Short version. Pick Clockify if Jira is one of several places your team tracks time and the timesheet itself is what people read. Pick Tempo if Jira is your system of record and the hours end up in front of a finance approver, a budget, or a client invoice. The price gap between them (Clockify is free, Tempo is not) is the part everyone notices first and the part that decides the least. The decision that actually matters is where your hours physically live and who reads them downstream.
I co-founded Planim Time, a desktop Jira tracker that competes with both, so weigh that. The flip side: I’ve watched a lot of teams frame this as “free Clockify versus expensive Tempo” and pick on price, then spend a quarter discovering they bought a different kind of tool than they thought. This post is the comparison underneath the price tag.
Marketplace and SaaS prices in this category drift quietly. Re-verify any number before quoting it in a procurement doc.
They’re barely the same kind of tool
Most “X vs Y” tracker posts compare two products that do roughly the same thing at different prices. This isn’t that. Clockify and Tempo sit on opposite sides of a line that matters more than any feature row.
Tempo Timesheets is an Atlassian Marketplace plugin. It runs inside Jira, a Jira admin installs it, and every hour it records is a native Jira worklog on the issue. Its reason to exist is the finance surface bolted on top: approvals, budgets, capacity planning, invoice-ready timesheets.
Clockify is a general-purpose time tracker with web, desktop, and mobile apps. It tracks time against anything (Jira, GitHub, a CRM, a meeting, a phone in your pocket) and stores those hours in its own cloud. It reaches Jira through a browser extension that injects a start/stop button next to each issue and can copy the entry into the Jira worklog. Jira is one integration among dozens, not the foundation.
So “free versus paid” is a symptom. Clockify can afford a generous free tier because Jira sync is a side feature, not the core; Tempo charges per Jira user because the Jira worklog is the whole point. Choosing on price means choosing between those two philosophies without noticing you did.
Where Clockify wins
Clockify’s free plan is genuinely free, and famously so: unlimited users, unlimited projects, unlimited tracking, no time limit, no card. For a team that wants to start tracking this afternoon without a procurement conversation, nothing on Tempo’s side competes, because Tempo has no permanent free tier at all (its “free” is a 30-day Marketplace trial).
Breadth is the other half of the pitch. Clockify tracks across GitHub, Trello, Asana, ClickUp, and many other tools through the same extension, has real iOS and Android apps, and rolls everything into report builders and (on paid tiers) client invoicing for work that never touched Jira. If your team’s time data is genuinely spread across tools, Clockify gives you one dashboard for all of it. Tempo can’t see anything that isn’t a Jira issue.
Paid Clockify stays cheap by this category’s standards: $4.99 Basic, $6.99 Standard, $9.99 Pro, $14.99 Enterprise, per user per month, and crucially you only pay for the people who use Clockify, not for every Jira seat.
What you trade for all that: the Jira sync is one-way and lives in a browser extension. Your hours’ real home is Clockify’s cloud, and Jira only sees them when the extension pushes. That single property is where most of the trouble below comes from.
Where Tempo wins
Tempo’s depth is on the finance side, and more than a decade of building for that reader shows. Approvals are a manager queue with lock-after-approval and an audit trail. Capacity planning puts a team’s available hours next to a project’s budget. Budgets and client invoicing (through Tempo’s Budgets, Cost Tracker, and Financial Manager modules, depending on the bundle) turn tracked time into invoice-ready numbers without a CSV round-trip. The reporting suite is built to defend hours against an internal audit or a client review. Clockify does some of this on paid tiers, but it isn’t built to be read by a finance team, and Tempo is.
Tempo also runs on Jira Cloud, Server, and Data Center alike, which matters if you’re not on Cloud. And because every Tempo hour is a native Jira worklog, Jira is authoritative by default: the worklog column, sprint reports, and any other tool reading Jira all agree without a second sync step.
What you pay for that surface: Tempo is priced per Jira user through the Marketplace, starting around $10 per user per month on Cloud and tiered by your Jira edition. There’s no free plan, a Jira admin has to install it, and it’s a browser-bound plugin with no offline mode and no menu-bar timer. You’re buying finance-grade depth on Jira, and you’re buying all of it for every Jira seat.
The question both pricing pages dodge: where do your hours live
This is the part neither marketing page frames honestly, and it’s the thing I’d actually decide on.
With Tempo, your hours live on the Jira issue. With Clockify, they live in Clockify’s cloud and are copied to Jira only when the extension pushes, one direction, no reconciliation. That difference has a cost on each side that the price tag hides.
Clockify’s hidden cost is a second system of record. The most common way I see this go wrong: a team adopts Clockify Free, tracks happily for a quarter, and then at sprint review or invoice time finds Jira’s worklog column reading zero. The hours exist, they’re just in Clockify, because the extension push was optional and nobody ran it consistently. Now finance is looking at Jira, the hours are in Clockify, and someone spends a day reconciling two stores that should have been one. If Jira is where downstream readers look (and on a Jira team it usually is), Clockify’s free price quietly buys you a reconciliation chore. I wrote up why one-way sync is the default trap in this category in two-way Jira worklog sync, and why most trackers fake it.
Tempo’s hidden cost is the dormant-seat tax. Tempo bills per Jira user, not per active tracker. A 50-seat Jira instance where 12 engineers actually log time is billed for all 50, including the 38 who never open a timer. That’s not a Tempo quirk; it’s how Marketplace per-Jira-user pricing works. But it means Tempo’s real cost per person who benefits is much higher than the sticker rate, and it climbs as your Jira grows faster than your tracking team.
Neither cost is wrong, exactly. They’re just the parts you don’t see until month two.
The math at 20 people
Same engineering team, same Jira Cloud instance, 20 people on it, of whom 12 actually track time and 8 never touch a worklog. Reframed around what you’re really paying for, not just the headline number.
| Clockify Free | Tempo Timesheets | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly bill | $0 | ≈ $200 at the $10/seat starting band (before volume tiering), billed for all 20 Jira users |
| Who’s billed | Nobody (or the 12 trackers, if you take a paid tier for reports) | All 20 Jira users, including the 8 who never log time |
| Where the hours live | Clockify’s cloud; Jira only if the extension pushes | Native Jira worklogs on the issue |
| What you actually buy | A timesheet you read in Clockify, plus optional one-way Jira copy | A finance surface (approvals, budgets, invoicing) on authoritative Jira hours |
| The catch | A second store to keep in sync | Paying for 8 dormant seats and enterprise machinery a sprint team won’t open |
The point of the table isn’t the $0 versus $200. It’s the bottom two rows. Clockify Free is cheaper in dollars and more expensive in reconciliation; Tempo is the reverse. If your team has no finance reader, you’re paying Tempo for surface area you’ll never touch. If your team does have one, Clockify’s $0 is a discount on a tool that can’t be where the hours officially live.
The decision in one table
| Your situation | Pick |
|---|---|
| Jira is one of several tools you track against | Clockify |
| The timesheet itself is the artifact; nobody reads Jira’s worklog column | Clockify |
| You need a real free tier, unlimited users, today | Clockify |
| You track from a phone, or invoice for non-Jira work | Clockify |
| Finance, a PMO, or a client reads your hours monthly | Tempo |
| You need approvals, budgets, capacity planning, or invoicing | Tempo |
| Jira must be the authoritative record of hours | Tempo |
| You’re on Jira Server or Data Center | Tempo |
| You need offline tracking, a menu-bar timer, or no Jira admin gate | Neither (see below) |
For the row-by-row feature matrices against Planim Time, the Clockify head-to-head and the Tempo head-to-head carry the full tables. If you’re weighing Tempo against another Jira-native plugin rather than a generalist, Tempo vs Clockwork is the closer comparison, and the wider field is in the best Jira time trackers for engineering teams.
When neither is quite it
There’s a case this comparison leaves out: you want Clockify’s free price and Tempo’s authoritative Jira worklog at the same time, plus a timer that survives Jira being unreachable. Neither product is built for that. Clockify keeps the hours in its cloud; Tempo keeps them in a browser plugin that dies with the Jira tab.
That’s the gap Planim Time sits in. It’s a native menu-bar app on macOS, Windows, and Linux, free forever with full two-way Jira worklog sync, so the hours are real Jira worklogs (authoritative, like Tempo) at no cost (like Clockify Free), and the sync reconciles both directions instead of pushing one way. The timer keeps running through a Jira outage or a flaky VPN, the API token lives in the OS keychain rather than a vendor cloud, and installing it doesn’t need a Jira admin. For the “free, but Jira is the source of truth” team that this whole post is really about, it’s the option the Clockify-vs-Tempo framing skips. I broke down the free-tier landscape across all of these in free Jira time trackers: which ones are actually free.
Where it loses to Tempo: no approvals, no budgets, no capacity planning, no invoicing, and Cloud-only for now. Where it loses to Clockify: no mobile app, no multi-tool tracking, no tracking of work that isn’t a Jira issue. Where it wins against both: the hours are free, native to Jira, and still landing when Jira isn’t.
The one oversimplification worth dropping before you decide: “Clockify is the cheap one.” It’s free in dollars, but if Jira is your system of record, the price moved to a column you won’t see until reconciliation season. And “Tempo is the expensive one” is true only if you’d otherwise have used its finance half. Price the tool by where your hours need to live, not by what the pricing page charges to start.