Harvest vs Kimai
Harvest and Kimai are both time tracking software. Harvest is a commercial product from Harvest. Kimai is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 5.1k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Harvest when
- An agency or consultancy bills by the hour and wants staff to track time easily against project budgets.
- Pick Kimai when
- A freelancer or company with many staff needs proven self-hosted time tracking and invoicing.
Side by side
Time and expense tracking with project budgets, reports and invoicing from tracked hours, integrated with QuickBooks and Xero.
A multi-user time tracking application with timesheets, reports, invoicing, budgets and approval workflows.
Resource planning needs the separate Forecast product, and per-seat pricing adds up for larger teams.
Several useful plugins are paid.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service, mobile app, desktop app and browser extension
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Not published
PHP, Symfony and MySQL
Closed source, sold by Harvest
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
503 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
5.1k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 10 years ago, latest release 2.71.0.
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.