WakaTime

WakaTime automatically tracks how developers spend their time coding, with a growing focus on measuring AI-generated code, model costs, and agent effectiveness. Founded in San Francisco by Alan Hamlett and launched in May 2013, the platform has grown to serve what the company describes as over 500,000 developers. It works by installing open-source plugins into editors and IDEs that silently send "heartbeat" events to WakaTime's servers whenever you type, switch files, or save.

What It Is

WakaTime is a developer productivity analytics platform that sits between your editor and a cloud dashboard. Its open-source CLI (wakatime-cli, written in Go) is the shared engine behind all official editor plugins — it collects metadata about files, projects, branches, languages, and AI tool usage, then sends that data to WakaTime's REST API. The resulting dashboards show time breakdowns by project, file, language, editor, operating system, and — increasingly — by AI agent and model.

AI Analytics: The Core Differentiator

WakaTime has expanded well beyond simple time tracking to become an AI coding analytics layer. The platform now tracks:

• AI vs. human line changes — how many lines were added or removed by AI tools versus typed by hand
• AI agent costs — estimated token spend per developer, per agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Windsurf, Cline, Gemini, and more), calculated from input/output token counts at representative API rates
• Model efficiency — average tokens per line and prompt length across models
• AI adoption — which agents developers are using and what percentage of code is AI-generated
• Prompt length metrics — mean and median prompt character lengths per session, to understand how developers interact with AI tools

The cost estimates are explicitly described by WakaTime as approximations for comparing agents and trends, not for reconciling invoices.

Plugin Ecosystem and Editor Coverage

WakaTime's plugin page lists support for over 100 editors, IDEs, and terminals, including VS Code, IntelliJ IDEA, Neovim, Vim, Emacs, Xcode, Android Studio, PyCharm, Cursor, Zed, and many more. All official plugins are open source on GitHub and share the same ~/.wakatime.cfg config file and the wakatime-cli binary. Plugins send heartbeats when you type, switch files, or save — and stop tracking when you stop typing, so idle time is not counted. Offline coding is supported: heartbeats are cached locally in a BoltDB file and synced when connectivity returns.

Team and Organization Features

For engineering teams, WakaTime provides organization dashboards that aggregate individual developer stats without requiring manual input. Team features include:

• Unlimited team dashboards with per-developer breakdowns
• Commit and PR stats overlaid on repository history
• Custom privacy controls (hide projects, obfuscate file paths, repo filtering)
• CSV and JSON export of team dashboards
• SSO, OIDC, and SCIM support at the Business tier
• Google Calendar, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Slack, and Zoom integrations

Update: wakatime-cli v2.21.4

The wakatime-cli repository on GitHub shows active development, with the latest release v2.21.4 published on June 30, 2026. The repository is written in Go under a BSD 3-Clause license and has 446 stars and 77 forks. The CLI is the shared foundation for all editor plugins, meaning updates to it propagate across the entire plugin ecosystem. The homepage now prominently features AI analytics as the primary value proposition, reflecting a significant product direction shift from pure time tracking toward AI ROI measurement.

Tradeoffs to Know

WakaTime only collects file metadata — paths, project names, branch names, language, line counts, cursor position — never file contents. Privacy controls in the config file allow obfuscating project names, hiding file paths, or excluding entire folders before data leaves the machine. The free plan retains all coding activity indefinitely but limits dashboard history to one week; paid plans unlock full historical access. The platform is a hosted SaaS service; while the CLI and all editor plugins are open source under BSD-3-Clause, the WakaTime backend and dashboard are not.