Attendance Tracker

Track Google Meet attendance without a Chrome extension

Your attendance extension stopped working again — or your school blocks extensions entirely, or you're on Firefox, Safari, or a managed Chromebook. Here's how to track Meet attendance the way Google actually intends: with an official add-on, no extension required.

Why attendance extensions keep breaking

Almost every "Meet attendance" Chrome extension works the same way: it scrapes Google Meet's web page, reading participant names out of whatever HTML the People panel happens to render today. That design carries three structural problems:

• Meet's UI changes; the scraper doesn't know. Google updates the Meet interface constantly. Each unannounced change to a class name or panel layout can silently blank an extension's roster mid-semester — usually discovered when the report you needed comes out empty.
• Chrome-only, one machine only. An extension lives in one browser profile. Switch to Firefox or Safari, borrow a laptop, or open Meet on a device where you can't install extensions, and your tracking is gone.
• Broad permissions, thin review. A scraping extension typically needs permission to read and modify the pages you visit — a wide grant for an attendance list, and precisely the category of access many school and company IT policies (reasonably) refuse to approve.

What an official Meet add-on is instead

Google Meet has a first-party add-on framework: apps published on the Google Workspace Marketplace that open inside Meet's own Activities panel. Attendance Tracker is one of them. Because it's part of Meet rather than bolted onto the browser:

• Attendance comes from the Meet REST API — the same participant data Google records — not from reading pixels or DOM nodes.
• It follows your Google account, not a browser install. Any machine, any supported browser: Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari — and Chromebooks, including school-managed ones where admins block extensions.
• It went through Marketplace review with narrow, Meet-specific OAuth scopes an admin can read and approve, and it's installable (or domain-deployed) from the Marketplace like any other Workspace app.
• Data survives the meeting: reports auto-export at meeting end, and with Pro, server-side Auto-Capture records meetings you hosted even when the panel was never opened — something a browser extension, which only exists while its tab does, cannot do.

Extension vs. official add-on, side by side

Setup: tracking attendance in three steps

1. Install once from the Google Workspace Marketplace. No browser restart, nothing added to Chrome.
2. Open it in Meet. In any meeting, click the Activities icon and choose Attendance Tracker. The side panel shows a live roster — Present, Late, Absent, and Guests — and can match participants against a Class Roster imported from Google Classroom. The panel is localized in 60 languages.
3. Export. Download an instant CSV (opens in Excel) or PDF report, send it to Google Sheets, or grab Moodle/Canvas gradebook CSVs. If the panel was open, the report also exports automatically when the meeting ends.

Frequently asked questions

My attendance extension stopped working — can this recover its data?

No. When a scraping extension misses a meeting, that data was never captured, and no tool can reconstruct it afterward. What switching gets you is that it doesn't happen again: the add-on's API-based tracking doesn't depend on Meet's UI staying still.

Does it work on a free Gmail account?

Yes — on personal Gmail meetings, the host tracks. In Workspace organizations, non-hosts like TAs and co-hosts can also track after a Workspace admin enables a one-time delegation at attendancetracker.dev/setup.

Is it free?

The core is free: live roster, Class Roster with Classroom import, PDF reports, per-session Moodle/Canvas exports, 2 exports a month across Google Sheets, CSV, or binary Excel (for classes up to 25 attendees, plus 1 large-class grace export), and Meeting History. Pro ($14.99/year Educator Pass, $4.99–$7.99/year regional, or a one-time $29 Lifetime Pass, $9.99–$19 regional) adds unlimited exports, hands-free Auto-Capture, semester gradebook exports, verifiable PDF certificates, and Slack/Google Chat/Discord digests.

How does it compare with the extensions people actually use?

We keep an honest feature-by-feature rundown in our extension comparison guide — including where a simple extension is genuinely enough.