TimeLeak vs ActivityWatch (2026): Both Local — Different Last Mile
2 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 $19 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.
The "raw data isn't insight" problem
The most common thing long-time ActivityWatch users say is some version of "the data is all there, the insight isn't." Buckets faithfully record that Chrome had focus for 3 hours and 12 minutes — and tell you nothing about the six status pages you re-checked fourteen times inside them. Sampling the actual screen context every 5 seconds, then having a model read the day, is what turns "Chrome: 3h" into "these 6 pages, 14 visits, replace with one 7:30am digest."
FAQ
Can I run ActivityWatch and TimeLeak at the same time?
Yes — they don't conflict. Some people keep ActivityWatch for its long-run buckets and run TimeLeak for a week each quarter as the audit pass.
Why isn't TimeLeak open source like ActivityWatch?
The product is plain, readable Python — you can audit every line of what runs on your machine before you run it, which is the part of open source that matters for trust. Selling a one-time license is what keeps it maintained without a subscription.
Does ActivityWatch's browser extension beat TimeLeak's window titles?
For per-tab URL detail in the buckets, yes. TimeLeak gets tab context from window titles plus sampled frames when text isn't enough — different route to the same 'what was I actually doing' answer.