Most "free" scheduling apps are free in one of three ways: free forever with a hard cap on people, free forever with the parts you actually need moved to a paid tier, or a free trial wearing the word free. The difference shows up in week three, when you hire your eleventh employee or go to approve a shift swap.
We checked all seven of these against the vendors' own pricing pages on 18 September 2026, because the roundups that currently rank for this search are wrong about half of them. Two of the apps most often listed as free, When I Work and Deputy, have no free plan at all. Homebase's free cap is 10 employees, not the 20 or the "unlimited" that other lists still print.
One disclosure before the list: Emplora is our product, so read our entry with that in mind. We have not put it first, we have written its free-plan limits as plainly as everyone else's, and there are teams on this list better served by one of the others.
The short answer
Biggest free plan: Sling, free for up to 30 users, as long as you do not need a time clock. Best free plan with a time clock: Connecteam, free for 10 users. Fastest to get a whole team onto: Emplora, because employees open the schedule from a QR code or a PIN with no email address and nothing to install. Best free plan for a restaurant: 7shifts, free for 15 employees at one location. If you need everything in one place and can pay: Homebase at $30 per location per month, flat, with no per-employee maths.
When I Work and Deputy are in the list because people keep looking for them here. Neither has a free plan in 2026.
Free plans at a glance
Checked against each vendor's own pricing page on 18 September 2026. Prices are US list prices billed monthly unless noted.
| App | Free plan | Time clock on free | First paid price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sling | 30 users | No | $2.00 per user per month |
| 7shifts | 15 employees, 1 location | No | $44.99 per location per month |
| Emplora | 15 employees, 1 location | Not offered on any plan | $39 per month, flat |
| Connecteam | 10 users, 1 schedule | Yes, with GPS | $35 per month per hub, to 30 users |
| Homebase | 10 employees, 1 location | Yes, 90 days of timesheets | $30 per location per month |
| When I Work | None, 14-day trial | Trial only | $2.50 per user per month |
| Deputy | None, trial of up to 31 days | Trial only | $5.50 per user per month, $30 minimum |
How we checked this
Every limit and price above was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 18 September 2026, not from another roundup. That matters more than it sounds: while writing this we found the pages currently ranking for this search disagreeing with the vendors and, in two cases, with themselves inside a single article.
Three things we do not claim. We have not run payroll through all seven. We do not score them out of five, because a scheduling app that fits a 12-person cafe is the wrong tool for a 40-nurse rota and one number cannot say so. And we cannot promise these numbers will hold: free tiers change quietly, and Homebase's went from 20 employees to 10 with no announcement we could find.
Where a vendor's own page contradicted itself, we say so in that app's section and name the source we trusted. Where we could not confirm something, it is not in the table.
Free forever, free trial, and free until it matters
Sorting the field into three buckets answers most of the question before you compare a single feature.
- Free forever with a headcount cap: Sling (30 users), 7shifts (15), Emplora (15), Connecteam (10), Homebase (10). The cap is the price. Pick the one whose cap you will not hit this year.
- Free trial only: When I Work (14 days) and Deputy (31 days). Useful for evaluating, useless as a free tool. Any list that calls these free is not reading the pricing page.
- Free until the feature you need: every one of them, in different places. Sling gives you 30 users and no time clock. 7shifts gives you shift trades and no time clock. Emplora gives you the schedule builder and charges for time off and swaps. The free plan is never the product, it is the shape of the product with a piece removed.
Sling: the biggest free plan, if you do not need hours
Sling, owned by Toast, is free for up to 30 users, which is the most generous cap here by a distance. The free tier is not a stub either: shift scheduling, long-term scheduling, shift templates, shift offers, time-off requests, shift alarms, announcements and private messaging are all included.
Where it stops: there is no time tracking at all on the free plan. No clock-in, no timesheets, no hours to hand to payroll. Schedule templates, employee unavailability, calendar sync and SMS shift alarms are paid, and so are shift swaps, which is worth reading twice: shift offers (posting a shift for someone else to pick up) are free, while swaps are a separate Premium feature, even though the marketing prose blurs the two.
First paid price: Premium at $2.00 per user per month billed monthly, $1.70 annually. At 30 users that is $60 a month, which is where per-user pricing starts to sting.
Best for: a team of 15 to 30 that tracks hours somewhere else already, or does not need to.
7shifts: the free plan built for restaurants
7shifts is restaurant software rather than general scheduling software, and it shows in the vocabulary, the POS integrations and the tip handling. The free "Comp" plan covers 15 employees at one location, confirmed on both the pricing page and the developer docs.
Free covers building and publishing schedules, employees offering up, trading and claiming open shifts, availability and time-off requests, the mobile app and POS integration. Shift trades being free is genuinely unusual.
Where it stops: no time clocking, no team messaging, no schedule templates, no break rules, no labor targets. One location, hard. Note that 7shifts' own page contradicts itself on whether one-way announcements are in the free plan: the plan card says yes, the comparison table below it leaves the cell empty.
First paid price: Essentials at $39.99 per location per month billed annually, $44.99 monthly, flat up to 30 employees.
Best for: a single restaurant with 15 or fewer staff. If that is you, also read our guide to restaurant staff scheduling and the restaurant scheduling page.
Emplora: the fastest to get a whole team onto
This is ours, so here is the plain version. Emplora is scheduling for shift-based teams: you build the week, publish it, and staff open their own schedule from a QR code or a PIN. No employee email addresses, no accounts for them to create, nothing to install. Onboarding a team of twelve is printing one card, not chasing twelve invitations, and that is the one thing we would genuinely claim over the others here.
The free plan: one location, up to 15 employees, up to 3 teams. Full schedule builder, weekly and monthly views, team colour coding, an unassigned shift pool, employee profiles, and live schedule updates, so a change is visible the moment you publish it.
Where it stops: shift swap requests, the time-off request workflow, sick-leave monitoring, the daily view, push and email notifications, and CSV or PDF exports all start on Starter. If approving time off inside the app matters from day one, our free plan is not enough on its own, and Connecteam's or 7shifts' will do that part for nothing.
We also do not offer a time clock on any plan. If you need clock-in and timesheets in the same tool, Homebase or Connecteam is the better answer.
First paid price: Starter at $39 a month, flat, covering 2 locations and 40 employees per location. Full pricing and the feature table, or what the product does.
Best for: a single site with 15 or fewer staff, high turnover, and people who will not install another app. Cafes, small restaurants, shops, clinics and studios. We have written up how this looks per sector on the industries pages.
Connecteam: the most complete free plan under 10 users
Connecteam's Small Business Plan is free for life for up to 10 users, and within that cap it is the most complete free tool here. The scheduling suite is whole: open shifts and claiming, repeating shifts, templates, auto-scheduling, shift replacements, and Excel import and export. GPS clock-in and geofencing are included, as are chat, forms and tasks.
Where it stops: the 10-user cap counts archived users as well as active ones, so staff turnover quietly eats seats. You get one job schedule and one time clock, so a second site, or a separate front-of-house and kitchen rota, forces an upgrade. Payroll integration, pay rates, API access, SSO and the analytics dashboard are all paid. Connecteam's help centre says the free plan has "no limitations", which its own pricing table contradicts; trust the table.
First paid price: Basic at $29 a month billed yearly, $35 monthly, flat for the first 30 users, per hub. Scheduling lives in the Operations hub, so that price buys Operations only. The features you tried during the trial span three hubs.
Best for: a field or deskless team of 10 or fewer that wants scheduling, GPS clock-in and comms in one app. Longer take: Emplora vs Connecteam.
Homebase: free time clock, tightest headcount
Homebase's free Basic plan is the one most people mean when they say "the free one". It covers 10 employees at one location, and it includes a real time clock on tablets, computers and POS devices, plus timesheets kept for 90 days and basic team messaging. For a team of eight that needs hours as well as shifts, nothing else here is free and does both.
Where it stops: 10 employees is the tightest free cap in this comparison, and it used to be 20, so half the roundups you will read are out of date. Time off and break waivers, departments and permissions, labor costing, business insights, payroll integrations and live human support are all paid. Timesheet history on free stops at 90 days.
First paid price: Essentials at $30 per location per month, $24 billed annually. It is flat per location with unlimited employees, which makes Homebase one of the cheaper answers at 25 or 40 staff even though it is the first to push you off free.
Best for: a business of 10 or fewer that needs a free time clock today, and does not mind paying $30 when it grows. Longer take: Emplora vs Homebase.
When I Work: no free plan since the change
When I Work has no free-forever plan. What it has is a 14-day trial of everything, no card required. Lists that still describe a 75-employee free tier are describing a plan that no longer exists.
What it costs: from $2.50 per user per month for a single location, $5 for multiple locations. Two things the headline price hides. Seats are sold in bundles of five or ten, so a 12-person team does not pay for 12 seats. And existing customers can still see an older layout with different plan names and prices, so check what your own account shows before you budget.
Worth it anyway if: you want a polished mobile app and a shift-swap flow your staff will not need explaining, and you are comparing paid tools rather than looking for free. Longer take: Emplora vs When I Work.
Deputy: no free plan, and a minimum spend
Deputy is the most capable tool in this comparison and the least free. There is no free plan, only a trial of up to 31 days, which is the longest evaluation window here.
What it costs: Lite at $5.00 per user per month billed annually, $5.50 monthly, and since 1 September 2025 there is a $30 per month minimum spend. A five-person team works out at $27.50 and is billed $30, so the headline per-user price only becomes real at about six people. Lite does include scheduling, timesheets, the time clock, compliance tools, swaps and messaging.
Worth it anyway if: you are scheduling against demand forecasts, or you need labor-law compliance built in rather than checked by hand. Longer take: Emplora vs Deputy.
What free costs you when you grow
The question is not which app is free, it is which app is free at the size you will be in a year. Here is the monthly bill for one location, billed monthly, at four team sizes.
| App | 10 staff | 15 staff | 25 staff | 40 staff |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sling | $0 | $0 | $0 | $80 |
| 7shifts | $0 | $0 | $44.99 | Pro tier |
| Emplora | $0 | $0 | $39 | $39 |
| Connecteam | $0 | $35 | $35 | $45 |
| Homebase | $0 | $30 | $30 | $30 |
| When I Work | $25 | $37.50 | $62.50 | $100 |
| Deputy | $55 | $82.50 | $137.50 | $220 |
Two patterns fall out of that table. Flat pricing wins as you grow: Homebase at $30 and Emplora at $39 barely move between 15 and 40 staff, while per-user pricing more than doubles. Free plans end at very different sizes: Sling carries a 25-person team for nothing, Homebase stops at 10.
Read the columns as floors rather than quotes. When I Work sells seats in bundles, Deputy's numbers include its minimum spend, and 7shifts' Essentials tier caps at 30 employees, so 40 people means the tier above.
What your team actually has to do
Every one of these articles is written for the manager. Nobody writes about the step that decides whether the rollout works: what the other fifteen people have to do before they can see Thursday.
The usual flow is an invitation to each employee's email address or phone number, then an account, then an app install. For a salaried office team that is fine. For a kitchen with three new starters a month, a rota of students, or a crew whose phones are full, each of those steps loses people, and a schedule half your team cannot see is worse than the spreadsheet you replaced.
So before you commit, answer three questions for the app you are considering: does every employee need their own email address, do they need to install something, and can you add someone who has neither. Emplora's answer is a QR code and a PIN, which is why we lead with it. Check the others against their own help centres rather than their marketing pages.
Getting your data back out
A free plan you cannot leave is not free. Before you build three months of rotas in one of these, check the export.
- Can you export at all on the free tier? On Emplora, CSV and PDF exports start on Starter, so the free plan is not an export path. Connecteam includes Excel import and export in its scheduling suite. Check each vendor rather than assuming.
- How much history is kept? Homebase's free plan stores timesheets for 90 days. History caps are easy to miss and impossible to undo.
- What happens when a trial ends? With Homebase, the all-in-one trial drops back to the free Basic plan, so the data stays but the paid features stop. Other vendors are less explicit, which is itself worth knowing.
What no free plan will do for you
Whichever you pick, these are paid everywhere, and it is better to know now than to discover it during an audit.
- Predictive scheduling compliance. Fair workweek rules in New York, San Francisco, Oregon, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles carry advance-notice requirements and penalty pay. No free tier here tracks them for you.
- Labor cost controls. Budgets, overtime alerts and cost-per-shift are the first thing every vendor puts behind the paywall, because it is the number owners care most about.
- Payroll integration. Free plans export or they do not; none of them push hours into payroll for you.
- Demand forecasting. Scheduling to expected covers or footfall is a premium feature everywhere it exists at all.
- Multiple locations. Nearly every free plan is single-site. That, more often than headcount, is what ends the free ride.
When a spreadsheet is still the right answer
If you have five people, a rota that barely changes, and everyone is on the same shift pattern week after week, a shared spreadsheet is fine and you can stop reading. Scheduling software earns its place when the schedule changes: when people swap, call in sick, have availability that moves, or work across teams.
A rough rule: if you rebuild the rota from scratch more than once a fortnight, or you have had a shift go uncovered because someone did not see a change, the spreadsheet is already costing you more than the free plan would. If you want to try it by hand first, our step-by-step guide to building an employee schedule works in either.
How to choose in five minutes
- Ten or fewer staff, one site, and you need hours as well as shifts: Homebase or Connecteam, both free at that size with a time clock.
- Fifteen to thirty staff and you track hours elsewhere: Sling, still free at 30 users.
- A restaurant with fewer than 15 staff: 7shifts, free, and built for the way restaurants actually run.
- A team that will not install an app or does not have work emails: Emplora, because QR and PIN access skips both.
- More than one location: budget for a paid plan now. Flat per-location pricing (Homebase) or flat per-account pricing (Emplora) beats per-user pricing as you grow.
- You want to evaluate the most capable tool: Deputy's trial of up to 31 days, knowing there is no free plan at the end of it.
Still weighing two of them against each other? We keep side-by-side comparisons of Emplora against Homebase, Deputy, When I Work and Connecteam, with the same pricing detail as this page. For the scheduling habits that make any of these tools work better, see shift scheduling best practices.
What changed in this update
- 18 September 2026: every free-plan limit and price re-read from the vendors' own pricing pages. Corrected Homebase (10 employees, not unlimited), Sling (30 users, not unlimited), 7shifts (15 employees, not 30) and Deputy's entry price. Removed When I Work's free plan, which no longer exists, and added Deputy's $30 monthly minimum spend, introduced 1 September 2025. Added cost-by-headcount, data export and employee-onboarding sections.