“Free Jira time tracker” is the query, and every vendor on the first page of Google wants you to think the answer is them. The pricing pages don’t make it easy. One product calls a 14-day trial “free”, another caps “free” at ten people on Cloud only, a third gives you a real free plan but quietly excludes the only feature you came for. By the time you’ve opened six tabs and read six different definitions of “free forever”, you’ve already spent the hour you were trying to save.
I co-founded one of these tools (Planim Time), so factor that in. The version of this post I want to read is the one that puts the actual ceiling of each free tier on the table, in plain English, without the vendor mood lighting. So that’s what this is. Numbers were correct in May 2026; pricing in this category moves, so re-check before quoting anything internally.
The two questions that matter
Before anything else, ask:
- Does the free tier expire?
- Does the free tier include the Jira integration?
You’d think both are yes by default. They aren’t. Trackers in this category routinely call a 14-day trial “free” on the pricing page (Hubstaff), or ship a permanent free plan that covers everything except the Jira sync you came for (Toggl Track, where first-party Jira Sync is gated behind the $18/seat/mo Premium plan and even then it’s import-only). Some products do both: gate Jira behind a paid tier and time-limit the trial.
A clean test for whether a “free” plan deserves the label: install it on a Friday, log time against a real Jira issue, and check on Monday whether you still have access. If the answer is yes, and the worklog actually landed on the right issue, you’re looking at a real free tier.
Actually-free-forever, with full Jira sync
Three products on this list pass that test, and they pass it differently.
Planim Time
Free forever, no time limit, no user cap. The free tier includes the full menu-bar timer (with pause and resume), two-way Jira worklog sync, a manual Push All button, and offline tracking that catches up when you reconnect. What’s gated behind Pro ($10/mo flat) is team-level reporting and per-user worklog views, the kind of thing a manager would pull up before a sprint review. For a single engineer or a small team that just wants their hours on the right Jira issue, the free plan is the product.
Caveat I’d want to know if I were you: Planim Time is Cloud-only today. If your Jira lives on Server or Data Center, this isn’t the answer for you yet.
Clockify
Clockify’s free plan is famously generous: unlimited users, unlimited projects, unlimited tracking, no time limit. The Jira integration runs through a browser extension that injects a start/stop button next to every issue, so you get hours into Clockify’s cloud and a report your finance team can read.
What it doesn’t do, on the free plan or any other, is push worklogs back into Jira as a true write-through. Hours live in Clockify; Jira keeps showing zeros in the native worklog column unless you also use a separate paid Marketplace connector. For workflows where Jira is the system of record (sprint reports, capacity planning, billable approvals), that’s the difference between “we tracked it” and “the customer can see it on the ticket”. For workflows where the timesheet itself is the artifact, Clockify Free is one of the most defensible choices in this category.
Clockwork Lite
Clockwork is a Jira Marketplace plugin, and Clockwork Lite is its free tier: up to ten users on Jira Cloud, full timesheet UI, no time limit. Above ten users it moves to per-Jira-user pricing on the Pro and Pro+ tiers, with rates that depend on your Jira edition.
For a five-person engineering team on Cloud, this is hard to beat. The whole experience lives inside Jira’s browser tab, no separate app, no second login, no token paste. The catch is the ten-user ceiling: the day your eleventh engineer joins, the upgrade isn’t a flat $10, it’s per-Jira-user, and if your Jira has 200 seats your bill scales with all of them, not just the ones tracking time.
Free-but-narrow
Everhour
Everhour does have a free plan, but it’s a courtesy plan, not a product. It caps user count, omits most reporting, and gates billing features behind paid tiers that start around $8.50 per seat per month on annual billing with a five-seat minimum. The paid tier is where the actual Everhour experience lives, especially the billing and budgeting workflows that are the reason most teams pick Everhour in the first place. If you’re shopping on price and Jira is the only thing you need, you can probably stand up the free plan, but you’ll outgrow it the first month a client asks for an invoice broken down by task.
Free-but-not-for-Jira
Toggl Track
Toggl has a real free plan, and it’s perfectly fine for tracking time against arbitrary projects in Toggl’s own database. The Jira piece is where it stops being free. Toggl’s own support docs are explicit: their first-party Jira Sync is one-way (Jira to Toggl, never Toggl to Jira) and lives on the Premium tier at $18 per seat per month. Below that, the integration is a browser extension that pulls issue titles into a timer popup; the hours never reach the Jira worklog.
If your team has already standardised on Toggl and Jira is incidental, the free plan is fine. If your team is looking for “free Jira time tracker” and reading this post, the free plan isn’t what you want.
No real free tier
Tempo Timesheets
Tempo’s pricing page advertises a 30-day Atlassian Marketplace trial, started by a Jira admin. After that, it’s a paid Marketplace plugin priced per Jira user, with seat-tiered rates that vary by Jira edition. There’s no permanent free plan, no individual-developer plan, no “free for the first three users” carve-out. The 30-day trial is generous and you’ll know inside a week whether Tempo is what your finance team needs, but it isn’t free.
Tempo’s strength is finance: approvals, budgets, capacity planning, invoicing. If the people asking for the tracker are billing clients or running a PSA workflow, the trial is worth doing. If they’re engineers who just want hours on the right ticket, the cheapest answer isn’t Tempo at all.
Hubstaff
Hubstaff’s marketing has been quietly walking back the “free” framing for a couple of years. Today it’s a 14-day trial of the Starter tier, then paid: $4.99/seat/mo Starter on annual, $7.50 Grow (the first tier where the Jira integration is enabled), $10 Team, $25 Enterprise. Two-seat minimum on every paid tier, so the floor for a Jira-tracking pair is $15 a month, before screenshots, payroll, or any of the monitoring features Hubstaff is actually known for.
Worth saying: Hubstaff is a manager’s purchase, not an engineer’s. It does things the other tools on this list refuse to do (screenshots, activity scoring, app and URL capture, optional GPS). If those are what you’re buying, the pricing makes sense. If they’re not, the question of whether it’s “free” is academic.
At-a-glance: what each free tier actually covers
| Tool | Free forever? | Jira sync on free? | User cap on free | Direction of sync |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Planim Time | Yes | Yes (two-way) | None | Worklogs round-trip with Jira |
| Clockify | Yes | Yes (one-way, via extension) | None | Hours live in Clockify |
| Clockwork Lite | Yes | Yes (Jira-native UI) | 10 (Cloud only) | Inside Jira |
| Everhour | Yes (narrow) | Limited | Small (free plan) | Hours live in Everhour |
| Toggl Track | Yes | No (Jira on Premium $18) | 5 (free tier) | One-way, import only |
| Tempo Timesheets | No (30-day trial) | n/a on free | n/a | Inside Jira |
| Hubstaff | No (14-day trial) | n/a on free | n/a | Hours live in Hubstaff |
| Jira native worklog | Yes (built in) | Yes (by definition) | All Jira users | Native |
A row worth highlighting: Jira’s built-in worklog UI. If “free” is the only constraint and you’re willing to click into every issue manually, that field has been in Jira since the early 2000s and costs nothing on top of the Jira seat you’re already paying for. I wrote a longer post on how that compares to the third-party options, if it’s relevant.
The cost that isn’t on the pricing page
Free pricing is rarely the most expensive part of adopting one of these tools. Worth budgeting for:
Token review. Every tracker on this list except Tempo and Clockwork asks for a Jira API token. Some store it in your OS keychain (Planim Time uses macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager, and the Linux Secret Service via the standard system APIs). Some POST it to a vendor cloud and decrypt it on every sync (Clockify, Toggl). IT and security teams care about this distinction during vendor review, and the difference shapes how long approval takes. I wrote a longer breakdown in where Jira time trackers store your API token.
Two-way sync, or its absence. Most “free” tiers in this category are one-way. Hours leave the tracker, land on Jira, and any edit made inside Jira’s own UI is silently overwritten on the next push. For an engineer who corrects a worklog on Friday afternoon, that’s a quietly destructive failure mode. Worth checking on the free plan before committing to a workflow; I covered the gory details in two-way Jira worklog sync, and why most trackers fake it.
Switching costs. Tracker A’s free plan is free; tracker A’s data is hostage. Migrating six months of historical worklogs from one tracker to another is rarely a one-button export. If you’re picking a tracker today and there’s any chance you’ll be reading “best Jira time trackers” again in eighteen months, prefer the one whose data already lives where you need it (i.e., on the Jira issue).
How I’d pick, if I were starting today
A short version, since you’ve read enough:
- Five or fewer engineers, Jira Cloud, willing to live in the Jira tab: Clockwork Lite. Free up to ten users, nothing to install.
- Any team size, you want a timer that survives Atlassian’s bad afternoons and pushes worklogs back to Jira: Planim Time on the free plan.
- Jira is one of several tools and the timesheet is what your team actually reads: Clockify Free with the browser extension. Hours land in Clockify, not on the Jira issue.
- You log time once a week, by hand: Jira’s native worklog field. It’s already on every issue. Friction-heavy, free forever.
The one case where this list doesn’t help you is when someone has already told you the company is going to buy Tempo or Hubstaff because they’re “free”. They aren’t. The 14-day or 30-day trial is the part the marketing page calls “free”, and after that you’re paying per Jira seat (Tempo) or per Hubstaff seat with a two-seat floor (Hubstaff) before the integration even turns on. If that’s the conversation you’re walking into, point at this post and push back.