WakaTime vs ActivityWatch: Which Is Better for Tracking Coding Time in 2026?

WakaTime is better if you want coding time broken down by project, language and editor, plus AI tool usage and team dashboards. Its free plan keeps only 1 week of history. ActivityWatch is better if you want free, open-source tracking that stays on your device and covers every app, not just your editor. Dayflow, our Mac app, adds an AI-written timeline of the whole day.

WakaTime measures coding time from inside your editor and sends it to a hosted dashboard that breaks it down by project, language, editor and AI tool. ActivityWatch records which app and window are active across your whole computer, keeps everything on your own device, and treats coding time as one add-on among many.

A disclosure before the details: we make Dayflow, a free, open-source Mac app that records the screen at one frame every 10 seconds and has AI write the day into a readable timeline. It appears below as a third option and is labeled as ours. This comparison is based on each vendor’s own documentation as checked on October 4, 2026, and on Dayflow 2.2.0’s published facts. We did not run our own tests. We also have a separate ActivityWatch vs Dayflow comparison if that is the choice you are weighing.

Quick comparison

Tool	Best for	How it tracks	Price	Platforms
WakaTime	Developers and team leads who want coding-time and AI-usage metrics	Open source editor plugins record coding time and AI usage per project, language and editor	Free; Basic $9/mo or $99/yr; Premium $14/mo or $153.96/yr; Team $21/dev/mo or $231/dev/yr; Business $24/dev/mo or $264/dev/yr	100+ editors, IDEs and terminals via plugins; web dashboard
ActivityWatch	Individuals who want private, local tracking of all computer use	Records active app, window title and away-from-keyboard time; browser extensions and editor plugins add detail	Free	Windows, Mac, Linux, Android
Dayflow (ours)	Mac users who want an AI-written timeline of the whole workday	Records the screen at one frame every 10 seconds; AI turns it into a timeline	$0; optional Pro at $20/month	macOS 14 or later

Key takeaways

• WakaTime is the specialist. It only sees supported editors and terminals, but inside them it reports per project, language and editor, and it tracks AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot and Codex.
• ActivityWatch is the generalist. It sees every app and window, keeps data on your device, costs nothing, and gets coding time through editor plugins.
• WakaTime’s free plan keeps 1 week of dashboard history. Full history requires Premium at $153.96 a year billed yearly.
• Only WakaTime offers team dashboards. ActivityWatch is built for individuals, and device sync is still listed as work in progress.
• Dayflow does not produce per-language stats. It covers the part of a developer’s day that happens outside the editor, on Mac only.

What WakaTime does better

Coding metrics with real depth. WakaTime’s plugins attribute time to a project, a language and an editor without you starting a timer. If you want to know how many hours went into one repository last month, or how your time splits between TypeScript and Go, that is the core of what it does.

Editor coverage. The vendor lists plugins for more than 100 editors, IDEs and terminals. If you move between a JetBrains IDE, VS Code and a terminal during the day, the time ends up in one dashboard.

AI usage tracking. This is the clearest difference in 2026. WakaTime tracks AI adoption, model usage and spend, and AI-generated versus human-written lines, across tools including Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot and Codex. ActivityWatch lists no AI features at all. If you or your manager want to know how much of the code is coming from an assistant and what that costs, WakaTime is the only tool here that answers it.

Goals and leaderboards. WakaTime has programming goals (one on the free plan) and private leaderboards. Some developers find these motivating. Others will ignore them.

Teams. The Team and Business plans add team dashboards, priced per developer. You can try the Team plan for 14 days without a credit card.

No setup beyond the plugin. Because the dashboard is hosted, you install a plugin and your stats appear on the web. The trade-off is that your coding activity lives on WakaTime’s servers, and the server location is not stated on the pages we read.

What ActivityWatch does better

It sees more than the editor. ActivityWatch records the active application, the window title and whether you are away from the keyboard. With browser extensions it adds the active tab title and URL. Code review in a browser, reading docs, sitting in a terminal outside a tracked editor and answering chat all show up. WakaTime, by the vendor’s own description, only captures activity inside supported editors and terminals.

Your data stays on your machine. The vendor states that all data is stored on your own device and is never sent to any server. For developers working under client NDAs or employer policies about third-party services, that can settle the question on its own. Our piece on time tracking without surveillance goes into why this matters for personal tracking.

Everything is free. There are no paid tiers gating features. The vendor describes ActivityWatch as completely free and open source with no feature gates, no usage limits and no ads. You keep full history without paying for it.

It is fully open source. ActivityWatch is licensed under MPL-2.0. WakaTime’s plugins are open source, but its hosted service is not.

It is extensible. You can write custom watchers and query the local API. If you want to pipe your own data in, or build a report the default UI does not offer, the hooks are there.

It runs on more operating systems. Windows, Mac, Linux and Android are all supported. iOS is not.

The limits are real, though. Sync between devices is listed as work in progress, so if you code on two machines you have two separate histories for now. There are no built-in AI summaries. And coding time comes from editor plugins rather than being the center of the product, so you should not expect WakaTime-level language and AI breakdowns.

Head-to-head table

Capability	WakaTime	ActivityWatch	Dayflow (ours)
Automatic capture	Yes, inside supported editors and terminals	Yes, active app, window title and AFK across the computer	Yes, full screen at one frame every 10 seconds
Coding time by project, language and editor	Yes	Via editor plugins	No per-language stats; coding appears as timeline entries
AI coding usage and spend	Yes, including Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot and Codex	None listed	No
AI summaries of your day	Not listed	None listed	Yes, AI writes the timeline; summaries can miss or misinterpret work
Manual timers	Not listed in vendor docs read	Not listed in vendor docs read	Not listed
Invoicing	Not listed	Not listed	No
Team reports	Yes, team dashboards on Team and Business	Not listed; aimed at individuals	No
Website blocking	Not listed	Not listed	No
Data location	Cloud dashboard; server location not stated	Local, never sent to a server	Recordings and timeline stored on your Mac; screenshot analysis local or cloud depending on mode
Free tier	1 week of history, unlimited projects, 1 goal	Everything	Full app at $0
Platforms	100+ editors, IDEs and terminals; web dashboard	Windows, Mac, Linux, Android	macOS 14 or later
Open source	Plugins yes; hosted service no	Yes, MPL-2.0	Yes, MIT

Pricing compared: what does each cost per year?

Plan	Monthly billing	Yearly billing
WakaTime Free	$0	$0
WakaTime Basic	$9/mo	$8.25/mo, billed $99 yearly
WakaTime Premium	$14/mo	$12.83/mo, billed $153.96 yearly
WakaTime Team	$21/dev/mo	$19.25/dev/mo, billed $231/dev yearly
WakaTime Business	$24/dev/mo	$22/dev/mo, billed $264/dev yearly
ActivityWatch	Free	Free
Dayflow (ours)	$0, optional Pro at $20/month	See Dayflow pricing

For one developer, the question is how much history you want. If the last week is enough, WakaTime Free costs $0. If you want your full coding history, which is what most people mean by tracking coding time over months, the cheapest WakaTime plan that fits is Premium: $153.96 a year billed yearly, or $168 a year if you pay $14 monthly. Basic costs $99 a year billed yearly; for exactly what it adds over the free plan, see the vendor’s pricing page. Teams pay per developer: $231 per developer per year on Team or $264 per developer per year on Business, both billed yearly.

ActivityWatch costs $0 with full history. The site mentions an optional AW Pro patronage with no confirmed price, so check the vendor’s site if you want to support it.

Dayflow is $0. If you run a local model through Ollama or LM Studio, there is nothing else to pay beyond your own hardware. If you connect your own cloud provider, that provider’s charges apply. Pro is $20 a month, which comes to $240 a year paid monthly.

When to choose WakaTime

• You want hours per repository, language and editor without starting timers.
• You want to measure AI coding: how much code comes from assistants, which models you use, and what it costs.
• You lead a team and need shared dashboards, or you want private leaderboards.
• You work across many editors and terminals and want one place for all of it.
• You are fine with a hosted dashboard and, for full history, paying $153.96 a year for Premium.

When to choose ActivityWatch

• You want coding time in context with everything else you do on the computer.
• Your tracking data must stay on your device.
• You want full history for free, with no feature gates.
• You work on Windows, Linux or Android as well as, or instead of, a Mac.
• You like building your own reports with custom watchers and a local API.
• You do not need AI summaries and are fine reading raw app and window data.

Where both fall short: what does neither tool see?

A developer’s working day is not all typing in an editor. Pull request reviews, design docs, a debugging session spent reading Stack Overflow, a planning call, a long Slack thread that settled an architecture question: these often decide what got done, and neither tool turns them into a clear record.

WakaTime does not see them at all, because it only captures activity inside supported editors and terminals. ActivityWatch does see them, as app names, window titles and, with the browser extension, tab titles and URLs. But what you get is a log of events and durations, not an account of the work. “Chrome, 47 minutes, github.com/…” tells you where you were, not what you decided or finished. Neither tool lists AI summaries of your day.

This is the gap Dayflow was built for, on a Mac. It records the screen at one frame every 10 seconds and has AI write the day into a timeline in plain sentences, so code review, docs and calls appear next to the coding. Full recordings and the timeline are stored on your Mac. How screenshots are analyzed depends on the mode you pick:

• Local AI: a supported model runs on your Mac through Ollama or LM Studio, and screenshot analysis stays on-device. You need the hardware to run it.
• Your own provider: selected screenshots go to the provider you configure, under that provider’s charges and privacy terms.
• Dayflow Pro: Dayflow manages cloud analysis. Under the privacy policy, Pro deletes screenshots after processing and may retain activity data for sync.

The local and cloud processing page explains the boundaries in detail. One more caveat: if you ask a cloud assistant about your Dayflow data, the data it retrieves goes into that conversation. Local storage does not make a cloud chat local.

You can export a date range as Markdown from Settings, which is useful for standups or a weekly summary. See automatic standup updates and the Codex work summary workflow for ways developers use that export. If your main problem is remembering what you worked on rather than counting hours per language, this is the part of the job WakaTime and ActivityWatch leave open.

What Dayflow does not fix: it will not tell you how many hours went into Rust versus Python, it does not track AI-generated lines or spend, and its AI summaries can miss or misinterpret work, so check them before you share them.

Where Dayflow is the wrong pick

Be honest with yourself about the job. In several common cases another tool here is the better choice.

• You want coding metrics. Per-language, per-editor and per-project hours, programming goals, AI-generated versus human-written lines: pick WakaTime. Dayflow does none of this.
• You manage a team. Dayflow has no team reports. WakaTime’s Team and Business plans have team dashboards.
• You are not on a recent Mac. Dayflow requires macOS 14 or later and does not run on Windows, Linux or Android. ActivityWatch covers all of those.
• Nothing may leave your machine and you cannot run a local model. Dayflow’s on-device mode needs your own hardware to run inference, and its cloud modes send selected screenshots off-device. ActivityWatch records lighter data, app and window titles, and states that none of it is sent to any server.
• You want something fully free and extensible to script against. ActivityWatch’s local API and custom watchers are built for that.
• You need invoicing, payroll approvals or website blocking. Dayflow provides none of these, and neither WakaTime nor ActivityWatch lists them in the vendor documentation we read. Look through our roundup of Mac time trackers for billing-focused options.

The bottom line: which should you use for coding time?

If “tracking coding time” means numbers about code, such as hours per project, language breakdowns, and how much your team leans on AI assistants, choose WakaTime. Start on the free plan, and budget $153.96 a year for Premium once one week of history stops being enough.

If it means an honest picture of where your working hours go, with coding as one part of it, and you want that data to stay on your own machine for free, choose ActivityWatch and add its editor plugins.

If you are on a Mac and the real question is “what did I actually get done this week”, including the reviews, docs and meetings around the code, Dayflow is our answer, with the limits stated above. For a wider view of how these tools sit next to the rest of the category, see our guide to the best time tracker for Mac.

Frequently asked questions

Is WakaTime free?

WakaTime has a Free plan at $0 with 1 week of dashboard history, unlimited projects and 1 programming goal. Paid plans are Basic at $9 a month or $99 a year, Premium at $14 a month or $153.96 a year, Team at $21 per developer per month and Business at $24 per developer per month. Full history requires Premium. There is a 14-day Team trial with no credit card required.

Is ActivityWatch really free?

Yes. ActivityWatch describes itself as completely free and open source, with no feature gates, no usage limits and no ads. It is licensed under MPL-2.0. The site mentions an optional AW Pro patronage, but no price for it was confirmed on the pages we read, so check the ActivityWatch website if you want details on supporting the project.

Can ActivityWatch track coding time like WakaTime?

Partly. ActivityWatch records the active application and window title on its own, and its editor plugins add coding activity on top. That gives you coding time inside a picture of your whole computer use. WakaTime is built specifically around coding, with per-project, per-language and per-editor breakdowns, programming goals and AI usage tracking, so its coding reports go deeper.

Does WakaTime store my coding data locally?

No. WakaTime's editor plugins send coding activity to WakaTime's hosted web dashboard, which is how you view your stats. The server location is not stated on the vendor pages we read. If you need tracking data to stay on your own machine, ActivityWatch states that all data is stored on your device and never sent to any server.

Can WakaTime track AI coding tools like Cursor and Claude Code?

Yes. WakaTime tracks AI coding usage, including AI adoption, model usage and spend, and AI-generated versus human-written lines. Its site lists tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot and Codex. ActivityWatch lists no AI features, and Dayflow uses AI to describe your day rather than to measure AI-generated code or spend.

Does ActivityWatch work on Mac?

Yes. ActivityWatch runs on Mac, Windows, Linux and Android. It does not support iOS, and syncing data between devices is listed by the vendor as work in progress, so each machine keeps its own local history for now. That makes it a good fit for developers who switch between a Mac and a Linux or Windows machine.

Which is better for a development team, WakaTime or ActivityWatch?

WakaTime. It offers Team and Business plans with team dashboards, private leaderboards and AI adoption metrics, and a 14-day Team trial with no card required. ActivityWatch is aimed at individuals and keeps data on each person's device. Dayflow is also the wrong pick here, because it has no team reports. For team coding metrics, WakaTime beats both.

Is Dayflow better than WakaTime for developers?

Not for coding metrics. If you want hours per language, per editor or per project, or AI-generated versus human-written lines, WakaTime does that and Dayflow does not. Dayflow is a better fit when you want a readable record of the whole workday on a Mac, including code review, docs, chat and meetings that happen outside the editor.

Does Dayflow run on Windows or Linux?

No. Dayflow is Mac only and requires macOS 14 or later. If you work on Windows or Linux, ActivityWatch is the better choice of the tools covered here, since it runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android and keeps data on your device. WakaTime also works wherever its editor plugins run, with stats viewed in its web dashboard.

How much does WakaTime cost per year for one developer?

It depends on how much history you need. The Free plan costs $0 but keeps 1 week of dashboard history. Basic is $99 a year billed yearly. Full history requires Premium, which is $153.96 a year billed yearly, or $168 a year if you pay $14 monthly. ActivityWatch costs nothing, and Dayflow is $0 with an optional $20-a-month Pro plan.