After a year building Planim Time, one of the trackers in this list, I know which of the other four would beat us in your situation, and where. So instead of a “best overall” ranking (a question with no honest answer), what follows is my actual shortlist, organised by the use case each tool wins on.
Prices in this category move. Re-verify before quoting any number internally.
Criteria
What I’m not weighing, and what I am.
I don’t weigh mobile apps highly for this audience. Phone-first tracking matters for field service, agencies billing from cafés, consultants on the move; Clockify below earns its spot partly on that. For an engineer in a sprint at a two-monitor desk, it’s almost never the deciding factor.
I don’t weigh AI weekly summaries highly. They’re the headline feature on every tracker’s pricing page right now, and the engineers I talk to read them once and turn them off. The hour you logged on Tuesday is whatever the worklog says.
I do weigh:
- Survival of a Jira outage. Atlassian’s status page shows a couple of degraded periods most months. If your tracker goes blank during them, that’s a failure mode you keep paying for.
- Authentication and credential boundary. Marketplace scope, vendor cloud, OAuth broker, and device-local credentials expose different systems during sign-in and sync. Treat the exact architecture as a security-review question, not a checkbox labelled “encrypted”.
- Round-trip sync, not just push. When a teammate fixes a worklog directly in Jira, the tracker should pick that change up and apply a documented conflict rule. Test it; the word “sync” alone does not prove the round trip. I’ve written about how separately.
- Whether Jira needs an installed app. Marketplace products need a tenant install; desktop products don’t. Connected-app authorization is a separate policy gate, covered in the no-admin time-tracking guide.
- Free tier that isn’t a teaser. An indefinite free tier that does the job, or a long trial. “Fourteen days then it nags you” doesn’t count.
Tempo Timesheets: finance and PMO that doesn’t sleep
If someone at your company has “Director” in their title and reads timesheets monthly, Tempo Timesheets is probably already the answer. Timesheets covers approvals, billable-time categorisation, exports, and audit-friendly reports. Capacity Planner and Financial Manager are separate Tempo products that consume the timesheet data; they are not features bundled into the Timesheets price.
Tempo’s current Cloud pricing is $1 per Jira user per month for 1–10 users and an average $5.21 per user for 11–100, with lower average rates in larger bands. The Tempo license must match the Jira license size, so the relevant number is the whole Jira site, not only the people who run a timer. Re-check the live table before procurement.
Trade-off: you’re paying for every Jira user and adopting a workflow that mostly serves the finance side of the room. The current 1–10-user tier is inexpensive, so a small team’s decision should not be framed as a price escape. The distinction becomes architecture and scope: Tempo brings a Jira-admin install and finance workflows; a focused desktop tracker brings offline operation without a Marketplace tenant install.
Pick Tempo Timesheets if approvals and billable-time reporting are load-bearing for your team. Evaluate the wider Tempo suite separately if you also need capacity or financial management. We have a longer head-to-head if you want the row-by-row.
Clockwork: Jira-internal and inexpensive for small sites
Clockwork (HeroCoders) is one of the lighter Marketplace options. It has separate Lite and Pro listings: Lite keeps the timer and timesheet surface small, while Pro adds approvals, costs, billing reports, and richer controls. HeroCoders removed Lite’s old 300-timer monthly limit in May 2026. Small Jira Cloud sites can use Marketplace pricing at no charge; larger sites pay by the Jira app-seat tier.
Under ten Cloud users, this is hard to beat: a real timesheet UI, embedded inside Jira, at zero cost. The catch is the same as Tempo’s at smaller scale. The timer is a Jira widget that lives or dies with the page. No offline mode, no menu-bar surface.
Watch the upgrade cliff. Above ten users the per-Jira-user model bills every Jira user, including ones who’ll never log an hour. A 50-person org where 12 actively track ends up paying for 38 people who don’t.
Pick Clockwork if you want the timer and timesheet inside the Jira tab and your admin prefers a centrally installed Forge Marketplace app, especially on a small Cloud site. Jira worklogs live in Jira, but do not treat that as an all-data-residency claim: HeroCoders says Clockwork does not yet carry the stricter Runs on Atlassian badge. Head-to-head.
Everhour: when the timer also has to be the invoice
Everhour is the right pick when “track an hour” and “bill a client” are two faces of the same job. The Team plan is $8.50 per user per month billed annually or $10 monthly, with a five-seat minimum. The free tier covers up to five users but excludes native integrations, so using Everhour with Jira requires the paid Team plan.
The Jira integration is a Marketplace add-on that replaces Jira’s native time-tracking UI with Everhour’s controls (with an optional browser extension for list and board views). Projects sync into Everhour’s web dashboard, and that’s where the centre of gravity is: budgets, billable rates, custom reports, QuickBooks/Xero/FreshBooks integrations, capacity planning. If a single hour has to end up on a client invoice through the same tool that started the timer, Everhour has built around that opinion for years.
The engineering trade-off: you pay for an invoicing engine even if you never invoice, Everhour’s integration state and time data live in its cloud, and logging forty minutes against PROJ-1247 takes more clicks than it should.
Pick Everhour if you bill clients hourly and the tracker also has to be the billing system. Head-to-head.
Clockify: generalist with a phone in its pocket
Clockify is the breadth play. The free tier covers up to five users and includes a working timer, timesheets, idle detection, calendar view, and mobile plus desktop apps. Clockify also has a free Atlassian Marketplace app for Jira Cloud. A Jira admin installs it, and Clockify documents two-way synchronisation between its entries and Jira worklogs.
If your tracking life really does span Jira, GitHub, Trello, Asana, Basecamp, ClickUp plus a phone, that breadth is useful. Clockify’s current Jira app is materially stronger than the old extension-only workflow because edits can flow in both directions. The trade-off is organisational rather than sync direction: it needs a Jira admin and creates a Clockify workspace that remains another system your team must govern.
For an engineering team that already pays Atlassian for Jira, the parallel Clockify dataset is still something a security review and retention policy must cover. That is not automatically a problem, but it is a different architecture from a Jira-focused desktop client.
Pick Clockify if you track across many tools or you need a mobile app as a first-class surface. Head-to-head.
Planim Time
Planim Time for Jira is what I’ve been working on for the last year. It’s a native desktop app, a menu-bar or system-tray icon on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Sign in with Atlassian is the default; an API-token path remains available as a fallback. Long-lived credentials are stored in the OS keychain. The timer runs offline, and worklogs sync both ways when Jira is reachable. Issue selection is JQL-driven, so whatever filter you already use in Jira, the tracker can use too.
On a normal workday the surface most people live in is the calendar (Pro). It’s a multi-week grid where worklogs are draggable blocks you can resize to extend or shorten. Closer to how Google Calendar feels than a row-by-row spreadsheet. Team stats roll up every member who logged time to the workspace’s Jira issues, not only the paid seats, so the boards include everyone’s hours without you having to buy licences for the people who won’t use Pro. Both come with a 14-day trial on first launch, no card.
Where Planim Time loses to the four above: no approval workflows, no capacity planning, no budgets, no full invoicing (CSV export is as close as we get), no mobile app, no kiosk mode. We track worked hours and push them to Jira; everything else is somebody else’s job. If you need any of that, one of the four above will earn its seat. We wrote separately about why we shipped a desktop binary instead of a Marketplace plugin if you want the architectural side of that trade-off.
Pick Planim Time if Jira is your source of truth, you want a timer that survives both Jira outages and laptop tab-evictions, and you want to evaluate it without a Jira admin installing another Marketplace app.
The short version
- Finance reads your timesheets monthly? Tempo Timesheets.
- You want the timer to live inside the Jira tab itself, ≤10 users on Cloud? Clockwork (Pro Free or Lite).
- You bill clients hourly through the same tool that runs the timer? Everhour.
- Your tracking life spans many tools and you need a real mobile app? Clockify (free up to five users; $4.99–$14.99 per seat above that).
- Jira is the source of truth and you want a timer that survives Atlassian’s bad afternoons? Planim Time.
Five buckets, five different winners. There isn’t a single “best Jira time tracker”, and the mistake every other roundup makes is pretending there is one.
If you’ve got Jira and an hour you need to remember on Tuesday, download Planim Time and point it at your real instance for a sprint. If it doesn’t earn its keep in the first week, one of the four above will, and now you know which one.