Leave management software for small teams

Leave management software holds every employee's allowance, takes their time off requests, routes them to a manager and shows the whole team who is away. The six products on this page each let staff request leave and let a manager approve it, apply accrual or allowance policies, and show absences on a team calendar. We read every price on the vendor's own website, and each product page links to the pages we used. Our list is shorter than we wanted, and the reason is in the section on what we left out.

Two kinds of product share the name

Dedicated leave trackers do one job. Vacation Tracker, TimeOff.Management and LeaveBoard price by the user, start at a low monthly amount and leave payroll, hiring and performance to other tools. A team of ten can be running on any of them in an afternoon.

The other three bundle leave into a larger system. BambooHR is a full HR platform with time off inside it. Connecteam puts time off in its HR & Skills hub beside scheduling and communication tools. OrangeHRM offers a free open-source edition and a quoted paid edition. These cost more or ask for more setup, and they make sense when the company also wants one employee record for everything else.

What the law fixes and what it leaves to you

Leave rules differ sharply by country, and the software only enforces what an administrator configures. In the United States, the Department of Labor says the Fair Labor Standards Act does not require payment for time not worked, such as vacations, and treats those benefits as a matter of agreement between employer and employee. A US employer therefore sets its own vacation and sick policy, apart from state paid sick leave laws and similar rules we did not review for this page.

The federal Family and Medical Leave Act is the exception that matters for tracking. It gives eligible employees up to 12 workweeks of leave in a 12-month period for most qualifying reasons. It covers private employers with 50 or more employees in 20 or more workweeks. An employee qualifies after 12 months with the employer and 1,250 hours of service in the 12 months before the leave starts, at a site with at least 50 employees within 75 miles. A company near the 50-employee line should check whether its tool can record leave that is job-protected separately from ordinary vacation.

The United Kingdom works the other way, with a statutory floor. GOV.UK states that most workers are entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid holiday a year, capped at 28 days, and that employers may count bank holidays toward it. For leave years beginning after 31 March 2024, part-year and irregular-hours workers build up leave based on hours already worked instead of receiving a fixed number of days. The EU Working Time Directive sets a floor of four weeks of paid annual leave and allows a payment in place of that leave only when the employment ends, according to the summary on EUR-Lex. Each member state adds its own rules on top.

For a buyer, this means the accrual feature is the one to test hardest. A US startup with a flat 15 days on January 1 needs a calendar-year allowance. A UK employer with agency staff needs hours-based accrual. A company with offices in several countries needs a separate policy per location, and the plans below limit that in different ways.

How common paid leave is

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in its September 2026 release, for March 2026, that 80% of private industry workers had access to paid vacation and 81% had access to paid sick leave. That is the majority of workers, but not all, so a growing company often adds a first policy at the same time it adopts a tool. The tools above are priced for exactly that moment, and four of them let a small team start without paying anything or with a very low monthly charge.

Where accruals and approvals start

The three required features are on every product here, though the plan where each one starts varies.

Vacation Tracker keeps accruals and caps, time off in lieu, blackout periods, probation periods and a limit on how many people can be away at once on Complete, its $4 plan. Core, at $2, has custom leave types and allowances with a single approver for each request. Multi-level approval also starts on Complete.

TimeOff.Management has one plan with no tiers. Its platform page lists two-tier approval, a view of who else is off while a manager decides, and leave allowance automation covering accruals, carry-over and pro-rata amounts. LeaveBoard says accrual is automatic each year and that the system calculates carry-over and pro-rata amounts, with allowances that can differ by employee, and its Pro plan adds advanced leave policies on top of the free tier.

BambooHR lists time-off requests, accruals, approvals and unlimited custom policies on Core, its lowest plan. Connecteam limits how many time-off policies with balance management each plan allows: 6 on Basic, 9 on Advanced and on its free Small Business plan, and unlimited on Expert. OrangeHRM lists request and approval, a PTO calendar and automated PTO accrual in its comparison table, but marks tiers with unlabeled icons, so we could not confirm from the page text which parts the free Starter edition includes.

What it costs for 15 and for 40 people

Monthly minimums change the answer more than the per-user price does. Vacation Tracker charges at least $50 a month on Core and $100 on Complete for up to 25 users, so 15 people pay $50 or $100, not $30 or $60. At 40 people the bill is $80 on Core and $160 on Complete.

TimeOff.Management charges $1.50 per user a month with no stated minimum, which is $22.50 for 15 users, and its pricing page gives $150 for 100. LeaveBoard is free up to 9 employees. Beyond that, Pro costs $1.35 per employee a month, which is $54 at 40 people, although its pricing page does not say whether that figure assumes monthly or yearly billing. Annual billing is marked as saving 17% without a figure.

BambooHR is the expensive outlier for small teams. Its pricing page lists $10, $17 and $25 per employee a month for Core, Pro and Elite, and its FAQ gives $10.25 and $17.50 for the first two, so the page contradicts itself. Companies with 25 or fewer employees pay flat monthly rates of $250, $425 or $650 instead. A team of 8 on Core therefore pays $250 a month, and so does a team of 25.

Connecteam prices by hub. The HR & Skills hub on yearly billing has a base fee of $29, $49 or $99 a month that covers the first 30 users, then $0.5, $1.5 or $3 for each extra user. A 45-person company on Basic pays $36.50 a month, and monthly billing raises each figure. Teams up to 10 can use the free Small Business plan, which includes all hubs. OrangeHRM publishes no paid price at all. Its Advanced edition is priced per employee per month on a quote, with a 30-day trial.

Prices that move with location and billing

Two details on the pricing pages affect what a buyer will actually pay. Vacation Tracker, TimeOff.Management and LeaveBoard show a dollar sign or a USD option, and LeaveBoard and TimeOff.Management also offer EUR toggles, so check the currency at checkout. Vacation Tracker's page shows a dollar sign without naming the currency, and TimeOff.Management lists no amount for the GBP and EUR options it offers. LeaveBoard also states that its prices exclude EU VAT for European businesses.

Where a vendor's price could not be confirmed as USD, the product is not listed, and the prices above come from the pages as fetched on the day of checking, so a buyer in another country may see different figures.

Security and where the data lives

Few leave tools publish certifications. Vacation Tracker says it holds a SOC 2 Type II report and complies with GDPR, with servers in North America and Europe. Connecteam shows SOC 2 Type 2, ISO/IEC 27001 and GDPR badges on its site footer. BambooHR states an annual third-party SOC II audit and keeps a data center in Ireland, and it lists SAML support among its security measures.

TimeOff.Management says its application, database and backups all stay in the UK, and that single sign-on is included on every account, but it does not mention SOC 2, ISO 27001 or HIPAA. LeaveBoard names no certification and mentions single sign-on and daily backups. OrangeHRM's pricing page says nothing about security, so a buyer needs to ask. HIPAA is not claimed by any of the six, which matters for a clinic that records medical leave in the same system.

Leaving a product later

Leave records carry legal weight, so export matters. Vacation Tracker's terms say reports can be exported as CSV or Excel at any time at no charge. TimeOff.Management exports leave reports as CSV and keeps an audit trail. LeaveBoard exports leave-of-absence reports for payroll as XLS. For the other three, we found no export statement on the pages we read.

Cancellation terms are also thin. Vacation Tracker ends access at the end of the paid term and sends refunds through a separate refund policy. TimeOff.Management does not refund partial months, and LeaveBoard says cancellation takes effect at the next renewal. BambooHR offers month-to-month terms or an extended term, without stating the length of the longer one.

What we left out and why

Several well-known tools did not make the list. Timetastic shows $1.50 and $2.50 per user a month for its Business and Pro plans, but the same page lists £1.20 and £2.00 in its structured data, so we could not tell which currency applies to a US visitor. Calamari lists a Time Off price that differs by a factor of ten between two parts of its pricing page. Kenjo and absence.io price in euros, and neither page described accrual rules in enough detail for us to confirm that capability. Leave Dates shows a starting price of £0.75 per user but £0.00 on each plan card, and its pages do not mention accrual.

Factorial and HiBob publish no plan-level leave prices we could use. Zoho People, Sage HR and Personio pages could not be read at all during our check. These are gaps in our evidence, not judgments about the products, and we will add them when the pages can be verified.

What to test during a trial

• Enter a part-year hire and a part-time worker, and compare the allowance the tool calculates with your policy by hand.
• Request leave that overlaps a teammate's approved days and see whether the manager is warned before approving.
• Set a carry-over limit, run the year-end rollover in the test account and read the new balances.
• Export a year of leave for one team and check that approver, leave type and status columns arrive.
• Add up the real monthly bill for your headcount, including any minimum, base fee or per-hub charge.