TickTappy vs Clockify

Clockify's free plan is famous for the right reason: unlimited users, unlimited projects and no time cap, on every platform. The catch is not a limit but a requirement. Everything runs through a workspace in Clockify's cloud, so free means an account, an email address and a server that holds the master copy of your hours.

TickTappy's free plan is free in the other direction. There is no account to create, nothing to verify and no workspace; the app opens to a row of coloured tag circles and the first tap starts the first timer. Your entries live on your device. If you later want them on a second device, Premium sync is $9.99 a year or $29.99 once, and it is the only paid feature.

In Clockify an entry can carry a project, a task, tags, a description and a billable flag, and the reports are built to slice on all of them. That depth is why teams choose it, and it is also why a personal timer in Clockify tends to drift into a project-management chore: the fields are optional, but an empty description column in the report nags you to fill it in.

TickTappy keeps one dimension: the tag. Tags can be grouped and reordered, and you can pin a running entry so it keeps going while you switch to something else, but there is nothing else to fill in. The day and week views answer the question most people are really asking, which is where the hours went, without a report builder.

Clockify does work offline on its mobile and desktop apps. Entries recorded without a connection queue up and sync when you are back online, and Clockify's help docs are candid that entries left unsynced when you log out while in forced offline mode can be lost. In other words the offline copy is a buffer, not the record.

TickTappy stores entries in a local database on the device first and only ever copies them out if sync is on. Airplane mode, a basement office or a week with no signal changes nothing about how the app behaves, and there is no unsynced state to be careful about. If you have ever lost an afternoon's entries to a sync that never happened, that is the difference.

If more than one person needs to see the same hours, Clockify is the better tool and it is not close. Shared projects, timesheet approvals, scheduling, billable rates and the integrations with project-management software are things TickTappy does not do and does not plan to. TickTappy is for the person whose only reader is themselves, or who exports a summary to an invoice at the end of the month.