Shiftie Review: Is It Worth It for Staff Scheduling?
Best for
- Restaurants, retail stores, attractions, care businesses, and other teams running shift-based schedules
- Small and midsize UK businesses that want scheduling, attendance, leave, HR records, and team messaging in one system
- Managers replacing spreadsheets, paper rotas, or fragmented WhatsApp scheduling
- Teams that want straightforward per-employee pricing rather than several feature-gated subscription tiers
Who should skip it
- Companies that need advanced workforce forecasting, deep payroll automation, or a very large third-party integration ecosystem
- Businesses primarily looking for full payroll, recruitment, performance management, or enterprise HCM software
- Teams that want a permanently free plan rather than a time-limited free trial
- Organizations that require extensive international compliance tooling beyond Shiftie's UK-focused positioning
Quick facts
Pricing, verified
Shiftie keeps its pricing unusually simple. The official pricing page lists the service at £2.75 per employee per month for the first 30 employees, with the core scheduling and team-management feature set included. There is also a 28-day free trial with no card details required.
1 employee
- 1 × £2.75
- Full Shiftie feature set
- Useful as a simple pricing baseline
10 employees
- 10 × £2.75
- Employee scheduling
- Time clock, leave, HR, and messaging
20 employees
- 20 × £2.75
- No need to move into a separate feature tier
- Good reference point for a small shift-based business
30 employees
- 30 × £2.75
- Matches the example shown on Shiftie's pricing page
- All listed core features included
What Shiftie does
Shiftie is a web-based employee scheduling and workforce-management platform designed to help shift-based businesses build rotas, record attendance, manage leave, store employee information, communicate with teams, and turn worked hours into timesheets.
Its appeal is consolidation. Instead of running the rota in one tool, absence requests in another, employee records elsewhere, and shift updates through messages, Shiftie puts those everyday management jobs into a single system.
What it does well / Where it falls short
What it does well
- Scheduling is the center of the product. Managers can create shifts, use schedule templates, account for employee availability, manage open shifts, and see leave information while building the rota.
- Simple pricing is a genuine strength. For teams of up to 30 people, calculating the monthly cost is simply the employee count multiplied by £2.75.
- Attendance feeds directly into timesheets. Shiftie's time clock connects scheduled work with actual hours, reducing manual re-entry.
- Leave and availability are connected to scheduling. Approved leave can feed into rota planning, helping managers avoid scheduling employees who are unavailable.
- It covers more than rota creation. Employee records, documents, reporting, messaging, multi-venue support, and HR tools broaden its usefulness without turning it into a heavyweight HR suite.
- The free trial is low-friction. Shiftie gives businesses 28 days to test the system and does not require card details to start.
Where it falls short
- It is focused rather than enterprise-deep. Businesses looking for advanced labor forecasting, large-scale workforce optimization, sophisticated payroll, or a broad enterprise HCM stack may outgrow the product's scope.
- The integration ecosystem is not its main selling point. Larger competitors generally have a broader library of integrations and specialist workforce-management extensions.
- There is no permanent free tier. The 28-day trial is generous, but continuing to use Shiftie requires a paid subscription.
- Billing follows active users. Managers need to keep employee status clean because active accounts are what feed into monthly user charges.
- Cancellation does not create a refund. Shiftie lets you cancel at any time, but its terms state that payments for the current billing period are not refunded.
- Setup still requires clean employee data. Moving from spreadsheets becomes much easier after onboarding, but the first step is still adding team members, availability, existing schedules, and company rules correctly.
When the paid plan is worth it
For a very small team: Shiftie becomes easy to justify once rota creation, leave requests, attendance, and employee communication are taking enough manager time that spreadsheets or group chats are becoming a bottleneck. At £2.75 per employee, a 10-person team works out to £27.50 per month.
For a 15–30 person team: this is where the value proposition becomes strongest. A 20-person team costs £55 per month and a 30-person team costs £82.50 per month, while the same account covers scheduling, availability, HR records, leave, documents, time clock, timesheets, multi-venue management, messaging, and reports.
For a multi-location operation: Shiftie is worth considering if the problem is coordinating staff and hours across venues rather than replacing a full enterprise HR platform. The product supports filtering schedules, employee rosters, timesheets, and reports by location.
Our rating
How it compares
Deputy is the clearest named comparison among the reference material reviewed for this article. Both products cover employee scheduling and time tracking, but Deputy has a deeper workforce-management stack while Shiftie's main advantage is simpler, lower-cost positioning for smaller teams.
| Area | Shiftie | Deputy |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | £2.75 per employee/month | Lite starts at £3.25 per user/month in the UK |
| Free trial | 28 days, no card required | Free trial available |
| Scheduling | Scheduling, availability, templates, open shifts, multi-venue tools | Scheduling plus increasingly advanced automation across higher tiers |
| Time & attendance | Time clock and timesheets included | Time clock and timesheets, with more advanced controls on higher plans |
| HR scope | Employee records, documents, leave, absence, messaging | Broader HR and workforce features, including optional HR capabilities |
| Best fit | Small and midsize shift-based businesses prioritizing simplicity and value | Businesses that need deeper automation, integrations, analytics, and workforce-management depth |
How to actually use it
- Start the 28-day trial with a real team. Add actual employees rather than dummy profiles so you can judge how the system handles your normal scheduling workload.
- Enter employee availability and leave. Get this data right first, because Shiftie's scheduling workflow becomes much more useful when unavailable staff are visible before shifts are assigned.
- Build one normal rota. Recreate the same week you would otherwise manage in Excel, on paper, or in another system.
- Create templates for repeating patterns. If your rota repeats weekly or seasonally, templates reduce the need to rebuild common shifts from scratch.
- Connect attendance to the schedule. Use the time clock and timesheets to compare scheduled hours with what employees actually worked.
- Test employee adoption before paying. Ask staff to view shifts, submit availability or leave, and interact with the system during the trial. Manager efficiency matters, but adoption by the team is what determines whether the software sticks.
Pros & cons
Pros
- Very competitive £2.75 per-employee starting price
- 28-day free trial with no card details required
- Scheduling, attendance, leave, HR, documents, messaging, and reporting in one platform
- Schedule templates and availability-aware rota planning
- Built-in time clock and timesheets
- Multi-venue support for businesses with several locations
- Rolling monthly billing rather than a required annual commitment
Cons
- No permanent free plan
- Less enterprise depth than larger workforce-management platforms
- Integration breadth is not the platform's strongest differentiator
- Active-user management directly affects monthly billing
- No refunds when an account is canceled during a billing period
- Limited independent customer-review volume makes long-term user sentiment harder to assess
Ready to try it?
Shiftie's 28-day trial gives you enough time to build real schedules, test time tracking, and see whether your team can replace spreadsheets and fragmented shift messages with one workflow.
Visit ShiftieFAQ
How much does Shiftie cost?
Shiftie starts at £2.75 per employee per month. At that rate, 10 employees cost £27.50 per month, 20 cost £55.00, and 30 cost £82.50.
Does Shiftie have a free trial?
Yes. Shiftie offers a 28-day free trial and says no credit card details are required to start it.
What does Shiftie include?
The listed feature set includes employee scheduling, availability, HR management, leave, document storage, time clock and timesheets, multi-venue support, team messaging, reports, and seven-day support.
Can I cancel Shiftie at any time?
Yes. Shiftie's terms allow cancellation at any time. Access remains available through the end of the current billing period, but the company states that payments already made for that period are not refunded.
Is Shiftie good for small businesses?
It is particularly well suited to small and midsize shift-based businesses that want employee scheduling, attendance, leave, HR records, and team communication without paying for a much larger enterprise workforce platform.
Sources
- Shiftie — official homepage — accessed 2026-07-30
- Shiftie — official pricing — accessed 2026-07-30
- Shiftie — official FAQs — accessed 2026-07-30
- Shiftie — Terms & Conditions — accessed 2026-07-30
- Dupple — Shiftie review — accessed 2026-07-30
- Software Advice — Shiftie profile — accessed 2026-07-30
- Capterra — Shiftie profile — accessed 2026-07-30
- Today Testing — Shiftie review — accessed 2026-07-30
- Work Management — Shiftie review — accessed 2026-07-30
- Deputy — official UK pricing — accessed 2026-07-30