Timing, Rize and RescueTime are real products made by real people, and any of them will tell you where your day went. They just do it by keeping a copy of your day on someone else's computer, and charging you every month for the privilege. Calliday doesn't — and neither does Timemator, which is why the second question matters as much as the first.
Written by the people who make Calliday. We've tried to keep it honest — including a section on what each rival does better.
Every tracker on this page watches the same things: the app you're in, the window title, the page, the document. The difference is what happens next. Timing, Rize and RescueTime upload it, and charge $9-ish a month forever to keep doing so. Calliday and Timemator keep it on your own Mac, where no network call reaches it, and ask for money once.
Which is exactly why the second question decides it. Timemator files time where you have written a rule and leaves the rest sitting on a timeline. Calliday reads the work around an unfiled gap and labels it for you — then writes the day up, answers questions about it on-device, and can prove to a client that the report wasn't edited.
Calliday and Timemator are bought once. Timing, Rize and RescueTime are annual-billing rates for one person, converted to a yearly figure so they're comparable — and they recur.
| Calliday | Timing | Timemator | Rize | RescueTime | ActivityWatch | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $39–89lifetime, 1–3 Macs | ~$108$9/mo annual | $39once, 2 Macs | ~$120$9.99/mo annual | $78Premium | Freeopen source |
| Where your history lives | Your Macs only | Their cloud | Your Macs only | Their cloud | Their cloud | Your machine |
| Account required | No — never asked | Yes | No — licence key | Yes | Yes | No |
| Works with the Wi-Fi off | Fully | Queues, then syncs | Fully | Queues, then syncs | Queues, then syncs | Fully |
| Telemetry / analytics | None | Yes | None declared | Yes | Yes | None |
| Automatic tracking (app, window, URL, document) |
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Rules that sort time into projects | Yes — name, glob, subdomain or regex |
Yes | Yes — app, file path, URL, regex, Slack channel |
Categories | Categories | Regex, DIY |
| Sorts leftover time by itself (reads the work around it) |
Yes learns from how you've already filed things and labels the gaps |
No | No unruled time waits on the timeline |
No | No | No |
| Billing rates & invoices | Yes rates per client, printable invoice, CSV |
Yes | Yes rates per task, PDF & CSV export |
No | No | No |
| Writes your journal for you (day, week or month) |
Yes three shapes, six points of view; searchable by regex |
No | No | AI summaries | No | No |
| Native Mac app | Yes — signed and checked by Apple |
Yes | Yes + iPhone, iPad, Watch |
Yes | Yes + web | Runs in a browser |
| Menu bar · CLI · Raycast | All three | Menu bar | Menu bar + widgets | Menu bar | Menu bar | Menu bar, API |
| Ask an AI about your day | Claude, over MCP reads your Mac; uploads nothing |
AI summaries (cloud) | No | AI coaching (cloud) | Assistant (cloud) | No |
| AI that never leaves the Mac | On-device Apple Intelligence, or any model you run yourself (Ollama, LM Studio) — no key, no network |
Cloud only | No AI | Cloud only | Cloud only | No AI |
| Pomodoros | Discovered grown from real focus, no timer |
No | No | Timer-based | Focus sessions | No |
| Privacy exclusions (never recorded, not just hidden) |
Yes — Pro | Some | Private browsing only | Some | Some | DIY |
| Tamper-evident history | Yes a report you hand a client can be shown to be unedited |
No | No | No | No | No |
| Multi-Mac sync | Yes — through your own
cloud storage (iCloud Drive, Dropbox, a NAS), never ours. Encrypted so only your Macs can read it; up to three Macs on one licence |
Yes — their cloud | Yes — iCloud, 2 devices, plus iOS |
Yes — their cloud | Yes + mobile | Self-hosted |
| Windows / Linux | macOS only | macOS only | macOS + iOS | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Time tracking is not a thing you use for three months. It's a thing you leave running for years — which is exactly when a subscription stops being cheap, and when paying once stops feeling like a price at all.
Five years at each product's current annual rate, against Calliday's one-time $39. Calliday Pro is $49 once, and stays $49. Timemator isn't on this chart for the same reason our own bar is short: it's $39 once too, and five years of it still costs $39.
Where each one genuinely stands, and who should pick it over us. Nearest neighbour first.
The other app on this page that keeps your day on your own Mac and charges for it once. No account, works offline, syncs through your own iCloud rather than a vendor's server, and it has something we don't: real iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch apps, plus a 30-day trial where ours is seven. It undercuts us on a second Mac too: $39 covers two of them, where our two-Mac licence is $69. If the whole of what you want is a private auto-timer that bills clients, Timemator has been doing that well since 2019 and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise.
The difference is what happens to the time you never wrote a rule for. Timemator's auto-tracking fires on rules you build by hand — this app, that folder, that URL, that Slack channel — and everything outside them sits on the activity timeline waiting for you to drag it somewhere. That's the work Calliday takes off you: unfiled time is read against the work around it and labelled, the day and week get written up for you, and you can ask Claude — or a model running entirely on your Mac — what happened last Tuesday. Then there's what a client sees: our exports carry a tamper-evident chain, so an invoice can be shown to be unedited. Timemator has no AI, no journal, no pomodoros, no CLI or Raycast, and development runs at a handful of releases a year.
Pick Timemator if you want the same privacy posture on your phone and wrist, and you're happy writing the rules yourself. Pick Calliday if you'd rather the leftover hours filed themselves, the week wrote itself up, and the report could prove it hadn't been touched.
The category's grown-up. Excellent automatic tracking, a mature rules engine, invoicing and team features, and years of polish behind it. It is the product Calliday is most often compared to, and the comparison is fair. The trade is that Timing is a cloud product with an account, sold only by subscription — its own docs describe syncing your data to their servers — and the Expert tier you'll want for two Macs runs ~$132 a year.
Pick Timing if you need team reporting. Pick Calliday if you bill clients from your own Mac and would rather your window titles never left the building — you get rates and invoices either way, and stop paying after the first $49.
The coach of the group. Rize leans hard into focus scoring, break nudges, session interruption warnings and AI-written advice about your work habits. If you want an app with opinions about how you should be spending your afternoon, Rize has the most of them. It also has the highest price, it's cloud-and-account by design, and its guidance tends toward the gamified end — which some people love and some people find nagging.
Pick Rize if you want active coaching and don't mind the upload. Pick Calliday if you want a record rather than a referee — our tomatoes ask, they never block.
The old guard, and still the broadest: real mobile tracking, Windows and Android alongside macOS, and the longest history of anyone here. Its weekly digest is the feature everyone else copied, and it earns that — it lands in your inbox unasked, for every user, with no AI to switch on first. Calliday writes your week up too, and links it into a record you can search back through rather than an email you'll archive; the honest difference is that RescueTime's simply arrives, and ours is something you turn on. Where it costs you is the cloud commitment — the product is fundamentally a web dashboard fed by an agent, and its productivity scoring is applied to your data on their servers.
Pick RescueTime if you need phone tracking or cross-platform coverage. Pick Calliday if a Mac is where your work happens and you'd rather not have a second copy of it online.
The other local one, and the one we'd have called our closest relative before Timemator showed up. Open source, local by default, self-hostable sync, and free forever — if privacy is the only axis you care about, ActivityWatch already wins and we won't pretend otherwise. What you trade is finish: a browser dashboard rather than a Mac app, trackers you install and configure yourself, categorisation you build by hand, and no menu bar report, no Raycast, no pomodoros, no billing, and no MCP server to point Claude at.
Pick ActivityWatch if you enjoy the setup and want to pay nothing. Pick Calliday if you want the same privacy posture as a finished Mac app you don't have to maintain.
A comparison page that only flatters its author isn't worth reading. Here's the current state of it.
The download starts a free 7-day Pro trial — no account, no card, nothing to cancel. Run it alongside your current tracker for a week and compare the two timelines.
macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon & Intel · everything stays in local databases on your own Macs. Always.