WakaTime vs Hackatime
Want to track your coding time without paying $9 a month? Hackatime is a free, open source tracker built by Hack Club. It uses the same editor plugins as WakaTime, so switching is mostly a config change.
Why look for a WakaTime alternative?
WakaTime invented this category, but it's also pricey for what it does. You get basic stats, but project breakdowns and anything older than two weeks sit behind a $9/month plan, and a longer dashboard history costs $14. That's a lot of money for some coding stats!
WakaTime is also focused on tracking AI coding time, rather than human coding time. On the other hand, we're mainly focused on tracking human coding time, although we do also show things like how much (or little) AI you use per day if you're into that kind of thing!
On the other hand, Hackatime is completely free! We built it for Hack Club's events so we could have a unified system to track students' coding time, but it's cheap enough to run that we can give free access to everyone, and it serves as good marketing!
So, how does Hackatime stack up?
| Feature | Hackatime | WakaTime Free | WakaTime Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free forever | Free | $9/month |
| Open Source | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Editor Support | 70+ editors | 70+ editors | 70+ editors |
| Data Retention | Unlimited | 14 days | Unlimited |
| Project Stats | Full access | Limited | Full access |
| Language Breakdown | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Leaderboards | ✓ (Community) | ✓ (Community) | ✓ |
| Self-Hosting | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Team Features | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| API Access | ✓ Full | Limited | ✓ Full |
What you give up
A few things WakaTime does that we don't:
No team dashboards
WakaTime Pro has team analytics. At the moment, we're not planning on implementing this, because we'd rather focus on making our offering for individual users better instead.
Built for Hack Club
Anyone can sign up, but the leaderboards and culture skew toward the Hack Club community. (Psst... if you're aged 13-18, you should come join us!)
Younger project
WakaTime has been around since 2013, whereas Hackatime launched in 2024. The plugin ecosystem is the same, but we're still adding things.
Less AI tracking features
WakaTime is much more suited to your needs if you need detailed stats on things like token usage. Whilst we do track AI coding time, and show things like AI vs human coding time, we aren't super interested in adding more AI stuff to Hackatime.
Reasons you might prefer Hackatime
Especially if you're a student, an open source contributor, or just not thrilled about another monthly subscription:
- Free, forever. No paid tier hiding behind a feature gate.
- Works with every WakaTime plugin. You just point it at a different URL.
- Open source, so you can read the code, send a PR, or run your own copy.
- We only track metadata (file names, languages, time). Never your code.
- Leaderboards if you want to see how you stack up against other people.
Getting started
Switching takes a couple of minutes. Same plugins, different server -
edit your ~/.wakatime.cfg file:
[settings]
api_url = https://hackatime.hackclub.com/api/hackatime/v1
api_key = YOUR_API_KEY_HEREOr sign in and let our setup page do it for you.
Give it a try!
Install the plugin and see your hours.
Start tracking for freeSetup takes about 2 minutes.