ActivityWatch vs Harvest
ActivityWatch and Harvest are both time tracking software. ActivityWatch is open source under MPL-2.0, with 19k GitHub stars. Harvest is a commercial product from Harvest.
Which to pick
- Pick ActivityWatch when
- You want private automatic time tracking without a cloud service.
- Pick Harvest when
- An agency or consultancy bills by the hour and wants staff to track time easily against project budgets.
Side by side
Automatically records which apps, windows and websites you use and shows how you spent your time, keeping data on your own machine.
Time and expense tracking with project budgets, reports and invoicing from tracked hours, integrated with QuickBooks and Xero.
Browser and editor tracking need extra watchers, and team use is not its focus.
Resource planning needs the separate Forecast product, and per-seat pricing adds up for larger teams.
Production-ready (both)
Desktop app
Cloud service, mobile app, desktop app and browser extension
Python and Rust
Not published
Open source, MPL-2.0 (weak copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Harvest
You can use it inside a product you sell; changes you make to its own files must be shared.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
19k GitHub stars
503 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 10 years ago, latest release v0.14.1.
Not known
Other comparisons
More time tracking apps
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.