ActivityWatch vs Hackatime

ActivityWatch significantly outpaces Hackatime in community adoption with 18,839 stars compared to 201 stars on GitHub. This 93.7x difference suggests ActivityWatch has a much larger and more active community. In terms of developer contributions, ActivityWatch has 1,008 forks, indicating strong developer engagement.

Hackatime is growing faster, adding 23 stars in the last 30 days (+13%) against adding 303 stars for ActivityWatch (+1.6%). Hackatime is the smaller project of the two, so it is closing the gap rather than extending a lead.

Both projects show recent activity, with ActivityWatch last updated 14 hours ago and Hackatime 12 hours ago.

Both tools share common technology foundations, being built with Bash. However, they differ in their additional technology choices: ActivityWatch uses Python while Hackatime leverages JavaScript, CSS, Typescript, Ruby.

ActivityWatch has been in development longer, starting 10 years ago, compared to Hackatime which began 2 years ago. This 8.9-year head start suggests ActivityWatch may have more mature features and established processes.

Hackatime uses the MIT license, which is more permissive than ActivityWatch's MPL-2.0 license, potentially offering greater flexibility for commercial use and integration.

Both tools serve similar use cases in Time Tracking. However, they also have distinct specializations: ActivityWatch also focuses on Productivity & Utilities.

Hackatime provides self-hosting options for complete data control and customization, while ActivityWatch may be primarily cloud-based or require different deployment approaches.