What am I actually using CharlieHR for?

Before comparing tools, the real question to ask yourself is what do you actually use CharlieHR for?

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If the honest answer is "mostly leave"

It's easy to take on a system like CharlieHR when you start hiring. It offers genuinely useful onboarding, employee records, HR documents and performance tooling. If you're using all of that regularly, then this page probably isn't for you. But if the main day-to-day use is booking leave for your team and checking allowances and who's off, then moving to holiday tracking software could save a fortune and offer more appropriate features.

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Our pick for dedicated leave tracking

Book Time Off, at £1 per user / month with a 30-day free trial and no card, is the one we would point most CharlieHR users to if they're looking for a dedicated, feature-heavy, yet cost-effective leave tracker. It's a focused tracker, with premium features like leave reporting and calendar syncing at a low, transparent price. A 15-person team pays £15 a month. We make Book Time Off, but it's not perfect for everyone, and where a competitor fits better, we name it below.

The cost gap by team size

CharlieHR is tiered by team size, whereas Book Time Off is a flat £1 per user / month with no tiers. The gap for leave-only use is large and widens with each band:

Team size CharlieHR (July 2026, + VAT) Book Time Off Roughly
3 people £20 + VAT (1 to 4 band) £3 / month ~8x
10 people £45 + VAT (5 to 14 band) £10 / month ~5x
15 people £105 + VAT (15 to 29 band) £15 / month ~8x
30 people £180 + VAT (30 to 49 band) £30 / month ~7x
50 people £315 + VAT (50 to 99 band) £50 / month ~8x

The jump from one band to the next can be steep: a team growing from 14 to 15 people crosses from the £45 band to the £105 band on CharlieHR, while Book Time Off simply moves from £14 to £15. None of this means CharlieHR is overpriced for what it is, but don't pay HR-suite prices if you're only using it to book and track leave.

The alternatives at a glance

Dedicated-tracker pricing was checked against each provider's own site on 23 July 2026; CharlieHR's bands were last verified July 2026. Figures move, so the dated sources are at the foot of the page.

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
CharlieHR From £20 / month (tiered) 7 days No card Full HR suite · per business by band
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Book Time Off
Our pick - best for leave-only

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

Book Time Off

£1 / user / month
UK-built - dedicated leave tracking - that's us
Core strengths: Book Time Off is the holiday and leave tracking software that offers the most features for the price, in a wonderfully presented suite. Everything you'd expect, like calendar and team views, one-click approvals, days remaining tracking, departments with managers, blocked 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.
Premium features included - 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 feeds for Outlook and Google calendars. There's also an admin reports and insights dashboard: a month-by-month bar chart of days taken, plus visual breakdowns by leave type and by department, alongside the full totals tables and CSV export. It's a flat £1 per user / month with a 30-day free trial, no card and no minimum.
Trade-offs It is leave only, so it won't do the onboarding, employee records, HR documents or performance tooling that you get from CharlieHR. 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's no CharlieHR-specific importer yet, but the onboarding wizard has most teams set up manually in minutes.
Best for CharlieHR users from roughly five to a hundred staff who only really use it for leave and want to cut cost sharply without losing leave-tracking quality.
See it with your own team in the trial

Add a few people, set allowances, and book and approve a request to see how it handles leave tracking, at a fraction of CharlieHR's price. 30 days free, no card.

Start free trial
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Leave Dates
Lowest headline price

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, with the Starter tier from £0.75 per user / month, though this is on annual billing (it's £1 for 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, and on monthly billing it matches Book Time Off at £1, and you'll have to pay more every month for a lot of features that come in the higher tiers. The visual planner suits some teams and feels constrained to others.
Best for Cost-led teams happy to pay annually, and anyone who prefers a more unorthodox visual year planner over the well-known calendar grid or wallchart.
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Timetastic
The established name

3. Timetastic - the established name

Timetastic

£1.20 Basic / £2 Pro
UK-built - the widely used, pricier leave tracker
Strengths The most established dedicated leave tracker in the UK - it's 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 many features people expect as standard, like single sign-on and deeper analytics, sit behind their £2 Pro tier. You pay for the big name.
Best for Teams that don't mind paying extra for an established brand, or that genuinely need a separate balance and approval flow for every leave type.
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Vacation Tracker
Slack and Teams first

4. Vacation Tracker - chat-first leave

Vacation Tracker

$2 / $4 per user / month (USD)
Chat-first leave tracking, priced in US dollars
Strengths Good for US-based companies, 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 is limited to one location, one department and one leave type, 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 can be tricky for a UK buyer, and the paid tiers carry monthly minimums ($50 Core, $100 Complete) that don't suit 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 CharlieHR

We are not pretending CharlieHR is the wrong choice for everyone. It's a polished, design-led UK HR platform, and it's the right answer when you use the breadth, not just the leave module. Keep it or get it if:

If several of those are true, then a leave-only tool like any of these alternatives might be a downgrade rather than a saving. That said, if you're reading all of those features thinking "I used them a couple of times" or, worse, "I've never actually used that," then it's probably time to shift to something that does what you need and pocket the saving for your bottom line, or for something more useful. If you want to stick with a full HR suite, it might be worth checking out more appropriate alternatives such as Breathe. If you're not moving from one to the other but deciding what's best for the first time, our annual leave tracker vs HR software guide weighs the two on scope and cost, or you could try a free trial of Book Time Off for 30 days to see if it gives you what you need before committing to a full suite.

Should you switch?

Before you make the call to switch, run a quick audit for yourself. Look at the last three months of CharlieHR usage (your admin can pull this from the dashboard) and ask which of these features your team actually clicked on. Then sort yourself into one of two camps.

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Keep CharlieHR if you regularly…
  • Store contracts and signed documents in the platform
  • Run quarterly or annual performance reviews through it
  • Use the onboarding workflows for new hires
  • Have managers check the org chart and reports
  • Use Perks discounts as part of the benefits offer
  • Pay for the HR Advice add-on (£179-299/month)
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Switch to a leave tool if…
  • The only feature anyone opens is leave management
  • You store contracts in Google Drive or Dropbox already
  • Performance reviews happen offline or in another tool
  • You hire occasionally, not constantly
  • The Perks discounts go unused
  • Setup felt heavier than the value you actually get

If you're in the right column on most of those rows, the move makes sense. The cost saving is real, and a dedicated holiday and leave tracking software will be at least as good without the cost, and your team will probably find the simpler tool more effortless, day-to-day.

How to move your leave data across

There is no CharlieHR-specific importer in Book Time Off yet. So the move from CharlieHR is manual but very quick for a small team:

  1. Export from CharlieHR. Download your people and leave data as your historical record.
  2. Add your people in Book Time Off. The onboarding wizard walks you through adding your managers and people with their allowance manually. For most small teams this takes minutes.
  3. Re-enter approved future leave so the calendar and Team view are correct. Then get your team to book their leave themselves, or do it for them. UK bank holidays load automatically, and you can block days if you need to.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best alternative to CharlieHR?

It depends on whether you use CharlieHR's wider HR features. If you mainly use it to track leave then a dedicated leave tracker is far cheaper and simpler and Book Time Off is £1 per user per month, which includes plenty of premium features. 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 CharlieHR for onboarding, HR documents, employee records and performance, keeping it (or moving to another full HR suite like Breathe) makes more sense than a leave-only tool.

How much does CharlieHR cost?

CharlieHR is tiered by team size and quoted before VAT. As of July 2026 the bands were around £20 + VAT per month for 1 to 4 people, £45 + VAT for 5 to 14, £105 + VAT for 15 to 29, £180 + VAT for 30 to 49 and £315 + VAT for 50 to 99, with a 7-day free trial and no card required. Verify the current figures on CharlieHR's own pricing page, as they change.

Is Book Time Off cheaper than CharlieHR?

For leave tracking, yes - and by a wide margin. Book Time Off is a flat £1 per user per month with no VAT tier surprises and no minimum. A 15-person team pays £15 a month, against roughly £105 + VAT (about £126) on CharlieHR's 15 to 29 band. Depending on team size, that is roughly 7 to 15 times more on CharlieHR if leave is all you use it for. The gap only matters if you are not using CharlieHR's wider HR features.

Can I import my CharlieHR data into Book Time Off?

CharlieHR lets you export your people and leave data, so you can add each person with their allowance and approver, then re-enter any approved future leave. For a small team this takes minutes.

When is CharlieHR worth keeping?

When you use the breadth not just leave. CharlieHR is a polished UK HR platform that bundles onboarding, employee records, HR documents and performance tooling alongside leave, so it earns its price when those are part of your day-to-day. If leave booking is the only feature you ever open, you are paying full HR-suite money for one module that a dedicated tracker does for a fraction of the cost.

Sources

Dedicated-tracker facts were checked against each provider's own site on 23 July 2026; CharlieHR's bands were last verified July 2026. Prices and trial terms change, so verify on the day you decide.

ProviderCheckedSource
Leave Dates (Starter from £0.75 annual / £1 monthly, tiers, 30-day trial, no card) 23 July 2026 leavedates.com/pricing-plans
Timetastic (Basic £1.20, Pro £2, 30-day trial, no card, separate balance per leave type) 23 July 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) 23 July 2026 vacationtracker.io/pricing
CharlieHR (tiered by team size + 20% VAT: £20 / £45 / £105 / £180 / £315 for the 1-4 / 5-14 / 15-29 / 30-49 / 50-99 bands; 7-day trial, no card) July 2026 charliehr.com/pricing
Book Time Off claims (features, pricing, Microsoft 365, no CharlieHR importer yet) 23 July 2026 Book Time Off product (see help centre)
About this guide

Written by the Book Time Off editorial team. We build Book Time Off. It's a dedicated leave tracker, so we make one of the tools here and say so throughout, and have included a clear note on when CharlieHR 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.