Toggl or Clockify alternative on a Mac: when automatic records are enough
Toggl Track and Clockify are built around a timer you start, a project you pick and an account that holds the entries. That is the right shape when hours go onto an invoice or a team timesheet. Hina 0.6.0 records the foreground app, the duration and input counts on this Mac without an account, which is the right shape when you want to know where the day went. It has no timer, no invoicing and no team features. If you bill by the hour, keep the timer and let Hina fill the stretches you forgot to time.
What Toggl Track and Clockify are built for
Both tools start from an entry that you create. In Toggl Track you press a timer or enter hours, attach a project, and the entry lives in your Toggl account. The product page lists billable rates, built-in invoicing, timesheet reports filtered by project, client or team, and integrations with tools such as Jira, Asana, Notion and Slack. Clockify has the same core, a Timer you start and stop or fill in by hand, plus a Timesheet for logging a week at once, Invoicing you download as a PDF and send to a client, and Reports you can download as PDF, CSV or Excel.
The team side is where they differ most from a local recorder. Clockify lists Approval for submitting and approving timesheets, Team with per-user hourly rates, and Time Off. Toggl Track's pricing page puts timesheet approvals on its Premium tier and above, and billable rates from Starter upward. Those pages were read on 19 October 2026 and plans change, so check the current tiers before you decide.
Both also have an automatic mode
Manual against automatic is not a clean split. Clockify lists an Auto Tracker that tracks the time you spend across apps, websites and documents automatically. Toggl Track's page lists Automated time tracking that runs in the background or with one click. So the real question is less whether the data is gathered automatically and more where it goes, who can see it, and what you can do with it afterwards.
Time entries you enter or confirm are stored in an account for sharing, approval and invoicing. Those entries are different from raw automatically recorded activity. Account storage for time entries does not establish that raw activity is uploaded. Toggl’s page says it takes no screenshots and has no surveillance features.
What Hina 0.6.0 does differently
Hina sits in the menu bar. It asks only for the Accessibility permission (named Device Control and Data Access on macOS 27), does not ask for screen recording, and takes no screenshots. By default it records the foreground app, how long you stayed, and counts of key presses and clicks, never the characters you typed. Window titles and page paths are off by default and are recorded only after you turn on Record window titles and page paths, on the welcome screen or in Settings, Privacy. Stored URLs keep only the scheme, host and path, and the database is a local file at ~/Library/Application Support/Hina/hina.sqlite.
There is no sync account, and recording, search, charts and daily reports work offline. The app reaches the network in exactly three places, each only when you click: the checkout page in your browser, activating a purchased key, and Check for Updates, which reads a version file on hina.day. None of the three carries your activity. Project names come from window titles and document paths, so Hina shows time under a folder or repository name, not under a client you defined.
What you lose and what you gain
You lose the things that need an account or a decision you made at the time. There is no timer to start, no billable flag, no hourly rate, no invoice, no approval step, and no shared project that a manager can open. Hina also has no rule editor that assigns time automatically, but Rename or merge projects in Settings, Data can fold two folders for one client into one row, and past days are recomputed too.
You gain the record of what actually happened on this Mac without having to remember to press anything. The Trail lists the stretches in order, the Day tab shows time by app, and Week and Month show the projects the time landed on. Because the records stay in that local file unless you export or copy them, it also suits work you would not want in a team workspace at all, such as a job search or a personal project.
When a manual timer is the better tool
Use Toggl Track or Clockify when the number is a promise to someone else. A client who pays by the hour wants a figure you chose to report, with a description and a rate, not a reconstruction. A team that needs to see who is working on what needs a shared workspace and permissions, and a timesheet that is approved before payroll needs the approval flow. Hina offers none of that, and it would be the wrong choice for any of those jobs.
A timer also records things a computer cannot see. A phone call, a whiteboard session and a document you printed and marked up leave no trace in the foreground app. Hina cannot see them either, and gaps where it was paused or not running show as gaps, not as work.
Using both: Hina fills the timers you forgot
The common failure of a manual timer is that you sit down, start working and realise an hour later that you never pressed start. That is where a local record helps. Open Hina, go to the Trail for that day, and find the stretch in order: the editor, the browser, the mail client. With window titles on, a proposal file name or a repository folder tells you which job it was. You then add the entry in Toggl or Clockify yourself, from what you can recognise.
Treat it as a clue, not a timesheet. Hina counts the foreground app and input, so it cannot tell a client's site from your own reading. If a stretch does not match, leave it blank rather than guessing to fill the day. The post on reconstructing project hours as a freelancer walks through that month-end check, and the Export CSV button in Settings, Data gives you the raw sessions if you want to sort them in a spreadsheet.
Before relying on reconstruction, turn on the timer's own safety nets. Clockify's help page lists reminders that notify you when no timer has run for a set interval inside your working hours, and idle detection that, after a set number of minutes without mouse or keyboard input, asks on your return whether to discard the idle time, discard it and continue, or keep it; the Mac App Store version lacks idle detection, the download from Clockify's site has it. Toggl's support pages describe tracking reminders and an Idle tracker in its desktop app and browser extension. These catch the missed start on the day, and Hina's Trail covers what they still miss.
Checking that the record is there
Before you rely on it, confirm three things. Recording health in Settings, General reads Ready; the Accessibility permission is granted, because without it Hina records only application names; and the time you care about is not before the day you installed it, since the Trail starts when recording starts.
A trial covers 7 days that have records. After that Hina keeps recording and today's Day tab and Trail stay readable, while older days, Week, Month and daily reports need a licence. Recording never stops because of it, and Export CSV and privacy settings stay available.