Kimai

What is Kimai?

Kimai is an open source time tracking application you run in the browser. You start and stop timers — or punch in and out in time-clock mode — against a project, customer, and activity, then report on where the hours went and bill them. It has been developed since 2009 and runs on PHP and Symfony.

What is Kimai best for?

Freelancers, agencies, and consultancies that bill by the hour and want project-level timesheets, per-client and per-project rates, and invoicing without paying per seat. It scales from a solo user to enterprises with thousands of accounts, and its team roles and permissions suit organizations that need to separate what each person can see.

What can Kimai do?

• Track time with start/stop timers or punch-in/punch-out time-clock mode, plus tags and descriptions
• Organize work by customer, project, and activity, each with its own hourly and budget rates
• Generate invoices from tracked time using configurable PDF and DOCX templates
• Report and filter across users, projects, customers, and activities, with money and time budgets
• Export data to XLSX, CSV, PDF, and HTML, plus EU e-invoicing (EN 16931 / XRechnung)
• Manage multiple users with role-based permissions, teams, SAML/LDAP login, and two-factor auth
• Automate through a documented JSON REST API and extend with community plugins

Is Kimai free?

Yes — Kimai is free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license, and self-hosting costs only your own server. Kimai Cloud is a paid managed option on the same codebase, running on EU servers with updates and backups handled for you, starting around €3.99 per user per month with a 30-day trial.

Where does Kimai fall short?

• Invoicing is template-driven rather than a full accounting system — it has no built-in online payment collection, so getting paid still means sending the PDF and reconciling elsewhere.
• Some capabilities, including expense tracking, live in plugins rather than the core app, so a full setup can mean assembling and maintaining several add-ons.
• The interface is dense and utilitarian — powerful once configured, but the many rate, budget, and permission settings make it more to learn than a single-purpose stopwatch app.

What does Kimai replace?

Kimai is a self-hosted alternative to Toggl Track, Harvest, and Clockify. It covers the same core job — timers, project and client tracking, reports, and billable-hour invoicing — but you host it yourself and keep the data, with no per-seat subscription. For invoicing beyond templates, pair it with a dedicated tool like Invoice Ninja.

FAQ

Is Kimai open source? Yes. Kimai is licensed under AGPL-3.0, and the full source is public on GitHub. The self-hosted version and the Kimai Cloud service run on the same open source code.

Can I self-host Kimai for free? Yes. Self-hosting is free under the AGPL license — you only pay for the server it runs on. Kimai Cloud is the optional paid, managed alternative.

Is Kimai a good Toggl or Harvest alternative? For teams that want to own their data and avoid per-seat pricing, yes — it matches the core time-tracking, reporting, and invoicing workflow. Hosted tools like Toggl are quicker to start with if you don’t want to run a server.

What do I need to run Kimai? A server with PHP 8.2+ and a MariaDB 10.6+ or MySQL 8.4+ database. Official Docker images are available, so the usual path is a container plus a database.