CountLink vs ShareMyTimer, Stagetimer, CountdownShare & Leaderboarded
All five let you run a countdown that multiple people watch in sync. Here's what's actually different — pricing, limits, and what each one is really built for. Checked directly against each site's own pricing page; verify anything that matters to you against the live source, since pricing changes.
| Feature | CountLink | ShareMyTimer | Stagetimer.io | CountdownShare | Leaderboarded |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price of the free tier | Free, no tiers at all | Free plan | Free plan | Free plan | Free plan |
| Viewers per timer (free) | Unlimited | 3 (Pro: 90) | 3 live connections | Not published; Pro advertises “unlimited views” | Not published |
| Timers you can keep (free) | Unlimited | 3 (Pro: 20) | 3 per room | Unlimited timers is a Pro feature | 2 saved boards |
| Account needed | Never | Not to start | Not to start | Not to start | Yes, to save a board |
| Watermark on free | None | Not published | Not published | Removing it is a Pro feature | Branding is a paid feature |
| Paid tier | There isn’t one | $6/mo Pro (or $9 one-time) | $17.50/mo Pro | Pro plan | From $19/mo |
| Live pause / add time for viewers | Opt-in — see below | Yes | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| Control display from your phone | Opt-in — see below | Partly | Yes | Not published | Yes — their headline feature |
| Works with no connection | Yes, once loaded | No | Desktop app (paid) | No | No |
| Keeps working if the vendor goes down | Yes | No | No | No | No |
Why the free tiers differ so much
ShareMyTimer and Stagetimer both push live control changes (pause, extend, messages) to every open viewer instantly — that requires a real-time server keeping a connection open per viewer, which costs them money to run. Their device/connection limits on the free tier exist because of that cost, not as an arbitrary restriction. CountLink's sync works differently: the countdown's end time is written into the shared link itself, so every device just does its own local math against that timestamp. There's no ongoing connection and no per-viewer cost, which is the direct reason CountLink can offer unlimited viewers for free, indefinitely.
The trade-off is real, and worth saying plainly even though it's narrower than it used to be: by default, CountLink can't push a live pause or a "+2 minutes" adjustment to everyone who already has the link open, because there's no ongoing connection to push through. There is now an opt-in exception — check "Let me pause, adjust, or stop this from my phone" before starting, and you get a second link that does exactly that live, via a small pub/sub relay rather than the link-timestamp mechanic everything else on this site uses. It covers the common case (one person driving, everyone else watching), and now includes flashing a short text message onto every connected screen — the same “wrap it up” nudge Stagetimer sells as a confidence-monitor feature. What it still doesn't cover is a stage manager driving several independent speaker clocks at once, which is closer to what ShareMyTimer or Stagetimer's always-on real-time model is built for.
Which one should you use?
Stagetimer.io is built for professional live events — conferences, broadcast production, multi-room speaker management — and prices accordingly ($17.50–35/mo for real usage). If that's your job, it's the right tool.
ShareMyTimer is the right choice if you specifically need live pause/resume/adjust pushed to everyone mid-session, or its OBS/Zoom/Meet integrations, and you're fine with device limits on the free tier or a $6/mo subscription to raise them.
Leaderboarded's headline feature — display the countdown full-screen on the class board and drive it from your phone — is no longer something CountLink can't do at all, but Leaderboarded's version is on by default and covers more than a plain countdown. If you want that polish out of the box, or need saved boards and branding, Leaderboarded is the better fit; their free plan covers everyday use but caps saved boards at two, and custom colours/branding start at $19/month. CountLink's phone control is a checkbox you tick before starting, not an account-backed feature — no signup, but also nothing saved between sessions.
CountdownShare is aimed at countdowns embedded in web pages and marketing email, including animated GIF countdowns that run inside an inbox — a use case CountLink doesn't cover at all. Removing their watermark and keeping unlimited timers are Pro features.
CountLink is the right choice for the common case: you know the duration ahead of time, you want to share it with any number of people for free, forever, and you don't want to think about device limits, accounts, or whether a server might hiccup mid-session.
A note on the “not published” cells above: CountdownShare and Leaderboarded don't state every free-tier limit publicly, and rather than guess, this table says so. Everything that is stated was read off each company's own site (ShareMyTimer re-checked August 2026, the rest in July 2026). Pricing and limits change — check the source before relying on any of it.
A few more tools in this space
The five above aren't the whole market — three more worth knowing about, checked briefly rather than to the same depth as the table (verified against each site August 2026, not fact-checked line by line):
Until.at is the closest match to CountLink's opt-in phone control — start a countdown on your phone, display it full-screen elsewhere. The mechanism is different, though: it's built around a downloadable app and a join code rather than a plain link, so it's a heavier setup for the same idea.
GoTimer is worth a look specifically for OBS — it's a dedicated, URL-configurable overlay with pre-built scenario links (starting soon, BRB, raid countdown) and no signup or watermark, purpose-built for streaming in a way a general-purpose shared timer isn't.
TimerLink covers similar ground to CountLink and ShareMyTimer (events, meetings, streams) but is account-based — a dashboard to manage multiple timers, password-protected links, no credit card to start but a free-tier structure that implies paid plans above it. If you want a saved timer library and don't mind an account, that's the trade-off; CountLink has neither the dashboard nor the account requirement.
Setting the time on the display itself
One thing CountLink does that the big general-purpose timer sites don't: the countdown display is also the control. Click or tap a pair of digits on the split-flap board and arrows appear over them; you can also type the time straight in like a microwave keypad, scroll over a unit, drag it on a touchscreen, or paste a duration such as 1:30:00 or 90m. Rolling the minutes past 59 grows an hours pair in automatically.
For comparison, the two largest free timer sites both use a read-only display and put the controls elsewhere on the page: on vClock the countdown is a plain text element with no editable or spin-button behaviour, and online-stopwatch.com likewise exposes no editable field on its display, with durations chosen from separate preset pages. Both were checked directly in the page's own markup in August 2026; the five products in the table above were not re-checked on this specific point, so treat this as a note about those two sites rather than a claim about the whole market.
Once a countdown is running the board locks — the controls are removed from the page entirely, so nobody opening your shared link can change what the room is looking at. It becomes settable again once the countdown finishes.