Leave tracking tools for small teams, compared

A team of 3 to 15 people has more choice about leave tracking than it probably needs. At one end are the free options everyone already has, a spreadsheet and a shared calendar. In the middle are dedicated leave apps at a couple of dollars a person. At the far end are HR systems, where leave is one module among many and the price reflects it. We make ToDoing, which is one of the options below, so weigh what we say with that in mind. We have tried to say plainly where each of the others is the better choice.

Prices are correct at the time of writing, November 2026, and are in US dollars.

Three questions that narrow it down

Does anyone need to know their balance without asking? If leave is informal and nobody counts days, a calendar is enough. Once people have an allowance, carry-over and half days, something has to do the arithmetic, and doing it by hand is where most of the arguments come from.

Does the leave need to sit next to the work? A separate leave tool tells you who is away. If the person planning the work has to remember to look there before giving someone a job, it will sometimes be forgotten, which is the problem we wrote about in Put the team's leave where the work is planned.

Do you need HR beyond leave? Employee records, onboarding, performance reviews and payroll are a different purchase. If you need them, you are choosing an HR system, and its leave module comes with it.

A spreadsheet

It is free and everyone knows how to use one. For three or four people with simple rules, a sheet with a row per person and a column per month works for a while. It strains as soon as the rules get real: half days, carry-over worked out in January, a joiner whose allowance has to be pro-rated, public holidays that differ between two offices. Each of those becomes a formula someone built and nobody else understands. Requests arrive by email or message and have to be copied in, and nobody else can see who is away without opening the file. A spreadsheet is a fine start for a very small team with one person who genuinely enjoys spreadsheets.

A shared calendar

Google Calendar and Outlook both let people mark themselves out of office, and everybody already looks at their calendar. As a record of who is away it is free and quite good. It holds no allowances, no balances and no approvals, so a calendar is a picture of leave rather than a system for it. That is enough for teams where time off is informal and trust does the job a balance would.

Timetastic

Timetastic is a dedicated leave app, simple and popular, and it says more than 275,000 people book their time off with it. Its Business plan covers requests, approvals, allowances and a shared calendar of who is off, with mobile apps for staff and managers. Pro adds booking limits per leave type, absence trends and company-wide reports. It connects to Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace, and to Sage 50 and QuickBooks, and a separate plan adds rotas and a time clock for shift workers. Business is $1.50 per user per month and Pro is $2.50, after a 30-day free trial.

It doesn't plan the work, so the plan lives in another tool and the two are checked separately. If you want a polished standalone leave app and are happy to keep planning elsewhere, it is a strong choice. We compared it with ToDoing in detail in ToDoing vs Timetastic.

Calamari

Calamari is a leave and attendance system with a serious rules engine. Its Time Off module can require notice for longer absences, cap the length of a booking, stop people in the same team from overlapping, route requests through several approvers with a backup, carry unused days over, build entitlement up month by month, count leave in hours or days, and hold different policies for different countries. It connects to Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Teams and Slack, and a separate module handles clock-in and timesheets. Time Off is $2 per employee per month billed yearly, or $2.50 billed monthly, with a 14-day trial.

All that control takes some setting up, and like Timetastic it sits apart from the work plan. It is worth the setup for companies with people in several countries, or with leave rules that have to be enforced rather than just written down.

BambooHR

BambooHR is a full HR system. Its plans cover employee records, hiring and onboarding, reports, time-off requests, accruals and a time-off calendar, with payroll and benefits available for US employees. For companies with 25 employees or fewer it charges a flat monthly rate, $250 a month on its Core plan and $425 on Pro. Above 25 employees it charges per employee, from $10.25 a month on Core.

That makes it far more system, and far more money, than a team needs if leave is the only problem. For an eight-person studio, $250 a month is more than thirty dollars a person. It makes sense for a company that is hiring steadily and needs a proper record of its people, where good leave tracking comes as part of a larger decision.

ToDoing

ToDoing is a work planner for small teams with leave built in, so it is the one option here that is also where the work is planned. Each leave type holds its own rules: a yearly allowance, working or calendar days, carry-over up to a cap, pro-rating for joiners, and whether it needs approval. Requests go to a named approver with a backup, approvers get an email and decide in the app, and everyone can subscribe to their own leave from their phone's calendar (admins to the whole team's). Public holidays come in by country and region. Once leave is approved it shows on the planning grid, and the task form tells you when you give someone work on a day they are on leave. Admins can export bookings, days per person and balances as CSV.

Leave is part of the Pro plan at $2 per person per month, which also covers the planner, projects, milestones and the team view. The free plan doesn't include leave, and every new workspace gets everything free for 14 days.

There are limits, too. There are no native mobile apps (the browser app installs to the home screen), no Slack or Teams integration, a single approval step rather than a chain, leave counted in days and half days rather than hours, and the year's allowance granted up front rather than accrued month by month. It fits a team of 3 to 15 that plans project work week by week and wants leave on the same calendar as that work.

Side by side

	Price at the time of writing	Balances and approvals	Next to the work plan	Best for
Spreadsheet	Free	Built by hand	No	Three or four people, simple rules
Shared calendar	Free with your calendar	No	No	Informal leave nobody counts
Timetastic	$1.50 to $2.50 per user per month	Yes	No	A standalone leave app with mobile apps and integrations
Calamari	$2 to $2.50 per employee per month	Yes, with a rules engine	No	Several countries, strict rules
BambooHR	$250 a month flat up to 25 employees	Yes, inside a full HR system	No	Companies that need HR records and onboarding
ToDoing	$2 per person per month, planner included	Yes	Yes	Small teams planning project work

If you are setting leave up from scratch, How to work out pro-rata holiday for a new starter and the free pro-rata leave calculator cover the sum most teams get wrong first.