Compare / WakaTime
WakaTime answers one question very well: how many hours went into code, per developer, without anyone starting a timer. Routines answers a wider one. It sorts the day on your Mac into app usage categories, coding time per repo included, with no editor plugin to install, and it shows what the team actually finished: routine runs, meetings recorded and to-dos completed, inside an assistant that also does some of that work. This page puts both side by side, adds four other automatic time trackers, and says where WakaTime is still the better tool. Every other comparison is on the compare hub.
Two different questions
WakaTime installs an open source plugin in your editor, IDE or terminal, and those plugins send heartbeat events while you type. What comes back is coding time per developer, broken down by project, language, file and branch. That is a real number, and nothing on this page argues otherwise.
Routines is an AI assistant that runs on the Mac. It runs scheduled routines against Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack and any MCP server, records and transcribes meetings, keeps a local markdown memory, and holds a shared to-do list. Since version 0.79 it also sorts the day into eight app usage categories on the device itself, coding, communication, browsing, meetings, design, email, writing and other, and lifts a repo name out of IDE and terminal window titles so coding time lands per project without a plugin. On the Teams plan the owner gets one dashboard for both halves: how many routines ran, how many meetings were recorded, how many to-dos were finished, and where the hours went, per member and per day.
What Routines does not do, stated plainly so nobody buys the wrong tool: there are no editor plugins, so there are no per language, per file or per branch coding stats, no keystroke level detail and no coding leaderboards. A repo name is only a label lifted from a window title, and an ambiguous title gets no label rather than a guess. There are no timesheets, no billable hours and no idle detection, and the app is macOS only. If coding minutes per language is the number you need, WakaTime is the right purchase. The meeting side of Routines is covered in more detail on the AI meeting notes page.
The team activity dashboard
These are real screens from the Teams console, seeded with a demo team. The owner sees counts, where the hours went, a shape for the day or the range, and who was active. No screenshots of anyone, no keystrokes, no window titles.
Checkmarks both ways · an honest comparison
The wider field
Read left to right on a phone. Every cell comes from the vendor's own site, checked on August 7, 2026. Where a vendor does not state something, this table says so instead of guessing.
| Criterion | Routines | WakaTime | RescueTime | Timing | ActivityWatch | Toggl Track |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| How it tracks | App usage plus work events, from the Mac app | Editor plugins, heartbeats while you type | Automatic apps and websites | Automatic apps, websites and documents | Automatic apps and windows | Manual timer plus optional background tracking |
| Automatic app and category time tracking | Yes, eight categories | Coding tools only | Yes | Yes | Yes | Optional background tracking |
| Coding time per project | Per repo, no plugin | Per project, file and language | Not advertised | By document and file path | Not advertised | Projects you pick yourself |
| Editor and IDE plugins | No | Yes, 100+ editors, IDEs and terminals | None listed | None listed | None listed | None listed |
| Team view | Hours and work output per member, owner only | Coding time and AI usage per developer | Team productivity and daily pattern reports | Connect tier only, aggregate project times | None advertised | Timesheets, approvals, profitability |
| Where the data lives | Your Mac; shared event metadata goes to our servers | Heartbeats sent to their service | Sent to their servers, in their own wording | Your Mac, with team reports in their web app | On your own device, never sent to any server | Their cloud |
| Mac app | Native Mac app, macOS only | Tray app plus the editor plugins | Desktop app, OS list not enumerated on their site | Native Mac app, web app alongside it | Windows, macOS, Linux and Android | Desktop, web, mobile and browser extensions |
| Price | Teams 20 EUR per seat per month, tax included | Free tier; Team 21 USD per developer per month | Free Lite tier; Team Focus 12 USD per user per month | Professional 10 EUR per month; Connect 20 EUR per user per month | Free and open source, MPL-2.0 | Free tier; Starter 9 USD per license per month |
Prices and features as of August 2026, from each vendor's own site
FAQ
WakaTime is a coding analytics service for developers. You install an open source plugin in your editor, IDE or terminal, and it sends heartbeat events while you are typing, which build dashboards of coding time. Its current positioning adds AI coding analytics: which models a team uses, what they cost, and how often AI written code gets rewritten. Facts here were read from wakatime.com on August 7, 2026.
There is a free plan with unlimited projects, weekly reports and one week of dashboard history. Paid individual plans start at 9 USD per month, and the Team plan is 21 USD per developer per month with a 14-day trial and no card required. Those are the figures on wakatime.com/pricing as of August 2026.
Automatic time tracking means the tool records what you worked on without anyone starting a timer. What differs is the scope of what it watches. WakaTime watches supported editors through plugins. RescueTime, Timing and ActivityWatch watch apps and windows across the whole machine. Toggl Track pairs a manual timer with optional background tracking. Routines watches the frontmost app on the Mac and files it into one of eight categories on the device.
Yes, with limits worth knowing before you switch. Since desktop version 0.79 the Mac app sorts the day into eight app usage categories, and coding time is broken out per repo, which it reads from IDE and terminal window titles. What it does not produce is per language, per file or per branch stats, keystroke level detail or leaderboards, because there are no editor plugins to produce them. If coding minutes per language is the number you need, WakaTime is the right tool for that job and this page is not arguing otherwise.
No. There is nothing to install in your editor, and no plugin exists. The Mac app already knows which app is in front of you, and it reads a repo name out of IDE and terminal window titles locally. An ambiguous title gets no repo label rather than a guessed one, so a category still reports its hours even when it cannot name the project. This also means the labels stop at the repo: there is no file, branch or language underneath them.
No. A shared work event carries a title, its kind, a timestamp, a duration and whether it ended ok or with an error. A shared usage event carries a category, an app name, an optional repo name, a number of seconds and an hour. Window titles, the pages you visit and browser domains never leave the Mac, because the category is decided there and the event has no field they could ride in. Routine output, meeting transcripts and to-do text are never sent either. The dashboard is visible to the team owner only. Each teammate holds two switches in their own copy of the app, per machine: sharing at all, and app usage inside it. Off stops sending and clears anything queued, and turning it on starts counting from that moment rather than backfilling.
Teams is 20 euro per seat per month, or 160 euro per seat per year, which works out to 13.33 euro per seat per month. Prices include tax. The minimum is 2 seats, there is a 14-day free trial, and every seat adds 50 hours of managed transcription to one pool the whole team shares.
ActivityWatch. It is free and open source under MPL-2.0, and its own FAQ says all your time tracking data is stored on your own device and is never sent to any server. Routines is not the same thing: your notes, transcripts and memory sit on your Mac, and so do the window titles and domains behind the categories, but the team activity view works by sending event metadata to our servers once a teammate turns sharing on, which is what lets the owner dashboard exist at all.
Routines runs on the Mac, records the meetings, runs the routines, sorts the hours into categories on the device, and gives the owner a metadata-only view of all of it. Seat pricing and the 14-day Teams trial are on the pricing page.
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