The 6 Best Privacy-First Time Tracking Software in 2026

I've had a time tracker running on my laptop every day for over three years, and I still read the macOS permission prompt like it's a contract. I'll also tell you up front that one of the tools below is ours (Rize), since you'd work it out in about thirty seconds anyway.

A good privacy-first time tracker gets you the real hours without photographing anyone's screen, so you can bill what you actually worked and still be someone people are willing to work for.

After testing ~13 options, I've narrowed it down to the 6 best privacy-first time tracking tools for agencies, consultancies, and freelancers who bill by the hour.

What makes the best privacy-first time tracking tool?

Five criteria, and each one has a test you can run yourself.

1. What a manager can see. Log in as an admin and screenshot the team view. If a manager can open someone's raw timeline or screenshots without that person approving it first, the tool is out (goodbye, Hubstaff and Time Doctor).
2. Where the data lives. Find the hosting region, the DPA (the paperwork behind GDPR-compliant time tracking), and whether raw activity ever leaves the laptop. That's the other kind of private: criterion one covers your boss, this one covers the vendor, and most tools only keep one of those promises.
3. How much of the week it catches by itself. Use it for a full work week, then compare what it caught against your own best guess of how the week went. The size of that gap is the whole reason to automate this.
4. Whether the hours become an invoice. Take one client's week from tracked time to billable entries to an export your accounting tool accepts, and count the clicks. Privacy is nice, but you're reading this because hours are leaking out of your invoices.
5. Whether your team keeps it running. Read the install screen and every permission prompt out loud, then ask if you'd hand this to the one person on your team who actually reads terms of service. If the answer's no, nothing else on this list matters, because the app gets quit by Wednesday.

The best time tracking tools for privacy at a glance

*Prices are billed annually.

Best free and open-source time tracker for data that never leaves your laptop

ActivityWatch (Windows, macOS, Linux, Android)

Pros:

• Free and open source, nothing held back
• Data stays on your own machine
• No screenshots, no Screen Recording permission

Cons:

• No team view, on purpose
• No clients, projects, or invoicing

ActivityWatch is a free, open-source app that logs which apps and windows you use, and it keeps all of it on your own computer. There's no sign-up screen. You install it, a little icon shows up in the menu bar, and you open localhost:5600 in a browser tab. That's the whole onboarding. I ran it on my Mac to track this article's progress.

Everything lands in a database file on your own disk. On macOS, it asks for Accessibility permission to read window titles, and the docs say it never touches Screen Recording.

The homepage says your data is never uploaded anywhere, which is nearly true. There's a Settings toggle for a daily check for new releases, which is a request to GitHub, not your activity. Version 0.14 also added an optional AI summary that stays dormant until you paste in your own API key, then sends app names, browser domains, and time totals to OpenAI or Anthropic. "Never" is a little generous.

The mediocre part is categories. Until you write rules, your whole day sits in one Uncategorized pile, and the rules are pattern matches, with regex if you want precision. Settings even has a banner that nags you when too much is uncategorized, so the developers know. There's a Stopwatch tab and a raw data export, but nothing here understands a client, so nothing turns into an invoice. It's a log, not a timesheet.

That's also why it can't do the job most readers of this article have. The maintainers say in their docs they won't help anyone point a team at one server to watch employees, and the API has no login by default. They want it used by choice, not installed by a boss. So "what can my manager see?" gets the best answer on this page: nothing.

Choose ActivityWatch if you're a solo freelancer or consultant who wants a private record of your day and will turn it into invoice hours by hand.

ActivityWatch pricing: Free and open source. Optional supporter plans run $5/month to $20/user/month.

Best automatic time tracker for teams that bill by the hour and don't want screenshots

Rize (macOS, Windows)

Pros:

• No timers; entries build themselves
• Managers see entries, never your raw activity timeline
• Invoicing built in

Cons:

• Cloud-hosted, so data leaves your laptop
• Mac and Windows only

Rize is an automatic time tracker for Mac and Windows that uses AI to turn the apps and sites you use into billable time entries, no timers required.

Here's the day-to-day. You work, and Rize builds your entries on a calendar, already tagged with a description, client, project, and billable status.

If you manage a team, here's the part you'll care about. Each person gets a window to review their own entries before they go to the manager. By default Rize auto-approves anything left untouched after 8 hours, and admins can switch that off so every entry needs a sign-off. That's the trade that keeps the Slack channel from going quiet. When it's time to bill, invoicing is built in, and approved hours export to QuickBooks, Xero, or FreshBooks through Zapier or CSV.

Quick test: if you've ever spent Friday afternoon building your week from memory, Rize is built for you. That means small agencies, consultancies, and accounting firms that bill by the hour on Macs and Windows machines, plus freelancers who bill clients and are tired of guessing.

Choose Rize if you want zero-touch time tracking, with no timers to start or stop, so you can focus on your work and let Rize handle the tracking. It's also best for knowledge workers on Mac or Windows who want a coach building better habits in real time and are fine with their data living in the cloud.

Rize pricing: 7-day free trial. Individual plans run $9.99 to $39.99/month billed annually. Team plans cost $29.99/seat/month billed annually ($39.99 billed monthly), with a two-seat minimum.

Best time tracker for teams that want a private activity timeline and a public timesheet

Timely (macOS, Windows, web)

Pros:

• Raw timeline hidden from managers and admins
• Pause, ignore, and delete controls for each person
• Invoicing and QuickBooks sync built in

Cons:

• Private from managers, not from Timely
• Drafts need your approval every day

Timely is an automatic time tracker where a small desktop app called Memory logs your window titles into a private timeline, and Timely's AI, which it calls AutoSheet, drafts timesheet entries from that timeline for you to approve.

Your timeline stays hidden from managers and admins, and a draft is marked "Private Draft" until you submit it. Timely says managers never see app names or window titles, and the people dashboard I looked at only dealt in hours, with filters for missing hours and overtime. For a tool that reports to a manager, that's about as strict as it gets.

The catch: that same dashboard shows who hasn't logged anything, with a notify button right there. Your boss can't see what you did, but they can see you skipped the paperwork. Still, I'd hand this to my most suspicious employee. Memory has a pause switch on its first screen, all the way up to "until Monday," plus an ignore list, and you can delete anything it logged.

The price you pay for everything Timely does for you is the daily review. Entries stay drafts until each person approves them, every day, and then somebody has to check that everyone did. Suppose your team will do that, great. If they won't, you just bought a very private, very empty timesheet. The Starter plan caps at five users and skips the accounting sync, so a real agency needs Premium.

Choose Timely if "private" means my boss can't see my screen, you're on Macs or Windows, and your team will actually approve their drafts. Skip it if "private" means the vendor can't see my data. That's ActivityWatch's job.

If you're down to Timely and Rize, I put them side by side in our in-depth Rize vs Timely comparison.

Timely pricing: 14-day free trial. Plans run from $9 to $22/user/month billed annually, plus a custom Enterprise tier.

Best offline-first time tracker for firms

Memtime (macOS, Windows, Linux)

Pros:

• Timeline never leaves your device
• Exports finished entries to QuickBooks, Xero, Clio, and more
• Runs on Linux and Windows Server too

Cons:

• You turn the timeline into entries yourself
• No team dashboard, no invoicing

Memtime is an automatic time tracker that keeps working with your wifi off, which is most of its pitch. It logs every app, file, and browser tab you touch into a timeline called Memory Aid, and that timeline sits on your computer and nowhere else.

Memtime's site also calls it the only automatic tracker with offline storage. It isn't. ActivityWatch, above, does the same thing for free. What you're paying Memtime for is the stuff ActivityWatch skips: projects, time entries, and a way to push finished hours into QuickBooks, Xero, or Clio.

Your manager sees only the entries you build and send. Memtime exports those, never the raw timeline, so your project tool gets a project, a duration, and a comment. It doesn't get the tab where you googled your own symptoms. And the timeline is detailed, because it reads file names, email subjects, and tab titles. One honest wrinkle: if IT owns your laptop and can get past your password, they could, in theory, open it. Memtime's own advice is to clear your log at the end of the day.

Where it gets mediocre is everything after the capture. You click and drag across the Memory Aid to create entries, then pick a project for each one. By default, that's your job, every day, or it piles up. There's a rules feature that drafts entries from keywords, client names, or folders, but it's off out of the box and you still approve each suggestion.

The other costs are quieter. Nothing syncs across devices, so a second computer means a second timeline. The Basic plan can't export to project or billing tools at all, so exporting means the Connect plan or higher. And with no team dashboard and no invoicing, somebody builds the invoice somewhere else.

Deciding between Rize and Memtime? The full breakdown is in our Rize vs Memtime comparison.

Memtime pricing: 14-day free trial, no credit card. Plans run from $14 to $29/user/month billed annually, plus custom Enterprise pricing for 50+ seats.

Best manual time tracker for teams that want a free plan and a written no-surveillance policy

Toggl (Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, web)

Pros:

• No screenshots, and no setting to turn them on
• Managers see your entries, never your timeline
• Free for up to three users

Cons:

• Forget to press play, lose the hours
• Entries live in Toggl's cloud

Toggl is a manual time tracker: a stopwatch with a reporting department attached. You press play, you work, you press stop, and the hours become reports and invoices. It only knows what you tell it. That's a great quality in a tool that shouldn't spy on you and a terrible one in a tool you'll forget to talk to.

The best privacy feature here is one that doesn't exist. Toggl's anti-surveillance page says it will never build screen recording, keystroke tracking, location tracking, or webcam monitoring.

What surprised me is that Toggl has a background mode at all. The Mac and Windows apps can log which apps and sites you touched, but only if you switch it on. I clicked into a timeline block and found a Copy as Time Entry button, and nothing got billed on its own. Toggl says that activity never leaves your device. That holds only while the sync-between-computers setting is off, which the same page mentions further down.

Invoicing works, with one trap. Mine pulled in my hours and priced the line at zero, because I hadn't set a billable rate on the project. Five-second fix, once you know about it. I did not know about it. Billing through QuickBooks or Xero? Toggl's integrations page currently marks both as legacy integrations it doesn't support.

Choose Toggl if you're a small team or freelancer who's disciplined with a timer, wants a written no-surveillance policy instead of a setting, and would like to start free.

I ran Toggl next to Rize on real client work, and the full results are in our Rize vs Toggl comparison. If Clockify's free plan is tempting you, Clockify vs Toggl has that matchup.

Toggl pricing: Free for up to three users. 30-day trial on paid plans, which run from $9 to $16/user/month billed annually, plus a custom Enterprise tier.

Best self-hostable time tracker for teams that want invoices without handing their data to a vendor

Solidtime (Web, macOS, Windows, Linux)

Pros:

• Self-host the whole server, free
• Window log stays on your device until you log it
• Invoicing and client reports built in

Cons:

• You still build every entry by hand
• Desktop app is still in beta

Solidtime is an open-source time tracker in two halves: a web app for clients, projects, timesheets, and invoices, and a desktop app that remembers which windows you had open.

I ran the desktop app on my Mac while writing this article. The calendar filled up with activity blocks, plus a few window titles here and there, like the name of the folder I had open in Finder. Then it just sat there. Nothing became an entry, so I typed them in by hand, which was the exact chore I installed it to avoid. It's basically Memtime's arrangement for a lot less money.

The privacy side is the better half. Window tracking is one checkbox in Settings, with a plain description of what it does. The activity stays on your machine until you turn it into an entry, and the web app calendar showed none of it, which fits.

So, what can your manager see? Every entry you log: project, description, duration. The docs give managers full access to entries and reports, and I didn't find a review step like Rize and Timely have, so an entry is visible the moment it exists. The dashboard also has a Team Activity panel showing who's working on what.

Choose Solidtime if you run a small agency or consultancy, can live with a timer plus a little end-of-day reconstruction, and like the idea of hosting your own data. Skip it if you want the timesheet built for you. That's Rize's whole thing.

Solidtime pricing: Cloud is free for one user, then €8/user/month billed annually. Self-hosting is free, and Business licenses start at €49/year per user.

How to choose the right privacy-friendly time tracking software?

If you're still undecided, start with Rize. Yes, I work there, so discount me however you like. But look at what you came here to fix. A tracker is only as accurate as the most forgetful person using it, and Toggl, Solidtime, and Memtime all lean on that person every day.

Rize doesn't. Here's how the automatic tracking works. There's no timer to start and no entries to build by hand. The week shows up on a calendar already tagged by client and project; you give it a quick look, and only then does your manager see it. For a team that bills by the hour on Macs or Windows, that's the default I'd hand most people.

It isn't the answer for everyone, and I'd rather say so. If your data can't leave the laptop, use ActivityWatch solo, or Solidtime if your team can self-host. On Linux, look at Memtime, ActivityWatch, or Solidtime. On a tight budget with three people or fewer, Toggl is free. Timely is the closest rival and cheaper per seat, so make it your second trial.

Still comparing? See how Rize stacks up against Toggl, Harvest, and Clockify, read how Rize works for agencies, browse more time tracking comparisons, or book a demo.