Comparison
Screen Time vs Dayflow: charts vs an account of your day
Your Mac already tracks your time - Apple built it in. Whether Screen Time answers your question depends entirely on what the question is.
Apple's Screen Time (System Settings → Screen Time) counts your usage per app and website, draws daily and weekly charts, and enforces app limits and downtime - across your Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It is free, private (Apple processes it as device data), and already installed. Start there; for many people it is enough.
Its limit is the unit it thinks in: the app. "Safari: 4h 51m" is one bar containing your research, your writing breaks, your competitor analysis, and your rabbit holes, indistinguishably. There is no meaningful export, and nothing that tells you what any of those hours were for. Screen Time answers "which apps, how long." It cannot answer "where did my day go" - which is usually the question people came with.
Dayflow answers the second question: it records your screen and has AI write a readable timeline of what you actually did. It is the only Mac tracker that is fully automatic, AI-powered, 100% local, and free - the same price as Screen Time, a different kind of answer.
Side by side
| Apple Screen Time | Dayflow | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (built in) | Free, open source (MIT); optional Pro $16/mo annual |
| Output | Hours per app/site, charts | Readable timeline: what you did, when, in sentences |
| Understands the work | No - app names only | Yes - AI reads the screen ("researching" vs "watching cat videos") |
| Coverage | Mac + iPhone + iPad | Mac only |
| App limits / downtime | Yes | No - observes, never blocks |
| Data location | Apple devices/iCloud sync | Your Mac only; local AI possible; auditable code |
| Export / history | Effectively none | Your data, on your disk |
When Screen Time is the right answer
- You want device-wide totals including iPhone and iPad - the place Dayflow cannot see.
- You want enforcement: app limits, downtime schedules, family controls.
- App-level awareness is genuinely all you need ("am I on Slack three hours a day?").
When you have outgrown it
The tell is rereading the chart and still not knowing what happened. Five hours of "Chrome" that you cannot account for; a productive-feeling day the charts call unproductive because the work happened in a browser; the need to reconstruct last week for a review and finding only app names. That is the point where the unit has to become the task, not the app - the work-journal category exists exactly for it.
Dayflow is the free way to try that: one frame every 10 seconds, AI writes the day up, ~100MB of RAM, everything on your Mac, open source and auditable. Keep Screen Time running for the phone and the limits; let Dayflow keep the journal.
Frequently asked questions
Is Apple Screen Time good enough for time tracking?
For app-level awareness, yes - it is free, built in, and syncs across your devices. For understanding your work it hits a ceiling fast: it reports hours per app ("Safari: 4h 51m") with no idea what you were doing, no export, and no way to tell research from rabbit holes. Whether that is enough depends on the question you are asking.
What does Dayflow show that Screen Time cannot?
What you actually did. Dayflow records your screen at one frame every 10 seconds and has AI write a readable timeline - "Implementing OAuth token refresh, 9:04-9:48" - instead of counting app hours. The same 5-hour Chrome bar becomes the tasks it actually contained.
Does Screen Time or Dayflow use more battery?
Both are lightweight. Screen Time is part of macOS. Dayflow captures a frame every 10 seconds (not video) and runs on roughly 100MB of RAM and under 1% CPU; with cloud AI analysis the battery cost stays negligible, and with local AI there are brief processing bursts.
Can I use both?
Yes, and it is a reasonable setup: Screen Time for device-wide app limits and iPhone coverage (which Dayflow cannot see), Dayflow for the actual account of your working day on the Mac. They do not conflict.
Same price as Screen Time. A real answer.
Dayflow is $0, open source, and everything stays on your Mac.
Download for MacOS macOS 14+ · MIT licensed · no account required