Nobody switches away from a bad app. You switch away from a good app whose deal you can't live with anymore — and Timing is a good app. It's the deepest automatic tracker on the Mac. If you're reading this, you probably already know that, and something else is bothering you.
For most people I hear from, it's one of four things: the subscription (around $79 a year, climbing for the higher tiers), the cloud sync, the complexity, or a Mac-only workflow that never wanted a dashboard in the first place.
Short answer: the best Timing alternative depends on why you're leaving. Timex or Chronoid for local automatic tracking with a one-time price. ActivityWatch for free and open source. RescueTime for cross-device reports. Toggl Track if you've realized you actually wanted manual timers for a team all along.
What you're giving up — be honest about it
Before you switch, know what Timing does that the alternatives mostly don't.
Document-level tracking is the big one. Timing sees which file you had open, not just which app. A designer gets "4 hours in client-branding.psd," not "4 hours in Photoshop." If you bill by project and your work happens in files, that's not a nice-to-have — it's the feature. Some alternatives approximate it with window titles; none match it.
The second is automatic project suggestions. Timing learns your patterns and drafts the timesheet for you. You correct it instead of writing it. That's a genuinely useful thing to outsource.
And the third is the iPhone: Timing pulls in your phone's Screen Time data, so your day is one cross-device record. If you need that, no local-only Mac app will give it to you.
The four exit reasons, and what fits each
If it's the subscription: Timing costs around $79 a year for the base tier, with a lifetime option around $290. Over three years that's $237 in subscriptions. If the features you use are "automatic tracking, timeline, export," you're paying a subscription for AI suggestions you've stopped reading. Chronoid ($49 one-time) and Timex ($49 one-time) cover the automatic-tracking core without the yearly bill. ActivityWatch covers it for free, with rougher edges.
If it's the cloud: Timing syncs your history through their servers. That's what enables the iPhone data and the cross-device view — and it means your window titles and document names live on someone else's infrastructure. If that's the part that's been bothering you, local-first is the category you want: Timex, Chronoid, Qbserve, or ActivityWatch all keep the record on your machine. The trade is real: no cross-device anything, and you're responsible for your own backups. (Timex at least makes a daily local backup and keeps seven.)
If it's the complexity: Timing has settings, tiers, and a learning curve — that's the price of depth. If you want the opposite shape — one window, one timeline, no project tree — a menu-bar tracker like Timex is deliberately smaller. It answers "where did the day go," not "which client owes me for Tuesday." Some people need both tools; more people need the small one.
If you wanted manual timers all along: Sometimes the realization isn't "Timing is wrong," it's "automatic tracking isn't how my work runs." If you bill in discrete sessions and actually remember to start timers, Toggl Track's free plan does that job forever-free, and its timeline feature backfills what you forgot. Leaving Timing for Toggl isn't a downgrade — it's a different sport.
Before you cancel anything: a five-minute checklist
- Export your history. Do it from the app before anything else — years of tracked time is the thing no alternative can give you back.
- Check what you actually used this month. If the answer is "the timeline and the weekly total," you don't need to replace project AI. If it's "document-level billing," think twice — you'll miss it.
- Trial the replacement with real work, not a test day. Run it a full week. The differences that matter (idle handling, away-time, browser detail) only show up in a real week with real meetings.
- Check the requirements. Timex needs macOS 15 or later and Apple Silicon. If your Mac is older, that's a hard no before you fall in love with anything.
Where my app fits — and where it doesn't
I make Timex, so you know the bias. It's a menu-bar tracker: 1 Hz sampling of the frontmost app and window title, one local SQLite file, no account, $49 once. What it won't do is document-level tracking, iPhone sync, or project suggestions — I'd rather you hear that here than on day 6 of a trial.
What it will do is show you the week you just lived, split by app and website, exportable to CSV, with rules you write deciding what counts as focus. For a lot of people leaving Timing, that turns out to be the 80% they were actually using. For the other 20%, Timing is the right app and they should stay.
If the local-first version sounds like you, download Timex — the trial gives you 100 hours of real tracking. That's about two and a half work weeks to decide.
— DK