What is the best employee time tracking software in 2026?

Key takeaways:

1. The best employee time tracking software in 2026 depends on the type of workplace: Skello for restaurants, multi-site retail and construction crews, Combo and Agendrix for independent restaurants, Octime and Kelio for healthcare and complex rules, Lucca, Factorial and Eurécia for office teams.
2. For a chain of 6 stores with 25 employees each, the entry-level monthly bill is €594 with Skello (scheduling and time clock billed per location) and €1,035 with Factorial, billed per user in a suite that also covers payroll and hiring.
3. Public prices vary widely: from €2.25 per user for Agendrix’s time module to €6.90 for Factorial, and from €59 to €99 per month and per location at Skello depending on the modules.
4. Since a 2019 ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union, every EU employer must run an “objective, reliable and accessible” system that records each worker’s daily working time.

Picking the best employee time tracking software from a generic top ten usually ends with the wrong tool. An 18-person brasserie and an 18-person accounting firm have almost nothing in common. The first one handles split shifts, last-minute temps and a summer peak at 35 staff. The second one fills in timesheets per client file.

Summary table: which time tracking software for which type of workplace

Why the type of workplace decides the software

Time tracking software receives hours, applies rules to them and passes a result to payroll. Each of those three steps changes from one trade to another.

In a restaurant, hours come from a time clock next to the staff room, with two services a day and an unpaid break in between. In a pharmacy, they follow a rota of night and weekend duty. On a building site, they start from a smartphone at 7:30 am in a car park.

Payroll is the third variable. A restaurant usually sends hours to an outside payroll provider once a month, while a large retail chain feeds an in-house payroll team every week. The export format, the cut-off date and the way corrections are handled after the cut-off all depend on that setup, and they are rarely visible in a sales demo.

Rules change too. French collective agreements set different maximum hours for hospitality and for pharmacies, and construction adds travel allowances that office work never sees. The time tracking software guide covers the features shared by every sector.

Restaurants, bars and hotels: seasonality first

Hospitality piles up constraints: two services a day, unpaid split shifts, temps called the day before, a headcount that doubles between April and September. Skello’s per-location billing stays stable when headcount varies with the seasons.

Skello was built for this ground. Schedules are drawn up per service, a tablet time clock records actual arrivals and the software compares planned and clocked hours at the end of each shift. Collective agreement rules, annualised hours and the choice between paid overtime and time off in lieu can all be configured. Public pricing is flat per location: €59 per month for the time clock, €79 for scheduling and €99 for both, with a 14-day free trial, on Skello’s website.

Combo targets the same customers with separate offers for traditional restaurants, fast food, bakeries and hotels. Its modular Time plan starts at €68 per month and per location, with an optional time clock.

Agendrix, a Quebec-born vendor, bills per user: €3.25 per month for the Essential plan, plus €2.25 for the time and attendance module. Its standout feature in restaurants is tip management, with tips entered in timesheets and shared according to the house rules.

Sector rules, such as the 48-hour weekly ceiling, are detailed in the article on the restaurant collective agreement.

Retail chains: consolidating several sites

In retail, the hard part is not clocking in one store but seeing the whole network. A regional manager wants to compare each store’s staff cost with its sales as soon as schedules are published.

Skello aggregates planned and actual hours from every location in one dashboard, with separate access rights for each store manager. Sunday openings and late-night sales periods are planned in the same place as the usual hours.

Combo also handles multiple locations with comparable per-site billing. It also offers an optional time clock, billed per employee, for networks that want to add this feature.

Pharmacies, clinics and care homes: on-call duty and rotations

Healthcare runs on cycles: multi-week rotations, night duty, weekend on-call, continuity of care whatever happens. The software has to spread hours over a full cycle rather than over a single week.

Octime has a long track record in healthcare and social care, with an Expresso edition aimed at organisations of 25 to 200 employees. Octime offers tailored support, with a quote drawn up after a demo.

Kelio, part of the Bodet group, also handles complex cycles thanks to a highly configurable rules engine. It shows an indicative price from €3.05 excl. VAT per employee per month, excluding time clocks and rollout.

Skello remains a good fit for a mid-sized pharmacy or optician, where the main constraint is the duty rota and the tracking of rest balances.

Construction and field services: clocking in away from the office

In construction, cleaning or maintenance, teams start the day far from any office. Clocking in happens on a smartphone, geolocated at the moment of arrival, and hours have to be tied to a specific site to calculate the margin.

Skello manages missions that group several shifts under one site, with planned versus actual hours. The mobile time clock records the location when the employee clocks in, without tracking them during the day. The mobile time clock app guide explains how it works.

Kelio serves the larger players in the sector, with time clock terminals and a rules engine suited to company agreements. Its rollout is supported and priced on quote, which suits large accounts.

Head offices and firms: self-reported time is enough

For staff working in an office or remotely, a time clock adds little. The need is about timesheets, absences and, in professional firms, time spent per client.

Lucca charges €3.00 excl. VAT per employee per month for its timesheet module, an indicative price for companies above 100 employees. Eurécia starts at €4.20 excl. VAT per employee per month for its Business plan, with a 30-day trial. Factorial lists €6.90 per user per month, in a suite that also covers payroll and hiring.

For this profile, per-employee billing stays the cheapest: a 15-person firm pays €63 excl. VAT per month with Eurécia.

How much time tracking software costs by profile

Below 20 employees per site, the gap is small and depends on the vendor. Factorial’s €6.90 per user comes with a suite that also covers payroll and hiring. Above that threshold, per-location billing stays stable as seasonal hires join the team.

These are entry-level prices published in October 2026, without options or hardware. The best time and attendance software comparison works out the cost over three years, hardware included.

What EU case law requires from employers

In its judgment of 14 May 2019 (case C-55/18), the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Member States must require employers “to set up an objective, reliable and accessible system enabling the duration of time worked each day by each worker to be measured”.

France applies this through a daily count of hours whenever schedules are not collective, with records kept for one year. Failing to keep that count is fined per employee concerned.

In a pay dispute, an employer without usable records has little to oppose to a spreadsheet filled in by the employee. Software that produces signed, time-stamped timesheets changes the outcome of that kind of dispute, whatever the sector.

Frequently asked questions