The Agency Stack — Where Free Open Source Wins, and the Narrow Case Where It Does Not
Time tracking and invoicing have the strongest free self-hosted options of any category we track. Here is an honest account of when Kimai and Invoice Ninja are simply the right answer, and the small set of cases where they are not.
Most comparison articles are written by someone who wants you to buy something. This one is going to spend most of its length explaining why you probably should not.
An agency's core stack is time tracking and invoicing. Those two categories happen to have the best free self-hosted software in the entire small-business market — better, in several respects, than the paid alternatives. If you are an agency looking to stop paying subscriptions, your answer is very likely free, and it is not ours.
What you are currently paying
From each vendor's own pricing page:
| Vendor | Published price | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Clockify | Paid seats $5.49 / $7.99 / $11.99 / $12.99 per seat/month, billed annually | (2026-07-21) |
| Harvest | From $9/seat/month ($108/seat billed annually) | (2026-07-21) |
| FreshBooks | Lite $23.00/month | (2026-07-05) |
| Invoice Ninja (hosted) | Ninja Pro $14/month | (2026-07-05) |
| Wave | Free (Starter) invoicing; Pro $19/month + payments/payroll add-ons | (2026-07-22) |
A five-person agency on Harvest at $9/seat is $45/month — $1,620 over three years. On Clockify's mid-tier it is similar. That is a real number and it is why people go looking.
The free answers, and they are genuinely excellent
When we searched self-hosted time tracking and invoicing on 1 August 2026, the same names came back every time — and unlike most categories, these are not compromises.
Kimai — described in the results as "the #1 open-source time-tracking software," self-hostable, with invoicing built in, actively maintained, and running on ordinary PHP hosting. It also ranks its own /clockify-alternative comparison page, which tells you how seriously the project takes this market.
Invoice Ninja — an open-source invoicing platform with "PDF invoice generation, client payments through 30+ gateways, multiple templates, team roles, and time tracking." Thirty payment gateways. Self-hosted. Free. It is the single most capable free product in either category.
Also real: solidtime, ActivityWatch, Timewarrior, InvoicePlane, Akaunting, SolidInvoice.
If you want to stop paying for time tracking and invoicing, install Kimai or Invoice Ninja and stop reading. That is the honest recommendation for the large majority of agencies, and no paid product in this article beats it on capability.
So what is left?
Two narrow things. We are going to be precise about them rather than inflate them.
1. Deployment reality
Invoice Ninja v5 typically wants nginx + php-fpm + a queue worker + a scheduler, with MySQL and Redis. That is a normal stack for anyone who runs servers, and it is a wall for a five-person design studio whose "IT" is a cPanel login and a domain.
Kimai is friendlier here and runs on ordinary hosting — so if shared hosting is your constraint, evaluate Kimai first, not us.
Where a simpler paid tool fits is the narrow band where even Kimai is more system than the job needs: Clockora is a staff timesheet — $49.00 one time (product page, read 2026-08-01) — that installs on shared hosting with no Composer, no queue, no Redis.
2. Scope you cannot outgrow
This is the more interesting difference and it is a design decision, not a limitation:
"Does Clockora invoice or bill these hours?" — "No — and that is deliberate. It records hours worked and approves them; it applies no billing rate and produces no invoice."
"Is it payroll?" — "No. It computes no wages, holds no pay rates, and moves no money. The overtime feature is a flag against an hours threshold, never a pay figure."
A timesheet that holds no rates is a different object from a billing system. For an agency that bills clients, that is a missing feature. For a business that needs staff hours recorded and approved — and specifically does not want pay rates in a system the whole team can see — it is the point.
And the exactness claim is testable rather than rhetorical: "Time is stored as integer minutes and summed in PHP, with cross-midnight spans and DST handled — the shipped 147-assertion suite proves it."
The invoicing side, honestly
Invora is self-hosted invoicing at $34.00 one time. Its own FAQ lists three things Invoice Ninja does and it does not:
"Does Invora support recurring invoices?" — "Not in 1.0 — each invoice is created individually, or one-click duplicated."
"Does it email invoices automatically?" — "It produces a branded print/PDF invoice and a read-only public client link; automated email sending is on the roadmap."
"Can it collect online payments?" — "No — you record payments manually; built-in payment gateways are roadmap."
Read those three together. Against a free product with thirty payment gateways, recurring billing and automated sending, a $34 licence without any of them is not competing on capability and should not pretend to.
The honest case for it is narrow and real: you invoice a handful of clients a month, you get paid by bank transfer anyway, you want a branded PDF and a record, and you want the whole thing to be four files on shared hosting rather than a stack with a queue worker. If that is not you, Invoice Ninja is free and better.
Choosing
Kimai — you want free, capable time tracking with invoicing, on ordinary hosting. The default answer.
Invoice Ninja — you want free, capable invoicing with real payment gateways, and you can run a proper stack. The default answer for invoicing.
Clockify or Harvest — you want hosted, do not want to run anything, and the per-seat cost is acceptable. Check the seat count you are actually paying for; agencies routinely pay for leavers.
Clockora — you need staff hours recorded and approved on shared hosting, deliberately without rates or billing in the system. A narrow case, honestly stated.
Invora — low invoice volume, paid by transfer, want a branded PDF and a record on your own server, and a queue worker is not something you are going to run.
Not us — if you need recurring invoices, online payment collection, automated sending, or client-facing payment gateways. Invoice Ninja does all four, for free.
The honest costs
Everything in the backup guide applies, and doubly to invoicing: an invoice register is a financial record with a retention obligation.
And a specific warning for this category: free does not mean free of work. Invoice Ninja self-hosted means you maintain a queue worker, a scheduler and Redis. That is real ongoing effort — it is simply effort instead of money, and for a technical team it is usually the better trade.
The short version
Time tracking and invoicing are the two categories where free self-hosted software is genuinely the best answer, not a compromise. Kimai and Invoice Ninja are excellent, and they are free.
The paid one-time options make sense in a narrow band: shared hosting with no container platform, low volume, no need for payment gateways, and — for timesheets specifically — a deliberate choice to keep pay rates out of the system.
If you do not sit in that band, install the free one. We would rather tell you that than take $34 for something that does less.
Next steps
- Clockora — self-hosted staff timesheet · live demo
- Invora — self-hosted invoicing · live demo
- The SaaS Price Observatory — Clockify, Harvest, FreshBooks, Wave and 78 others, quoted from their own pages and dated
Prices are quoted from each vendor's own pricing page with the date read. Kimai and Invoice Ninja are not our products and we have described them as we found them — check them yourself before buying anything, including ours.