Stintt vs RescueTime
- Nothing installed on the laptop
- Timesheet drafted from calendar events
- Log off-calendar work from a chat message
RescueTime measures how you spend attention. Stintt produces the timesheet and invoice — from the calendar, with no productivity score attached to anyone.
RescueTimeDesktop activity trackers
- An app runs on every machine
- Accurate by watching all day
Calendar events, read-only
- The week is already written down
- Chat covers what never got booked
- No agent on anyone’s laptop
Accurate, but it means software watching every machine all day.
Capture depends on a desktop or browser agent running on the machine.
Stintt vs RescueTime, row by row
The same twelve rows every comparison on this site uses, so nothing is cherry-picked for RescueTime. Where a capability is optional or plan-gated, it is marked partly rather than rounded either way.
RescueTime is a focus tool that got filed under time tracking. It watches the apps and sites you use, sorts them into productive and distracting, and hands you a score for the day. As a personal habit instrument that is useful. As a billing system it is the wrong shape entirely: a productivity percentage is not an hour against a client, and it is not something you can put on an invoice or defend in a dispute. Stintt is built for the billing question — what did we do, for whom, and is it approved.
Compared August 2026 from each vendor's public documentation and pricing pages. Products change — check with the vendor before you decide.
Three steps, and none of them is a migration.
There is no import from RescueTime, and pretending otherwise would be the first promise we broke. There does not need to be — a connected calendar arrives carrying the history a new tracker would spend months collecting.
Connect a calendar
Read-only access, granted once. It cannot create, edit or delete an event, and there is nothing to install on anyone's machine.
The history is already there
Existing calendar events become a draft timesheet immediately, so the first week is a review rather than an empty grid waiting for data to accrue.
Review, approve, bill
Correct the draft, log anything off-calendar from chat, and approve. Only approved entries reach a client invoice, and discarded time stays on the record.
What RescueTime leaves on the table
Three specific things, not a feature count.
An hour you can bill, not a score you can argue with
Stintt produces entries attached to a client, a category and an approver. Nobody has ever invoiced a productivity percentage.
No score attached to a person
Stintt reports on the shape of the week — utilization, meeting load, capacity — never on individual behaviour, because the behavioural data is not collected.
Nothing running on the machine
A calendar sync happens server-side. There is no agent to install, update or explain to the team.
When RescueTime is the better choice
If the problem you are solving is personal focus rather than client billing — "where did my attention go this week" — RescueTime answers a question Stintt deliberately does not ask.
If none of that describes your team, the rest of this page is the case for switching. If some of it does, RescueTime is a reasonable buy and we would rather you knew that here than after a trial.
What people ask about RescueTime and Stintt
No, and it never will. App and website history is not collected — there is no agent to collect it. If that is the question you need answered, RescueTime is the right tool and Stintt is not.
Yes, at the calendar level: focus blocks, meeting load and the split between meetings, focus, admin and breaks — plus a ranking of which recurring meetings consume the most hours.
Not in any direct way — it measures attention, not client work. Stintt turns approved hours into invoice line items with rates and tax handling.
