Kimai: A Self-Hosted Toggl/Harvest Alternative for Time Tracking
Toggl's free plan caps out at 5 users and strips out reporting features. Past that you're paying per seat for a stopwatch — a self-hosted tracker removes the seat count entirely, though you lose Toggl's native mobile apps and one-click integrations.
Toggl Track's free plan covers up to 5 users with basic time tracking, but reporting (exportable reports, billable-rate breakdowns) sits behind the Starter plan at around $9/user/month billed annually. For a 3-person team on Starter, that's roughly $27/month just to track hours and see them broken down properly.
What per-seat time tracking actually costs you
Time tracking is one of those tools where the core function — start a timer, stop a timer — barely changes between the free and paid tiers. What you're paying for past the free cap is reporting depth and team-level visibility: seeing where hours actually went across a project, not just logging them.
What Kimai gives you instead
Kimai is an open-source, self-hosted time tracker built on Symfony — timers, project/client/activity breakdowns, billable-rate reporting, and built-in invoice generation. Docker deployment, one container plus a database, and it idles well within the resources of the same small VPS as the rest of this stack. No per-seat fee and no user cap — add as many team members as you need without the bill changing.
The catch, and it's a real one
Toggl's biggest advantage isn't the tracking logic, it's the surface area: native desktop and mobile apps, browser extensions, and one-click timer buttons built into tools like Trello, Asana, and Jira. Kimai's mobile experience is a browser-based PWA rather than a native app, and it doesn't have that same web of third-party timer-button integrations — starting a timer usually means opening Kimai directly rather than clicking a button inside whatever tool you're already working in. If your team lives inside integrations like that, Toggl's per-seat cost is buying real convenience. If you mostly need accurate hours and clean reports without the app-store polish, Kimai does that part for free.
I run this on the same Vultr box as the rest of this stack — see the full cost roll-up for how it all fits together.
Disclosure: this post contains an affiliate link to Vultr. If you sign up through it, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only link to providers I actually use.