The best free game playtime trackers for PC

Three different kinds of tool

Almost every playtime tracker falls into one of three categories, and the category matters more than the individual app.

1. Store counters - Steam, Epic, GOG Galaxy, Xbox. Free, built in, and accurate for their own games only.
2. Library managers - Playnite and similar. They unify your libraries and track the sessions they launch, at the cost of becoming your new front door to gaming.
3. Process trackers - tools that watch what is running on Windows and time recognised games regardless of origin. They do not change your habits, and they depend on recognising executables.

Store counters: free, built in, incomplete

If everything you play comes from one store, the store's own counter is the right answer and you need nothing else. Steam's is the most complete: per-game hours, two-week figures, and a sortable profile list.

The moment your library crosses stores, this breaks. Epic, GOG, EA, Ubisoft, Battle.net, and the Xbox app each cover a slice, several show nothing at all, and none covers the games that belong to no store. See the individual guides for Steam, Epic, GOG, Game Pass, and Battle.net.

Playnite: the best choice if you want a library manager

Playnite is free, open source, mature, and extremely capable. It imports your libraries from many sources, has a large plugin ecosystem, gives you a unified and heavily customisable frontend, and records playtime for games it launches.

If you want one place to browse and start everything you own, Playnite is the strongest free option and we would recommend it over our own app for that job. The trade-off is that its tracking follows from launching through Playnite. If you keep opening games from Steam or a shortcut out of habit, the record has holes. We wrote a longer PlayCounter vs Playnite comparison rather than pretending the choice is obvious.

Community process trackers

A handful of smaller Windows tools take the process-watching approach, including community projects distributed through GitHub, itch.io, and Overwolf, plus older freeware like Gameplay Time Tracker. They vary a lot in maintenance status, interface quality, and whether games are recognised automatically or must be added by hand.

Two things are worth checking before installing any of them: whether the project is still actively maintained, and whether the source is available for a tool that watches every process on your PC. Both are reasonable things to insist on.

PlayCounter, and who it is actually for

PlayCounter is our free, MIT-licensed process tracker for Windows. It runs in the tray, recognises games automatically by executable, and records sessions with cover art, totals, session counts, and history. You do not launch games through it and you do not create an account. History stays in local app storage.

It is a good fit if your games are scattered across launchers, folders, and standalone installers and you want a passive record without changing how you play.

It is the wrong choice if you want a unified launcher (use Playnite), if you only play on one store (use its counter), if you need macOS or Linux today (Windows only), or if you need your existing hours imported (it starts from installation). Games with generic or renamed executables need a one-time identification, and emulators are tracked as the emulator rather than per ROM.

Quick comparison