If it's your job to schedule and manage shifts, you know what a headache it can be. Staffing every position adequately while avoiding high labor costs can feel like an impossible task—and that's before you factor in last-minute absences and shift-swapping.
There are dozens of tools out there to make your job easier. Gone are the days of manually updated spreadsheets or handwritten schedules pinned to bulletin boards: employee scheduling apps help you schedule workers quickly and more efficiently. The best solutions keep you and your team organized, let employees handle shift-swapping on their own, and show you whether your labor costs align with your budget.
I spent several weeks testing dozens of employee scheduling apps against rigorous criteria. In this article, I'll present my five top picks to help you decide which tool is right for your organization.
The 5 best employee scheduling apps
- Deputy for making more intelligent staffing decisions
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Homebase for prioritizing employees
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Planday for businesses with multiple departments or locations
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Sling for day-to-day employee management
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ZoomShift for a minimalist and easy-to-use app
What makes a great employee scheduling app?
How we evaluate and test apps
All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.
Every business's scheduling needs are different, but all great employee scheduling software has a few things in common:
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Ease of use for managers. The platform should have intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces that make it easy to schedule employees and make changes as your staffing needs evolve. The best apps are complex enough to handle businesses with multiple roles, departments, and locations—so you can see at a glance if essential jobs are being covered. And the app gets bonus points if it offers advanced features like auto-scheduling, payroll, and applicant tracking.
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Ease of use for employees. All good employee scheduling apps are functional on the employees' side, too. They should have a mobile app that lets your staff see their upcoming schedules, swap or pick up shifts, and put in time-off requests. And of course, push notifications from a mobile app make sure employees are kept in the loop about last-minute schedule changes.
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Integrations and exporting. Scheduling is directly tied to other business-critical HR processes, like processing payroll and approving time off. And when you onboard a new employee, all of their information should be readily available in your scheduling app. That's why top employee scheduling apps feature robust integrations and import/export functions. Exporting also helps keep labor costs in line with your budget and projections, since you can't tell if you're spending too much on staffing unless you compare those costs with data from other sources.
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It's available as a stand-alone app. If you're looking for employee scheduling software, odds are good that you need a lightweight scheduling solution—not broad (and expensive) HR software. Many of the best employee scheduling apps come as stand-alone tools that are relatively inexpensive.
When reviewing these apps, I signed up for each one, added multiple employees and roles, and created a few sample schedules. I paid attention to ease of use on the manager's side and the employee's side, as well as any important features like templates, integrations, leave requests, and in-app messaging. Based on all that testing, here are my picks for the best employee scheduling platforms.
Best employee scheduling app for making more intelligent staffing decisions
Deputy (Web, iOS, Android)
Deputy is an all-in-one employee scheduling, timesheets, tasking, and communication platform. Getting started with Deputy is fairly straightforward: when you sign up, the app prompts you to either add new employees manually or bulk import them from another source, like a spreadsheet.
Adding a new shift is also pretty simple: just click the plus sign on the schedule, which you can view by employee or by role. Once you've filled out a shift's details, you can either schedule it or select from a list of helpful options, like repeating the shift tomorrow or for the rest of the week. After testing several scheduling apps, I was thankful for any small feature like this that saved me time scheduling multiple shifts at once.
Deputy's real strength, however, is that it offers several features that can help you make smarter staffing decisions. Its robust reporting features make it simple to analyze staffing data, like how sales volume correlates with the number of employees on hand at any given time.
The auto-scheduling feature can also incorporate historical data and data from third-party sources to determine how certain factors—like the weather, time of day, or major events like holidays—impact your business. It then takes these factors into consideration when automatically generating schedules, so you always have an ideal number of staff on hand. These features make it a good choice for businesses that want to schedule employees more efficiently but who lack the skills or time to analyze scheduling trends themselves.
Deputy also has more integration options than almost every other tool on this list, making it easy to connect your staffing solution to the rest of your tech stack. And if your chosen tool isn't on the list, Deputy's integration with Zapier lets you can create automated workflows with thousands of popular apps.
Deputy pricing: Free plan available for 100 shifts and timesheets per month, a time clock, leave management, and 24/7 support. Paid plans start at $4.90/user/month for features like auto-scheduling, labor forecasting, and robust reporting.
Best employee scheduling app for prioritizing employees
Homebase (Web, iOS, Android)
Homebase's intuitive, drag-and-drop interface is a great option if you need an app that's easy to learn. Easily drag and drop shifts, copy to other days, and duplicate schedules with a click. Homebase also allows you to easily group employees into departments and view the schedule according to role, which is especially helpful for businesses like restaurants that need to see whether they have enough back-of-house staff versus front-of-house staff on the schedule.
Where Homebase really shines, however, is the special attention it gives to prioritizing your employees. From the moment you sign up, you're shown a preview of what the employee experience looks like using the app. The well-designed mobile app lets staff easily trade, find cover for, and claim open shifts. In-app team messaging also simplifies the process of managing their own schedules.
Homebase boasts many HR features like applicant tracking (with job board integrations), break and overtime compliance for your state, and safety screening processes. And Homebase's Enterprise plan functions as an all-in-one HR tool, offering onboarding tools, employee documentation, and advanced compliance processes as well.
Homebase also offers several native integrations with point-of-sale (POS) systems. If your business relies on POS terminals, you probably already know that they can be an invaluable source of data about customer traffic. With native integrations to common POS systems like Square, Toast, and Clover (and even industry-specific tools like Bevspot), you can make sure that your staffing decisions are backed by real data about when you do the most business.
These integrations also mean you only need to add or delete employees in one system, and the change will sync with the other tool—a huge plus if, like many retailers and restaurants, you hire additional staff seasonally or have high turnover.
Homebase pricing: Starts free; paid plans from $24.95/month per location for features like team communication, auto-scheduling, and manager permissions.
Best employee scheduling app for businesses with multiple departments or locations
Planday (Web, iOS, Android)
Planday is a powerful shift scheduling tool for businesses that have multiple locations, departments, or both. The granular hierarchy options built into the platform let you structure employees into groups and departments—and from there, you can use sections, positions, shifts, and shift types to further visualize and organize your employee management.
The scheduling tool contains several views, so managers can easily build a schedule by employee, role, or section. If you need to organize your schedule by categories—like back-of-house and front-of-house, or day shift and night shift—Planday makes it easy.
Other useful features include schedule templates, auto-scheduling, and color coding for quickly pinpointing employees who are over or under their hour limit. Employees can use the Planday app to clock in, swap or pick up open shifts, request time off, and set their available hours.
As I was testing, the only real downside that stuck out to me was the reporting tool. While Planday does let you export customized reports to Excel, there are no fancy dashboards or in-app views of your employee scheduling data.
While Planday is part of the Xero family and therefore plays well with Xero's accounting tools, its other integrations are limited. But you can use Planday's Zapier integrations to connect the app to the rest of your tech stack, like BambooHR or Google Sheets.
Planday pricing: No free plan available. Paid plans start at $2.49/user/month for one location and basic scheduling features; the Plus plan starts at $94.80/month for 20 users, multiple locations, and advanced tools like auto-scheduling and leave management.
Best employee scheduling software for day-to-day employee management
Sling (Web, iOS, Android)
Sling offers all of your basic employee scheduling features, like an intuitive interface, role-based scheduling, and customizable templates. But if you're looking for a tool that prioritizes day-to-day employee management, Sling's thoughtful extras make it a no-brainer.
For example, the Tasks tab lets managers create and attach tasks to shifts, so every employee knows what they're responsible for. Employees can then view all tasks assigned to them on the Tasks tab on their mobile app—or they can click into a shift on the schedule to see attached tasks and subtasks.
To further support a healthy work culture, Sling offers a messaging feature where users can hold group or private conversations. The mobile app makes it easy for employees to swap or pick up shifts, view the company newsfeed, and set their unavailability. And the platform helps managers identify potential "clopening" scenarios (where the same employee closes on Monday and opens on Tuesday, not getting enough rest time between shifts).
Sling pricing: Free plan available for unlimited employees, managers, and locations. Paid plans start at $1.70/user/month for time tracking, templates, and internal messaging.
If you don't need time and attendance tracking (or you have the budget to pay $4/user/month), you may also want to consider When I Work as a good option for day-to-day employee management. The tool offers internal messaging and task lists, along with an intuitive interface, multiple integrations (including with Zapier), and robust reporting.
Best minimalist employee scheduling app that's easy to use
ZoomShift (Web, iOS, Android)
ZoomShift is an excellent choice for managers who want a reliable scheduling app with a minimal learning curve—and who don't need a lot of flashy features. The user interface is one of my favorites of the tools I tested; it was easy to navigate, and it was simple and quick to build a schedule.
Managers can view schedules by calendar, role, team member, location, or in a spreadsheet. You can create shift and schedule templates, export timesheets and payroll data, and make announcements using the public chat feature.
Employees can clock in using their mobile app, desktop device, or a kiosk. They can also set their availability, make time off requests, and swap or pick up shifts easily from the app.
While ZoomShift is lacking some of the advanced features of other tools on this list—like robust reporting and complex hierarchies—it's easy to use and a great choice for businesses that need a simple scheduling solution.
ZoomShift pricing: Plans start at $2/user/month for basic scheduling features and unlimited locations. The Premium plan is $4/user/month for more advanced features like geofencing, customizable role permissions, and preventing early/late clock-ins.
Findmyshift is another easy-to-use option that's very simple to set up, with an intuitive and aesthetically pleasing interface. If your team doesn't use role-based scheduling and instead just needs a simple tool to organize employees' schedules, Findmyshift offers a free plan for up to 5 team members, or you can pay $25 per month for a team of up to 20.
Which employee scheduling software should you choose?
There's a wealth of employee scheduling apps out there, and most of them are fairly similar—which is why it's crucial to know what's most important to your business.
Do you need to track how much you're spending on labor? Deputy is probably the right choice for you. If you're looking for tools that prioritize employees and day-to-day employee management, look no further than Homebase or Sling. On the other hand, you may want to consider Planday if you have multiple locations and customizable scheduling hierarchies would make your job easier. Or do you just need a basic tool that's easy to use? In that case, Zoom Shift might be the best fit.
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This article was originally published in July 2019 by Hannah Herman. The most recent update was in April 2023.