Clockoli vs WakaTime

WakaTime is the closest thing to a developer-native time tracker, and it is the comparison we get asked about most by people who have never used a timesheet in their life. It claims 500,000+ developers, its IDE plugins send a heartbeat every couple of minutes, and its browser extension parses github.com URLs into a project and a language on its own.

It is also solving a different problem to Clockoli, and the difference is worth being precise about, because “time tracker” covers both.

The split: measurement versus a claim

WakaTime measures. Plugins in your editor emit heartbeats on switch and on save; a timeout slider (15 minutes by default) merges them into blocks so short gaps do not shred your day. You never start anything. The Durations view then shows read-only rows per project, file and branch on a 24-hour axis. You can change what a duration was attributed to — project, language, category, branch — but you cannot change when it happened, because it is a record of what your machine observed.

Clockoli records a claim you are willing to bill for. You start a timer on a URL, you correct it inline as HH:MM – HH:MM, and the result is the number that goes on an invoice with your name against it.

That is why WakaTime has no editing and Clockoli treats editing as a core feature. Neither is wrong. They answer different questions:

• WakaTime answers where did my coding time actually go?
• Clockoli answers what am I invoicing this client for, and can I defend it?

What WakaTime does better

It requires nothing of you. The single biggest failure mode of every manual tracker, including ours, is forgetting to press start. WakaTime cannot be forgotten. If your problem is “I want to know how I spend my week” rather than “I need to bill someone”, automatic capture beats discipline every time.

Language, editor and file granularity. Nothing here can tell you that you spent nine hours in one file this week. WakaTime can.

The daily gauge. Today’s total against your own daily average, in the editor status bar and the extension popup. It is a cheap, motivating number and we are considering something like it.

It already treats a repo as a project. WakaTime derives the project from the GitHub URL and tags PR /files pages as code review — the same identity rule Clockoli uses for tasks. Good precedent, independently arrived at.

What Clockoli does that WakaTime cannot

Time on things that are not code. WakaTime sees your editor and your browser tabs. Clockoli treats any URL as a task, so the support ticket, the spec doc, the dashboard and the two-hour call all bill to something. For most people who invoice, non-coding hours are a large share of the invoice.

Editing, and a record of the edit. You cannot fix a WakaTime duration, because it is a measurement. You can fix a Clockoli entry, and the fix is a commit, so the correction is visible rather than silent.

Rates, reports and billing. WakaTime is an analytics dashboard. There are no hourly rates, no billable flag, no client-facing report. Clockoli reports across the whole team from one shared repo, groups by day, person, source or task, and keeps rates in your browser.

Your data on your disk. WakaTime’s free tier keeps one week of history and Premium is $14/month; either way the history lives on their servers. Clockoli’s lives in your repository, and a year of it is a git clone away — readable by an agent with no API key and no rate limit.

Which to pick

Take WakaTime if the question is personal: how much did I code, in what, this week. It is very good at that, and it works whether or not you remember it exists.

Take Clockoli if someone is paying for those hours. Billable time needs to be intentional, editable and defensible, and it needs to cover the work that happens outside your editor.

They also compose. Nothing stops you running WakaTime for insight and Clockoli for the invoice — they do not compete for the same click, because Clockoli only counts what you deliberately started.