What's the best leave management software for a small business?

Timetastic is a UK-built leave planner that keeps one promise: everyone can see who's off, and everyone's allowance stays straight. People book from the web, the mobile app or chat, the approver gets a notification, and the team calendar updates on the spot. Most companies set it up in an afternoon.

The pricing is the easiest to forecast in this ranking. Business is $1.50 per user a month, Pro $2.50, and Rota & Time Clock $5.50 if you also want shifts and clocking in. At 50 employees, that's $75 on Business or $125 on Pro; at 150, $225 or $375. There's no contract, you pay month to month, and the 30-day free trial is long enough to run a real month of requests. Charities and B Corps get half off.

Where to look closely as you grow: approval chains and department structure. A 40-person company with one approver per team is fine; a 140-person company where a team lead approves and HR confirms needs to check that flow during the trial. Payroll connections are lighter than in a full HR system, so plan on a report for whoever runs payroll.

Tip: build your leave year, carryover cap and holiday calendars before inviting anyone, then import opening balances on the first day of a leave year. You'll never have to explain a half-year correction.

Think of BambooHR as an HR platform first, with time off as one of its most developed modules. You can build accrual rules around length of service, part-time hours and separate employee groups. Employees can look ahead at the balance they'll have on a future date, and HR keeps a record of who approved what. Once you hit the point where leave, onboarding and employee records all hurt at once, many companies land here.

You pay for the platform. Up to 25 employees, Core is a flat $250 a month. Past 25, it's billed per head from $10 on Core and $17 on Pro in the page header ($10.25 and $17.50 per the pricing FAQ), with volume discounts applied automatically. At 50 employees, Core comes to about $500 a month; at 150, about $1,500 before volume discounts. Payroll, benefits administration and time tracking are add-ons quoted on request, so the full bill is only known after a sales call.

Buyers who leave reviews like how tidy the screens are and how far the leave rules go. What they grumble about: the bill, extras they assumed were part of the base plan, and reports that need tweaking before they show what HR wants.

Tip: set up accrual policies by employee group from day one, not one policy for everyone with exceptions. It's the difference between a clean year-end and a week of manual fixes.

Vacation Tracker works where your team already talks. Requests, approvals, balance checks and daily "who's out" summaries happen inside Slack or Microsoft Teams, with calendar sync. For a distributed team, it fixes the problem that kills most leave tools: people forgetting to open them.

Read the pricing twice. Core is $2 per user a month with a $50 monthly minimum, and Complete is $4 with a $100 minimum. Automatic accruals, which most companies with monthly PTO need, are only on Complete. At 50 employees, that's $100 on Core or $200 on Complete; at 150, $300 or $600. Below 25 people on Core, or 25 on Complete, you're paying the minimum, not the per-user price. Yearly billing takes 10% off.

Once on Complete, accrual rates, carryover and custom leave types are handled well. The payroll side is lighter: expect to export reports for your payroll provider rather than a live sync.

Tip: companies that grant one lump of days every January don't need accruals at all, which means the $2 plan covers them. Rebuild your real policy in the 14-day trial and let it decide the plan for you.

Factorial is an all-in-one HR platform from Barcelona with a growing US presence. Leave is handled inside the same module as hours and shift planning, so a request, its approval and the remaining balance all show up next to the timesheet, on desktop or in the mobile app. Buyers like having leave and hours in one place instead of two tools.

The pricing is hard to plan around. The page starts at $8 per user a month, but plans are built after a demo and modules are added on top of Core. At 50 employees, that's at least $400 a month before modules; at 150, at least $1,200. The real number only comes with the quote, and buyers report that the entry price rarely matches the final bill once connectors and modules are in.

The most serious complaints are about balances over time: some HR managers report they can't reliably rebuild an exact balance after several years of carryover, and others find policy updates slow to arrive. Support is described as slow when your contact changes.

Tip: bring a real employee file to the demo, someone with old carryover and a recent sick leave, and ask the rep to rebuild that balance live. Then insist on a quote where leave and payroll connectors sit on separate lines.

Jibble is first a time tracking tool: employees clock in from a phone, tablet or computer, and managers get timesheets. Its free plan is free for good, with unlimited users, which makes it the cheapest way to put a time clock and simple leave requests in one place for an hourly crew.

At 50 or 150 employees, the free plan still costs $0, which no other tool here can say. The catch is on the leave side. Accruals are in Jibble's feature list, but the free plan doesn't clearly say they're included. If balances have to grow on their own each pay period, get the vendor to name the plan that does it, in writing, before you roll out the free tier.

For a team that needs "who's off" visibility and a clean record of requests, the free plan works. For accurate PTO balances with carryover across 100 people, a dedicated tracker is safer.

Tip: a common setup for hourly crews is Jibble free for clocking in plus a paid tracker for balances. It often costs less than a single platform that does both.