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.
Time Off Management Software Compared
Minimum charges, base fees, and seat floors mean the advertised per-user rate is close to meaningless below about fifteen people, so this compares what twelve tools actually bill a team of 5, 15, 25, and 50
Most comparisons of this category quote a per-employee rate and move on. That rate is close to meaningless below about fifteen people, because half the products here carry a minimum charge, a base fee, or a seat floor that a small team clears on the vendor's terms rather than its own.
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 that appears in a features table, and it is the difference between a sensible purchase and a bill five times larger than it needed to be.
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. Pricing verified August 2026.
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, often free small | 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
Grouped by type, then sorted by entry price within each group. 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 user | About $1/user | |||
| Timetastic | Dedicated time off | Per user | $1.50/user | |||
| Calamari | Dedicated time off | Per employee, modular | About $2/employee | |||
| Vacation Tracker | Dedicated time off | Per active user | $2/user | |||
| Homebase | Scheduling combo | Per location | $24.95/location | |||
| Connecteam | Scheduling combo | Flat per hub | $29/hub | |||
| Buddy Punch | Scheduling combo | Per user plus base | $4.49/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 | About $8/user | |||
| BambooHR | HR suite module | Per employee | $10/employee | |||
| Rippling | HR suite module | Modular, quoted | Quote only |
How we evaluated these tools
We evaluated for a US business of 5 to 50 people, where whoever approves leave also does several other jobs. Four tests, applied identically to all twelve.
Dedicated time off tools
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 users 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 $10 a month 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 the nearest comparable tool, and the gap only closes 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. There is no time tracking, no scheduling, and no payroll module, so this is leave and nothing else. The vendor is UK-based with a US-facing site, and pricing appears in both currencies across its properties, so confirm you are reading the dollar figures. There is 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.
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. Any team under twenty-five users pays it in full, so a five-person business is paying $10 a head for a product advertised at $2, and the Complete plan raises the floor to $100. Above twenty-five people the minimum stops binding and the 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 about $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 about $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 pays exactly what fifteen pays, so the bill does not move as you hire. Time off requests, approvals, and balances sit alongside the schedule, so an approved day is already reflected when the manager builds next week.
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. The free tier is genuinely useful for a small single-location team but limited beyond that, and the deeper HR features sit on the higher tiers. 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: full feature access up to ten users with nothing gated inside the cap. Above that, $29 flat covering thirty users works out under a dollar a head at twenty-five people, which no per-user tool in this comparison approaches, and requests come through a mobile app built for staff who have no work email address.
The structure to understand is the hub. Time off sits with scheduling and time tracking in one hub, communication in another, HR and training in a third, so wanting two means paying two base fees. Annual billing is charged as ten months rather than twelve, which is where the discount comes from. 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.
It 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 Basic, and that gap only repays if the compliance and forecasting features get weekly use. The $30 monthly minimum binds below about five employees, and HR and analytics are separately priced add-ons rather than included.
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 46 percent of the bill. There is no free plan and the trial runs fourteen days. Scheduling and real-time GPS cost extra on the lower tiers, 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
These are not time off products. They are platforms where time off is one module among many, which makes them 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, which is unusual among payroll providers.
As a leave purchase alone it is the wrong shape and roughly forty times the price of the cheapest dedicated tool at five employees. The $49 base fee dominates small bills, and the base rate increased in March. The honest framing is that if payroll is on your list this year, 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, this is not the page section for you.
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, and the rate does not fall until you are large enough for per-employee pricing to beat it. Pricing is otherwise quote-led, with third-party analysis putting most buyers between $12 and $22 all-in per employee. Buying this to manage leave is the clearest example 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 the free tier gives access to documents and e-signature for evaluation.
Pricing is quote-based and the published figures vary widely across aggregators, which makes budgeting harder than with the self-serve tools. The Starter plan for up to ten employees lands around $80 a month, so a five-person team pays $16 a head. The free plan does not include time off, so it is not a route to free leave management. As with the other suites, this 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 is a module on a quote-priced platform, so evaluating it means evaluating the whole thing, and the total lands far above every dedicated option for a company that only wanted to manage leave. Nothing is published, and the figures circulating come from third-party reporting rather than the vendor, so treat them as directional.
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 | About $1 per user, free to 9 | $0 | $15 | $25 | $50 |
| Homebase Essentials | $24.95 per location | $0 | $25 | $25 | $25 |
| Connecteam Basic | $29 flat per hub, free to 10 | $0 | $29 | $29 | $39 |
| Timetastic | $1.50 per user | $8 | $23 | $38 | $75 |
| Calamari Time Off | About $2 per employee | $20 | $30 | $50 | $100 |
| Vacation Tracker Core | $2 per active user, $50 minimum | $50 | $50 | $50 | $100 |
| Deputy Core | $6.50 per user, $30 minimum | $33 | $98 | $163 | $325 |
| Buddy Punch Starter | $4.49 per user plus $19 base | $41 | $86 | $131 | $244 |
| Gusto Simple | $49 base plus $6 per employee | $79 | $139 | $199 | $349 |
| Factorial | About $8 per user, $80 starter to 10 | $80 | $120 | $200 | $400 |
| BambooHR Core | $10 per employee, $250 flat to 25 | $250 | $250 | $250 | $500 |
| Rippling | Quoted, modular | Quote | Quote | Quote | Quote |
Three things fall out of it. Below ten people, three products cost nothing and several cost more than a hundred dollars a month for the same job. Between fifteen and twenty-five, the flat and per-location options pull ahead sharply because they simply stop rising. And 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 users |
| Connecteam | $0.00 | Free plan covers up to 10 users |
| Homebase | $0.00 | Free tier covers time off for a small single-location team |
| 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 | $6.60 | $30 monthly minimum is just cleared at this size |
| Buddy Punch | $8.29 | $19 base fee is 46 percent of the bill at 5 people |
| Vacation Tracker | $10.00 | $50 minimum charge against $10 of actual usage |
| Gusto | $15.80 | $49 base fee dominates; buys full payroll |
| Factorial | $16.00 | $80 starter plan is priced for up to 10 |
| 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 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. That last one is not purely a policy choice, because several states treat accrued vacation as earned wages that must be paid out at termination. Answer these before the trial and any of these tools is configured in an afternoon.
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 |
| 15 to 50 salaried staff, 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 | It below 25, where the $50 minimum dominates |
| Hourly staff, one location | Homebase, free small and about $25 at any size | 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 a business under about ten people is usually served completely by a free plan, and a business under fifty rarely needs to spend more than about $30 a month on this. The products that market hardest in this category are largely priced for a stage past this audience.
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 teams of 5 to 50 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, in several states, acknowledge in writing. Every one of these products holds the balance; none of them holds the signed acknowledgment that the policy was communicated. Decide where that record 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.
A closing note on sequencing: run a real request through your two finalists before committing to an annual plan, 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. Our guide to managing absence at small scale covers what usually goes wrong in the first month.
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 charges $50 regardless of size, Calamari requires ten seats, Buddy Punch adds $19, and BambooHR applies a $250 flat rate to any team of 25 or fewer. At five employees the effective per-head cost ranges from nothing to $50.
Is there free time off management software?
Yes. LeaveBoard is free for up to nine users, Connecteam free with full features for up to ten, and Homebase has a free tier covering time off for a small single-location team. Vacation Tracker offers a free version alongside its paid plans. 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, but record-keeping obligations arrive once you do. 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.