Empoche is a native Mac application that silently records how you spend time across apps and projects, then surfaces that data alongside a built-in task and project manager so your tracked hours and your to-do list live in one place.
What is Empoche?
Empoche is an automatic time-tracker for macOS that watches which apps and documents you use, groups that activity into projects you define, and pairs the resulting timelines with task management — all without requiring you to start and stop timers manually. Where most time-trackers demand discipline (remember to click before you context-switch?), Empoche works in the background from the moment you open your Mac, capturing the ground truth of your day whether you remembered to log it or not.
What does Empoche do best?
Empoche's strongest suit is the zero-friction capture loop: it records app usage continuously, then lets you classify that raw activity into meaningful projects after the fact — or in advance via rules you configure once. I found that within a week of running it I had an honest picture of where my afternoons were actually going, which turned out to be a humbling but useful dataset.
The integration of task management is what separates Empoche from single-purpose trackers like Timing or Timeular. Rather than exporting hours to a separate tool, you can attach tasks directly inside Empoche and see time-per-task without switching contexts. The timeline view — a scrollable ribbon of your day broken into color-coded project blocks — is genuinely well-designed and faster to read than spreadsheet-style logs.
- Passive capture: no timers, no manual start/stop, no willpower required
- Project classification rules: map specific apps or URL patterns to a project once, and every future session auto-categorizes
- Task layer: attach actionable to-dos to projects and see how much time each consumed
- Timeline visualization: a chronological view of your day in one scrollable ribbon
- Reports: daily, weekly, and per-project breakdowns you can use for invoicing or personal retrospectives
How much does Empoche cost?
Empoche is free to download and try. A subscription unlocks the full feature set including unlimited project history and detailed reporting — check the official site at empoche.com for current pricing tiers, as these change periodically. The free tier is genuinely usable for personal time awareness, while the paid tier targets freelancers and consultants who need billable-hour accuracy.
Who should use Empoche?
Empoche is built for anyone who bills by the hour or simply wants honest accountability over their workday — freelancers, consultants, remote workers, and anyone who has ever reached Friday afternoon wondering where the week went. If you already live in a heavy-duty project manager like OmniFocus or Things 3, Empoche works alongside them rather than replacing them; its task layer is deliberately lightweight, not a rival to those deep-todo systems.
It is not the right fit for team leads wanting to track other people's hours — Empoche is firmly single-user and personal. Enterprise workforce-monitoring tools occupy a different category entirely.
What are the best Empoche alternatives?
The closest native Mac competitor is Timing, which also does automatic background capture and has a polished timeline UI with strong invoicing features. RescueTime is the long-established web-based option that offers distraction blocking alongside automatic tracking, but its Mac client feels dated compared to either Timing or Empoche. Toggl Track and Harvest are excellent if your team needs collaborative time reporting, but both require you to manually start timers — the discipline tax that Empoche eliminates. Clockify is free and team-oriented but again relies on manual logging. If you want pure task management without time tracking, Things 3 or OmniFocus remain the Mac gold standard.
Empoche sits in the middle of this map: more opinionated than RescueTime, more integrated than Timing (which lacks tasks), and less demanding than the manual-timer crowd.
How does Empoche compare to Timing?
Both apps capture your Mac activity automatically and present a timeline view, but they diverge in a few meaningful ways. Timing leans harder into invoicing workflows and has a richer set of calendar integrations. Empoche leans into the task-management layer — if you want to attach a to-do list to a project and see time consumed per task, Empoche handles that natively while Timing outsources it. Design-wise, Empoche feels lighter and less cluttered; Timing's sidebar can become dense once you have many projects. For pure billable-hour reporting, Timing may have the edge; for a unified capture-plus-tasks loop, Empoche wins.
