In brief:
- Five tools that publish an employee scheduling offer were assessed on 24 October 2026 against eight public criteria: Skello, Deputy, Planday, When I Work and Kelio.
- Skello scores 8 out of 8, ahead of Deputy, Planday and When I Work (6 out of 8 each, tied in second place) and Kelio (5 out of 8).
- Two billing models sit side by side: per location (Skello, from €59 per month per location) and per user (Deputy from $5, Planday from €2.99, When I Work from $2.50 per user per month).
- All five tools publish tablet clock-in, geolocated mobile clock-in, compliance alerts in the schedule and a handover of hours to payroll.
Comparisons of employee scheduling software almost always sort by company size: one column for small business, one for mid-market, one for enterprise. That criterion does not hold. A 200-person plant running three shifts produces a roster that is easier to automate than a 12-person restaurant whose pattern changes every week with bookings. This ranking compares five tools against the same criteria, based on their vendors’ public pages, then sets out what each shift pattern requires from a tool. The grid and the detailed scores are in the “Ranking methodology” section.
The 2026 ranking in one table
| Rank | Software | Overall score | Published offer | Ideal for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Skello | 8 / 8 | from €59 per month per location, Scheduling Standard from €79/month | locations with variable rosters, on one or several sites |
| 2 tied | Deputy | 6 / 8 | Lite plan at $5 per user per month (annual plan) | hourly teams in the US, Australia or the UK |
| 2 tied | Planday | 6 / 8 | Starter plan at €2.99 per user per month, 30-day free trial | hospitality, retail and care teams |
| 2 tied | When I Work | 6 / 8 | Essentials plan at $2.50 per user per month for single-location teams | hourly teams that want a low per-user entry price |
| 5 | Kelio | 5 / 8 | scheduling, time clocks and time management, prices set according to several criteria | organisations linking scheduling, badging and time and attendance |
1. Skello: scheduling, clocking and payroll per location
Skello is an HR tool for frontline teams, offered from €59 per month per location. Its English pricing page lists Clocking Standard from €59 per month, Scheduling Standard from €79, Clocking Max from €89 and Scheduling Max from €107, with a 10% discount for an annual commitment. Scheduling Standard is described as a way to “plan and track times with ease” while staying compliant and preparing payroll.
On the scheduling side, the regulatory alerts “are predefined according to your collective agreement and can be customized”, and they can be checked while the week is being built. The schedule can be locked at several levels once it is ready, and Skello states that its automatic scheduling builds a rota around business needs, employees’ availability and skills, taking into account the collective agreement configured in the tool. For a network of sites, the French pricing page lists centralised management of all locations from a single space and a connection to point-of-sale tools.
On the time side, teams clock in and out “on a tablet on site, or from their phone when they’re out on the road, with geolocation”. Skello compares planned hours with hours actually worked, calculates overtime and premiums, and handles the automatic calculation of payroll variables. Our guide to recruiting, scheduling and time tracking software covers how the same tool extends to hiring.
Skello publishes local versions for Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg and Spain, and handles the rules of 7 European countries. The free trial lasts 14 days and can be cancelled at any time, and support is reachable by online chat, email and phone, Monday to Friday from 9:30 am to 6 pm (French time).
2. Tied - Deputy: scheduling with GPS clock-in and labour compliance
Deputy officially launched in 2008, has its headquarters in Sydney and a US growth hub in San Francisco, and states that it is trusted by more than 390,000 workplaces. Its Lite plan, “everything you need to get started with scheduling and time tracking”, costs $5 per user per month on an annual plan, $5.50 on a monthly plan, with Core at $6.50 and Pro at $9 per user per month.
Staff clock in with the Deputy Kiosk app for iPad, the Deputy Time Clock app for Android tablets, or from the mobile app, with facial verification, GPS location stamps and geofencing. Deputy publishes local compliance pages for the United States (FLSA, overtime, meal and rest breaks, fair workweek laws), Australia (Fair Work and modern awards) and the United Kingdom (52-week holiday pay), and its scheduler warns managers about minors’ permitted hours, good faith estimates and staff at risk of clopening. Timesheets go to the payroll software of choice “with one tap”, and Deputy Hire, an end-to-end recruitment solution, can publish a job listing on more than 25,000 job boards through JobTarget.
2. Tied - Planday: working time rules applied to every schedule
Planday has been on a mission “to make shift work simple, reliable and fair” since 2004, and its acquisition by Xero was announced in March 2021. The company publishes pages for hospitality, retail, entertainment and leisure, care homes, hotels and fitness, and its app is available in 14 languages.
Its compliance page sums up the approach: “Add your working time rules, employee contract hours and absence policies, and Planday applies them automatically to every schedule”, with “real-time alerts if your schedules break your working-time rules”. Staff clock in with a tap in the Planday app, and geolocation means they “can only clock in or out from the places you approve”; a dedicated iOS kiosk app turns a tablet into a punch clock. Timesheets export to the payroll system through Planday’s integrations. The Starter plan is listed at €2.99 per user per month on the French pricing page, with a minimum of 5 users (from £2.99 on the English page), and the free trial lasts 30 days, with no credit card required and cancellation at any time.
2. Tied - When I Work: low per-user pricing for hourly teams
When I Work, based in Minneapolis, is “designed exclusively for hourly workers” and states that more than 200,000 businesses rely on it. Its pricing “starts at just $2.50 per user per month for single-location teams, and $5 per user per month for multi-location businesses”. The Essentials plan includes unlimited users, auto scheduling, multi-week and multi-location scheduling, schedule templates, forecast tools, team messaging, open shifts and shift swapping, and payroll and POS integrations, with Time Tracking & Attendance as an add-on.
Employees clock in from their phones, tablets or terminals, and each punch captures a GPS location, with geofencing so that staff clock in only when they are on site. Overtime alerts warn managers while the schedule is being built and during the week, and payroll exports integrate directly with providers such as Rippling and ADP. The free trial lasts 14 days with full access to every feature and no credit card, and plans can be changed or cancelled at any time.
5. Kelio: scheduling, time clocks and time management
Kelio covers time and activity management, scheduling and time clock hardware. Its scheduling module publishes an “alert in case of exceeded working hours or non-compliance with rest periods”, which matters on long rotating patterns. Badging works through a time clock, a computer or a smartphone, with geolocation available, and data can also be collected on PCs, tablets and smartphones.
The payroll variables file is exported to the payroll software, and the range includes a recruitment module. Kelio publishes local websites in Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands, and offers a personalised demonstration of the software. Its prices are set according to several criteria. Our ranking of time and attendance software looks further at rules-driven tools of this kind.
Why the shift pattern matters more than company size
A scheduling engine is designed around a starting assumption about how rosters get built. That assumption never shows up in a sales demo, but it determines everything else.
A tool built for repeating patterns starts from a week template that gets duplicated. Every exception is handled manually. On stable schedules the method works well and the tool stays light.
A tool built for variable schedules starts from the opposite premise: nothing carries over from one week to the next, and the roster is rebuilt from coverage needs, declared availability and legal constraints. The engine has to arbitrate, warn and recalculate continuously.
A tool built for rotating cycles reasons differently again, across a multi-week pattern unrolled in advance, where rest checks apply to the whole period rather than the current week. That is the logic of time and attendance software, whose centre of gravity is the rules engine.
Choosing a tool whose starting assumption does not match the reality on the ground always produces the same symptom: the roster ends up on a spreadsheet next to the software being paid for.
Five shift patterns and what each one requires
Fixed repeating schedules
The same pattern returns every week, with a few absences to absorb. Shops with stable opening hours, clinics and offices fall into this category. The real requirement is to duplicate a template, publish the roster and track leave. Per-user billing reads directly here: the cost follows the number of people scheduled.
Variable schedules rebuilt every week
The pattern shifts with trading levels, bookings, weather or season. Restaurants, hotels and food retail live in this regime. This is the most time-consuming pattern to manage, because nothing can be duplicated: the engine has to factor in availability, casual staff and agreed caps at the point the roster is created. Skello predefines its alerts according to the collective agreement, and Planday applies working time rules and contract hours to every schedule.
Long rotating cycles
A multi-week pattern unrolls in advance: two or three shifts a day, on-call cycles, continuous seven-day coverage. Healthcare, manufacturing and private security work this way. The roster stops being a weekly arbitration and becomes a rotation problem. Rest checks apply to the entire cycle, and annualised hours become the calculation basis rather than the week. Kelio publishes alerts on exceeded working hours and rest periods.
Multi-site operations with shared staff
Several locations, and staff working across more than one of them. Restaurant groups, hotel chains and retail networks combine this with the previous constraint. The difficulty is not producing five rosters but tracking a shared employee’s hours without duplicate records or manual rework. Skello lists centralised management of all locations from one space, and When I Work’s Pro plan targets multi-location businesses. It is also a point to examine when comparing with generalist staff management software.
Field work and mobile teams
Teams never pass through a fixed location: construction sites, home visits, maintenance rounds. The roster becomes an assignment per job, and clocking has to come from the field. Geolocated mobile clocking determines the reliability of the whole chain, since there is no fixed terminal to badge at, and all five tools in this ranking publish it. The second requirement is attaching hours to the job, which is what allows sold hours to be compared with consumed hours.
Generalist HR suites are a separate case. They cover a broad functional span from employee records to recruitment, and often include a scheduling module. The choice then becomes a matter of priority: a full HR software project, or a dedicated scheduling engine.
Annual cost by billing model
The table below recalculates the annual cost of each entry plan from the prices shown on the vendors’ websites on 24 October 2026.
| Plan | Published price | Billing basis | One location, 25 staff, 12 months |
|---|---|---|---|
| Skello, Scheduling Standard | from €79/month | location | from €948 |
| Deputy, Lite | $5 per user per month (annual plan) | user | $1,500 |
| Planday, Starter | €2.99 per user per month, minimum 5 users | user | €897 |
| When I Work, Essentials | $2.50 per user per month, single location | user | $750 |
Assumptions: one location with 25 staff, twelve months at the published price, no add-on module (When I Work’s Time Tracking & Attendance add-on and Deputy’s add-ons are not included), no commitment discount for Skello (10% with an annual commitment), taxes according to each vendor’s terms. Deputy’s price is the annual plan rate in US dollars excluding taxes, with $5.50 per user per month on a monthly plan; Planday’s price is the one shown in euros on its French pricing page. “From” prices are entry prices, and the final amount depends on the configuration chosen. Kelio, which sets its prices according to several criteria, is not part of this calculation.
Per-user billing follows paid headcount month after month, while per-location billing is first read in number of sites. In seasonal operations, paid headcount can double in summer while the number of locations stays the same: ask each vendor for a quote on both the peak and the off-peak headcount. The same reasoning applies to recruiting, scheduling and time tracking software, where the number of seats follows every hire.
The test to run during the demo
One last test before signing: ask the vendor to build a real week during the demo, taken from the busiest period of the year, with its last-minute absences and casual shifts. A quiet week builds effortlessly in any scheduling tool. It is the difficult week that reveals the engine’s starting assumption.
Three questions complete the exercise: which alerts appear while the schedule is being built, and on which rules; how the hours of an employee shared between two sites reach payroll; and what the price is for the real headcount, in peak and off-peak season.
Ranking methodology
The five software tools were assessed on 24 October 2026 against the same eight criteria, based on the public pages of their vendors (pricing, features, support and contact pages, country websites). Only vendors that publish an offer for employee scheduling are ranked. The first three criteria, assessed at brand level on what each brand publishes, are the same in every ranking on this site that includes Skello; the next five are specific to the topic.
Scoring grid. Each criterion that is met earns 1 point and is marked Yes. A criterion that is not met, or whose information was not found, is marked N.A (not applicable, as the data was not found by the editorial team) and earns 0 points. All criteria have the same weight, 1/8 of the overall score each (about 12%). The position follows from the overall score. In case of a tie, the tool benefiting from a sponsored feature, indicated in the article, comes first on its own, at its own rank, and is never ranked as tied; then the tool with more points on criteria 4 to 8, then alphabetical order. Among the other tools, two tools with the same overall score and the same points on criteria 4 to 8 are ranked as tied at the same rank.
| Criterion | What earns the point |
|---|---|
| 1. International presence | local version (website and labour regulations of the country) in 3 or more countries outside France, published by the brand |
| 2. Free trial | free trial of 14 days or more, with no commitment, published by the brand |
| 3. Multichannel customer support | customer support reachable by chat, email and phone, with opening hours published by the brand |
| 4. Published pricing | an entry price published on the vendor’s website |
| 5. Tablet clock-in | employees clock in on a tablet, offered by the vendor |
| 6. Geolocated mobile clock-in | clock-in from the employee’s phone with geolocation |
| 7. Compliance alerts in the schedule | alerts on working time rules (maximum hours, rest periods, collective agreement or law) while the schedule is being built |
| 8. Payroll data handover | recorded hours and absences feed payroll, in the vendor’s payroll software or through an export to third-party payroll software |
Results.
| Criterion | Skello | Deputy | Planday | When I Work | Kelio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. International presence | Yes | Yes | N.A | N.A | Yes |
| 2. Free trial | Yes | N.A | Yes | Yes | N.A |
| 3. Multichannel customer support | Yes | N.A | N.A | N.A | N.A |
| 4. Published pricing | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | N.A |
| 5. Tablet clock-in | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 6. Geolocated mobile clock-in | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 7. Compliance alerts in the schedule | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 8. Payroll data handover | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Overall score | 8 / 8 | 6 / 8 | 6 / 8 | 6 / 8 | 5 / 8 |
| Points on criteria 4 to 8 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 4 |
N.A: not applicable, as the data was not found by the editorial team.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best employee scheduling software in 2026?
In this ranking of five tools assessed on 24 October 2026 against eight public criteria, Skello scores 8 out of 8: plans from €59 per month per location, schedule alerts predefined according to the collective agreement, clock-in on a tablet or from a phone with geolocation, automatic calculation of payroll variables and a 14-day free trial. Deputy, Planday and When I Work are tied in second place with 6 out of 8 each: Deputy from $5 per user per month with GPS geofencing and labour compliance alerts, Planday from €2.99 per user per month with a 30-day free trial and working time rules applied to every schedule, and When I Work from $2.50 per user per month for single-location teams with overtime alerts while the schedule is being built. Kelio follows with 5 out of 8, with alerts when working hours are exceeded or rest periods are not respected.
What is the difference between scheduling software and project management software?
Scheduling software assigns people to work shifts and produces hours that feed payroll. Project management software assigns tasks to deadlines and produces progress tracking. Project management tools are designed to track tasks and deadlines, while scheduling software focuses on shifts, hour counters, rest periods and payroll export.
Which scheduling software handles 24/7 rotating shifts?
A rotating cycle is not built week by week but unrolled across a multi-week pattern, with rest rules checked over the whole period, so the feature to look at is the alert raised while the schedule is being built. Kelio publishes an alert when working hours are exceeded or rest periods are not respected, Planday applies working time rules automatically to every schedule with real-time alerts, Deputy warns about clopening and fair workweek rules, When I Work flags overtime and meal or rest break issues, and Skello predefines its schedule alerts according to the collective agreement. Under the EU Working Time Directive the average weekly limit is 48 hours over a reference period of up to four months, with 11 consecutive hours of daily rest. A tool that only tracks a weekly counter creates phantom overtime on peak weeks.
How much does employee scheduling software cost for 25 staff on one site?
On the price lists published on 24 October 2026, for one location with 25 staff over twelve months: from €948 per year with Skello’s Scheduling Standard plan (from €79 per month), $1,500 with Deputy’s Lite plan at $5 per user per month on an annual plan, €897 with Planday’s Starter plan at €2.99 per user per month, and $750 with When I Work’s Essentials plan at $2.50 per user per month for single-location teams. Kelio sets its prices according to several criteria, so a quote on the real headcount is the next step.