TimeLeak vs ActivityWatch (2026): Both Local — Different Last Mile
5 min read · TimeLeak
ActivityWatch deserves real respect: open-source, local-first, extensible watchers, a solid dashboard. If you want raw local tracking data and enjoy building your own analysis, it's a fine choice — and philosophically TimeLeak agrees with it completely: your activity data belongs on your machine.
Where they part ways is the last mile. ActivityWatch hands you buckets and charts and wishes you luck. TimeLeak's entire reason to exist is what happens after capture:
- the day compressed into aggregates a cheap AI model reads for about a cent,
- an observations ledger where a pattern must appear 3 days running to count,
- a daily brief whose every line is a named behavior + estimated minutes + a mechanical fix (hotkey, script, digest, extension).
| TimeLeak | ActivityWatch | |
|---|---|---|
| Philosophy | local capture, BYO-key AI analysis | local capture, DIY analysis |
| Screenshots | yes — sampled frames for what text can't explain | no (title/app watchers) |
| Output | daily fix-list brief | dashboards + raw buckets |
| Price | free watcher; Pro one-time | free, open source |
The honest take
Tinkerer who loves building dashboards? ActivityWatch, no contest. Want the machine to read the day and hand you tomorrow's fix before dinner? That's TimeLeak — and the free tiers of both coexist happily on one machine.