Tidst vs Toggl Track

The biggest difference is where the workflow starts

Toggl starts with the timer. You press start, do the work, press stop. Everything else — reports, rates, projects, team dashboards — is built on top of that act.

Tidst starts after the work. A completed Todoist task or a calendar meeting arrives in The Queue, and you decide what belongs on the timesheet. There is a timer too, but it is one route in rather than the foundation.

The question is not which is more accurate. It is whether the hard part of your day is measuring the work, or remembering it.

Two rows worth reading twice

Toggl's free plan does not include billable rates

It is a genuinely useful free plan — time tracking across web, desktop and mobile, the integration catalogue, calendar support, basic reports. But rates start on the paid tiers, which is the one feature a freelancer comparing time trackers is usually there for. Tidst's free version includes client rates, fixed fees, retainers and reports.

Automatic desktop tracking is Toggl's Premium tier

If the automatic activity timeline is why you are considering Toggl, it is worth knowing it is not on Free or Starter. Tidst does not offer it at any price — it is not that kind of product.

Todoist works differently in each

Toggl's Todoist integration is a browser extension. It puts a start/stop timer inside Todoist on Chrome, Firefox and Edge, so you can begin tracking without leaving your task list. It tracks time while you work.

Tidst goes the other way. It reads completed tasks from the Todoist projects you connect, server-side, and brings them in for review afterwards — so a task you tick off on your phone, on the bus, still reaches The Queue. A browser extension cannot follow you there.

If you want a timer where your tasks are, Toggl's approach is the direct one. If you want the tasks you already finished to come back and ask about their duration, that is what Tidst is.

What happens when you forget the timer

This is the case that separates them, because it is the common one.

With Toggl, a forgotten timer means adding the entry manually from memory, or — on Premium — reconstructing it from the desktop activity timeline.

With Tidst, there was no timer to forget. The completed task and the calendar meeting are waiting either way. What Tidst cannot recover is work that left no trace at all: the unplanned phone call, the thinking time, the fix that never became a task. That still needs a manual entry.