head to head · open source
Kimai vs Wakapi
Kimai has 5,005 GitHub stars, 844 forks, 350 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Wakapi has 4,433 stars, 300 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Kimai leads on adoption by 13% (5,005 vs 4,433 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 | ★ 5.0K | ★ 4.4K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | PHP | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 844 | ⑂ 300 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Kimai if
- You weight community size — 5.0K 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 is a free and open source, web based time tracking application written in PHP on the Symfony framework, licensed under AGPL 3.0. It is built as a multi user, multi timezone and multi language system that handles the time tracking use cases of freelancers as well as companies with dozens or hundreds of users. The project lives in the PHP ecosystem, stores its data in MariaDB or MySQL through Doctrine, and renders its interface with Tabler. It is distributed both as a self hosted on premise application and as a hosted SaaS version at kimai.cloud.
read the full Kimai overview →
About Wakapi
Wakapi is a minimalist, self hosted backend for coding statistics that speaks the WakaTime API. It is written in Go and released under the MIT license, and it lives in the developer tools and productivity ecosystem alongside the WakaTime client tooling it is designed to work with. The project presents itself as a free and open source alternative built by developers for developers, and it ships as a single service that collects, stores and visualizes time tracking data sent from editors and IDEs.
read the full Wakapi overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kimai or Wakapi more popular?
Kimai has 5,005 GitHub stars and Wakapi has 4,433. 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 (5,005 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Wakapi if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.