Time Off Management Software: 12 Tools Compared
Time off management software compared: all-in cost at 5, 15, 25, and 50 employees, which minimums bite, and standalone tools vs HR suites.
Most comparisons of this category quote a per-employee rate and move on. That rate is close to meaningless below about fifteen people, because more than half the products here carry a minimum charge, a base fee, or a seat floor, so a small team ends up paying on the vendor's terms rather than its own.
This page compares twelve tools across three genuinely different product types, then models what each one actually bills at 5, 15, 25, and 50 employees with every minimum included, so you can see what a team your size would really pay. Pricing verified September 2026.
The numbers are stark once you do the arithmetic. A five-person business pays $50 a month for a tool advertised at $2 per user, or $250 a month for one advertised at $10 per employee. Two other products cost that business nothing at all.
None of this arithmetic appears in a features table, yet it is the difference between a sensible purchase and a bill five times larger than it needed to be.
Three kinds of product, one search term
Every product here handles requests, approvals, and balances. What differs is how much else comes with it, and that decides both the price and how long you spend setting it up.
| Dedicated tool | Scheduling combo | HR suite module | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | One job, done properly | Time off attached to a roster | Time off inside a wider platform |
| Typical price per employee | About $1 to $2 | Flat or per location, sometimes free for a small team | About $8 to $10, or bundled |
| Also gives you | Very little else | Shifts, time clock, messaging | Records, payroll, reporting, org chart |
| Time to first request | Same day | About a week | Weeks |
| Buy it when | Time off is the only broken process | You are already scheduling shifts | You need the rest of the suite anyway |
| Skip it when | You already own a suite that does this | Your team has no shifts to schedule | Time off is genuinely all you need |
The mistake worth avoiding is buying up a level. An HR suite will absolutely manage time off, and it will also ask you to configure employee records, permissions, and an org structure before it does. If the problem is that nobody knows their balance, that is a solved problem for a dollar an employee.
12 time off tools at a glance
All twelve tools are grouped by type, then sorted by entry price within each group, with flat and per-location plans ahead of per-user ones. The last column is the one to read first if your team is small.
| Product | Type | Priced by | Entry price | Free plan | Also tracks hours | Minimum or base fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LeaveBoard | Dedicated time off | Per employee | About $1.13/employee | |||
| Timetastic | Dedicated time off | Per user | $1.50/user | |||
| Calamari | Dedicated time off | Per employee, modular | $2/employee | |||
| Vacation Tracker | Dedicated time off | Per active user | $2/user | |||
| Homebase | Scheduling combo | Per location | $24/location | |||
| Connecteam | Scheduling combo | Flat per hub | $29/hub | |||
| Buddy Punch | Scheduling combo | Per user plus base | $4.99/user plus $19 | |||
| Deputy | Scheduling combo | Per user | $6.50/user | |||
| Gusto | HR suite module | Base plus employee | $49 plus $6 | |||
| Factorial | HR suite module | Per user, quoted | From $8/user | |||
| Rippling | HR suite module | Modular, quoted | From $8/employee plus $40 | |||
| BambooHR | HR suite module | Per employee | $10/employee |
How we evaluated these tools
We evaluated for a US small business, where whoever approves leave also does several other jobs, and applied the same four tests to all twelve tools.
Dedicated time off tools
Dedicated tools are built to do one job. If your only broken process is leave, this group solves it for roughly a dollar or two an employee and asks almost nothing of you in return.
LeaveBoard is the cheapest credible route out of a spreadsheet. Nine employees free covers a great many businesses outright, and the paid rate above that cap is the lowest here, so a team crossing ten people pays about $11 a month on annual billing rather than facing a step change. Requests, approvals, balances, and a shared absence calendar all work as expected.
It is a smaller product than the better-known names and the depth reflects that: reporting is basic, the integration list is short, and complicated accrual arrangements are handled less flexibly than by tools built around accrual. For a business with a straightforward policy that wants balances to stop being a guess, none of that matters much. For one juggling several leave types across states, it will.
Timetastic is the clearest example on this page of pricing that behaves the way buyers expect: $1.50 per user, no minimum, no base fee, no seat floor. At five employees that is under $8 a month against $50 for Vacation Tracker, and the gap is narrowest around twenty-five people.
The product itself is deliberately narrow, built around a shared calendar of who is off and a request flow that takes seconds. Narrow is the trade: the Business and Pro plans are leave and nothing else, accruals need Pro, and scheduling and a time clock arrive only on the Rota and Time Clock plan at $5.50 per user. There is no payroll module.
Timetastic has no permanent free plan, only a 30-day trial, which makes it a poor fit for a five-person team that could use a free tier instead. The vendor is UK-based, and its pricing page switches currency by visitor location, showing pounds in the UK and Ireland and dollars elsewhere, so confirm you are reading the dollar figures.
Vacation Tracker puts requests and approvals where the work already happens. Employees request leave in a chat message, managers approve from a notification, and the team sees who is away without opening another application. For a remote team, removing the extra tool from the loop is genuinely the difference between a process people follow and one they forget.
The $50 monthly minimum is the thing to weigh. On monthly billing, any team under twenty-five users pays it in full, so a product advertised at $2, spread across a five-person business, costs $10 a head. The Complete plan, which holds the accrual policies, raises the floor to $100.
Above twenty-five people the minimum stops binding and Vacation Tracker's pricing becomes competitive. The product is also chat-first by design, so a workforce without Slack, Teams, or Google Workspace loses the main reason to choose it.
Calamari sells its capabilities as separate modules, which means you can buy leave management alone at $2 an employee and add time and attendance or core HR later without migrating to a different product. For a business that knows leave is the immediate problem but expects clock-in to follow, that path is worth something concrete.
The ten-employee minimum is the catch at the small end: a five-person team buys ten seats and pays $20. There is no free plan and the trial runs fourteen days. Each module is separately priced, so a business that eventually wants leave, attendance, and records is paying three line items and should compare that total against a suite rather than against the entry rate.
Time off inside a scheduling platform
For hourly and shift businesses, leave and the roster are the same problem: an approved day off is a hole in Saturday. These products treat them together, and for that audience buying them separately makes little sense.
Homebase charges per location rather than per person, which at these headcounts is the most consequential pricing fact on this page. Fifty employees at one address cost exactly what fifteen cost, so the bill does not move as you hire. Time off sits alongside the schedule, so an approved day is already reflected when the manager builds next week.
The tiers matter more than the headline price. Time off requests and availability start on Essentials at $24 a location, while PTO policies that track accruals and balances, blackout dates, and advance-notice rules need Plus at $56. The free Basic plan covers scheduling and time tracking for up to ten employees but no time off requests at all.
The model inverts across sites: you pay the full location fee again for each one regardless of headcount there, so five small sites cost five times over. As a pure leave tool it is more product than you need, and a business with no shifts to schedule is buying a scheduling platform for its leave module.
Connecteam is the strongest free offer here for a deskless team: every hub is free up to ten users, with only a few advanced items such as payroll integration and API access held back. Requests come through a mobile app built for staff who have no work email address.
Above ten users, Connecteam's $29 flat fee covering thirty users works out to about $1.16 a head at twenty-five people and under a dollar at thirty. Annual billing is charged as ten months rather than twelve, which is where the annual discount comes from.
The structure to understand is the hub. Time off sits in the HR & Skills hub with documents and training, scheduling and time tracking sit in the Operations hub, and communication has a third, so a shift business wanting leave and the roster together pays two base fees. As with Homebase, a desk-based team with no shifts is buying a workforce platform to get a leave module.
Deputy is the most compliance-mature option in this group. Leave, availability, and the roster interact properly, so an approved absence updates coverage rather than sitting in a separate list, and the platform handles break rules and overtime thresholds that the cheaper schedulers approximate. For a business where a mishandled absence creates a legal exposure rather than an inconvenience, that depth is what the premium buys.
Deputy is also the most expensive scheduling option here for pure leave management. At twenty-five employees Core is about $163 a month against $29 for Connecteam's HR & Skills Basic, and that gap only pays off if the compliance and forecasting features get weekly use. The $30 minimum on monthly plans binds below five users, HR is a separately priced add-on, and analytics costs extra below the Pro plan.
Buddy Punch handles the case where leave accrues from hours worked rather than from a fixed annual allowance, which is common in hourly businesses and handled badly by tools designed around a salaried leave year. Accruals sit on the same record as the punch, so the balance reflects what somebody actually worked, and clock-in verification through facial recognition, QR codes, and geofencing is the strongest here.
The $19 monthly base fee lands hardest on the smallest teams: at five employees it is 43 percent of the bill. There is no free plan and the trial runs fourteen days.
Buddy Punch's tiers also hold back several features. QR codes and geofencing start on Pro, scheduling costs extra on Starter, and real-time GPS costs extra on Starter and Pro, so a business wanting leave, scheduling, and verification together pays well above the entry rate. If accrual is a simple annual allowance, cheaper tools cover it.
Time off inside an HR suite
HR suites are not time off products. Each is a platform, often called an HRIS (human resources information system), where time off is one module among many, which makes these suites excellent value if you need the rest and poor value if you do not.
Gusto is payroll software with time off tracking included rather than a leave tool with payroll attached, and that ordering shapes the decision entirely. Approved leave is already inside the system that runs the pay cycle, so paid time off is costed correctly and payout at termination is handled without moving data between products. Pricing is published on Gusto's own site, so the model below uses list rates.
As a leave purchase alone it is the wrong shape: roughly ten times what Timetastic charges at five employees. The $49 base fee dominates small bills; it was $40 before an increase during 2025.
Gusto makes sense when payroll is on your list this year. Then the marginal cost of time off is effectively zero, and buying a separate tool creates two records of who is away. If payroll already works elsewhere, you can skip Gusto.
BambooHR is the most complete HR platform in this comparison and time off is included at every tier rather than sold as an add-on. Requests, approvals, balances, and reporting sit alongside employee records, onboarding, and performance, so there is one source of truth about people rather than several. For a company that has outgrown spreadsheets across the board, that consolidation is the point.
The flat rate below twenty-six employees is where small buyers get caught. A five-person team pays $250 a month, which is $50 an employee for a capability available elsewhere for a dollar.
Above twenty-five employees, BambooHR's published per-employee rates apply, with automatic volume discounts as headcount grows. Buying it just to manage leave is the clearest example on this page of buying up a level.
Factorial has the strongest mobile experience of the suites here, which matters more for leave than for most HR functions: requests are made and approved on phones, often away from a desk. The platform covers records, documents, time tracking, and reporting alongside time off, and every plan includes the core toolkit with document sending and e-signature.
Pricing is a tailored quote: Factorial publishes a starting rate of $8 per user a month and builds the plan from the modules you choose, which makes budgeting harder than with the self-serve tools. At that floor a five-person team pays at least $40 a month.
Factorial publishes no free plan, so it is not a route to free leave management. As with the other suites, it only makes sense if you want the platform.
Rippling is the deepest consolidation option here, connecting leave to payroll, benefits, device management, and app provisioning on one employee record. For a company that already wants that stack, time off is a checkbox rather than a procurement exercise, and the data consistency across modules is genuinely better than an integration achieves.
The structural point is that time off is not purchasable on its own. It comes inside Rippling's base HRIS module, so evaluating it means evaluating the whole thing, and a company that only wanted to manage leave ends up pricing a platform. Rippling's own figures set only a floor of $8 per employee a month plus a $40 monthly base fee, so the real number is the one in your quote.
What this costs at 5, 15, 25, and 50
One table, four headcounts, every minimum and base fee included. This is the arithmetic the category rarely publishes and the reason the advertised rates mislead.
| Option | How it is priced | At 5 | At 15 | At 25 | At 50 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LeaveBoard | $13.50 per employee a year, free to 9 | $0 | $17 | $28 | $56 |
| Connecteam HR & Skills Basic | $29 flat per hub, free to 10 | $0 | $29 | $29 | $39 |
| Timetastic | $1.50 per user | $8 | $23 | $38 | $75 |
| Calamari Time Off | $2 per employee, 10-seat minimum | $20 | $30 | $50 | $100 |
| Vacation Tracker Core | $2 per active user, $50 minimum | $50 | $50 | $50 | $100 |
| Homebase Plus | $56 per location | $56 | $56 | $56 | $56 |
| Deputy Core | $6.50 per user | $33 | $98 | $163 | $325 |
| Buddy Punch Starter | $4.99 per user plus $19 base | $44 | $94 | $144 | $269 |
| Gusto Simple | $49 base plus $6 per employee | $79 | $139 | $199 | $349 |
| Factorial | From $8 per user, quoted | From $40 | From $120 | From $200 | From $400 |
| BambooHR Core | $10 per employee, $250 flat to 25 | $250 | $250 | $250 | $500 |
| Rippling | From $8 per employee plus $40 base, quoted | From $80 | From $160 | From $240 | From $440 |
Rippling and Factorial sell on a quote, so each is shown at its starting rate as a floor: Factorial at its published $8 per user, and Rippling at the $8 per employee its blog gives for the base HRIS module, which includes time off, plus the $40 monthly base fee on its small-business page, read October 2026. Homebase is per location, so a second site doubles every column.
Three things fall out of it. Below ten people, two products cost nothing and BambooHR costs $250 a month for the same job. Between fifteen and fifty, the flat and per-location options hold still while per-user bills climb: Connecteam stays at $29 up to thirty users and Homebase at $56 a location, while Deputy passes $160 at twenty-five.
Third, the ordering is not stable. Vacation Tracker looks expensive at five and reasonable at fifty, while Deputy looks reasonable at five and expensive at fifty.
Why minimums decide the small end
Divide each monthly bill by five employees and the advertised rates stop describing anything real.
| Product | Effective cost per employee at 5 | Why the advertised rate does not apply |
|---|---|---|
| LeaveBoard | $0.00 | Free plan covers up to 9 employees |
| Connecteam | $0.00 | Free plan covers up to 10 users |
| Timetastic | $1.50 | No minimum, so the advertised rate is the real rate |
| Calamari | $4.00 | 10-employee minimum, so you buy 10 seats for 5 people |
| Deputy | $6.50 | Annual Core rate applies; the $30 minimum on monthly plans does not bind at 5 |
| Factorial | From $8.00 | Quoted plans start at $8 per user |
| Buddy Punch | $8.79 | $19 base fee is 43 percent of the bill at 5 people |
| Vacation Tracker | $10.00 | $50 minimum charge against $10 of actual usage |
| Homebase | $11.20 | Balances need Plus at $56 a location; the free plan has no time off |
| Gusto | $15.80 | $49 base fee dominates; buys full payroll |
| Rippling | From $16.00 | $40 base fee is half the bill at 5, and the final price comes by quote |
| BambooHR | $50.00 | $250 flat rate applies to any team of 25 or fewer |
What setup actually involves
Vendors in this category advertise setup in minutes. That is broadly true of the software and misleading about the project, because the slow part is not configuration.
| Product type | What you configure | Realistic time to first request | What actually slows it down |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dedicated time off tool | Accrual rules, holiday calendar, approver chain, staff invites | Same day to a few days | Agreeing on the accrual policy internally, not configuring it |
| Scheduling combo | Everything above plus shifts, locations, and how leave interacts with the roster | About a week | Building the first schedule and getting staff to adopt the app |
| HR suite module | Everything above plus employee records, org structure, permissions, and often payroll | Weeks | Data migration and deciding who can see what |
The policy questions are the same whichever product you buy: how much leave accrues and on what schedule, whether unused days carry over and with what cap, how much notice a request needs, who approves whose absence, and what happens to a balance when somebody leaves. Answer these before the trial and the leave settings in any of these tools can be configured in an afternoon.
What happens to a balance when somebody leaves is not purely a policy choice, because several states treat accrued vacation as earned wages that must be paid out at termination. The California Labor Commissioner, for one, holds that earned vacation vests (becomes the employee's to keep) as the work is performed and must be paid at the final rate of pay when employment ends.
Dwight SchruteSales3 people
Darryl PhilbinWarehouse1 person
Kelly KapoorCustomer Service1 personPTO schedule: the three shapes an accrual rule takes
A PTO schedule is the shape of the accrual rule, and there are only three common ones. A flat annual grant on a fixed date. An amount that accrues each pay period, which prorates a mid-year hire automatically. And an hourly rate, where a set number of hours worked earns one hour of leave.
The hourly shape is also the one state sick leave laws use. California's paid sick leave rules set a floor of one hour for every 30 hours worked. They also require the available balance to appear on the pay stub or in a written statement issued the same day, and records of hours earned and used to be kept for three years.
The shape decides which tools fit. Buddy Punch is built for the hourly version, since accruals sit on the same record as the punch. The dedicated tools and the free plans handle a flat annual grant cleanly and get rigid once tenure tiers, separate sick and vacation banks, or a carryover cap enter the picture.
Phones, overlaps, and blackout dates
Two things decide whether a leave tool survives its first year, and neither appears on a pricing page: whether staff can use it from a phone, and whether it can stop two people booking the same week. Both take ten minutes to check in a trial and are expensive to discover afterwards.
Requesting time off from a phone
A PTO tracker app usually means one specific thing in practice: whether an employee can do this without a laptop. The answer splits three ways across this list. Some products ship a native mobile app, some put the request inside Slack or Teams, and some offer a mobile web page that works without feeling like an app.
What an employee needs on a phone is short. See the balance, submit the request, find out the answer. What a manager needs is shorter still, which is to approve from the notification without opening anything else. Connecteam and Homebase are built for staff with no work email at all, Factorial has the strongest mobile experience among the suites here, and Vacation Tracker moves the whole flow into chat.
Run the awkward test during the trial rather than the easy one. Submit a request from a phone on mobile data, approve it from a different phone, and confirm the balance moved in both places. A desktop demo never exercises that handoff between two phones.
Vacation scheduling: who can be off at the same time
A leave tool answers whether a person has the days left. Vacation scheduling is the other half of the question, which is whether the team can spare them that week. Most products here publish a shared calendar, and for a salaried team of ten that is genuinely enough.
Past that size, three settings are worth asking about by name before the trial ends: a cap on how many people from one team can be away at once, blackout periods around a busy season or a month-end close, and whether the approver is shown the clash at the moment of approving rather than on a calendar somebody has to remember to open.
Ask which of these three settings a product enforces and which it merely displays, because the answer varies more across this list than the feature names suggest.
The verdict by team type
A single ranking assumes every small business has the same problem. Across this audience the right answer changes seven times.
| Your situation | What usually fits | What to avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Under 10 people, simple policy | LeaveBoard free, or Connecteam free if deskless | Anything with a minimum charge; you are paying for absent headcount |
| A salaried team past the free plan caps, leave only | Timetastic at $1.50 with no minimum | HR suites; you are buying a platform to solve one process |
| Distributed team living in Slack or Teams | Vacation Tracker, once past about 25 people | Buying it below 25, where the $50 minimum dominates |
| Hourly staff, one location | Homebase Plus, $56 a location at any headcount | Per-user pricing, which climbs as you hire |
| Deskless crew across job sites | Connecteam, flat at $29 per hub to 30 users | Paying per user for staff who request leave twice a year |
| Shift work with coverage and break rules | Deputy, despite costing several times the alternatives | Cheap tools that treat leave as separate from the roster |
| Buying payroll or an HRIS this year | Gusto or BambooHR, where leave arrives included | A separate leave tool, which creates two records of who is away |
The uncomfortable summary is that the smallest teams are usually served completely by a free plan, and a team that needs leave management alone can stay under $40 a month up to about twenty-five people with LeaveBoard, Timetastic, or Connecteam's HR & Skills Basic hub. Spending more pays off when the same bill also buys a roster, as with Homebase Plus at $56 a location or Deputy, or when it also buys payroll or an HR system, as with Gusto or BambooHR.
Before you choose
FirstHR does not manage time off. There is no request flow, no accrual engine, and no absence calendar, and for those you need one of the twelve tools above. What it covers is the employment record around them: an HR platform for US small businesses handling onboarding, employee files, e-signature, training records, and document management at a flat $98 to $198 a month.
One connection is worth naming before you buy. The leave policy you configure in whichever tool you pick is also a document the employee has to receive, and California, for one, requires an individual written notice that covers paid sick leave.
Each of these products can hold the balance, but whether it also holds a signed acknowledgment that the policy was communicated is a separate question to check. Decide where that acknowledgment lives at the same time you decide where the balance lives, rather than discovering the gap during a dispute.
How to choose time off management software
Five questions settle this, and the first two eliminate most of the market before you open a trial.
Before you commit to an annual plan, run a real request through your two finalists, ideally an awkward one such as a half day or a request that crosses a carryover date. Most of these are free or on trial long enough to allow it, and an awkward request surfaces rigid accrual logic far faster than a feature list does.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is time off management software?
Software that holds your leave policy, accepts employee requests, routes them to an approver, and keeps a running balance for each person, usually with a shared calendar of who is away. It replaces the spreadsheet most small businesses start with, and what it fixes is accuracy rather than effort: a balance calculated the same way every time and visible to the employee.
How much does time off management software cost?
A dedicated tool runs about $1 to $2 per employee a month, so fifteen people costs roughly $15 to $30. Minimums complicate the small end: Vacation Tracker's monthly plans carry a $50 minimum, Calamari requires ten seats, Buddy Punch adds $19, and BambooHR charges a $250 flat rate up to 25 employees. At five employees the effective per-head cost ranges from nothing to $50.
Is there free time off management software?
Yes. Two genuinely free plans cover a very small team: LeaveBoard up to nine employees and Connecteam up to ten users. Homebase's free Basic plan leaves out time off requests, and Vacation Tracker sells only paid plans after its trial. Above roughly ten people these caps run out, but a team of five should exhaust the free tier before paying a minimum designed for a larger buyer.
Should I buy a dedicated time off tool or an HR suite?
Buy the dedicated tool unless you already need the rest of the suite. If leave is the only broken process, a purpose-built tool at $1 to $2 an employee solves it in an afternoon. The calculation flips if you are already buying payroll or an HRIS, where time off arrives included and a separate tool means two sources of truth about who is away.
Does time off software integrate with payroll?
It depends on the type. Time off inside a payroll platform needs no integration, since approved leave already sits where the checks are cut. Scheduling platforms and larger dedicated tools generally offer named connectors. The smallest tools often offer an export rather than a sync, which matters if you regularly pay out accrued balances.
How long does time off software take to set up?
A dedicated tool can be live the same day, a scheduling platform takes about a week, and an HR suite takes weeks. The variable is rarely the software. What slows things down is the policy work: accrual rate, carryover, notice period, and approver chain. Teams that arrive with those written down configure any of these products quickly.
Do small businesses have to track time off by law?
There is no general federal requirement to offer paid time off. The Department of Labor states that the Fair Labor Standards Act does not require payment for time not worked, leaving vacation and sick pay to agreement.
Once you do offer it, record-keeping obligations arrive. Several states and cities require paid sick leave with specific accrual and carryover rules and require you to show balances to employees. Some states treat accrued vacation as earned wages payable at termination. A business in more than one state may be under more than one set of rules.
Can I manage time off in a spreadsheet instead?
For a handful of employees on a simple policy, yes, and many businesses do it for years. It breaks predictably: nobody knows their balance without asking, two people book the same week unnoticed, and the record lives in one file on one machine. A tracking spreadsheet delays the purchase rather than removing the need for it.
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