Kimai vs Toggl: Self-Hosted Time Tracking for Small Teams

Toggl Track is everywhere because the UX is genuinely good. Open the app, hit a button, time tracked. But once your team grows past five people, the price stops being a rounding error. Nine euros per user per month for the cheapest paid plan, and the bill grows linearly with hires. For agencies and consultancies, where billable hours are the actual product, that math gets painful fast.

Kimai is the open-source alternative most teams reach for when they hit that wall. Self-hosted, MIT-licensed, includes invoicing, and the monthly cost depends on your server size, not your headcount.

Here is what each one is actually good at, and how to decide.

TL;DR

• Toggl Track if you want polished native apps on every platform, zero ops, and you are a small team where the per-seat math still works.
• Kimai if you have more than five users, you want flat infrastructure pricing, and you can run a small server (or pay someone to run it for you).

Both are honest tools, neither is a scam. The question is whether you would rather pay Toggl per seat or pay a server bill that does not grow when you hire.

Toggl Track

Toggl is a SaaS-only time tracker built by a remote team that took the UX problem seriously. It shows.

What it does well. Native desktop apps for Mac, Windows, Linux. Mobile apps for iOS and Android. Browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Edge. Idle detection. Pomodoro mode. Calendar sync. Reporting that does not feel like an enterprise audit tool. Two-click setup, no infrastructure to think about.

What it costs. The free plan caps at five users and skips features like billable rates, project templates, time rounding, and audit logs. The paid plans start at €9 per user per month (Starter) and go up from there for Premium and Enterprise. For a 10-person team, that is roughly €90/month, before any annual discount.

Where it gets uncomfortable. Your timesheet data lives on Toggl's infrastructure. That is fine for most teams. It becomes not fine when a client asks you to sign a DPA that says data stays in the EU, or when GDPR Article 28 reviews start asking detailed questions about subprocessors. Toggl is fully compliant, but the answer is always "trust Toggl," not "we control the data ourselves."

Pick Toggl if you have five or fewer people, you want zero ops, and you value the native apps more than the cost predictability.

Kimai

Kimai is the PHP/Symfony open-source time tracker that has been quietly compounding features since 2009. It is what time tracking looks like when the people building it use it for their own consultancy.

What it does well. Multi-user with role-based permissions, multi-timezone, 30+ language translations. Built-in invoicing (generate PDFs straight from tracked time), money and time budgets per project, customizable templates. JSON API for everything, so you can pipe time data into Grafana, Metabase, or your accounting system. SAML, LDAP, OIDC, 2FA via TOTP. Public secret URLs for sharing project dashboards with clients.

What it costs to run. PHP and MySQL behind Nginx, 2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM baseline for a small-to-medium team. Unlimited users on the same server. No per-seat licensing, no feature gating, no upgrade-or-die.

Where it falls short. No native desktop or mobile apps. The web UI is responsive and usable on mobile, but it is not the same experience as Toggl's app. Idle detection requires a third-party extension or relying on the user to remember. Onboarding new users takes more clicks than Toggl. The visual polish is closer to "well-designed enterprise app" than to "consumer SaaS."

Pick Kimai if you have more than five people, billable hours are core to your business, you need invoicing built in, and you are okay running a small server.

The Migration Path

If you are already on Toggl, moving is not painful. Kimai imports CSV exports out of the box, and the data model maps cleanly: Toggl projects become Kimai projects, Toggl clients become Kimai customers, Toggl tags become Kimai tags. Plan a half-day for the export-import dance and another half-day to set up user accounts and rate cards.

Hardest part is usually the habit change. Your team has muscle memory for the Toggl button. The Kimai web punch-in is one click further away. Most teams get over this in a week.

How to Choose Without Overthinking It

A useful decision:

• Team of 1-5, value polish over cost? Toggl, and do not overthink it.
• Team of 5-50 with billable hours as the product? Kimai pays for itself in one or two months.
• Need invoicing baked into the same tool as tracking? Kimai (Toggl makes you reach for QuickBooks or Xero for the invoice side).
• Cannot host your own data? Toggl, until that constraint changes.

Wrapping Up

Time tracking should not be a recurring SaaS bill that scales with your hiring. Toggl is a great product, but it is a product priced for individuals and tiny teams. Kimai is the version that makes sense once you have a team and you want the data on your side of the wire.

If you want to skip the PHP-FPM tuning and MySQL backups, you can deploy Kimai in one click on Elestio. We handle the server, backups, and updates so you can focus on actually billing the hours you tracked.

Thanks for reading. See you in the next one.