Short version. Pick Tempo Timesheets if a finance director or PMO reads your team’s hours every month and your timesheets feed approvals, budgets, or client invoices. Pick Clockwork if your Jira Cloud team is ten users or fewer, you want a timesheet that lives inside the Jira tab, and you don’t need any of Tempo’s finance surface. Above ten Cloud users with no finance reader, neither one is the obvious answer, and that’s the case most engineering teams actually have.
I co-founded Planim Time, a desktop tracker that competes with both of these, so weigh that. The flip side: I’ve watched a lot of teams pick between Tempo and Clockwork in the last year, and the choice almost never turns on which one has a richer feature list. It turns on who reads the timesheet at the end of the month, and whether your team has crossed the ten-user Cloud cliff. Everything below is that decision unpacked.
Marketplace prices in this category change quietly. Re-verify before quoting any number internally.
What they have in common
Worth getting these out of the way, because the marketing pages don’t.
Both are Atlassian Marketplace plugins. Both install inside Jira itself rather than on your laptop, which means a Jira admin has to install and enable them before anyone on the team can track a single hour. Both bill per Jira user once you outgrow their free tier, not per active tracker user, so a 50-person Jira instance where 12 engineers actually log time will be billed for all 50. Both surface a timesheet inside the browser tab and rely on the Jira session being live; neither has a native menu-bar or tray timer, neither runs offline, and neither survives a Jira outage. And both write through to the same Jira worklog at the bottom, so the hours themselves are identical regardless of which one started the timer.
If those four properties (Marketplace install, per-Jira-user billing, browser-bound timer, no offline) are non-issues for your team, the rest of this post is the genuine decision. If any of them is a deal-breaker, the last section walks through why neither product fits and what people pick instead.
Where Tempo Timesheets pulls ahead
Tempo has spent over fifteen years optimising for the question a finance director asks when they open a timesheet, and the surface shows it. The submit-and-approve flow is the part finance teams already know how to read: a manager queue, lock-after-approval, full audit trail of who changed what. Clockwork has approvals on its Pro tier too, but Tempo’s is the one a finance approver opens without asking how to read it.
Capacity planning sits next to the timesheet, so you can place a team’s available capacity against the budgeted hours of a project and watch burn against both as the sprint goes. Budgets are a separate Tempo product (Tempo Budgets, Cost Tracker, Financial Manager, depending on which year’s bundle your team bought) but they integrate tightly with Timesheets. Client invoicing is in the same envelope: billable rates per person and per project, rolled up into invoice-ready timesheets that go straight to accounting without a CSV round-trip. Clockwork doesn’t try to do invoicing.
Then there’s the reporting suite. It’s built for the moment a 200-person engineering org has to defend its tracked hours to an internal audit or a client review, and plenty of finance teams pick Tempo for that reason alone. Across Jira editions, Tempo runs on Cloud, Server, and Data Center with the full timesheet feature set on each; Clockwork runs on the same three, but its Lite tier and the free 10-user Cloud allowance are Cloud-only.
What you pay for that surface: Tempo Timesheets on Cloud starts around $10 per user per month and tiers up per Jira user from there, with the per-seat rate depending on your Jira edition. The number drifts year on year, so check the Marketplace listing before quoting it in a procurement doc.
Where Clockwork pulls ahead
Clockwork (Herocoders) is the lighter option, and on the right team size that’s the entire pitch. Clockwork Lite, split off in January 2025, is genuinely free up to ten Jira Cloud users with a real timesheet UI, JQL-based issue selection, and CSV export. Above ten users (or on Server / Data Center) Clockwork moves to the paid Pro and Pro+ tiers, scaling per Jira user, with Marketplace pricing that varies by Jira edition. Tempo’s free tier is comparatively thin and tied to the smallest Jira Cloud plans; the moment you outgrow that, you pay.
The daily UI is the other half of the pitch. Clockwork’s timesheet grid is faster to scan and faster to edit than Tempo’s, and if your team’s actual interaction is “open the timesheet, fix three rows, leave”, Clockwork wins that loop. Clockwork also bundles holidays, leave requests, and absence tracking inside the timesheet on a single approval flow. Tempo bundles absence tracking too, but through additional modules (Tempo Planner, Tempo Workforce) layered on top of Timesheets rather than baked into the same view. If absence and timesheet are one record for your team, Clockwork is the shorter path.
Underneath both products is the same Marketplace plugin scaffolding, but Clockwork carries fewer Tempo-specific permissions to grant, fewer Marketplace SKUs to wrangle, and fewer add-ons to budget for. For a Jira admin already managing a sprawl of Marketplace apps, that matters.
What you trade for the lightness: no genuine budget or capacity-planning module, no invoicing engine, less audit-tuned reporting once your team is past 50 people, and the same per-Jira-user pricing cliff above 10 Cloud users as everyone else in this category has.
The math at 20 people
Same engineering team, same Jira Cloud instance, 20 people on it, of whom 12 actively track time and 8 never touch a worklog. The cleanest way to feel the difference between these two.
| Tempo Timesheets | Clockwork (Pro) | |
|---|---|---|
| Billed seats | 20 (every Jira user) | 20 (every Jira user) |
| Approximate monthly bill | ≈ $200 at the $10/seat starting band, tiered discounts apply above 10 seats on Cloud, more on enterprise editions | Per-seat Pro pricing; below Tempo’s at small bands, narrows as the team grows |
| What you get for it | Approvals, budgets, capacity, invoicing, audit reports | Timesheet, leave, PTO, lighter reports |
| Effective cost per active tracker | ≈ $17/active/mo at the starting band | Lower at this size; converges as headcount grows |
Two things to notice. First, both products bill the 8 people who never log time. That’s not a Tempo or Clockwork choice; it’s how the Atlassian Marketplace per-Jira-user model works. A 20-person Jira instance where 12 people track time and 8 don’t is paying for 8 dormant seats either way. Second, the gap between Tempo and Clockwork narrows as the team grows past about 50 users, because Clockwork’s per-seat rate scales while Tempo’s enterprise tiers start including more in the base. Below 20 users, Clockwork is usually cheaper. Above 100, the headline rates converge and the decision is back to which surface your team actually uses.
The decision in one table
| Your situation | Pick |
|---|---|
| Finance director or PMO reads timesheets monthly | Tempo |
| You need approval workflows, capacity planning, or budgets | Tempo |
| You invoice clients from tracked time | Tempo |
| Your Jira Cloud team is ≤10 users and you just want a timesheet inside Jira | Clockwork |
| You need leave and PTO bundled with the timesheet | Clockwork |
| You want the lightest possible Marketplace install for an engineering-only team | Clockwork |
| You need offline tracking, a menu-bar timer, or you don’t have Jira admin access | Neither (see below) |
| Your engineers want to start a timer without opening Jira at all | Neither |
For a full row-by-row comparison against Planim Time, the Tempo head-to-head and the Clockwork head-to-head carry the feature matrices.
When neither fits
There’s a third case the Tempo-vs-Clockwork framing leaves out: your team needs the timer to survive things that take Jira itself down, and neither product is designed for that. Atlassian’s status page carries a couple of degraded periods most months. A browser-tab timer dies with the tab; a Marketplace plugin dies with Jira. Both Tempo and Clockwork are the latter.
That’s the gap Planim Time sits in. It’s a native desktop app, a menu-bar or tray icon on macOS, Windows, and Linux. The timer keeps running through a Jira outage, through a VPN hiccup, on a plane. Worklogs sync both ways through your personal Jira API token, which lives in the OS keychain rather than in a Marketplace plugin’s permission scope. Installation doesn’t need a Jira admin, which on its own is the difference between five minutes and three weeks of internal tickets for a single engineer trying to evaluate something. If you’re moving off Tempo specifically, the desktop-tracker version of that migration is walked through in migrating from Tempo to a desktop tracker, and the wider five-way shortlist lives in the best Jira time trackers for engineering teams in 2026.
Where Planim Time loses to Tempo: no approvals, no capacity planning, no budgets, no invoicing. Where it loses to Clockwork: no leave or PTO module, no in-Jira timesheet surface. Where it wins against both: it’s still tracking when Jira isn’t.
Two oversimplifications worth dropping
The first is “Clockwork is just a cheaper Tempo.” It isn’t. Tempo is a finance product with a timer attached; Clockwork is a timer with a timesheet attached. Above 20 people they trend toward similar prices, but they’re solving different problems. Picking Clockwork to save money on Tempo gets you a tool that doesn’t do approvals, budgets, or invoicing, and if you actually needed those, you’ve just made a worse choice.
The second is “they both store data in Jira, so switching is free.” The Jira worklog round-trips. The Tempo-specific records (approval status, budgets, plan approvals, invoicing metadata) and the Clockwork-specific records (leave, PTO, absence requests) do not. Switching is cheap if you only used the timesheet half; expensive if you leaned on the wrappers.
Underneath both is a quieter mistake: “Tempo is for big teams, Clockwork is for small.” Roughly true on headcount, but the actual cutoff is the reader. A 5-person agency that bills clients hourly should still pick Tempo. A 60-person engineering team with no finance approver should still pick the lighter option.