Comparing Time Tracking Apps for Jira – Part 1

If your team spends their day working in Jira, then it makes sense for them to use Jira to track their time Jira as well. Time tracking allows you to see how much time is being spent on given issues, epics or projects and use that information to better manage your resources. Of course, time tracking can also be used to produce timesheets so that you can pay the team that’s doing all that great work.

However, you may need options that go beyond what’s natively included in Jira. In this article, we’ll take a look at the top paid, time tracking apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. Then will follow that up with a second article exploring the free options.

Paid Time Tracking Apps for Jira

Search the Marketplace for time tracking apps and you’ll find a lot of options.

While Jira does allow users to create worklogs on issues, it’s native time tracking functionality is quite limited. Not only do the worklogs have to be manually created, but you are stuck with the worklog screen Jira provides. You can’t add your own custom fields- say for tracking billable hours, cost centers or clients.

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The options for extracting the data that’s been entered are even more limited. Jira’s native time tracking is, not surprisingly, used to populate Jira reports such as Sprint burndown charts, Velocity report, Cumulative flow diagram, etc. You can also use JQL to query some information (author, date, comment, group and role) about the worklogs, but JQL always return a list of issues. It doesn’t give you an easy way to produce a timesheet or configure your own reports.

Therefore, many Marketplace apps, such as Timesheet Tracking for Jira, Worklogs - Time Tracking and Reports, and Timetracker - Time Tracking & Reporting for Jira focus on expanding the how you can create worklogs and extractworklog data in multiple forms.

Other apps, like Clockwork and Tempo, go a step farther by providing alternative ways to capture time in the first place. Clockwork allows you to set automatic timers that log work for the assigned user whenever the issue is in an active status, thus putting time tracking on autopilot. Tempo offers Google and Office 365 calendar integration to seamlessly create worklogs from calendar events (with the date and time fields pre-populated).  Similar functionality is currently in development for Clockwork.

Deciding which option is right for you will depend on the needs of your teams, and what you project your future needs will be. See the table below for a full feature comparison.

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‍In the next article we’ll look at free time tracking options available in the Atlassian Marketplace.

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