The two leading open-source time tracking projects, compared on the signals that predict whether a dependency survives: commit cadence, release history, licence and health.
solidtime is the safer default: actively maintained maintenance, 356 commits in the last twelve months and a health score of 84/100, against 83 commits and 71/100 for ActivityWatch. Licence still decides the commercial question — solidtime ships under AGPL-3.0, ActivityWatch under MPL-2.0. Both are Time Tracking projects; the category scores 35/100 on saturation with 10 open-source implementations tracked.
| Metric | ActivityWatch | solidtime |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | 19k | 8.9k |
| Maintenance status | Actively maintained | Actively maintained |
| Commits (12 months) | 83 | 356 |
| Commits (3 months) | 32 | 110 |
| Active months / 12 | 8 | 12 |
| Last commit | 2026-08-06 | 2026-08-06 |
| Last release | 2026-08-06 | 2026-08-07 |
| Licence | MPL-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Licence family | copyleft | copyleft |
| Health score | 71/100 | 84/100 |
| Replaces | — | Time Tracking |
| Repository | activitywatch/activitywatch | solidtime-io/solidtime |
Repository metadata refreshed August 2026. Stars never decay — read the maintenance rows first.
Automatically track how you spend time on your devices.
Modern time tracking application for freelancers and agencies.
On maintenance signals, solidtime leads: 356 commits in the last twelve months across 12 active months, versus 83 commits and 8 active months for ActivityWatch. Star counts (19k vs 8.9k) reflect historical popularity, not current health, so read them second.
ActivityWatch is licensed under MPL-2.0 (copyleft) and solidtime under AGPL-3.0 (copyleft). Permissive licences (MIT, Apache, BSD) allow closed commercial products. Copyleft (GPL) triggers on distribution and AGPL triggers on network use, which covers SaaS. Source-available licences usually forbid competing hosted services outright.
ActivityWatch is marked actively maintained with its last commit recorded 2026-08-06 and 32 commits in the last three months. It still qualifies as having momentum, so it is a viable dependency.
The Time Tracking category is rated open at 35/100, with 6 maintained implementations. In a crowded category every prospect can find a free version in minutes, so your wedge has to be something maintainers structurally will not build: compliance, SLAs, managed scale or a workflow they reject.
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Two maintained free tools already own this category. IdeaProof scores your idea against live competitors, market size and 1,000+ documented failures in about two minutes.
Validate your idea freeSearch this database by category and by the commercial product you would replace. It covers 1665 projects across 130 categories, each mapped to the paid tool it substitutes. If your category shows a "Crowded" verdict, a maintained free version almost certainly exists and your positioning has to account for it.
No. It means free is your price anchor. Plenty of large companies were built next to a good open-source project — the ones that failed were the ones selling the same job at a price the free tool made indefensible. Find the part of the job the project deliberately does not do, and sell that.
Each category gets a 0–100 score built from three inputs: how many implementations exist, what share of them are still actively maintained, and how far ahead the leading project is compared with the category median. 62+ is Crowded, 38–61 Contested, under 38 Open. 11 categories are Crowded and 88 are Open.