DoneThat vs RescueTime

The short answer

RescueTime and DoneThat both track your work without a timer. The difference is what they do with it. RescueTime scores your time against productivity categories and helps you block the distracting ones. DoneThat reconstructs what you were actually working on and coaches you against your own goals.

If your problem is "I keep ending up on Reddit", RescueTime is built for exactly that and has been for over a decade. If your problem is "I have no idea where my week went, and I want something to tell me what to change", that is the gap DoneThat is built for.

What each tool actually is

RescueTime is a focus product. It runs in the background, classifies what you use into productivity tiers, and gives you a score plus tools to defend your attention: focus sessions, site blocking, goals, and alerts when you cross a threshold. Timesheets exist, but as a paid upgrade layered on top of that core.

DoneThat is an automatic work tracker with an AI coach on top. The unit is captured activity — what was on screen, in which app, for how long, and what it appears to have been about — reconstructed into a day you review rather than build. That history then feeds goals, coaching, and AI assistants through an API and an MCP server.

Both remove the timer. Only one of them tries to tell you what the work was.

How each one records your time

RescueTime: categories and scores

RescueTime tracks automatically, with idle detection and offline activity logging. It then maps applications and sites onto productivity categories and produces a score.

That model is its strength and its ceiling. Categories are a fast, cheap way to answer "how much of today was focused?" They are a poor way to answer "what was I doing?" Two hours in your code editor and two hours in your code editor on the wrong project score identically. So does an hour in a browser reading documentation you needed versus an hour reading the news.

DoneThat: reconstruction, not classification

DoneThat captures screen-first and reconstructs the day rather than bucketing it. The output is closer to a record of the work than a score of the work, which is what makes the coaching layer possible — Don can pull you back to a goal because it can tell what you have drifted onto, not just which productivity tier the app belongs to.

The trade-off is real: DoneThat needs to see your screen and RescueTime largely does not. Worth being precise about what that ask is, though. Screenshots are never stored — they are processed in real time and deleted immediately, and only the structured activity derived from them persists. Apps you exclude are redacted on your machine before anything is sent. Bring your own Gemini or OpenAI-compatible model and the raw activity never reaches our servers at all. The desktop app is open source.

Focus tools: where RescueTime is ahead

This is not a close call, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

RescueTime's distraction toolkit is the most complete in this comparison: focus sessions that block distracting sites while they run, configurable goals, and alerts that fire when you cross a threshold. If you want software that physically gets between you and the thing you keep clicking on, RescueTime does that and DoneThat does not.

DoneThat's equivalent is different in kind rather than better. Don, the AI coach, nudges you onto your goals, can block calendar time for them, flags low-value work while you can still fix it, checks in on your mood, reminds you about meetings, and suggests breaks. It is persuasion rather than enforcement. Which one works better depends entirely on whether you respond to a locked door or a conversation.

Pricing compared

RescueTime pricing, as of 11 August 2026:

All paid plans include a 14-day trial with no payment up front. There is no free tier.

The thing to notice before budgeting: timesheets are not in the base plan. If you need projects, clients, billable rates, rounding or CSV export, you are on Solo+ or Team+, which is roughly 70% more than the headline $7. Comparisons that quote RescueTime at $7 against a competitor's billing-capable plan are not comparing the same thing.

DoneThat is subscription-based with a 14-day free trial; current prices are on the DoneThat download page rather than restated here, because a hardcoded number on a comparison page goes stale.

Privacy and data control

RescueTime is a cloud service that classifies your activity server-side. What it holds is category-level: which app, which site, which bucket, for how long. That is less granular than what DoneThat captures, and if minimising what any vendor holds about you is the priority, that is a genuine point in RescueTime's favour.

DoneThat captures more, deliberately, and spends its privacy design on controlling what enters the record rather than on keeping the record thin:

• No screenshot archive. Processed in real time, deleted immediately; only structured activity persists.
• Per-app exclusions applied locally, before anything is sent for analysis.
• Bring your own LLM — your Gemini or OpenAI-compatible model, so raw activity never reaches our servers. Keys encrypted locally.
• Open source desktop app, so the capture path can be inspected.

The honest framing: RescueTime holds less about you. DoneThat holds a richer record because coaching and AI memory need one, and gives you the switches to decide what goes into it.

Platform support

If mobile matters, RescueTime wins outright.

Where RescueTime is the better choice

• Distraction is the actual problem. Blocking, focus sessions and alerts are its core competence, not a bolt-on.
• You want a long historical trend. If you have years of RescueTime data, that record is valuable and not portable into anything else.
• You track on your phone. DoneThat has no mobile app.
• You want the lightest possible capture. Category-level tracking is a smaller ask than screen-first capture.
• A simple score is what you want. Not everyone wants a coach. A number that goes up is a legitimate thing to want.

Where DoneThat is the better choice

• You want to know what you worked on, not which category it fell into. Reconstruction beats classification when the question is where the week went.
• You want coaching, not alerts. Don reads the work and reaches out during it; goals and thresholds do not.
• You want AI tools to have your work history. MCP and an API make it queryable as long-term memory. RescueTime has no equivalent.
• You need billing output without an upgrade tier. RescueTime puts timesheets behind Solo+/Team+.
• Your team wants shared signal without surveillance. Summary-level dashboards, relative trends rather than per-person hours, per-summary visibility, optional mood tracking.
• You want peer accountability. Follow others, share summaries, Slack and Discord, accountability groups — all opt-in.

Can you run both?

They overlap enough that most people will not want to. Both run a background agent, both produce a daily view, and the two productivity numbers will not agree — which is confusing rather than informative. If you are testing, run them in sequence rather than in parallel, a fortnight each.

The exception is a genuine blocking need: RescueTime's focus sessions alongside DoneThat's reconstruction and coaching is a coherent pairing, because the enforcement and the record are doing different jobs.

How we compared these

Everything stated about RescueTime comes from its public pricing and product pages, read on 11 August 2026 and linked below. Feature claims about DoneThat are first-hand: we build it, which is a bias worth reading this with.

Where RescueTime is better we have said so — the focus toolkit is more complete than ours, its platform coverage is wider, and it holds less data about you. Vendors change pricing without notice; check the source links before deciding on the numbers.

Questions people ask about RescueTime

Is RescueTime free?

No. RescueTime has no free plan as of 11 August 2026. Every paid plan includes a 14-day trial with no payment up front, starting at $7 per month billed annually for Solo Focus.

Does RescueTime include timesheets?

Only on the plus tiers. Timesheets — projects, clients, billable rates, rounding and CSV export — require Solo+ at $12 per month billed annually or Team+ at $16 per user per month. The base Focus plans do not include them, so the billing use case costs roughly 70% more than the headline price.

Can RescueTime block distracting websites?

Yes, and it is the best in this comparison at it. Focus sessions block distracting sites while they run, and you can set goals and real-time alerts. DoneThat has no blocking: Don nudges you back to your goals instead, which is persuasion rather than enforcement.

What is the difference between RescueTime and DoneThat?

RescueTime scores your time against productivity categories and helps you block the distracting ones. DoneThat reconstructs what you were actually working on and coaches against your own goals. Two hours in your code editor and two hours in your code editor on the wrong project score identically to a category-based tracker.

Does RescueTime work on mobile?

Yes, RescueTime has iOS and Android apps alongside web and desktop. DoneThat has no mobile app, so if phone tracking matters, RescueTime wins outright on that axis.