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Show HN: An open source alternative to Wakatime

by jemiluv8 on 3/25/25, 10:52 AM with 23 comments

I built an open source alternative to wakatime because I don't think a wakatime premium should cost more than a Github copilot subscription. The problem wakatime solves is rather straightforward. Their hardest bit of business is creating all those plugins, besides that the backend just ingests plugin data and organizes it into a dashboard that gives insights into developer work habits.

I also felt features like goals, invoices and management of clients shouldn't require premium subscription. And for the most part, I feel I'm right. Especially after implementing these features.

The website is now in beta testing and I'd love your feedback on some of the metrics you'd like to see that are not currently on the wakatime website.

I've already added stats about the amount of coding time spent writing code. And for me it feels like a big deal thus far.

I've also been playing with an idea of showing developer focus/attention as buckets of heartbeats over time or heartbeat frequency over time.

I feel there is more. Looking forward to hearing your feedback

  • by xnx on 3/28/25, 5:24 PM

    Hoping someone can change the title to something like "Shown HN: Wakana - Open source wakatime alternative"

  • by neilv on 3/28/25, 7:36 PM

    WakaTime offers business/enterprise licensing, where self-improvement/introspection suddenly looks exactly like corporate task management, employee surveillance, and performance metrics.

    So, "leaderboard" (fun!) becomes "stack-ranking" (vicious!).

    How do you see Wakana positioned and used, in practice?

    * Will it be used by the individual for self-improvement and time management?

    * Will metrics-crazed companies use it to whip-crack employees?

    * Will even a non-corporate leaderboard/ranking be twisted and gamed for self-promotion?

  • by rustc on 3/28/25, 8:33 PM

    So this uses https://github.com/wakatime/wakatime-cli under the hood. Is there any way to make wakatime-cli store all data locally in a file (like sqlite or csv)?

  • by airstrike on 3/28/25, 5:38 PM

    Home page says:

    > Copy and paste this into your ~/.wakatime.cfg file

        [settings]
    api_url = https://api.wakana.io/api
    api_key = ## replace this with your api key when you login
    From the FAQ:

    > This is a self-hosted version of wakatime.com that is open source and free to use. We rely on the same open source plugins and collect the same data that is available from wakatime's open source plugins.

    Naturally this being FOSS, I see from the README on github that you have a choice to self-host, so maybe that ought to be front and center on the home page? Actually the README has a ton of content that could be on the site

  • by j1elo on 3/28/25, 9:32 PM

    The Docker instructions at https://github.com/jemiluv8/wakana point to using this image:

      ghcr.io/muety/wakapi:latest
    Seems that "muety/wakapi" is the source project from which this one was forked, so, is that Docker image just an artifact of forking the README and forgetting to update it?

  • by Diti on 3/28/25, 5:52 PM

    Why does such a tool need an API and an external connection? I use `arbtt`, which is local-only.

  • by jonny_eh on 3/28/25, 5:40 PM

    What's wakatime?

  • by jemiluv8 on 3/25/25, 11:05 AM

    Let me know if anyone has challenges setting up.