If leave is the only BreatheHR module you actually use, you are paying HR-suite money for one feature. A 25-person business pays around £89 a month for Breathe Regular; the same team on Book Time Off is £25 a month flat · about £770 a year saved. There is no Breathe-specific importer yet, so the migration is manual: name, email, team, allowance per person. At a few seconds each, a typical 25-person team is done in around 30 minutes.
Book Time Off
Recommended for UK SMEs that only use Breathe for leave tracking
A focused leave management tool for UK small and medium businesses. Calendar and wallchart views, custom annual allowances per person, days remaining at a glance, and UK bank holidays loaded automatically from the GOV.UK feed (never deducted from anyone's allowance). Flat £1 per user per month, 30-day free trial, no card required.
Typical 25-person team saves £770 a year vs Breathe RegularThe first question: do you actually use the rest of BreatheHR?
BreatheHR is a genuinely good HR suite. Built for UK SMEs, ISO 27001 accredited, and used by over 15,000 businesses. The leave module specifically handles UK statutory entitlements, pro-rata calculations, TOIL, Bradford Factor scoring, and team calendar views. Nothing wrong with the product.
The question is not whether Breathe is good. It is whether you are using enough of it to justify what you pay. Breathe bundles roughly a dozen feature areas into one subscription:
- Leave and absence tracking (the part you definitely use)
- Document storage with electronic signatures
- Performance management and one-to-ones
- Recruitment tracking
- Onboarding workflows
- Expense management
- Rota, time tracking, time logs
- E-learning
- HR dashboards and reporting
- Optional add-on modules (recruitment, learn, expenses)
If you genuinely use two or three of these as part of your day-to-day HR work, the bundled price is fine and probably cheap. If, when you log into Breathe, the only thing you click is the holiday tracker and the team calendar, you are paying for a feature suite to get one feature.
A useful 30-second audit. Open BreatheHR right now. Look at the navigation menu down the left. Honestly, when was the last time you clicked anything other than People, Calendar, or Reports for leave? If the answer is "I cannot remember", you have your answer.
The pricing math: what BreatheHR costs vs a leave-only tool
Breathe uses flat-fee tiered pricing per business, not per user. The Micro plan starts at £24 per month for up to 10 employees, then steps up at clear bands. Add-on modules (Recruitment, Learn, Expenses) cost extra on top.
Book Time Off uses flat per-user pricing: £1 per user per month with no minimum and no tiers. There is one plan. The headline trial is 30 days, no card required.
Here is how that plays out across four common team sizes. Breathe figures are the published Micro through Pro plans (without add-ons); Book Time Off figures are simply £1 multiplied by team size.
The savings widen further if you have any Breathe add-on modules (Recruitment, Learn, Expenses) that you would also drop. Many of them cost extra per month on top of the base plan, so cancelling them at the same time often doubles the saving for teams who originally signed up for the full bundle.
Two things to note. First, Breathe's tiers jump at 11, 21, 51, 101, and 151 employees, so adding a single hire near a tier boundary can spike your bill more than your headcount suggests. Book Time Off's flat per-user pricing means a one-person hire costs £1 a month extra, never £30 or £60. Second, neither price is the whole picture: include a brief allowance for setup time and team adjustment in any switch, which we cover below.
What you give up · an honest list
If we were not honest about this, the article would not be worth reading. Moving from a full HR suite to a leave-only tool means actively giving things up. Read the list before you decide:
- Document storage with electronic signatures (contracts, policies, handbooks)
- Performance reviews, one-to-ones, or appraisals tracked in Breathe
- Recruitment workflows and ATS for hiring
- Onboarding workflows for new starters
- Expense submission and approval
- Rotas or time tracking
- E-learning courses you have set up for staff
- HR dashboards your senior team relies on
- Bradford Factor scoring as an active part of how you manage absence
- The only Breathe screens you visit are leave-related
- Documents live in Google Drive, SharePoint, or your finance system instead
- Performance and one-to-ones happen in Notion, Lattice, or in conversation
- You hire infrequently and use a different recruiting tool when you do
- Onboarding is run in your project management tool or by your manager
- Expenses run through your accounting software (Xero, QuickBooks, etc)
- Your annual cost of Breathe is materially higher than £1 per user per month
The point of the comparison is to be specific. There is no "Breathe is bad" argument here. Breathe is fine. The argument is that you should not pay HR-suite money for leave-only use, and a clean self-audit will tell you which side of that line you sit on.
The 5-step migration walkthrough
Two things to be straight about before you start. First, there is no automated BreatheHR-to-Book-Time-Off importer today. The only platform-specific importer in Book Time Off is for the Timetastic full-organisation export (the .xlsx file); broader imports including a Breathe option are on the roadmap. Second, that does not actually slow the migration down much. The new-person form takes name, email, team and annual allowance, which is a few seconds of typing each. For a typical 25-person team the whole migration is around 30 minutes.
Here is the sequence we recommend, designed so the two systems run in parallel for one or two pay cycles before you cancel Breathe at your next billing date.
Inside BreatheHR, go to Reports > People Data Export and download the Excel file. This is the canonical employee list with profile data. Then go to Reports > Leave overview report, set the date range to cover your current leave year (and previous year if you have carry-over), and export to Excel. These two files become your reference document for the manual entry below.
No card needed. 30 days free. You can do this in a coffee break: the trial gives you the full product immediately, no sales call, no demo gating. If after 30 days it does not work for you, do nothing and the trial ends.
Open your People Data Export from Breathe alongside Book Time Off. For each person, use the new-person form in Book Time Off to enter the basics:
- Full name→Name field
- Work email→Email field
- Team / department→Team checkboxes
- Annual leave allowance→Allowance field
- Start date (if needed)→Start date field
Each person is a few seconds of typing. For a 25-person team that is roughly 10 to 15 minutes; for a 50-person team, 25 to 30 minutes. Set each person's annual allowance to whatever Breathe currently shows as the source of truth · including any pro-rata reductions or part-time figures Breathe has already applied. Book Time Off does not auto-calculate working patterns, so you carry across the final number.
Open the Leave Overview Report. Filter to approved future leave only (the bookings that have not happened yet). Re-enter those into Book Time Off as approved leave so the calendar and wallchart reflect reality from day one. For leave already taken this year, you have two choices: re-enter every booking, or simply reduce each person's starting allowance by the days they have already used. The second is faster and gets the same balance.
For one or two payroll cycles, ask the team to book new leave in Book Time Off only, but keep Breathe as the read-only record of historical leave. After the parallel period, when balances look right and people have used the new system at least once each, log in to Breathe and cancel at your next billing date. There is no penalty · Breathe is a monthly subscription with no contract lock-in.
Time it to your leave year, not your calendar. If your leave year resets in April or January, doing the switch in the first month of the new year is by far the cleanest moment. Allowances are fresh, no carry-over to reconcile, and the Leave Overview Report only needs to cover one year of historical bookings.
If you happen to be on Timetastic rather than Breathe, the migration is even faster: Book Time Off has a one-click import that takes a Timetastic export directly. See our Timetastic migration guide for that route. A Breathe-specific importer is on the roadmap; until it ships, the manual approach above is what most teams do, and at seconds per person it is quicker than the prospect of it suggests.
Suggested timeline if you start today
Run the BreatheHR exports. Sign up for Book Time Off. Total time: 15 minutes.
Add the team manually via the new-person form. Add approved future leave. Total time: around 30 minutes for a 25-person team, longer at scale but linear.
Send the announcement email (template below). Show the team the new system in your next standup or by short Loom video.
Parallel run. New leave goes through Book Time Off. Breathe stays live as historical reference.
Cancel BreatheHR before the next billing date. Save the People Data Export and Leave Overview Report somewhere safe as your historical record.
Common pitfalls (especially the documents one)
The six things teams trip on most often when they leave Breathe:
Today, the only platform-specific importer in Book Time Off is for the Timetastic full-organisation export (the .xlsx file). A Breathe-specific importer is on the roadmap, but plan for manual entry for now. The good news: the new-person form is fast (a few seconds each), so a 25-person team is around 10 to 15 minutes of typing, not the afternoon people imagine.
If you have stored contracts, handbooks or other employee documents in Breathe, there is no bulk export. Each document must be downloaded one at a time from each employee's profile. For a 50-person team with several documents each, that is a real afternoon of clicking. Plan for it before you cancel.
If you set the date range too narrow, you miss leave that started before but extends into the period. Set the range wide enough to capture start dates for every booking you want to bring across, then filter in Excel.
Breathe lets you customise bank holiday calendars. Book Time Off pulls the official England & Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland calendars from the GOV.UK feed. Confirm which region each team member falls under before importing. The defaults usually match, but it is worth a 60-second check.
If you actively use Breathe to track TOIL (time off in lieu) balances per person, those balances need to be carried across manually as adjustments to the relevant person's allowance, or set up as a separate custom leave type in Book Time Off. Take a screenshot of current balances before you cancel.
Breathe is paid monthly in advance. Cancel before the renewal date in your billing history; if you cancel after, you have already paid for the next month. There is no pro-rata refund. Set a calendar reminder for two days before your renewal date and decide then.
Side-by-side: BreatheHR vs Book Time Off for leave
For the avoidance of doubt, this table only covers the leave-related capabilities. Breathe does plenty Book Time Off does not (the whole HR suite). The point is to show that, specifically for leave management, the dedicated tool keeps pace and in places goes further.
| Feature | Book Time Off | BreatheHR Regular |
|---|---|---|
| Calendar view of team leave | Yes | Yes |
| Wallchart view | Yes | Limited |
| Custom annual allowances per person | Yes | Yes |
| Days used / days remaining at a glance | Yes | Yes |
| UK bank holidays from GOV.UK feed | Yes (auto) | Yes |
| Bank holidays never deducted from allowance | Yes | Yes |
| Half-day bookings (AM/PM) | Yes | Yes |
| Custom leave types (sickness, maternity, jury service, etc) | Yes | Yes |
| One-click email approvals | Yes | Yes |
| Departments with managers and approval routing | Yes | Yes |
| Departmental capacity limits (max absent at once) | Yes | Limited |
| CSV export of leave data | Yes | Yes (Excel) |
| Direct Breathe import | No (manual entry, ~30 min) | N/A |
| Direct Timetastic import | Yes (one click) | No |
| Bradford Factor calculations | No | Yes |
| Document storage with e-signatures | No | Yes |
| Performance reviews and one-to-ones | No | Yes |
| Recruitment / ATS | No | Yes |
| Rotas, time tracking, expenses | No | Yes |
| Pricing model | £1 per user / month flat | £24 to £525 / month tiered |
| Free trial | 30 days, no card | 14 days, no card |
| Setup time | ~30 min (manual entry) | 1 to 2 hours |
The honest read of this: for leave-only use, the dedicated tool wins on price and on a couple of leave-specific touches (the wallchart, the departmental capacity limits, the longer trial). Breathe wins on everything else · and "everything else" is the entire reason to keep paying for an HR suite. If you only use the leave row of that table, you are already in the column on the left.
For the wider market context, see our BreatheHR alternatives 2026 guide which covers the HR-suite alternatives if you actually need a Breathe replacement (rather than to step away from suites altogether). Our UK leave management software pricing guide shows where Breathe sits across the wider market.
Sample team announcement email
The change is small but worth flagging clearly. Here is a drop-in template that softens the surprise and gives the team everything they need.
Subject: A small change to how we book annual leave
To: All staff
Hi everyone,
From [date], we will be using Book Time Off to book and approve annual leave instead of BreatheHR. Nothing changes about your allowance, your manager, or how we approve leave · only the system you log into.
What you need to do:
- Look out for an invitation email from Book Time Off in the next day or two
- Set your password and have a quick look at the calendar and wallchart
- From [cutover date] onwards, please book any new leave through Book Time Off, not Breathe
Your remaining allowance has already been moved across. Any leave you have booked for the rest of the year is also already in there, so you should not need to re-request anything. If you spot something missing, send me a quick message and I will fix it.
The new system has a calendar view and a wallchart so you can see who else is off when you are choosing dates · useful when planning around team leave.
Any questions, just shout.
[Your name]
If your team is used to the BreatheHR mobile app for booking leave on the go, mention that Book Time Off is fully responsive on phone browsers, with a clean booking flow on small screens. There is no separate app to install, which most teams find easier rather than harder.
For wider context on whether to use any leave-tracking software at all, our how to manage staff holidays without spreadsheets guide covers the move away from Excel; our Timetastic migration guide walks through the parallel piece for Timetastic users.
Sources
Every figure quoted in this article links back to an official or first-party source. We do not cite secondary HR review sites or AI-generated content.
| Source | What it covers |
|---|---|
| breathehr.com · Pricing | Official Breathe pricing tiers (Micro, Starter, Regular, Pro, Premium, Plus) |
| Breathe Knowledge Base · Exporting data | Official documentation of People Data Export, Leave Overview Report and document download process |
| Breathe Knowledge Base · People data export | Detail on the Excel format and fields included in the people export |
| Breathe Knowledge Base · Leave Overview Report | How the Leave Overview Report behaves, including the start-date filter behaviour |
| breathehr.com · Holiday tracking | The BreatheHR leave-management feature set used for the comparison table |
| GOV.UK · Holiday entitlement | UK statutory leave rights that any leave system must respect |
| ACAS · Checking holiday entitlement | Standard guidance on calculating UK leave entitlement for the migration step |
Frequently asked questions
Is it worth switching from BreatheHR if we only use the leave module?
If leave really is the only Breathe module you use, yes · you are paying for an HR suite to get a feature a dedicated tool offers for a fraction of the price. A 25-person business on the Regular plan is around £89 a month. Book Time Off for the same team is £25 a month. That is roughly £770 a year saved with no loss of leave-tracking capability. The break-even kicks in much earlier than most teams realise.
Is there a BreatheHR-specific import tool in Book Time Off?
Not yet. The only platform-specific importer in Book Time Off today is for the Timetastic full-organisation export (the .xlsx file). Broader imports including a BreatheHR option are on the roadmap. For now the migration is a manual but quick process · the new-person form takes name, email, team and allowance, which is a few seconds each. A typical 25-person team is done in 10 to 15 minutes of typing.
How long does the BreatheHR to Book Time Off migration take?
About 30 minutes for most UK SMEs. The active part is manual data entry: adding each person via the new-person form (name, email, team, annual allowance) takes seconds per person, so a 25-person team is roughly 10 to 15 minutes of typing. Add a few minutes to re-enter approved future leave, then run both systems in parallel for one or two pay periods before cancelling Breathe at your next billing date.
Can we export our leave data out of BreatheHR?
Yes. BreatheHR offers a Leave Overview Report that exports leave records to Excel for any date range you choose, plus a People Data Export that downloads employee profile information. Both are reachable from the Reports area of your account. The catch: documents stored against employee profiles have to be downloaded individually, one employee at a time, with no bulk export.
What does Book Time Off do that BreatheHR does not?
Book Time Off is a leave-tracking specialist, so the leave experience is faster and more visual: a calendar view, a wallchart view, days remaining at a glance, UK bank holidays loaded automatically from the GOV.UK feed (never deducted from allowance), and one-click email approvals. It is not an HR suite. There is no document storage, no performance reviews, no recruitment module, no payroll integration.
When does it actually make sense to keep BreatheHR?
Keep Breathe if you genuinely use the wider HR suite. Document storage with electronic signatures, performance reviews, recruitment workflows, expense management, rota and time tracking, e-learning · if any two or three of these are part of your daily HR work, the bundled price still makes sense. The switch is only worth doing if leave really is the only module you use today.