When comparing Emacs Org-mode vs Qbserve, the Slant community recommends Emacs Org-mode for most people. In the question“What are the best time tracking apps for freelancers?” Emacs Org-mode is ranked 7th while Qbserve is ranked 25th. The most important reason people chose Emacs Org-mode is:
This app's flexibility is based on its minimalist approach, giving the user near-infinite freedom.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros

Pro Ultimate flexibility
This app's flexibility is based on its minimalist approach, giving the user near-infinite freedom.
Pro Absolutely free
Emacs with Org-mode is free as in beer and free as in speech – that is, it costs nothing and it’s totally open source.

Pro Files are usable anywhere at anytime
Users are not tied to one service provider, program, platform, or database engine.

Pro Incredibly extensible
There are many plug-ins for Org-mode, including Org-habits and Org-notify. If Org-mode lacks some piece of functionality, it is very easy to add it.
Pro Agenda views
Pro Excellent unofficial Android app (orgzly)

Pro Offline support
Pro Efficient features for deadline organization
Pro Supports plaintext spreadsheets
Pro There are a lot of extensions, for exporting to html, bootstrap, js-reveal and much more
Pro Quickly add rich text
Pro Invoice generation
It's possible to generate PDFs with invoices based on tracked project time or create ones from scratch.
Pro Automatic project tracking
Qbserve categorizes project time automatically based on opened documents and web pages.
Pro Dynamic icons
The dock icon will change color depending on what you are currently doing, acting as a reminder to get back to work when you've become distracted. You can also set goals, and in the status bar you will see a percentage of how close you are to your daily goal.
Pro Data is stored locally
Pro Wide database
There are over 7500 apps/sites/games in the database which provides lots of data for more accurate tracking.
Pro Differentiates between work and play
Qbserve can determine the difference between productive and distractive activities. It doesn't use a static algorithm either - it will read content page-by-page to determine whether or not it is productive or not. this allows certain chats to count as work, and other chats to not count, even if you are using the same chat service for both.
Cons
Con Unintuitive user interface
The key combinations are unintuitive and difficult to remember. This is probably because there are a lot of hidden "modes" depending on where the cursor is. Actions aren't paired with reversing actions like in other todo apps. For example, hitting shift-tab does NOT reverse the effect of hitting tab.


Con Android app isn't very good
There are several user-created apps for Android, but none seem to offer the same level of functionality as other to-do apps.
Con Not really cross platform
Although it is possible to get a lot of it working, no all in one, sync included, out of the box solution is available for mobile devices.
Con By default, a hard-to-read display
The default way of writing an outline or checklist creates a very messy wall of text that's difficult to read with no vertical spacing. You can manually add vertical spacing, but the Org operations don't preserve it. There are pretty-display modes, but you need to remember how to enable them, etc. etc.
Con No synchronization
Since Qbserve is a serverless solution – you can't sync your database between multiple Macs.
Con Short free trial
While it's good that there is a 10 day free trial, 10 days isn't very long. A longer trial would allow for better judgement of how much more productive the software made you.
