The 7 Best RescueTime Alternatives – Comparison Guide

Do you need an alternative to RescueTime? It is a good tool for users with no budget and simple needs thanks to the limited free option. RescueTime is also one of the few time tracking tools that directly blocks distracting websites with their paid version.

Here’s a list of RescueTime alternatives to help you track time in your business.

Time Doctor

With the Time Doctor time tracker (that’s us!), you’ll have much better productivity assurance metrics with your tracked time data, like screenshots, keyboard & mouse activities, and more. But you’ll have to do without the automatic time capture or browser based time tracking options since those methods of tracking time naturally don’t provide the aforementioned assurance metrics.

Time Doctor is also a good RescueTime alternative because of the payroll features for your workers, and the strong number of useful integrations.  Time Doctor integrates with project management tools (Basecamp, Jira, and more), communication tools (like Slack), and accounting tools (like Freshbooks).

Sign up here and get a 14 day free trial and watch your business become more profitable.

Tick

Tick is a time tracker that is even lighter on features than Toggl, but it has one major difference that makes it stand out from the crowd – per project pricing. This could make it much cheaper than RescueTime (and all other solutions on the list) if you have a very large team working on a very small number of projects. It also allows custom projects and tasks, and browser based time tracking which RescueTime is missing.

TimeCamp

TimeCamp is another strong RescueTime alternative, combining screenshots and website and application data into one tool that has a great selection of integrations. It’s also supports automatic and invisible time tracking, which is really only appropriate if you are tracking time in a situation where there is no expectation of privacy at all – such as when an employee is using office space and office hardware that is company owned. As an alternative to RescueTime, it may suffer in the accuracy department because it doesn’t require time to be tracked live and makes no distinction between manually added time and live tracked time.

Toggl

What Toggl lacks in features, it makes up for in sheer ease of use. Toggl doesn’t have the Website and Application data provided by RescueTime, and it also isn’t able to differentiate between live tracked time and manually added time. RescueTime can. But Toggl lets you create custom Tasks and Projects, and also allows browser based time tracking – two important features for some use cases. Where Toggl really shines as a RescueTime alternative is in the massive number of integrations they currently support.

ActivTrak

ActivTrak is another affordable option, and one of the very few time tracking tools that purports to block certain websites like RescueTime does. But be aware, if you hope to block your employees from accessing certain websites, it’s a feature that’s rather easy to circumvent. ActivTrak is missing custom tasks & projects, and real time vs manual time differentiation. It can be run invisibly, and can also capture screenshots which give it an edge, so long as you don’t need any mobile apps or integrations. You’ll need to pay annually to use ActivTrak, with a minimum of five users. Teams under five users are free, with limited features.

Everhour

With Everhour there is no need to install a desktop application – you track time right in a web browser. It’s better than RescueTime for project management in that it lets you create custom Projects and Tasks in advance before starting your time tracking for the day. Everhour is meant to be more team focused than some other solutions, but like Tick, it’s very light on features. Here’s to hoping Everhour 2 is a bit more robust.

Staff.com

This brand new time tracking solution is geared more towards tracking productivity in larger office environments and less on mobile and remote teams. Staff.com lets you track activity automatically in the background, and has strong accuracy on it’s recorded data. As a RescueTime alternative it does currently suffer from no integrations but that is likely to change thanks to the powerful API it has. Larger organizations will appreciate the longer trial period of 30 days (which is actually rather standard) when compared to RescueTime’s 14 day trial.

Did you switch away from RescueTime to an alternative? If yes, why? Or did you switch to RescueTime after trying something else? Let us know in the comments below!

We thought it may be easier to compare the features of these time tracking apps in a single chart.

Here is a comparative chart summarizing some key feature differences in our selection of top time tracking software tools: