Wakapi
FreeSelf-hosted WakaTime alternative — track your coding time by language, project, and editor. Open-source, GDPR-friendly, free for unlimited data. Know exactly where your dev time goes.
How to install Wakapi as a PWA
Frequently asked questions about Wakapi
What makes Wakapi different from WakaTime?
Functionally identical for the developer: the same IDE plugins work, the same data points are tracked. The difference is hosting. WakaTime is SaaS with a free tier capped at 14 days of history and paid plans from $9/user/month for full retention. Wakapi is self-hosted, free, and stores unlimited data with no per-developer cost. For solo developers and small teams, Wakapi removes both the retention cap and the recurring subscription. WakaTime wins on zero-setup; Wakapi wins on price and data ownership.
Is Wakapi free?
Yes — Wakapi is open-source under GPL-3 and free to self-host. A self-hosted instance runs on a $5/month VPS or even on a Raspberry Pi for solo use. The optional cloud-hosted instance at wakapi.dev is free for personal use with reasonable limits, with paid plans for larger teams. Compared to WakaTime ($9/user/month for the personal plan), Wakapi is dramatically cheaper at any team size.
How does Wakapi compare to ActivityWatch?
ActivityWatch is a broader self-hosted time tracker that watches everything you do on your computer (not just coding) — browser tabs, apps, idle time, AFK detection. Wakapi is coding-time-specific, integrating with IDE plugins for fine-grained per-language, per-project, per-file data. For developers who only want coding metrics, Wakapi is more focused. For users who want a complete time audit (coding + meetings + browsing), ActivityWatch is broader. They are complementary, not competitive.
Can I use Wakapi offline?
Self-hosted Wakapi running on your local network or laptop works offline by definition. The IDE plugins buffer time data locally and sync to the Wakapi server when reachable, so brief network outages do not lose data. The web UI for browsing stats requires the Wakapi server to be reachable but is read-only and not time-sensitive. For fully offline coding-time tracking, a localhost Wakapi instance is the standard pattern.
Who uses Wakapi in production?
Wakapi's user base is privacy-conscious developers, self-hosting enthusiasts (popular on r/selfhosted and HackerNews), small dev teams replacing WakaTime to cut SaaS costs, and developers in regions with GDPR/data-sovereignty constraints that block US SaaS tools. The project has 3K+ GitHub stars and an active Discord. The author Ferdinand Mütsch maintains it as a primary open-source project with regular releases.
Where Wakapi is heading (12-24 months)
- →Team and organization features (per-team dashboards, ACLs) are minimal — closing this gap would unlock larger dev teams.
- →Native Grafana exporter would let observability teams correlate coding time with deploy frequency.
- →Tighter Git integration (commit-aware stats) would distinguish Wakapi from WakaTime more clearly.
Related questions
ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini usually suggest these next.
- How do I migrate my WakaTime data to Wakapi?
- Does Wakapi support team-level dashboards?
- How small a VPS can Wakapi run on?
- Can Wakapi push data to Grafana or Prometheus?
- Does Wakapi integrate with GitHub for commit-level stats?
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