Rescuetime vs Timely
An alternative to RescueTime’s surprisingly manual functionality
“RescueTime is not built to understand time from a project/task perspective; it's a productivity perspective. Timely saves time in terms of categorizing and billing — it's simpler.”
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What makes Timely the best RescueTime alternative?
An alternative to RescueTime’s surprisingly manual functionality
Timely and RescueTime are the only fully-developed automated time tracking solutions currently available on the market. Both can capture everything you work on in the background for you, without the need for any manual timers or note taking. However, the tools diverge on the application and sophistication of their automation, and what you can actually do with your time data. Here are a few reasons why RescueTime users upgrade their automatic time tracking to Timely.
“I needed a tool that could track specific projects ”
Timely is designed to help you seamlessly capture, report and invoice accurately across your project portfolio, whereas RescueTime is primarily designed for managing your personal productivity. As such, assigning time against different projects can become an extremely painful, manual process. The majority of RescueTime users who switch to Timely do so for the latter’s advanced project time tracking and task management features.
“RescueTime involved too much work to create invoices.”
Likewise, RescueTime just isn’t set up to translate your tracked activity into accurate invoices for billing clients. In contrast, Timely streamlines routine accounting through its native QuickBooks Online integration. Users can create accurate, professional invoices in bulk for all unbilled project work in a click.
“I waste time trying to figure out how to process all of RescueTime’s information.”
Both Timely and RescueTime capture every second of your work day, so it’s important that the sheer granularity of that data stays accessible. RescueTime’s UI can leave users feeling overwhelmed by unstructured information, with many complaining that the manual effort required to categorize work into a meaningful format undoes the efficiencies won from its automatic features. Contrastingly, Timely lets you simply drag and drop tracked activities to your timesheet, or enlist AI to draft time entries for you.
“Lately, there are some bugs that make RescueTime double count time — I had 48-hour days!”
Automatic time tracking is only accurate if the software powering it is actually reliable. From more intuitive mobile time tracking to ensuring automatic time tracking actually works on Chromebook, Timely guarantees regular developer attention across all of its apps. We are constantly refining and expanding what our automatic time tracking can do to offer you the best possible experience.
