I’m the co-founder of Planim Time, one of the trackers in this list. If that’s enough to close the tab, I get it. The rest of this post is an attempt to make the bias work for you instead of against you: because I’ve spent the last year on the inside of this category, I know which of the other four would beat us in your situation, and on which axes. The shortlist below is the same one I’d give a friend who emailed me asking — sorted not by “best overall”, which is a question with no clean answer, but by the use case where each one is genuinely the right pick.
Prices in this category move; I’ve tried to footnote rather than freeze them, and the post has a last_updated field for a reason — re-verify before quoting any number internally.
What “best” actually means here
Before naming five trackers, here’s what I rejected from the criteria most listicles in this SERP use, and why.
I don’t weigh mobile apps highly. If you track time on a phone in 2026, you’re a designer logging client meetings, not an engineer in a sprint. The latter is who this post is written for.
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 it is.
I do weigh:
- Survival of a Jira outage. Atlassian’s status page shows a couple of degraded periods most months. A tracker that goes blank during them is a failure mode you absorb forever.
- Where the API token lives. A token in your OS keychain is in the same vault your browser uses for saved passwords. A token in a SaaS account inherits the SaaS’s threat model.
- Round-trip sync, not just push. If a teammate edits a worklog inside Jira, does the tracker pick that up, or does the next push silently overwrite their fix? Most trackers don’t pick it up, and I’ve written about why separately.
- Whether you need a Jira admin to install it. Marketplace apps need one; desktop apps don’t. For a single engineer trying to evaluate something, the difference between five minutes and three weeks of internal tickets is decisive.
- Free tier that is not a teaser. Either an indefinite free shape that’s actually usable, or a generous trial. “Fourteen days then it nags you” doesn’t count.
With that out of the way:
Tempo Timesheets — finance and PMO that doesn’t sleep
If somebody at your company has the word “Director” in their title and reads timesheets monthly, Tempo Timesheets is probably already the answer. It’s been the #1 time management product in the Atlassian ecosystem since 2009, and the moat is real: approvals, capacity planning, budgets, invoice-ready timesheets, audit-friendly reports — none of which are easy to retrofit.
Tempo Timesheets on Cloud starts at $10 per user per month and scales per Jira user from there, with separate price tiers for Server and Data Center. Tempo has been raising list prices roughly annually, so before quoting any number internally, re-check the Atlassian Marketplace listing — it’s the only price source that’s ever current.
The trade-off is that you’re paying per Jira user for a workflow that mostly serves the finance side of the room. If a four-engineer squad has to pay $40/month so two of them can log hours and a non-engineer can run an approval flow, the math on enterprise features stops looking great. That’s the gap I see most often when teams switch off Tempo: not because Tempo is bad — it’s not — but because the engineers were paying for a finance product they didn’t need.
Pick Tempo if approvals, capacity planning, or client invoicing inside the tracker are load-bearing for your team. We have a longer head-to-head if you want the row-by-row.
Clockwork — free for ten, Jira-internal for everyone else
Clockwork (HeroCoders) is the lightest option in the Marketplace. There are two SKUs: Clockwork Pro, which is free for the 0–10 user tier on Jira Cloud and paid above, and Clockwork Lite, which HeroCoders carved out in early 2025 as a streamlined, lower-cost alternative for teams that want a smaller surface than Pro.
For under-ten teams on Cloud, the math is hard to beat: a real timesheet UI, fully embedded in Jira, at $0. The catch is the same as Tempo’s at a smaller scale — you’re inside the browser tab. If Jira goes down, your timesheet view goes with it. There’s no offline mode and no menu-bar surface; the timer is a Jira widget that lives or dies with the page.
I’d also flag the upgrade cliff. Going from Pro Free (≤10 users) to paid Pro is the moment a lot of teams stop and re-evaluate, because the per-Jira-user model means every Jira user — including the ones who’ll never log a single hour — is on the seat count. For a 50-person engineering org where 12 people actively track, this can be more expensive than the math suggests at first glance.
Pick Clockwork if you have ten or fewer Cloud users and want a Jira-native timesheet at zero cost, or your policy is genuinely “everything stays in Jira’s database.” 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. Pricing as of April 2026 is $8.50 per user per month billed annually, with a 15% premium for monthly billing and a five-seat minimum on the paid plan. The free tier covers up to five users.
The Jira integration runs through a browser extension that surfaces a timer button on the Jira issue page, and projects sync from Jira into Everhour’s web dashboard. Everhour’s centre of gravity, though, is the dashboard itself — budgets, billable rates, custom reports, QuickBooks/Xero/FreshBooks integrations, capacity and time-off management. If a single hour eventually has to find its way to a client invoice through the same tool that started the timer, that’s an opinionated workflow, and Everhour has built around it for a long time.
The trade-off for engineers: you’re paying for an invoicing engine even if you never invoice. Token storage is in Everhour’s cloud account (not your OS keychain), and the workflow is “open the dashboard, find the project, attach the timer” — which feels heavier than it should when all you wanted was to log forty minutes against PROJ-1247.
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 packs in a working timer, manual entries, timesheets, idle detection, a calendar view, mobile and desktop apps, the Pomodoro timer, and 80+ tracking integrations. Paid tiers run Basic $4.99 / Standard $6.99 / Pro $9.99 / Enterprise $14.99 per user per month on monthly billing, with 20% off on annual. There are iOS and Android apps, a desktop client, a browser extension, a kiosk mode, and a Jira integration that pushes worklogs through the extension.
If your tracking life genuinely spans Jira, GitHub, Trello, Asana, Basecamp, ClickUp and a phone in your pocket, the breadth is paid for and used. If 90% of your hours are on Jira, you’re paying for surface you’ll never touch — and the Jira integration itself is one-way (extension → Jira) rather than round-trip, which becomes painful the moment a teammate edits a worklog in Jira directly.
There’s also the second-cloud problem: time entries live primarily inside Clockify’s account and get pushed to Jira on demand. For an engineering team that already pays Atlassian for Jira, adding a parallel store of the same data is the kind of thing your security review will eventually flag.
Pick Clockify if you actually track across many tools, you need a mobile app as a first-class surface, or you want a free tier that hands you Pomodoro and a kiosk mode without paying for them. Head-to-head.
Planim Time — full disclosure, this is mine
Planim Time for Jira is what I’ve been working on for the last year. It’s a native desktop app — a menu-bar / system-tray icon on macOS, Windows, and Linux — that talks to your Jira instance through your personal API token, stores the token in the OS keychain, and runs entirely offline. Worklogs round-trip in both directions: edit a worklog in Jira’s UI and it shows up in the tracker within about a minute, without a webhook server in the middle.
Pricing is $0 Free (full timer, two-way sync, manual Push All, no user cap), $10/month Pro (calendar, automations), and $8/seat/month Team (workspace stats, minimum 2 seats). One flat price across macOS, Windows, Linux, Cloud, and Data Center. There’s a 14-day Pro trial on first launch with no credit card.
Where Planim Time loses to the four above: no approval workflows, no capacity planning, no budgets, no client invoicing, no mobile app, no kiosk mode. We track worked hours and push them to Jira; everything else is somebody else’s job. If your team needs any of the things in that list and you’ve read this far hoping I’d reveal a hidden Pro tier that does them, sorry — they’re not on the roadmap.
We also wrote separately about why we shipped a desktop binary instead of a Marketplace plugin; the short version is that Atlassian’s own outages turned out to be the design constraint we kept hitting.
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’d rather your API token live in the OS keychain than in another vendor’s cloud.
Honest summary
If I had to compress this whole post into one decision tree:
- Finance reads your timesheets monthly? Tempo Timesheets.
- You’re a ≤10-user team on Jira Cloud and want zero cost? Clockwork (Lite or Pro Free).
- You bill clients hourly through the same tool that runs the timer? Everhour.
- Your tracking life spans many tools, you need a mobile app, and your team is five people or fewer? Clockify (its free tier caps at five users; bigger teams pay per seat).
- Jira is the source of truth and you want a timer that survives Atlassian’s bad afternoons? Planim Time.
Five categories with five distinct winners, which is also why I won’t claim there’s a single “best Jira time tracker” — the category isn’t shaped that way. The mistake every listicle in this SERP makes is pretending it is.
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.