3 Time Tracking Apps I Tested as a Freelancer
Time tracking has a genuinely bad reputation for something so boring. People hear it and think surveillance, micromanagement, somebody standing behind your chair with a clipboard. I used to think that too.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you: tracking your own time, voluntarily, for nobody but yourself, is almost embarrassingly satisfying.
There’s a small, specific pleasure in finally knowing something you’ve always just guessed at:
- How long does writing an email actually take?
- How much of a “quick call” is setup versus substance?
- Did that project really take eight hours, or have you just been telling yourself it did?
There’s a name for why I kept getting this wrong: the planning fallacy, the well-documented tendency to assume a task will take as long as it did the one time everything went right.
Back then, I didn’t know the term existed. I just knew my invoices never quite matched reality, and I couldn’t figure out why.
A timer doesn’t lie to you the way your memory does. It tells you whether that “quick call” was actually quick, or whether the project you swore took eight hours quietly stretched into twenty.
As a freelancer, the appeal was obvious, but so was the budget problem. I wasn’t about to add a monthly subscription to find out something I wasn’t even sure I needed to know yet. So my search started with one filter: free and actually free, not free-for-two-weeks.
Here are the few time tracking apps I tried:
TrackingTime
As the name suggests, TrackingTime is built around tracking time, and its free plan looks quite good: unlimited projects, unlimited clients, no seat cap, and the app can work on my desktop, phone, and browser.
Compared to spreadsheets, it feels like a real upgrade. The timer runs smoothly, projects stay separate, and I get a record of my week that isn’t stitched together from memory. It also keeps things simple on the privacy side, with self-reported time entries and no screenshots or keystroke logging, which fits the idea of tracking your own hours for yourself.
One thing I only properly understood once I looked closer: TrackingTime isn’t just a timer; it’s built as the operational back office for agencies and professional services. Its paid plans let companies bill retainers, route timesheets through approvals, and even give clients their own login to check hours in real time.
That’s also where the free plan runs out. Tracking itself is free, but billable rates and invoicing aren’t included, and timesheets and reports export only as PDFs, with CSV and Excel behind an upgrade.
If you’re a small agency or a team billing retainers, TrackingTime is built for you. As a solo freelancer who just wants to bill for hours, you might outgrow the free plan quickly.
Clockify
Clockify is the one almost everyone has heard of, and I get why. The browser extension makes starting the timer painless, and the numbers it gives back can be a little uncomfortable, in a useful way. Tasks I’d have sworn took twenty minutes are quietly stretching into forty.
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Clockify also offers a free plan, but it’s now been limited to five users since April.
With the user cap, it seems reports on the free plan have also moved to covering a 31-day window only. CSV and Excel exports sit behind a paid plan now, so Free means PDF only. Setting an hourly rate or marking time as billable needs an upgrade too.
The user cap doesn’t touch a solo freelancer like me, but the reporting and billing limits do. A 31-day report window means you won’t be able to see a quarter’s worth of work without stitching exports together.
Jibble
Jibble is the one I actually use for my own tracking, and it covers more than I expect for free.
The Chrome extension is the reason it works for me. The timer sits right there in the browser I already have open all day, so starting it isn’t something I have to remember. It’s something my hands do.
Clients and projects stay separate. If I forget to stop a timer or track something wrong, I can fix the entry. Reports run over whatever stretch I want instead of a fixed window, with an export to Excel whenever I want to look at something properly.
The part that matters most: I can turn tracked hours straight into an invoice and set project-specific rates, in whatever currency a client pays me in, without it becoming a second piece of software to manage.
And I don’t pay for any of it: the timer, the corrections, the reports, the billing and invoicing. None of it sits behind a subscription.
There’s a whole techy side of Jibble that I barely touch: GPS tracking, geofencing, facial recognition, a shared kiosk, QR code, RFID, and NFC, clearly built for a company with people clocking in on a site somewhere. It also connects to Claude now, which is something I’d like to try sometime. None of it is why the app is still open on my laptop.
If you’re a solo freelancer who wants time tracking and invoicing without another subscription, this is the one I’d point you to.
What actually changed when I started tracking time
I thought tracking my time would just fix my invoices. It did that, eventually, but that’s not the part that stuck.
What actually changed is smaller and stranger. I stopped having that vague, low-grade anxiety about where my day went, the kind that shows up at six in the evening when you’re tired but can’t point to anything you finished.
I know now. Some days that’s a relief. Some days it’s just mildly annoying, like finding out a meeting really was as pointless as it felt.
I also started saying “quick call” less, mostly out of guilt, since I’m one of the people who knows exactly how long those actually run.
I don’t think the number itself is the point. The point is that I stopped operating on a story I was telling myself about my own week, and started operating on something closer to what actually happened.
That’s a small shift. It’s also the only productivity habit I’ve kept that didn’t ask me to become a different kind of person to use it; it just asked me to stop guessing.
