When I Work Alternatives 2026: 9 Compared and What They Cost

Quick answer: The best When I Work alternatives are Homebase for a single location with a lot of staff, Deputy for compliance-heavy shift work, Connecteam if you need team communication alongside scheduling, and Sling, ZoomShift or 7shifts if you want a free plan. When I Work has no free tier at all, which is the most common reason teams start looking.

Why Teams Look for a When I Work Alternative

When I Work is a clean, well-built scheduling product, and its pricing is the most predictable in this category: Essentials at $2.50 per user per month, Pro at $5, and Premium at $8, with unlimited users and unlimited locations on every tier. There is no per-location fee and no bundled user block to reason about.

Two things push people to compare. The first is that there is no free plan. After a 14-day trial you pay, and that is unusual here — Homebase, Connecteam, Sling, ZoomShift, 7shifts, Jibble and Clockify all keep a free tier of some kind. For a ten-person cafe, the difference is $25 a month against nothing.

The second is how per-user pricing behaves with a large team on one site. Forty employees at a single location costs $200 a month on Pro. The same team on Homebase Plus costs $70, because Homebase charges per location with unlimited staff. Per-user pricing is the right structure across many small sites and the wrong one for a single large one.

Scope is the third consideration, though it cuts both ways. When I Work is a scheduling and attendance tool that integrates outward to payroll and HR. If you want communication, training or hiring inside the same app, you are looking at a different class of product.

The Best When I Work Alternatives in 2026

Homebase — Best for One Location With Many Staff

Homebase charges per location with unlimited employees: Essentials at $30 per location per month, Plus at $70, All-in-One at $120, each roughly 20% cheaper on annual billing. The free Basic plan covers one location and up to 10 employees.

The crossover against When I Work is straightforward. Homebase Essentials at $30 equals When I Work Essentials at $2.50 per user when you have 12 employees. Above that, Homebase is cheaper and keeps getting cheaper as you hire. It also bundles hiring, POS integration on the free tier, and first-party payroll at $39 per month plus $6 per employee paid. Our Homebase alternatives guide covers where it stops working.

Deputy — Best for Compliance-Heavy Operations

Deputy is priced close to When I Work — $5 per user per month on Lite, $6.50 on Core, $9 on Pro, with a $30 monthly minimum — so this is a capability move, not a cost saving.

Core brings demand forecasting, auto-scheduling, labour optimisation and budgeting, alongside break compliance and predictive scheduling rules treated as core behaviour. If you operate under fair-workweek legislation, or if labour cost as a share of revenue is a weekly number, Deputy does work When I Work leaves to you. Payroll is an add-on at $8 per user per month plus a $49 base.

Connecteam — Best for Deskless Teams Needing More Than a Rota

Connecteam sells three hubs — Operations, Communications, and HR & Skills — priced separately from $29 per month on Basic, $49 on Advanced and $99 on Expert, each covering the first 30 users on annual billing. The free Small Business plan covers up to 10 users across all hubs.

For scheduling alone, one hub at $29 for 30 users undercuts When I Work Essentials, which would be $75 for the same headcount. The caveat is that needing all three hubs means roughly $177 a month at Advanced. Our Connecteam vs When I Work comparison goes feature by feature, and the Connecteam alternatives guide covers the trade-offs.

Sling — Best Free Plan for a Real Team

Sling’s free tier covers up to 30 users with shift scheduling, time-off requests, open shifts, long-term scheduling and messaging. Against a product with no free plan at all, that is the sharpest contrast on this page: a 30-person team pays $75 a month on When I Work Essentials and nothing on Sling.

Paid tiers are Premium at $2 per user per month and Business at $4, both around 15% cheaper annually — still below When I Work at every level. Time tracking requires Premium and kiosk clock-in requires Business, so the free plan schedules but does not record hours.

7shifts — Best for Restaurants

7shifts bills per location with no per-employee charge on paid plans, and runs a free plan with no time limit. For a restaurant with 35 staff on one site, per-location pricing is structurally cheaper than $5 per head.

Beyond price, it handles tip pooling and distribution, POS-integrated sales-per-labour-hour forecasting and tipped-wage compliance — all things a general scheduling tool treats as someone else’s problem. Our 7shifts comparison covers how it stacks up against the broader platforms.

ZoomShift — Best Simple Free Scheduler

ZoomShift keeps a free Essentials tier for up to 20 users, limited to one location and two weeks of forward scheduling. Starter is $2 per active team member per month and Premium is $4, both with unlimited users and locations, and each tier includes a 14-day full-feature trial.

It does less than When I Work deliberately. For a team that wants to publish a rota, collect availability and let people swap shifts, the smaller surface is a feature, not a compromise.

Jibble and Clockify — Best If You Only Need the Clock

Jibble tracks time free for unlimited users, with mobile and web clock-in, kiosk mode, timesheets and integrations including Slack, Microsoft Teams and QuickBooks. If your When I Work usage is really just attendance, this replaces it at no cost and with no user cap.

Clockify solves a different question — hours against projects and clients, not shifts against a rota. Its free plan covers five users, with paid tiers at $3.99, $5.49, $7.99 and $11.99 per seat per month billed annually. Choose it for billable work, not for a shift pattern.

When I Work Alternatives Compared on Price

Tool	Free plan	Entry paid price	Billing basis	Best for
When I Work	None	$2.50/user/mo	Per user	Many small sites
Homebase	1 location, 10 employees	$30/location/mo	Per location	One site, many staff
Deputy	None	$5/user/mo	Per user, $30 min	Compliance, forecasting
Connecteam	Up to 10 users	$29/mo per hub	Per hub, first 30 users	Deskless comms
Sling	Up to 30 users	$2/user/mo	Per user	Free scheduling
7shifts	Yes, no time limit	Per location	Per location	Restaurants
ZoomShift	Up to 20 users	$2/user/mo	Per user	Simple rotas
Jibble	Unlimited users	Paid tiers available	Per user	Free time tracking
Clockify	Up to 5 users	$3.99/seat/mo	Per seat	Project time

Pricing shown is approximate; check vendor websites for current rates.

The Free Options, Ranked by What They Actually Cover

Because When I Work has no free tier, “free” is the single most common reason people arrive here. The free plans differ enough that the right one depends on what you need to stop paying for.

Sling covers the most people for scheduling — 30 users, with time-off requests, open shifts and messaging included. It is the best free rota for a team of any real size. It does not track time unless you upgrade to Premium.

Jibble covers the most people for time tracking, with no user cap at all. Between them, Sling and Jibble give a 30-person operation scheduling and attendance for nothing, at the cost of running two apps.

Connecteam is the most capable free plan per user, because 10 users get every feature across all three hubs, not a restricted subset. For a small deskless team it is the closest thing to a full platform at no cost.

Homebase is the only free plan that includes POS integration, which is what makes basic sales-versus-labour reporting possible without paying. The 10-employee, one-location cap is firm.

ZoomShift covers 20 users but only schedules two weeks ahead, and 7shifts runs a free plan with no time limit that suits a single restaurant.

The honest caveat: free tiers are acquisition tools, and the limits are placed where growing businesses hit them. Assume you will outgrow one, and check the price of the tier above before you commit a team to the workflow.

What to Test Before You Move Off When I Work

When I Work’s reputation rests less on any single feature than on the parts of shift management that are irritating everywhere else. Those are the things to test in a trial, because they are easy to lose and hard to notice until payroll is wrong.

Shift swaps and open-shift claiming. The useful question is not whether a tool supports swaps, but how much manager involvement each one requires. Some let an employee claim an open shift outright if they are qualified and not heading into overtime; others queue every swap for approval. On a team where people trade shifts weekly, that difference is hours of management time.

Availability and time-off collection. Check that recurring availability, one-off requests and approved leave all block the schedule automatically. Where they do not, managers end up cross-checking a second source, which is how someone gets rostered on a booked holiday.

Overtime warnings while building, not after. A tool that flags approaching overtime as the rota is drafted prevents cost. One that reports it next week only explains it. Build a realistic week in each trial and watch when the warning appears.

Clock-in accuracy controls. GPS boundaries, photo verification and kiosk mode vary in availability and in tier placement. Several tools put kiosk clock-in behind a higher plan than the one you priced, Sling among them, so confirm the tier before comparing headline numbers.

The payroll handoff for your provider specifically. Ask whether approved hours export natively to the payroll system you already use, or arrive as a CSV someone reformats each run. This varies by provider pairing, not by product, so a general integrations page will not answer it.

How to Choose, by Situation

Many locations, small teams at each. Stay on When I Work. Per-user pricing with unlimited locations is the cheapest structure for that shape.

One location, more than 12 employees. Homebase, on per-location pricing.

You want to pay nothing. Sling for scheduling up to 30 users, Jibble for time tracking without a cap.

Labour law compliance is the hard part. Deputy.

You are a restaurant managing tips. 7shifts.

You need chat, onboarding and training in the same app. Connecteam.

For the wider category, see our guides to the best employee scheduling software and workforce management platforms.

Frequently Asked Questions