Best time tracking app

[mborinstein]

I am looking for a third-party app that will help our leadership understand how much time engineers are spending on tickets each month. My two MUST HAVES are:

1. Grouping by epic: For each epic, how much time did each engineer spend on tickets within that epic

2. NON-CUMULATIVE TIME: If an engineer worked on a ticket from November 1 - 3, and they picked up another ticket from November 2-3, I do not want the total time spent across both tickets (3 days + 2 days). I want to know that in November, they spent 3 business days working on tickets. 

I ideally also want an app that will let me customize what "time spent" working on a ticket means (i.e. being able to only look at the time from when a ticket moved to In Progress to when it moved to Done). 

I have found some apps that give me pieces of this (Timepiece, Time in Status) but the non-cumulative time part seems hard to find. Any recommendations? 

[Robert]

That’s a really thoughtful and well-defined question — and honestly, one that a lot of engineering teams struggle with once they scale. 👏

You’re absolutely right — most marketplace apps like Timepiece, Time in Status, or Tempo Timesheets tend to give you cumulative time logs, which are fine for reporting effort but not great for understanding actual working days spent within a time window.

From experience, what you’re describing — “non-cumulative time per engineer within epics” — usually requires something that can analyze state transitions + timestamps rather than raw time logs.

A few ideas worth exploring:

Custom Jira automation + reporting via eazyBI or Custom Charts: You can pull issue histories and calculate distinct “In Progress” dates per user. It’s a bit of setup, but it gives you exactly what you’re after — calendar days of activity rather than total logged time.

Tempo Timesheets (advanced filtering): It’s not perfect for non-cumulative time out of the box, but if you combine Tempo with Automation for Jira (to track state changes as custom fields), you can approximate it.

WorklogPRO might be another one to test — it supports aggregating worklogs by user and epic and can filter based on specific status durations.

If you want to go deeper, you can also export your issue histories via Jira REST API and process them in a small Python or Google Sheets script — compute “distinct active days per user per epic.” That’s often the cleanest approach if you don’t want to overpay for heavy marketplace apps.

Totally get what you’re going for though — leadership doesn’t need inflated “effort hours,” they need real working footprint data. Love how clearly you’ve defined that difference. 👌