A world clock online is a web tool that shows the current time in several cities or countries side by side, updating automatically and adjusting for daylight saving time so the numbers stay correct without any manual input. If you only need to glance at a handful of cities once in a while, almost any of the tools below will work — the real differences show up when you need to save an unlimited list of cities, find a meeting slot that works across time zones, or embed a live clock on your own website.
Four tools cover nearly every real situation you'll run into: timeanddate.com's Personal World Clock for a saved, shareable city list; World Time Buddy for scheduling calls across zones; 24timezones.com for embedding a clock widget on your own site; and vClock for a fast, no-login glance at a few cities. The comparison below breaks down exactly which one fits which use case.
The 4 Free World Clock Tools, Compared
Tool | Multiple / unlimited cities | Meeting planner | Sharing & embedding | Saves your settings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
timeanddate.com Personal World Clock | Unlimited, reorder by city, country, or local time | Separate Meeting Planner tool included | Unique bookmarkable/shareable URL per clock list | Free account saves your list across devices |
World Time Buddy | Yes, shown as side-by-side hour columns | Built in — hover/slide across columns to find overlap | No embed widget; calendar integrations (Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, Gmail) | Free sign-up saves cities and settings |
24timezones.com | Yes, plus a time zone map view | Not a dedicated scheduling feature | Embeddable HTML clock widget for any city, multiple per page | No account needed for basic use |
vClock World Clock | 40+ cities, several displayed at once | Not offered | No sharing or embedding | No login required |
In short: pick timeanddate.com if you want a permanent, saved list of cities you check often; pick World Time Buddy if the point is actually booking a call that works for everyone; pick 24timezones.com if you need a live clock showing on your company website; and pick vClock if you just need to check a few cities' times right now with zero setup.
4 Real World Clock Tools You Can Use Today
timeanddate.com — Personal World Clock lets you add as many cities as you want and sort the list by city name, country, or local time, which matters once you're tracking more than five or six locations. It automatically reflects daylight saving time changes everywhere in the list, so you never have to remember which regions just switched. Each personal clock list gets its own unique URL you can bookmark or share, and creating a free account lets you save that list and pull it up again from any device.
World Time Buddy combines a world clock, a time converter, and a meeting scheduler into one view built around side-by-side hour columns for each city. Slide or hover across the row and every column updates together, so you can see instantly which hour works for all your locations at once — it's the fastest way to find a meeting slot without doing offset math. It's free to use, works as a browser page, mobile app, or browser extension, supports a 12h/24h toggle, and a free sign-up (Google, Facebook, or email) saves your city list and syncs with Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, and Gmail.
24timezones.com pairs a world clock with a time zone map so you can compare several cities' current time at a glance. Its standout feature is the embeddable HTML clock widget: you can drop a live, ticking clock for any city directly onto your own website's HTML, and you can place more than one widget on the same page. That makes it the practical pick for a business that wants to show visitors the local time at its office, or the current time in each office if it has more than one.
vClock — World Clock lets you pick from more than 40 cities and display several of them at the same time, with no installation and no login required. The display updates every second and adjusts automatically for daylight saving time, so it's accurate the moment you open it. It doesn't offer any meeting-planning or scheduling features — it's built purely for quickly checking what time it is somewhere else right now.
Which World Clock Fits Your Situation?
Remote teams across time zones
When the goal is finding a meeting slot that doesn't force someone to dial in at midnight, World Time Buddy's column view is built exactly for this: add every teammate's city, then slide across the row until you spot a block of reasonable hours in all of them. Save the city list once with a free account so you're not re-adding the same five cities before every scheduling conversation.
International sales and working with overseas clients
Before you send a cold email or place a call, you need a quick, reliable read on whether it's actually business hours where your contact is. timeanddate.com's Personal World Clock is well suited here because you can build a saved list of every market or client city you deal with and check it in one glance, without re-typing city names each time you need it.
Keeping in touch with family or friends abroad
Nobody wants to be the relative who calls at 3am by mistake. For this, vClock's no-login, glance-and-go format is the least friction: pick the one or two cities you actually care about, and it just works without an account or a saved list to manage.
Adding a world clock to your own company website
If you want visitors to see your office's local time — useful on a Contact or About page, especially if you have more than one location — 24timezones.com's embeddable widget is the only one of the four built for that, since it drops a live clock directly into your site's HTML. If you're weighing whether to add a clock widget like this to your own site, this is exactly the kind of small UX detail Mihata handles when building or refreshing a company website, alongside the SEO and hosting setup.
Why These Clocks Stay Accurate Even After You Close the Tab
None of these tools run a local timer that just keeps counting in the background. Instead, every time the page loads, it calculates each city's displayed time fresh from a reference time (UTC) plus that city's current offset — which is also how daylight saving time gets applied automatically, since the tool simply switches which offset it adds on the transition date. That's why closing the tab and reopening it hours or days later still shows the correct time instead of a stale, drifted one.
The catch is where that reference time comes from: most of these web tools pull it from the viewing device's own system clock. If your computer or phone's date and time are wrong — a dead CMOS battery, a manually mis-set clock, disabled automatic time sync — every city shown will be off by the same amount, even though the tool itself is working correctly. Before anything time-sensitive, like an international meeting, it's worth confirming your device has automatic time sync turned on, and right around a region's actual daylight saving transition date, it's worth double-checking against an official source if precision matters, since not every tool applies the switch at the exact same moment.
A world clock for tracking other places and a personal clock for your own desk or screen solve different problems, and it's worth keeping the two straight. If what you actually want is a clock to leave running in front of you rather than a list of other cities, see our guides to a no-install browser clock you can leave open on a Windows desktop and turning a spare iPad into an always-on desk clock, or try Mihata's free web clock and timer directly.
If you need help choosing or embedding a world clock tool, or with AI and web tooling for your business more broadly, Mihata is happy to help.
FAQ
Is there a free world clock that shows multiple time zones on one page?
Yes. timeanddate.com's Personal World Clock and World Time Buddy both let you add multiple cities to a single view for free, and vClock displays several cities at once with no account needed. All three update automatically and handle daylight saving time without any manual adjustment.
Which world clock tool is best for scheduling meetings across time zones?
World Time Buddy is built specifically for this: its side-by-side hour columns let you slide across the row and instantly see which hours overlap across every city you've added. timeanddate.com also offers a separate Meeting Planner tool for the same purpose, alongside its Personal World Clock.
Can I embed a world clock widget on my own website?
24timezones.com is the one built for this — it provides an embeddable HTML clock widget for any city that you can add directly to your site's code, and you can place multiple widgets on the same page for different offices. None of the other three tools covered here offer an embed option.
Do these world clocks handle daylight saving time automatically?
Yes, all four tools — timeanddate.com, World Time Buddy, 24timezones.com, and vClock — automatically adjust for daylight saving time changes worldwide, so you don't need to manually update anything when a region switches clocks.
Does the time reset or drift if I close the browser tab?
No. These tools don't run a local counter that could drift; every time the page loads, it recalculates each city's time from a UTC reference plus that city's offset, so closing and reopening the tab still shows the correct current time. The main risk is a wrong system clock on your own device, since most of these tools use it as that reference point.