When comparing Emacs Org-mode vs RescueTime, the Slant community recommends RescueTime for most people. In the question“What are the best time tracking apps for freelancers?” RescueTime is ranked 5th while Emacs Org-mode is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose RescueTime is:
Users and team leaders can get weekly emails that summarize what everyone has been spending their time doing.
Specs
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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 Weekly email summary
Users and team leaders can get weekly emails that summarize what everyone has been spending their time doing.
Pro Simple setup
Starting out with RescueTime is as easy as making an account and installing the software. It really is pretty simple and does not take much time at all.
Pro Estimates productivity
Users can customize what constitutes productive time and not, this allows for good flexibility depending on what ones job requirements are.
Pro Keeps track of set goals
The app allows setting goals and helps keep track of progress towards them in the dashboard and weekly email to motivate you.
Pro Detailed reports
Reports show how you allocate your time between various apps, websites and categories of tools as well as tell you how productive you were and if you've achieved set goals.
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.