ActivityWatch
Automatically track how you spend time on your devices.
Maintained, but at a slower pace than the leaders in its category.
Commit activity more than 31% of tracked projects; popularity more than 87%. How this is calculated.
Commits, last 11 months
| Stars | 19k |
|---|---|
| Latest release | v0.14.0b8 · 18 Sept 2026 |
| Repo updated | 26 Sept 2026 |
| Licence | MPL-2.0 |
| Built with | Python |
Is ActivityWatch actively maintained?
Over the last 11 months the project absorbed 103 commits, of which 52 arrived in the most recent quarter — roughly 17 commits a month.
The most recent tagged release, v0.14.0b8, shipped within the last month — a current, installable version exists today.
ActivityWatch ranks #5 of 13 in Time Tracking, placing it mid-table for maintenance activity.
What ActivityWatch actually does
ActivityWatch is an open-source application designed to automatically monitor and record your device usage. It logs your active window titles, browser history, and application runtimes to give you an overview of how your hours are spent. All data remains locally stored on your machine rather than being sent to a third-party cloud service.
Best fit: It is well-suited for freelancers, developers, and privacy-conscious users who want to audit their daily habits without sharing telemetry data with external companies.
Worth knowing: The project relies on a beta release cycle and relies on various client-side watchers that can occasionally require manual troubleshooting across different operating systems. You should also expect to manage local storage growth over time as event logs accumulate.
Deployment notes
Because the backend is built with Python, running it as a persistent server typically requires setting up a process manager like systemd and ensuring adequate persistent storage for the local database. If you expose the web UI externally, you will need to configure a reverse proxy to handle TLS termination securely.
Links
ActivityWatch as a replacement for
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