BreatheHR alternatives for leave management (2026)

BreatheHR is the default UK HR suite for SMEs, and a good one. But plenty of teams quietly realise they only ever open it to book and approve leave, which is paying full HR-suite money for one module. If that is you, a dedicated leave tracker is cheaper and simpler. This is the honest, dated comparison of the best alternatives, led by Book Time Off, with a clear note on when Breathe is worth keeping.

The question to ask first

Before comparing tools, answer one thing honestly: what do you actually use BreatheHR for?

If the honest answer is "mostly leave"

You are paying for an HR platform to do the job of a leave tracker. A dedicated tool gives you the same leave management, often a better booking experience, at a fraction of the cost. If you genuinely use Breathe's documents, onboarding, sickness records, performance and HR admin, the rest of this page is not for you and you should keep it.

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Our pick for leave-only teams

Book Time Off, at £1 per user / month with a 30-day free trial and no card, is the one we would point most leave-only Breathe users to. It is a focused tracker, UK bank holidays load automatically, and for a 15-person team it costs £15 a month against a per-business HR-suite bill. We make Book Time Off and say so; where a competitor fits better, we name it below.

The alternatives at a glance

Dedicated-tracker pricing was checked against each provider's own site on 5 June 2026; Breathe's figure was last verified May 2026. Figures move, so the dated sources are at the foot of the page. Book Time Off is in the first row; Breathe is shown last as the incumbent baseline.

Tool	Price	Free trial	Card to start	Type
Book Time Off	£1 / user / month	30 days	No card	Dedicated leave · flat rate, no minimum
Leave Dates	From £0.75 / user / month	30 days	No card	Dedicated leave · tiered (annual for lowest)
Timetastic	£1.20 Basic / £2 Pro	30 days	No card	Dedicated leave · per-type balances
Vacation Tracker	$2 Core / $4 Complete (USD)	7 days	No card	Dedicated leave · free tier · chat-first
BreatheHR	From ~£24 / business / month	14 days	No card	Full HR suite · per business by band

The pattern is clear: for leave alone, the dedicated trackers are a fraction of an HR-suite bill. Breathe earns its price only when you use the wider platform.

1. Book Time Off · best for leave-only teams

Book Time Off

£1 / user / month

UK-built · dedicated leave tracking · that's us

Strengths Calendar and team views with today highlighted, custom annual allowances per person, half-day (AM/PM) bookings, one-click email approvals, days used and days remaining at a glance, departments with a manager and a max-absent limit, blocked or blackout dates, and group bookings with one-click group cancellation. Carry-forward of unused allowance runs with a company-wide limit and an optional expiry window, where carried days sit in a separate labelled balance with a use-by date and are dropped automatically if unused in time. UK bank holidays load automatically from the GOV.UK feed for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and are never deducted from anyone's allowance. Microsoft 365 single sign-on, per-user Outlook sync, Teams notifications and a daily who's-off Teams digest are included, and a full Slack integration is in the same plan (one-click approval DMs, leave booking from inside Slack, a daily who's-off channel post, /whosoff and automatic "On leave" statuses), plus read-only iCal/ICS subscribe feeds. It is £1 per user / month with a 30-day free trial, no card and no minimum.

Trade-offs It is leave only: no documents, onboarding, contracts, sickness-policy workflows or performance tooling, so it replaces Breathe only if leave is all you use Breathe for. Leave types share one allowance (categories on one calendar under a single approval workflow, not separate balances per type), the working week is company-wide, and there is no Breathe-specific importer yet, so the move is manual.

Best for Breathe users from roughly five to a hundred staff who only really use it for leave and want to cut cost without losing leave-tracking quality.

See it with your own team in the trial

Add a few people, set allowances, book and approve a request, and watch UK bank holidays appear on the calendar. 30 days free, no card.

Start free trial

2. Leave Dates · lowest headline price

Leave Dates

From £0.75 / user / month

UK-built · visual year planner · dedicated leave

Strengths The lowest headline price here: the Starter tier is from £0.75 per user / month on annual billing (£1 on monthly), with higher tiers above it. Built around a clean visual wall chart and personal year chart, with custom allowances, carry-over of unused leave and a 30-day free trial with no payment details up front.

Trade-offs The lowest rate needs annual commitment; on monthly billing it matches Book Time Off at £1. The visual planner suits some teams and feels constrained to others, and richer features sit on the higher tiers.

Best for Cost-led teams happy to pay annually, and anyone who prefers a visual year planner over a calendar grid.

3. Timetastic · the established name

Timetastic

£1.20 Basic / £2 Pro

UK-built · the best-known dedicated leave tracker

Strengths The most established dedicated leave tracker in the UK, polished and widely used, with a 30-day free trial and no card. It runs a separate balance for each leave type, so if you need distinct pots and approval flows per type it does that out of the box. A Pro tier (£2 per user / month) adds further controls.

Trade-offs At £1.20 on Basic it is the dearest dedicated tracker on headline price, and some features sit on the £2 Pro tier. If you only ever deduct annual leave, you may be paying for per-type machinery you will not use.

Best for Teams that want the most established brand, or that genuinely need a separate balance and approval flow for every leave type.

4. Vacation Tracker · chat-first leave

Vacation Tracker

$2 / $4 per user / month (USD)

Chat-first leave tracking · priced in US dollars

Strengths Built around Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace, so people book and approve leave inside the chat tool they already use. A genuine free plan covers one location, one department and one leave type for unlimited users, and paid Core ($2 per user / month, or $1 annual) and Complete ($4 per user / month, or $3 annual) tiers add leave policies, reporting, accruals and multi-level approvals, with separate balances per type.

Trade-offs Pricing is in US dollars, so currency and VAT handling for a UK buyer, and the paid tiers carry monthly minimums ($50 Core, $100 Complete) that hurt very small teams. The free plan's single-location limit is tight and the 7-day trial is short.

Best for Teams that genuinely need a separate balance per leave type, and Google Workspace-centric teams. (For Slack and Microsoft Teams, Book Time Off covers in-chat booking and approvals itself.)

When to keep BreatheHR

We are not pretending Breathe is the wrong choice for everyone. It is a strong, established UK HR platform, used by over 16,000 organisations on its own count, and it is the right answer when you use the breadth, not just the leave module.

You store HR documents and contracts in it and rely on that as your single record.
You run onboarding, sickness records or performance reviews through Breathe, not just holiday.
You want one system for all HR admin and value consolidation over a lower per-head cost.

If two or more of those are true, a leave-only tool is a downgrade, not a saving. If none are, you are the reader this page is for. If you want HR breadth but find Breathe expensive, another full HR suite such as CharlieHR is a like-for-like comparison rather than a leave-only swap. Still deciding in principle? Our annual leave tracker vs HR software guide weighs the two on scope and cost.

What you give up if you switch

If we were not honest about this, the page 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:

Keep BreatheHR if you use any of these

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

Switch to a leave-only tool if

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 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.

How to move your leave data across

There is no Breathe-specific importer in Book Time Off yet (a broader import including a Breathe option is on the roadmap; today the only platform-specific importer is for the Timetastic full-organisation export). So the move from Breathe is manual, and for a small team it is quick:

Export from Breathe. Breathe provides a Leave Overview Report and a People Data Export to Excel. Download both as your historical record.
Add your people in Book Time Off. Use the new-person form to add each person with their allowance and approver. For most small teams this is well under an hour.
Re-enter approved future leave so the calendar and Team view are correct, then invite the team. UK bank holidays load automatically.

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Related

To sense-check entitlement first, try the free annual leave entitlement calculator, or see the wider best leave management software ranking. Still weighing a suite against a leave-only tool? Our annual leave tracker vs HR software guide sets the two side by side.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best alternative to BreatheHR?

It depends on whether you use Breathe's wider HR features. If you mainly use it to track leave, a dedicated leave tracker is cheaper and simpler, and our pick is Book Time Off at £1 per user per month, which also handles booking and approvals inside Slack and Microsoft Teams. Leave Dates and Timetastic are the other strong dedicated options, and Vacation Tracker suits teams that need a separate balance per leave type. If you genuinely use Breathe for documents, onboarding, sickness records and HR admin, keeping it (or moving to another full HR suite like CharlieHR) makes more sense than a leave-only tool.

Is BreatheHR worth it?

BreatheHR is a well-established UK HR platform used by over 16,000 organisations on its own count, and it is worth its price when you use the breadth: documents, onboarding, sickness records, performance and wider HR admin alongside leave. It is poor value if leave booking is the only part you ever open, because you are paying full HR-suite money for one module a dedicated tracker does for a fraction of the cost.

How much does BreatheHR cost?

Breathe prices per business by employee band rather than per user. As of May 2026 its smallest tier started from around £24 per business per month (up from £22 in early 2026), rising in steps as headcount grows, with some modules charged as paid add-ons. There is a 14-day free trial with no card required. Verify the current figure on Breathe's own pricing page, as it changes.

Can I import my BreatheHR data into Book Time Off?

There is no Breathe-specific importer in Book Time Off yet (a broader import including a Breathe option is on the roadmap; the only platform-specific importer today is for the Timetastic full-organisation export). Breathe lets you export your data, including a Leave Overview Report and a People Data Export to Excel, so the move is manual: add each person with their allowance and re-enter any approved future leave. For a small team this takes well under an hour.

Is Book Time Off cheaper than BreatheHR for leave?

For pure leave tracking, yes, usually by a wide margin. Book Time Off is a flat £1 per user per month with no minimum, so a 15-person team pays £15 a month. Breathe's per-business banded pricing for the same team sits well above that once you are only using it for leave. The saving only holds if you are not relying on Breathe's wider HR features.

Sources

Dedicated-tracker facts were checked against each provider's own site on 5 June 2026; Breathe's pricing was last verified May 2026. Prices and trial terms change, so verify on the day you decide.

Provider	Checked	Source
Leave Dates (Starter from £0.75 annual / £1 monthly, tiers, 30-day trial, no card)	5 June 2026	leavedates.com/pricing-plans
Timetastic (Basic £1.20, Pro £2, 30-day trial, no card, separate balance per leave type)	5 June 2026	timetastic.co.uk/pricing
Vacation Tracker (free plan; Core $2 / $1 annual, Complete $4 / $3 annual USD; monthly minimums; 7-day trial, no card)	5 June 2026	vacationtracker.io/pricing
BreatheHR (per-business banded, smallest tier from ~£24/month, up from £22 early 2026, add-on modules, 14-day trial, no card, 16,000+ customers)	May 2026	breathehr.com pricing
Book Time Off claims (features, pricing, Microsoft 365, no Breathe importer yet)	5 June 2026	Book Time Off product (see help centre)

About this guide

Written by the Book Time Off editorial team. We build Book Time Off, a dedicated leave tracker, so we make one of the tools here and say so throughout, including a clear note on when BreatheHR is the right tool to keep. Competitor pricing was verified against each provider's own site on the dates shown; we describe only what each tool actually does.