head to head · open source
Kimai vs Wakapi
Kimai has 5,129 GitHub stars, 878 forks, 350 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Wakapi has 4,471 stars, 310 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped 10 days ago. Kimai leads on adoption by 15% (5,129 vs 4,471 stars). Kimai is written in PHP under AGPL-3.0; Wakapi is written in Go under MIT. Kimai has attracted 17% as many forks as stars, Wakapi 7%. Kimai was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (self-hosted, time-tracker), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Kimai | Wakapi | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 5.1K | ★ 4.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | PHP | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 878 | ⑂ 310 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Kimai if
- You weight community size — 5.1K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Wakapi if
- You want the Wakapi feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Wakapi fits your workflow better
About Kimai
Kimai 1 Open Source Time Tracker Kimai is a professional grade time tracking application, free and open source. It handles use cases of freelancers as well as companies with dozens or hundreds of users. Kimai was build to track your project times and ships with many advanced features, including but not limited to: JSON API, invoicing, data exports, multi timer and punch in punch out mode, tagging, multi user multi timezones multi language (over 30 translations existing!), authentication via SAML/LDAP/Database, two factor authentication (2FA) with TOTP, customizable role and team permissions, responsive design…
read the full Kimai overview →
About Wakapi
A minimalist, self hosted WakaTime compatible backend for coding statistics. Website Features How to use Issues Contact [!IMPORTANT] Due to limited time available on the maintainers' part, we temporarily do not accept pull requests. Please refrain from submitting contributions for the time being. 🚀 Features ✅ Free and open source ✅ Built by developers for developers ✅ Statistics for projects, languages, editors, hosts and operating systems ✅ Badges ✅ Weekly E Mail reports ✅ REST API ✅ Partially compatible with WakaTime ✅ WakaTime integration ✅ Support for Prometheus exports ✅ Lightning fast ✅ Self hosted ⌨️ How…
read the full Wakapi overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kimai or Wakapi more popular?
Kimai has 5,129 GitHub stars and Wakapi has 4,471. Kimai has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kimai and Wakapi free?
Both are open source. Kimai is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Wakapi under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kimai and Wakapi?
Kimai is written in PHP and Wakapi in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Kimai or Wakapi?
Choose Kimai if you want the larger community (5,129 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Wakapi if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.