DoneThat vs TimeScroll
Open-source macOS app with timeline view and local AI-powered search.
By Don, DoneThat's AI coach · verified 
AI Memory: side-by-side
Tools to archive your digital life and make it available for later use by eg AIs.
| Tool | Input data | Platform support | Data location | API |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Privacy-first work tracker and AI coach Best for: Calendar-like timeline of your work. | Screen, audio, apps | macOS, Windows, Linux | Cloud | Yes |
Open-source macOS app with timeline view and local AI-powered search. Best for: Finding past screen content with text and NLP search on macOS. | Periodic snapshots, indexed text | macOS 13+ | Local, optional encryption at rest | No, but open source |
TimeScroll is best for
Finding past screen content with text and NLP search on macOS.
DoneThat is best for
Calendar-like timeline of your work.
TimeScroll: pricing and platforms
- Starting price
- Free
- Free tier
- Free forever, with no paid tier
- Platforms
- macOS
- Worth knowing
- Open source, with the code on GitHub. There is no subscription and no upsell, so the only cost is the disk space the snapshot archive occupies.
Pricing as of , from TimeScroll's pricing page. Vendors change prices without notice, so check before you buy.
What TimeScroll does well
- Free forever with no paid tier and no upsell.
- Open source, so the capture path can be read rather than trusted.
- Fully local — nothing leaves your device, with optional encryption at rest.
- Snapshots are indexed for text search, so you can find what was on screen rather than just which app was open.
- Local AI search over your own history, without sending it anywhere.
- Universal binary for macOS 13+, plus timeline browsing and app usage analytics.
Where TimeScroll falls short
- macOS only, and requires macOS 13 or later.
- Snapshots are stored on your machine, so the archive is real disk usage you manage.
- Built for recall rather than time reconstruction: it will not total your week by project.
- No coaching, goals, nudges or accountability features.
- No MCP server, so other AI tools cannot query it as long-term memory.
- Independent project, so support is community-based rather than a vendor SLA.
See the full ai memory comparison or visit TimeScroll.
The short answer
TimeScroll is free, open source, local-only, and makes your Mac's past searchable. If that is what you want, take it — no paid product competes with free and open on those terms, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
What it does not do is reconstruct your time or act on it. It answers "what was on my screen on Tuesday?" It does not answer "where did this week go, and what should I change?"
What TimeScroll gets right
Free forever, no paid tier. Not freemium with a wall three weeks in. There is no upsell.
Open source. For a tool that snapshots your screen, being able to read the code is close to a requirement rather than a bonus.
Nothing leaves the device. Snapshots, indexing and search all run locally, with optional encryption at rest so only you can read the archive. Stronger than our position.
Indexed text, not window titles. Search finds what was actually on screen. That is a deeper record than app-and-duration tracking, and it is what makes recall genuinely useful.
Local AI search. Natural-language queries over your own history without sending it to anyone.
A universal binary for macOS 13+, with timeline browsing and app usage analytics included.
What you are trading
The archive is real. Periodic snapshots stored locally means disk usage that grows, and a searchable record of your screen living on your machine to secure and eventually prune. That is the cost of local-first recall, and it applies to every tool in this category that keeps images.
No time reconstruction. TimeScroll will not tell you that nine hours went into a recurring meeting, or that your stated priority got 15% of your attention this week. It is not measuring time.
No action. Nothing nudges you, sets a goal, or notices that you have drifted three weeks running.
macOS only, and 13 or later.
What DoneThat adds
Reconstruction rather than recall. The day is assembled into reviewable time you can act on, not a searchable pile.
A coach that reaches out. Don nudges you onto goals, blocks calendar time for them, flags low-value work while you can still fix it, checks your mood, reminds you of meetings, suggests breaks.
History AI tools can query through an MCP server and API.
A team dimension — summary-level dashboards, relative trends rather than per-person hours, visibility set per summary by the person it belongs to, optional mood tracking.
On capture: screenshots are never stored — processed in real time, 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, though only the desktop app — TimeScroll is open throughout, which is a genuine difference.
Platform support
| TimeScroll | DoneThat | |
|---|---|---|
| macOS | Yes, 13+ | Yes |
| Windows | No | Yes |
| Linux | No | Yes |
Where TimeScroll is the better choice
- Cost matters at all. Free, no tier, no upsell.
- You want to read the code before letting anything snapshot your screen.
- Nothing may leave your machine. Local-only with optional encryption at rest.
- Searchable recall is the requirement. Indexed screen text is exactly the right tool for finding things.
- You are on macOS and expect to stay there.
- You want local AI search without a provider involved.
Where DoneThat is the better choice
- You use Windows or Linux.
- You want your time reconstructed, not your screenshots searchable.
- You want to be nudged during the work.
- You want goals tracked and drift noticed.
- You want AI tools to have your work history through MCP and an API.
- You do not want a snapshot archive to exist, even locally.
- You want peer accountability. Follow others, share summaries, Slack and Discord, accountability groups — all opt-in.
- You want vendor support rather than a community project.
How we compared these
Everything stated about TimeScroll comes from its public site, read on 11 August 2026 and linked below. Claims about DoneThat are first-hand: we build it and charge for it, which is the bias to read this with.
TimeScroll is free, fully open source, and keeps everything local. Those advantages are real and we have not tried to argue around them — the honest position is that recall and reconstruction are different products, and if you only need recall on a Mac, this one costs nothing.
Sources
AI-generated comparison
Prompt
Compare https://donethat.ai/ and https://timescroll.muzhen.org/ honestly. Check both websites yourself, then summarize where DoneThat is stronger and where TimeScroll is stronger. Do not rank them globally.
Result
DoneThat and TimeScroll both reconstruct what happened on your computer, but they serve different buyers: DoneThat is a paid, coached productivity system aimed at knowledge workers who want timesheets, AI feedback, and workflow integrations, while TimeScroll is a free, local-only macOS recall tool for people who mainly want to search their own screen history without sending data anywhere.
DoneThat stronger
- Ships an AI coach (Don) that does real-time interventions, weekly reviews, and goal-setting on top of raw activity data, rather than only surfacing what you saw.
- Turns tracked activity into structured outputs like automated timesheets, which is directly useful for freelancers, operators, and managers who need to report time.
- Offers concrete workflow integrations (API, MCP, Zapier, n8n) so the captured data can flow into other tools instead of staying inside one app.
- Provides visible social proof and a clear ROI story (eight named testimonials, a 23-hours-saved-per-week breakdown) that makes the buying case easier to justify.
- Presents tiered paid plans with a trial, signaling an ongoing product with support expectations rather than a side project.
TimeScroll stronger
- Is free with an optional Ko-fi tip, so there is zero purchasing friction for individuals who just want recall on their own machine.
- Keeps everything local with encryption-at-rest and a private-by-design posture, which is an easier sell to privacy-sensitive or security-reviewed users.
- Focuses tightly on one job - searching anything you saw on your Mac, including a timeline view and local NLP search - instead of bundling coaching and reporting.
- Is a native Swift macOS app explicitly tuned for low power, memory, and storage use, which appeals to Mac users who care about performance and battery.
- Is fully open source on GitHub with a public roadmap, giving technically-inclined users transparency and the ability to inspect or extend the code.
Questions people ask about TimeScroll
- Is TimeScroll really free?
- Yes — free forever with no paid tier, and open source with the code on GitHub. The only real cost is the disk space its snapshot archive uses.
- Does TimeScroll send my data anywhere?
- No. Snapshots, indexing and search all run locally, and the project states nothing leaves your device. You can additionally enable encryption at rest so only you can read the archive. That is a stronger position than DoneThat's.
- Does TimeScroll work on Windows?
- No, it is macOS 13 or later only. DoneThat runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.
- Why pay for DoneThat when TimeScroll is free?
- Only for what it does not do. TimeScroll makes your Mac's past searchable, very well and at no cost. It does not reconstruct your time by project, set goals, nudge you during the work, share summaries with a team, or expose your history to AI assistants through MCP. If searchable recall is the requirement, use TimeScroll.
Comparison last verified against TimeScroll's public materials on . DoneThat makes one of the products compared here; competitor claims are drawn from public sources and never from private data.
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