An ActivTrak alternative you can host yourself.
ActivTrak is the most restrained of the big workforce-analytics products — screenshots are optional and it leads with team-level insight rather than individual surveillance. It still works by recording which applications and websites each person uses, and it only runs in ActivTrak's cloud.
Those are the two things MunkiSee does differently, and for some buyers they are the only two things that matter.
- You want to know what people spend time on, not just whether they were there.
- You are doing workload-balance or burnout analysis and want focus and multitasking metrics.
- You want benchmarks against other organisations to argue from.
- Your fleet includes Macs or ChromeOS devices.
- A cloud-only, US-hosted service is fine for your data governance.
- Data sovereignty is a requirement, not a preference — you need it on your own infrastructure, or entirely off the internet.
- Recording which websites staff visit is a line you will not cross, or cannot get past your works council.
- The question is presence and utilisation, not behavioural analytics.
- You need unassigned machines — kiosks, terminals, shift PCs — measured too.
- You are an MSP and need genuine tenant separation across client estates.
Side by side
ActivTrak has moved further towards privacy than most of its category, and this comparison should not be read as calling it invasive. The difference is one of category: analytics about behaviour versus measurement of presence.
| Capability | MunkiSee | ActivTrak |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Cloud or self-hosted Self-hosting on Enterprise; activity data never leaves your infrastructure. Offline builds exist for air-gapped sites. |
Cloud only |
| Application and website tracking | Not recorded The agent does not know or report which window has focus. |
Yes The foundation of the product's analytics. |
| Productivity classification | No | Yes Apps and sites classified productive, unproductive or undefined. |
| Screen capture | Not possible No screen-reading capability exists in the agent. |
Optional Off unless enabled; not the product's emphasis. |
| Keystroke content | Never | Not captured |
| Real-time fleet presence | Yes Every device shown active, idle or offline, refreshed every 5 minutes. |
Near real-time, user-centred |
| Devices with no assigned user | Yes A licence is a device, so kiosks and shared terminals report like anything else. |
User-oriented licensing |
| Team-level analytics and benchmarks | Trends, not benchmarks Utilisation by team, department and site against a baseline band — but no cross-company comparison. |
Yes A genuine strength. |
| Multi-tenant management for MSPs | Professional and above Separate databases per tenant, one portal, per-client billing summaries for rebilling. |
Single-organisation model |
| Data retention control | Yours to set 90 days to unlimited by plan, adjustable, with self-service removal on Professional. |
By plan tier |
| Platforms | Windows only | Windows, macOS, ChromeOS |
| Query from an AI assistant | Yes An MCP server, so an assistant can answer fleet questions directly. |
API only |
"No screenshots" is not the same as "no content"
A URL history is content. It reveals which bank someone uses, which health condition they looked up on a lunch break, which recruiter's site they opened, which union they read about. Nobody has to view a screenshot for that record to be sensitive — and once it exists you are its custodian, subject to access requests, breach obligations and whatever a future manager decides to go looking for.
MunkiSee's answer is not a policy about who may look. It is that the data is never created. The agent has no way to determine what application is in the foreground, so there is no window history to govern, secure, disclose or subpoena.
When self-hosting is the whole decision
Government suppliers, defence-adjacent manufacturers, health providers and anyone with a sovereignty clause in their contract usually cannot put workforce data into a foreign-hosted service, regardless of how good it is. That eliminates most of this category before the demo.
MunkiSee Enterprise runs on your own hardware, in your datacentre or on a VM you control. The only thing a self-hosted install ever sends us is a licence check and a seat count — never activity data. Sites with no internet at all are served by an offline build that never checks in.
For MSPs, tenancy is structural
Managing twenty client estates in a product designed for one organisation means twenty logins and a lot of care. On Professional and above, MunkiSee gives each client its own isolated tenant with its own database, manageable from a single portal without logging out, with per-client billing summaries for rebilling. Seats are licensed in aggregate across the whole book.
Where ActivTrak wins, honestly
If your actual question is how work is distributed — who is drowning, who is context-switching all day, which teams never get a focus block — ActivTrak answers it and MunkiSee cannot. That analysis requires knowing what people are doing, and we deliberately gave that up. Their benchmarking is real, their platform coverage is wider, and if you are on Macs we are not in the running.
What your privacy officer will ask for
The full list of what is collected, where it is held, who processes it and how long it is kept — written plainly rather than buried in a policy.
Read it here →Try it against your own fleet
30 days, up to 10 seats, silent install through Intune, SCCM or one command line. No card.
Start a free trialQuestions people ask before switching
Can MunkiSee really be self-hosted, or is it a hybrid?
Genuinely self-hosted. The server, database and dashboard all run on your machine. It contacts our licensing service periodically to confirm the licence and report a seat count — that exchange is the only thing it sends, and an offline build removes even that.
What happens if the licence lapses?
The instance goes read-only. Every dashboard, report and export keeps working on the history you already have; only the recording of new activity stops, and agents buffer locally and back-fill once it is current again. Your data is never held hostage.
Can I get the analytics without the app tracking?
You can get presence analytics: utilisation by team and site, hourly heatmaps, twelve-week trends with a baseline band, idle-gap distribution, dormant devices. You cannot get behavioural analysis, because that needs the data we chose not to collect.
We are an MSP. How does billing work?
Seats are licensed in aggregate across every client tenant, with per-client summaries so you can rebill accurately. Add and remove seats whenever a client's fleet changes; the next invoice is prorated. Details on the licensing page.
Comparison reviewed August 2026 against ActivTrak's publicly available product documentation. ActivTrak is a trademark of its owner and is used here only to identify the product being compared; MunkiSee is not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Products change — verify anything that matters to your decision on the vendor's own site, and tell us if something here has gone out of date.
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