Time tracking is an important element for personal and professional growth. Keeping track of the time you spend on completing different tasks can help you manage your time more constructively. This concept of tracking enables you to maintain a healthy workflow, get insights, and be more productive. When it comes to business, time tracking is crucial for every stakeholder involved, whether you are a CEO, a manager, or a team player. Generally, it is used to make sure that every employee is getting fair compensation respective to their work. But now management tracks the time to make sure that the time spent on a task, bought enough value or not. It also enables managers to set the right path for the members so that they can utilize their time and energies for the task that would bring the most productivity rather than consuming the most time on rather irrelevant tasks. As it is commonly said, Time is money, and investing this money thoughtfully is very important for the basis of a successful business. The importance of incorporating the time tracking tool is undeniable for a big enterprise and for a small-scale business too. It helps you in payroll management and measures the productivity of the team.

We do not want you to break and bank and opt for an overly expensive fancy tool, when there are several amazing, flexible, and versatile applications available in the market. So we have provided a rundown of the top 6 free and open-source tools that will make sure that everyone knows, where their time goes.

Cattr

Tired of analyzing the employee’s timesheet? Need a solution that will fit perfectly with your infrastructure? Then look no further because Cattr is the perfect solution to your needs with amazing features like automatic activity detection, and screenshot capture that lets you track and monitor. You can easily track the activity to pinpoint the improvement areas and lackings among the team for enhanced productivity. The availability of open-source coding allows you to make the application more adaptable to your needs. On-premises feature keeps the company data secure. Also, Increased server management control and customization enable you to keep your data safe and sound. You can also enhance the productivity of the tool by adding extensions and even creating your own. These plugins let you customize the tool even more and tailor it according to your needs.

Get it now from https://pkgs.org/download/python-cattrs

OpenProject

It is a perfect tool to keep your team on track with their projects and tasks. The productivity reporting feature and Gantt Chart module make it easier for the team to log the hours against specific tasks and track progress against it. You can easily strategize the projects and enhance the team’s efficiency by using agile methodology support and in-built employee scheduling capabilities. Customizable cost reporting enables you to assign different hourly wages to the employees respective to the tasks they are working on. This tool also has an expense-tracking feature that enables you to have a cost analysis of any particular task. For easier collaboration and clearer communication, the tool allows you to export the reports in CSV format to the stakeholders.

Get it now from https://www.openproject.org/download-and-installation/

Redmine

This is an open-source comprehensive tool that has made time tracking easier and very accessible for users through its remarkable features including Wiki collaboration, time tracking capabilities, issue tracking, calendar, and Gantt Chart. Redmine allows you to manually log hours according to the tasks which helps in costing, budgeting, and project management. This tool only provides restricted access to sensitive information and permits the authoritative personnel to make changes in the documents. It also has budgeting and cost estimation capabilities that will aid you in resource allocation and managing wages more accurately. Also, the provision of individual billable hours helps you in accurate budgeting and provides insights about the most productive employees.

Get it now from https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/download

Pendulums

Pendulums is a modern, open-source time-tracking tool that ensures the maximum productivity and success of your business through its amazing features. It has a user-friendly interface with the availability of statistics, multiple project tracking, and customized tags for each project. Generating organized reports, analyzing, reviewing, and sharing them is very easy and enables you to assess the team’s capabilities. Multiple project tracking does not let you limit to any project just for the sake of hours completion but you can work on multiple projects and easily track the hours spent on each project. This tool empowers you to add an unlimited number of employees to a project and complete it within or even before the time limit. Another important feature that is worth mentioning is the rest time reminder that can be customized according to the user’s preference. Work is important, but you can never deny the importance of physical and mental health, and Pendulums depicts it by incorporating this feature.

Get it now from https://snapcraft.io/pendulums

TimeCamp

TimeCamp is a free, open-source application that is completely compatible with Linux and provides amazing features including automated time tracking without any manual input, customizable timesheets, task, and project tracking, integrations with plenty of other tools, productivity tracking, GPS tracking, and a user-friendly interface. Apart from these features, TimeCamp has an extensive reporting capability generating daily, weekly, and monthly reports, billable hours, and project-specific reports. Also, it is available in the mobile application form that makes time tracking available on the go.

Get it now from https://www.timecamp.com/applications/

Project Hamster

It is one of the smoothest applications for time tracking available for Linux users. some of the notable features are task management, rest reminders, integration for many tools, offline time tracking, a user-friendly interface, extensive reporting, and many more.

Get it now from https://github.com/projecthamster/hamster

Closing Remarks

Time tracking and managing is unquestionably the most crucial step for the growth of a business. If you want to excel in your professional life and want to have a balance in your personal life too, then time tracking of every task must be included in your daily routine. To help you out with this, we have discussed the top 6 free and open-source time-tracking tools that can be tailored according to your needs.