What is the best free alternative to Tempo Timesheets?

It depends on what you need from Tempo. For a Marketplace plugin that lives inside Jira, Clockwork Lite is free up to 10 Cloud users. For a desktop timer that survives Jira outages, Planim Time has a complete free tier with no user cap. For a browser-extension timer with a parallel timesheet, Clockify has a free tier. None of these match Tempo's PSA stack (approvals, budgets, invoicing); they each replace a different slice of what Tempo does.

Is there a cheaper alternative to Tempo for small teams?

For Jira Cloud teams of ten users or fewer, Clockwork Lite is free where Tempo charges from the first seat. Planim Time is also free at any team size for its core tracking and pushes worklogs back to Jira. Both skip Tempo's approval and budgeting layers, which is the trade-off — they're cheaper because they do less.

Can I keep my worklog history when switching from Tempo?

Yes for the worklogs themselves — they live on the Jira issues, not inside Tempo, so they survive any switch. What you lose is Tempo-specific data: approval state, accounts, budgets, plan approvals, and invoicing metadata. If your team relied heavily on those wrappers, plan for a parallel-run sprint; if you only used the timesheet half, the switch is usually same-day.

Which Tempo alternative works without a Jira admin?

Any tracker that uses a personal Jira API token instead of a Marketplace install. That includes desktop apps like Planim Time and browser extensions like Clockify. Marketplace alternatives (Clockwork, Everhour as a Marketplace app) all need a Jira admin to install the plugin and grant project permissions, the same gate Tempo has.

Does Tempo have a free tier?

Tempo Timesheets has a limited free tier tied to the smallest Jira Cloud plans, but it is comparatively thin against Clockwork Lite's 10-user free ceiling on Cloud. Most teams hit the paid tier on Tempo within their first few seats. Re-check Tempo's pricing page before quoting numbers — Marketplace pricing in this category drifts year over year.

Tempo Timesheets alternatives in 2026, by use case

If you’re shopping for an alternative to Tempo Timesheets, you’re probably in one of three situations. Tempo has gotten too expensive at your seat count, the workflow has accumulated more PSA features than your team needs, or you’ve inherited Tempo and you can’t tell what it’s doing for you that a simpler tool wouldn’t.

This post is the shortlist I’d give a friend in any of those three situations, organised by what the team actually needs the tracker to do. I co-founded Planim Time, one of the alternatives on this list, so factor that in. Some of the others would beat us in your situation, and the point of this writeup is to be honest about which ones and when. If you’ve already decided to leave Tempo and you’re looking for the mechanics, the migration playbook is the right post; this one is for picking the destination.

Tempo’s prices and tier structure move; the numbers below were correct in May 2026. Re-verify on each vendor’s pricing page before signing anything.

What Tempo actually does

Useful to name, because the alternatives split along these features:

Worklog capture. A timer or manual entry that pushes time onto Jira issues. Every Jira tracker does this part, with varying degrees of friction.
Timesheets and approvals. Weekly views, manager approval workflows, lock-after-approval. Common in companies that bill clients or that have SOC 2 controls around time tracking.
Accounts and budgets. Multi-project rollups, customer accounts that span Jira projects, contract caps and revenue recognition.
Capacity planning. Forecasting team capacity, availability calendars, allocations.
PSA workflows. The whole professional-services-automation stack: rate cards, billable vs non-billable, invoicing, revenue forecasts.

A team using Tempo for the first two features is paying Tempo prices for the last three. A team that genuinely uses the last three would struggle to replace Tempo with anything in this list. Decide which group you’re in before you start shortlisting.

If you want a simpler timer, not a PSA

Planim Time. Free tier with two-way Jira worklog sync, no user cap, no time limit. Pro is $10 a month flat for the workspace, covering team-level reporting and per-user worklog views. Cloud only today; if you’re on Data Center, this isn’t the alternative yet. Best fit for a team that wants Tempo-quality worklog hygiene without the timesheets-and-approvals layer. The head-to-head page has the feature matrix.

Clockwork. Lives inside Jira as a Marketplace plugin. Free up to ten users on Cloud, paid above that on per-Jira-user pricing. Closest to Tempo in shape (Marketplace plugin, in-Jira UI) and the cleanest swap if your team’s main complaint about Tempo is the price, not the model. See the Clockwork comparison for where it lands feature by feature.

Clockify. Free tier with no user cap. Paid tiers add the reporting features small finance teams care about. Hours live in Clockify’s database with the Jira integration running through a browser extension; if you need worklogs back on the Jira issue, you’ll need a paid Marketplace connector on top. Best for teams where the timesheet is the artefact and Jira is incidental. Clockify comparison.

If you do want a PSA, just not Tempo’s PSA

This is the harder cut, and most of the cheaper alternatives don’t qualify.

Everhour. Closer to Tempo on the billing-and-budgeting axis than any free tracker is. Starts around $8.50 per seat per month on annual billing with a five-seat minimum. The Jira integration is solid, the budgeting and client billing workflows are real, and it sits naturally next to your Jira without trying to be your Jira. Best for an agency or consultancy that bills clients out of Jira issues. Everhour comparison.

Tempo Cost Tracker itself, as a standalone, if it’s the cost piece you actually use. Tempo unbundled the PSA features into a separate product line some time ago, and a few teams find that the smaller bundle costs less than the full Timesheets seat. Worth pricing if you’re already on Tempo and the renewal conversation is what brought you here.

If you came for the monitoring features

Tempo doesn’t really do this part, but if you ended up on Tempo because it was the only Jira tracker your manager could find and the actual ask was “I want to see what the team is doing”, Tempo isn’t what you want either.

Hubstaff. Screenshots, activity scoring, app and URL capture, optional GPS. Two-seat minimum, paid tiers starting at $4.99 per seat on the Starter tier, though the Jira integration only turns on from the Grow tier ($7.50 per seat on annual billing). Different category of product from Tempo, and worth being clear with yourself about whether monitoring is what you want. The privacy and morale costs are real; I wrote a longer piece on this. Hubstaff comparison.

If your team already uses Toggl

Toggl Track. Real free tier, perfectly fine for arbitrary time tracking. The Jira-instead-of-Tempo story isn’t its strength: first-party Jira Sync is one-way (Jira to Toggl, never the other direction) and lives on the Premium tier at $18 per seat per month. Below that, the integration is a browser extension. If your team has already standardised on Toggl across non-Jira projects, the cleanest path is to keep Toggl for those and pick a Jira-native tracker just for Jira. If the question is whether to migrate from Tempo to Toggl wholesale, the answer is usually no. Toggl comparison.

What you’ll feel missing

Whichever tracker you pick, there are pieces of Tempo most teams don’t realise they were using until they’re gone:

Tempo accounts. Custom rollups of Jira projects under a single billable account, especially handy when one client has work spread across multiple Jira projects. Most lighter alternatives don’t have an equivalent. You’ll need to do the rollup in your reporting tool instead.

Tempo plan view. The capacity planning UI, with team allocations across weeks. Replaceable with calendar tooling for most teams, but not as one piece.

Tempo approvals. Manager-locks-the-timesheet workflows. Clockify, Everhour, and Clockwork all have a version of this; lighter trackers like Planim Time don’t, on purpose.

Tempo’s accounts integration with Jira Service Management. If your team logs time on JSM tickets and rolls them into customer accounts, this is a Tempo-specific workflow that almost nothing else in the Jira ecosystem replicates.

The migration cost is dominated by these gaps, not by the worklog data itself. Worklogs export and re-import. The accumulated workflow around them doesn’t.

How to shortlist, fast

Three questions:

Do you bill clients out of Jira? If yes, shortlist Everhour and Tempo Cost Tracker. If no, go to question 2.
Are timesheet approvals a compliance requirement? If yes, shortlist Clockify, Clockwork, or stay on Tempo. If no, go to question 3.
Does the team mostly want a timer that puts hours on the right Jira issue? If yes, shortlist Planim Time and Clockwork.

The cheapest defensible move is usually the one that matches your real workflow rather than Tempo’s full feature set. Teams that switch from Tempo to a $10/month flat-rate tracker and don’t miss anything aren’t getting away with something. They were paying for a PSA they were never going to use.

If you’ve narrowed it down and want to think through the actual data migration, the playbook for moving worklogs out of Tempo is the next thing to read.