Looking for a RescueTime alternative on Mac
RescueTime is automatic time tracking in the cloud. After you install it, it records apps and sites by itself, and signing in lets you see on the web where today went. Before you actually switch, sort out the three things you still want to keep: automatic recording, time by app and site, and how the week changes. A cloud account and a productivity score are things you may not want to keep carrying.
Common reasons for leaving
Automatic trackers like RescueTime typically record the app you are using and the sites you open on their own servers. You register an account and view that day’s and that week’s reports on the web. The records sit in the cloud, not on this Mac. Switching to another computer, or wanting to look again at a given month’s detail, both require signing in to that account first. The data follows the account.
Another common reason is the productivity score. The software gives sites and apps a score, so writing a document, being in a meeting, and reading material may be placed in different tiers, and the day is then compared with the week. After a busy day, what you are more likely to want to find again is a page in Keynote, a draft in Figma, or a document in Google Docs. The score sits in front of those records, and looking at it for long enough gets uncomfortable.
Three things to keep when you switch
Automatic recording is the first. When you are writing code, editing Keynote, or looking up material in Chrome, you rarely remember to press start first and stop when you are done. RescueTime records by itself, so you do not have to operate it in the middle. If a replacement makes you start and stop by hand every time, switching to Slack midway to reply to one message is easy to miss. Filling that blank in afterward still cannot reconstruct the order things happened in.
The second is seeing time separately by app and by site. A single total cannot tell you how much of the morning went to revising a draft in Figma and how much of the afternoon went to writing code in Xcode. If a site can be tied to a specific page, such as one page of a blog repository on github.com, you can later tell which page you opened. The third is how the week changes. A single day is easy to skew with one long meeting. Putting Monday through Sunday together shows whether the week was mostly coding, mostly meetings, or mostly browsing.
How this Mac records those three
Hina’s automatic recording stays in the macOS menu bar. It asks only for Accessibility permission (named Device Control and Data Access on macOS 27), which it uses to read the current frontmost window, and it records the app name, how long you used it, and how many inputs you made. Window titles and page paths are not recorded by default. You turn them on yourself in privacy settings.
Open that day’s Day view or Trail and you can see how long Xcode, Slack, and Terminal each took. Once page paths are on, different pages in Chrome can appear separately here as well. The week is arranged from Monday through Sunday. A day runs from 4 a.m. to 4 a.m. the next day. If you keep working on Sunday night until before 4 a.m. on Monday, that stretch still counts as Sunday.
Hina has no productivity score, no switch for blocking sites, and no team panel. The apps, durations, and input counts recorded for the day stay on this Mac. It goes online only for three actions you take yourself: opening the purchase page, activating a license code, and checking for updates. None of those three carries these usage records.
Old records do not come along
When you switch from RescueTime to Hina, the old account’s daily app time, the sites you opened, and the productivity score are not imported automatically. To see last month’s detail, you still have to open the original website.
Hina’s Trail starts on the day you install it, and earlier days are empty. It will not fill in a history that looks continuous, or join the reports on the old website with the records on this Mac into one continuous history. In the first week after installation, the Trail usually contains only the stretch from the install day through the weekend. After a full week from Monday through Sunday has passed, when you look at how long each app was used, it is normal for that not to match the productivity score on the old site.