Book Time Off at £1 per user per month flat is the right answer for most UK SMEs over any free alternative. No mainstream UK leave tool still offers a genuine free-forever tier (Leave Dates, which used to, now starts at £0.75 per user per month on annual billing). For everyone else, £1 per user beats "free" the moment you add up the admin time, user-cap migrations, GDPR risk and audit-trail gaps that come with free options.
What "free" actually means
When you Google "free leave management software" you get dozens of results. Almost none of them are genuinely free in the way the word implies. They're trials with countdown timers, freemium plans with the bits you actually want paywalled, open-source projects that need a developer to run, or spreadsheets that work right up until they don't.
That doesn't mean every free option is a trick. Leave Dates is cheap for tiny teams, from £0.75 per user per month. A 30-day trial is useful for evaluation. A spreadsheet might be all a 3-person team needs. But for the typical UK SME · somewhere between 6 and 100 people · "free" almost always costs more than £1 per user per month does, once you count what you actually spend in time, risk and migration pain.
The rest of this article does the maths properly so you can decide for yourself.
Our recommendation up front
Book Time Off · £1 per user per month, flat
For any UK SME with 6 or more people, Book Time Off is worth paying £1 a head a month over any free alternative. Here's what you get for the price most teams could find behind a sofa cushion:
- Calendar and wallchart views · see who's off this week the moment you log in
- Custom allowances per person · 22 days for a part-timer, 28 for a senior, all on the same view
- Custom leave types · sickness, compassionate, jury service, with their own balances
- UK bank holidays loaded automatically from the GOV.UK feed for England & Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
- Half-day bookings, one-click email approvals, departments with max-absent limits
- Built-in import for the Timetastic export if you're switching across
- 30-day free trial with no card required · the full product, the whole team, real bookings
One plan, one price, no upgrade tier, no team-size minimum, no contract. The cheapest paid option in the UK leave-tracking market · and almost always cheaper than free once you count what free really costs.
The four kinds of "free"
Sorting through what shows up when you search for "free" is the first step. There are four categories and they mean very different things in practice.
Lowest headline price
No dedicated UK leave tool still has a permanent free plan. The lowest headline price is Leave Dates' annual Starter, from £0.75 per user per month.
Example: Leave Dates from £0.75/user/mo
Free trial
Full product access for 7 to 60 days, after which you pay or lose access. Useful for evaluation, but not actually "free software" in any meaningful long-term sense. The longer the trial, the more confident the provider.
Examples: Book Time Off (30 days), WhosOff (up to 8 weeks), CharlieHR (7 days)
Freemium with key features paywalled
A free plan that excludes features you'd realistically need · wallchart view, custom leave types, bank holiday auto-loading. Usually a marketing funnel for the paid tier and rarely worth the headache.
Examples: Some international tools targeting global SMEs
Self-hosted or DIY
Open-source projects you host yourself, or spreadsheet templates you build out. Free of license fees but you pay in setup time, hosting costs and ongoing maintenance. Rarely UK-focused.
Examples: GitHub leave-tracker projects, Excel/Google Sheets templates
What each free option really costs you
The honest accounting. "What is free" is the marketing claim; "the catch" is what you find out later.
| Option | What is free | The catch | Right for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Book Time Off Recommended | 30-day trial, then £1/user/month | Costs £1/user/month after 30 days · nothing else | Almost every UK SME with 6+ people |
| Leave Dates Starter Cheapest paid | From £0.75/user/mo on annual billing, full feature set | Lowest rate needs a year's commitment; £1 on monthly billing | Teams that want the lowest price on paper |
| WhosOff trial Trial | Up to 8 weeks free, full product | Pays from £1.75/user/month after the trial · 75% more than us | Teams that want a longer evaluation window |
| Timetastic trial Trial | 30 days free, full product | Pays £1.20-£2/user/month after · 20-100% more than us | Teams trying the most polished UX before paying |
| CharlieHR trial Trial | 7 days free | Barely enough time to set up. Pays from £20/month + VAT after | Teams already certain they want CharlieHR |
| Excel / Google Sheets | The software (you pay for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace anyway) | No automation · manual updates, no audit trail, fragile at 10+, real GDPR risk | Teams of 1-5 who don't mind the manual work |
| Open-source self-hosted | Software license is £0 | Server costs £5-20/month, hours of setup, ongoing patching, no UK focus | Tech teams with a developer who enjoys the project |
Notice the pattern. The "Right for" column gets narrower the further down you go · tiny teams, evaluators, very specific scenarios. Book Time Off's "Right for" column is the wide one: almost every UK SME with 6 or more people.
Six hidden costs of free
What "free" actually charges you, in the currency that doesn't show up on a price page.
A spreadsheet leave tracker takes 15-30 minutes a week to maintain · chasing requests, updating balances, handling clashes. At a junior salary that's £25-£50 a month in time alone, multiples of what dedicated software costs.
The cheapest headline rates (such as Leave Dates' £0.75) usually need a year's commitment paid up front. On monthly billing the price rises to around £1, the same as a flat-rate tool, so the "cheapest" rate is not always the one you actually pay.
Spreadsheet leave tracking exposes you to data risk. The ICO fined PSNI £750,000 in 2023 over a spreadsheet-related data exposure. For SMEs the absolute risk is smaller, but the same principle applies · structured tools are safer.
When a leave booking gets disputed ("I booked that day, why is someone else off?"), free spreadsheets can't tell you who changed what when. Dedicated tools log every request, approval and edit. The first time this matters, it's worth months of subscription.
Open-source software is genuinely free of license fees but you pay in server hosting (£5-£20 a month), security patching, backups, version upgrades and your own time when something breaks. For a small team that exceeds £1 per user per month before you've added a single feature.
Free now often means migration pain later. Whatever tool you start with becomes the source of truth for your team's leave history. Picking a tool that scales with you means doing the migration once, not twice.
Why £1/user beats free: three worked examples
The maths in three real shapes of UK SME. None of these are theoretical · they're the exact patterns we see in customers who switch to Book Time Off after trying to make "free" work.
Free spreadsheet vs £1/user
Leave admin takes ~30 minutes a week · chasing requests, updating balances, handling clashes. At a junior HR rate of £15/hour, that's £30 a month of time. Book Time Off would cost £10 a month for the same team.
Net saving: £20/month + a proper audit trail + zero GDPR exposure
Paid Leave Dates vs Book Time Off
The paid Leave Dates tier is roughly £1 per user per month. So is Book Time Off. Same price, different products. The difference: Book Time Off has built-in Timetastic import (handy if your team ever wants to leave us), no upgrade tier dangling above you, no USD pricing risk, and pricing in actual sterling instead of dollars.
Net difference: same price, simpler product, no FX wobble
Open-source vs Book Time Off
Server hosting is around £15 a month. The developer who set it up spends 1-2 hours a month on maintenance · another £30-£60 of opportunity cost. Total real cost: £45-£75 a month. Book Time Off would be £25 a month.
Net saving: £20-£50/month plus your developer's time back
For more on what UK leave software should cost across the whole market, our UK pricing guide sets out the £1-£2 per user fair-market range, our Excel vs leave software comparison goes deeper on the spreadsheet case, and our three-way comparison covers the leave-only paid options head-to-head.
When free is the right pick (narrow)
To be clear about the cases where the cheapest option wins · there are two, and they're narrow.
1. The lowest price on paper is your single priority. Leave Dates' annual Starter, from £0.75 per user per month, is the cheapest. It needs a year's commitment, and on monthly billing it is £1, the same as Book Time Off.
2. You're evaluating before paying. Use the longest free trial available. Book Time Off offers 30 days with no card. WhosOff offers up to 8 weeks. Timetastic offers 30 days. Avoid the 7-day trials where you barely have time to onboard the team.
Outside those two cases, the cost arithmetic is one-sided. The hidden costs of free options · admin time, GDPR risk, no audit trail, migration pain, self-hosting overhead · almost always exceed £1 per user per month for any team above 5 people. That's why we recommend Book Time Off as the default and reserve free for the specific situations where it genuinely wins.
How to switch to Book Time Off
If you're currently on a free tool that's outgrown its limits, the move is straightforward. The realistic path:
Spot the trigger before it bites
The signs: the cheapest rate stops fitting (an annual lock-in or a tier jump), your spreadsheet has had its first version-conflict overwrite, someone disputed a leave day and you couldn't prove who booked it, or you're spending more than 30 minutes a week on leave admin. Any one of these is the cue to switch.
Sign up for Book Time Off's 30-day trial
No card required. The trial is the full product so you can put your whole team in, configure allowances and book real leave. Run it in parallel with your current setup for a couple of weeks before fully cutting over.
Export from the free tool, import the team
From Leave Dates or a spreadsheet, add your people in Book Time Off by invite. Set each person's starting allowance as their remaining balance from the old system, not their full annual entitlement.
Tell the team and switch the source of truth
Send a quick message: "From Monday, all leave bookings go through Book Time Off · here's the magic link to set up your account." Most people will figure out the interface within a day. Stop using the old tool and let it expire or archive.
Keep the old data for compliance
Before fully retiring the old tool, take a final export of all historical leave records. Save it somewhere your business retains records (Google Drive, OneDrive). UK employment records typically need keeping for 6 years; this gives you a clean cut-off without losing the audit trail.
FAQ
Is there genuinely free leave management software in the UK?
No dedicated UK leave tool still offers a genuinely free permanent plan. Leave Dates, which used to, now starts at £0.75 per user per month on annual billing. Every other "free" option is either a short trial, a feature-limited tier with the bits you actually want paywalled, an open-source project you have to host and maintain yourself, or a spreadsheet template. For most UK SMEs, Book Time Off at £1 per user per month is genuinely cheaper than free options once you count the hidden costs.
Why does Book Time Off beat free leave software?
Three reasons. First, £1 per user per month is so cheap that the admin time you save on day one pays for the year. Second, free options come with hidden costs · user-cap migrations, GDPR risk, no audit trail, hours of self-hosting maintenance · that almost always exceed £1 per user once you add them up. Third, Book Time Off has no upgrade tier and no team-size minimum, so what you pay on day one is what you pay forever, with a 30-day no-card trial to confirm it fits before you commit.
When is a free option actually the right pick?
Two scenarios. First, if you want the lowest headline price, Leave Dates' annual Starter is from £0.75 per user per month (no free-forever tier any more). Second, if you're evaluating before paying, use the longest free trial you can find (Book Time Off offers 30 days, WhosOff up to 8 weeks, Timetastic 30). Outside these two cases, £1 per user per month beats free once you account for the costs free options hide.
Are free trials worth using before paying?
Yes · especially the longer ones. Book Time Off offers 30 days free with no card required, which is enough time to put your whole team in, configure everything and book real leave. WhosOff offers up to 8 weeks. Timetastic offers 30 days. CharlieHR offers 7 days · barely enough to set up, and a sign the provider isn't confident the trial will sell itself. The longer the trial, the more confident the provider is in the product.
Is free leave-tracking via Excel or Google Sheets a real option?
For 1-5 people a simple spreadsheet works. From 5-10 it gets fragile (overwrites, version conflicts, no audit trail) and from 10+ it becomes a real risk. The ICO has issued real fines (the £750,000 PSNI case in 2023) over data exposure linked to spreadsheet handling. Once you factor in admin time and compliance risk, £1 per user with Book Time Off is cheaper than the spreadsheet for any team above five people.
Is open-source leave management software worth using?
Generally no for UK SMEs. The few open-source options are not UK-focused (no GOV.UK bank holiday integration, weak UK leave-law alignment), require self-hosting (server costs, security patching, admin time), and have small user communities. The total cost of running open-source · hosting at £5-20 a month, maintenance hours, your time when something breaks · almost always exceeds the £1 per user that Book Time Off charges, and you carry all the risk yourself.
Sources
Pricing and feature claims are taken from the providers' own published pages, last verified May 2026.
| Source | Used for |
|---|---|
| Leave Dates product page | Current pricing tiers and feature set |
| Timetastic pricing page | 30-day free trial terms |
| WhosOff pricing page | Free trial length up to 8 weeks |
| CharlieHR Help Center | 7-day trial confirmation and pricing |
| ICO PSNI fine notice | The £750,000 spreadsheet-related GDPR fine cited |
| FitSmallBusiness leave software review | Leave Dates current pricing tiers |