DoneThat vs Early

The short answer

EARLY — formerly Timeular — and DoneThat both capture your work automatically. EARLY points that capture at billing and business reporting, and pairs it with a physical device you flip to change task. DoneThat points it at understanding your own week and coaching you through it.

If someone is paying for your hours, EARLY is built for that end of the problem. If nobody is, most of what you would pay for is reporting machinery you will not open.

The physical tracker

Worth leading with, because nothing else in this comparison has anything like it.

EARLY sells an eight-sided device that sits on your desk. Each face maps to an activity; you flip it to switch. For people who want the deliberateness of marking a task change without opening an app — and for people who find on-screen tracking itself distracting — it is a genuinely good idea, and it is the main reason to choose EARLY over any of its software-only competitors.

Two practical notes. The tracker is hardware sold separately from the subscription, so it is an additional one-off cost that does not appear in a plan comparison. And it is still a manual signal: flipping the die is a smaller action than starting a timer, but it is an action, and it is one you can forget.

How each one records your time

EARLY captures automatically — the tools, documents and websites you worked on — and uses that to fill in and suggest entries. The physical tracker sits on top as an explicit signal of what you are doing.

DoneThat captures screen-first and reconstructs the day, with nothing to flip or start. The reconstruction knows what the work was about rather than which application held it, which is what makes coaching against goals possible.

On the ask, since DoneThat's is larger: screenshots are never stored. They are processed in real time and immediately deleted; only the derived structured activity persists. Excluded apps are redacted on your machine before anything is sent. With your own Gemini or OpenAI-compatible model, raw activity never reaches our servers. The desktop app is open source.

Pricing

EARLY starts from about €6.30 per month billed annually, or roughly €7.50 billed monthly, across four tiers: Personal, Personal Pro, Team for up to 20 people, and Enterprise above that. There is a 30-day free trial and no free plan. Figures verified 11 August 2026.

Worth knowing before you compare: EARLY does not publish a per-tier price table on its pricing page, so working out which tier you need and what it costs means going through signup. And the physical tracker is priced separately from every plan.

DoneThat is subscription-based with a 14-day free trial; current prices are on the DoneThat download page rather than restated here, since they come from a live API and a hardcoded figure would go stale.

Platform support

EARLY wins on mobile; the desktop story is a tie.

Where EARLY is the better choice

• You bill for your time. Billable hours, reporting and the surrounding admin are mature here.
• The physical tracker appeals. Nothing else offers it, and for some people it is the thing that finally makes tracking stick.
• You track on your phone. DoneThat has no mobile app.
• Your team needs shared reporting today. EARLY's team tier is built for it.
• You want a long evaluation. 30 days beats DoneThat's 14.

Where DoneThat is the better choice

• Nobody is billing anybody. If the data is for you, the reporting machinery is cost without benefit.
• You want nothing to remember at all. No timer, and no die to flip either.
• You want coaching, not reports. Don nudges you onto goals, blocks calendar time, flags low-value work while you can still fix it, checks your mood, reminds you of meetings, suggests breaks.
• You want AI tools to have your work history. MCP and an API make it queryable as long-term memory; EARLY has no equivalent.
• Your team wants shared signal without surveillance. Summary-level dashboards, relative trends rather than per-person hours, visibility set per summary by the person it belongs to, optional mood tracking.
• You want peer accountability. Follow others, share summaries, Slack and Discord, accountability groups — all opt-in.

Can you run both?

Only if the physical tracker is doing something for you that software cannot. Otherwise the overlap is large — two automatic capture agents producing two versions of the same day — and you would be paying twice to answer one question.

How we compared these

Everything stated about EARLY comes from its public pricing and product pages, read on 11 August 2026 and linked below. Note the rebrand: material referring to Timeular describes this same product, so older reviews may quote superseded prices.

Feature claims about DoneThat are first-hand: we build it. EARLY's billing workflow is more complete than ours, it has mobile apps and we do not, its trial is longer than ours, and the physical tracker has no counterpart on our side — all said plainly above. Vendors change pricing without notice; check the source links.

Questions people ask about Early

What is the EARLY physical tracker?

An eight-sided device you flip to switch between activities, sold separately from the subscription. It is the most distinctive thing about EARLY: a tactile way to change task without touching a screen. Budget for it as a one-off hardware cost on top of whichever plan you pick.

Is EARLY the same as Timeular?

It is the same product line, rebranded to EARLY. Older comparisons and reviews referring to Timeular are describing this tool, so pricing and feature details in them may be out of date.

How much does EARLY cost?

From about €6.30 per user per month billed annually, or roughly €7.50 billed monthly, across Personal, Personal Pro, Team (up to 20 people) and Enterprise tiers. There is a 30-day free trial and no free plan. Exact per-tier figures are not published as a table, so check at signup.

EARLY vs DoneThat: which should I pick?

EARLY if the time data leaves your hands — billing, client reporting, team dashboards — or if the physical tracker appeals. DoneThat if the data is for you: reconstruction of what you actually worked on, coaching against your goals, and work history an AI assistant can query.