is the lowest paid step. Dayflow’s plans page covers what Pro adds.

The bottom line

If you want to remember your week for 1:1s and reviews, start with Dayflow at $0. If meetings are eating your calendar and you want to see by how much, Rize is the better tool. If you want polished reports and Linear sync on a Mac, pay for Timing, and if your team already plans in Toggl (formerly Toggl Track), keep your own hours there. If nothing may leave your machine, use ActivityWatch, and add WakaTime only if your week still includes real coding time.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best time tracking app for an engineering manager on a Mac?

For tracking your own week and preparing 1:1s and reviews, Dayflow is the strongest free option. It records the screen at one frame every 10 seconds and has AI write a readable timeline, at $0 under the MIT license. Timing is the better pick if you want structured reports and will pay from $9 per month billed annually. Rize is the better pick if meeting load is the main question.

Which app shows how much of my week goes to meetings?

Rize is the better choice here, and it beats Dayflow on this job. Rize can connect Google Calendar to capture meeting time alongside its automatic app and website tracking, then adds AI focus insights. Dayflow shows what was on your screen but has no calendar connection. Rize Basic costs $9.99 per month billed annually or $12.99 billed monthly, with a 7-day trial and no credit card required.

Is there a free tracker for Mac that keeps my data off the cloud?

ActivityWatch is free, open source under MPL-2.0, and its developers state that all data stays on your device and is never sent to any server. It has no AI summaries listed. Dayflow is also free and stores recordings and the timeline on your Mac. If you choose its local AI mode through Ollama or LM Studio, screenshot analysis stays on-device too.

Can I use a time tracker to prepare for my performance review?

Yes, as a memory aid. A tracker that keeps a readable record of the whole week helps you list what you shipped, unblocked and decided months later. Dayflow exports a date range as Markdown, which you can sort into a self-review. Treat AI summaries as a draft, since they can miss or misread work. Check every claim against the actual doc, PR or decision before you submit.

Does Dayflow work on Windows or Linux?

No. Dayflow runs only on macOS 14 or later. If you work on Windows, Rize supports Windows 10 or later and Toggl (formerly Toggl Track) has a Windows app. If you work on Linux, ActivityWatch runs on Linux as well as Windows, Mac and Android, and it is free. WakaTime also works across platforms through editor plugins, but it tracks only coding time.

Should engineering managers use WakaTime?

Only if you still write code and want that slice measured. WakaTime tracks time per project, language and editor through plugins, plus AI coding usage. It sees nothing outside the editor, so 1:1s, docs and Slack are invisible to it. The Free plan costs $0 and keeps 1 week of dashboard history. Full history needs Premium at $14 per month billed monthly or $12.83 per month billed yearly.

Is Timing worth paying for if free trackers exist?

Timing is worth paying for if you want polished reports, project totals and plan-dependent Linear or ClickUp sync on a Mac. It records apps, websites and documents automatically and includes AI activity summaries on all plans. Professional costs $9 per month billed annually or $11 billed monthly. If you mainly need a readable record for 1:1 prep, a free option such as Dayflow covers that job.

Will a screen-recording tracker capture confidential HR information?

Yes. If a compensation sheet, written feedback or a candidate packet is on screen, a screen-based tracker records it. Dayflow stores full screen recordings on your Mac. Its local AI mode keeps analysis on-device, while your own provider or Dayflow Pro processes selected screenshots off-device. If your company restricts screen recording, ActivityWatch records only app and window titles and keeps data local.

Can I track my whole team's time with Dayflow?

No. Dayflow has no team reports, timesheet approvals, invoicing, payroll or website blocking. It is built for one person's own record. If you need team time data, Toggl (formerly Toggl Track) has team reports and capacity planning and is free for up to 3 users, with Starter at $9 per user per month billed annually. Rize, Timing and WakaTime also sell team plans.