As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates absence.io 2/5 and Timetastic 2/5 in Absence Management. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 4 of the 6 judges pick absence.io and 2 pick Timetastic. absence.io scores higher on 5 of 7 criteria (European sovereignty, Sick leave, eAU & continued pay, Pricing transparency, plus 2 more). Timetastic scores higher on 2 of 7 criteria (Health data, access & works council and Requests, approvals & team calendar). Provenance — absence.io: EU-Made; Timetastic: UK / wider Europe. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
absence.io carries the higher mean on pricing transparency (7.0 vs 6.0, six judges lean absence.io), sovereignty (6.3 vs 3.2, six lean absence.io), sick leave and eAU (3.0 vs 0.7, six lean absence.io), payroll handover (5.0 vs 4.7, two lean absence.io, four tie) and leave policies (3.2 vs 2.8, one lean absence.io, five tie). Timetastic carries the higher mean on absence data protection (4.0 vs 2.5, five judges lean Timetastic) and requests and approvals (5.0 vs 4.5, three lean Timetastic). The weighted totals split by judge: the data protection officer, integrator and skeptic score absence.io higher (4.6 vs 3.6, 4.6 vs 4, 4.4 vs 4.1), while the team lead and payroll accountant score Timetastic higher (4.1 vs 4.3, 4.2 vs 4.4). Sovereignty attributes list absence.io's data residency as EU only and Timetastic's as unknown. With the lean differing by judge and by criterion, this head-to-head declares no winner.
Choose absence.io if
You must run German sick-leave and eAU processes: six judges lean absence.io on sick leave and eAU (3.0 vs 0.7), and most judges recorded no rating for Timetastic, finding no public information on sick notifications, certificates or the six-week continued-pay count.
You need full prices before you commit: six judges lean absence.io on pricing transparency (7.0 vs 6.0) — Starter 2,99€, Pro 4,99€ and Complete 7,99€ per user per month, net, with a 10% annual discount and monthly cancellation.
Your payroll runs through DATEV: absence.io leads payroll handover 5.0 to 4.7, two judges leaning its way, scored on a DATEV connection covering expenses and travel cost reports.
You require EU-only data residency: absence.io's data residency is listed as EU only, six judges lean absence.io on sovereignty (6.3 vs 3.2), and hosting is stated exclusively on ISO-certified servers in Germany.
Your buying panel is led by a data protection officer, integrator or skeptic: their weighted totals favor absence.io (4.6 vs 3.6, 4.6 vs 4, 4.4 vs 4.1).
Choose Timetastic if
Absence data protection is your gate: five judges lean Timetastic (4.0 vs 2.5), while absence.io's judges split 2 to 4 there, with lower scores citing no public information on who may see a sickness reason or access logging.
Your team approves time off from phones and chat tools: three judges lean Timetastic on requests and approvals (5.0 vs 4.5), scored on mobile approvals, a shared calendar and Slack and Teams updates.
Your contracts run under English law: Timetastic's legal entity jurisdiction is GB, an EU data representative is named, and English law governs.
Your buying panel mirrors the team lead and payroll accountant: their weighted totals favor Timetastic (4.1 vs 4.3 and 4.2 vs 4.4).
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Skeptic
Knows "eAU supported" can mean a photo upload, "DATEV integration" can mean a CSV, and "GDPR-compliant" can mean every manager sees every diagnosis-adjacent note. Reads for who actually retrieves the certificate, which leave rules are computed rather than typed in, and whether the carry-over expiry notice exists at all.
absence.io
This judge's pick
Timetastic
Criterion by criterion
Entitlements & German leave rules
absence.io
Remaining-leave balances, tenure-based additional days, and special and parental leave appear as tracked types in the privacy notice's data-category list, and holiday planning has been the product's core since 2014. But we found no public information on public holidays per federal state, part-time proration, carry-over expiry or half-day and hourly leave, so I cannot put this above the basic-balance level.
Timetastic
What the pages show is a plain holiday tracker: holiday allowance records with approvals and configurable leave types. We found no public information on public holidays, part-time proration, carry-over with expiry notices, or any German or Austrian leave rule, so nothing here computes leave the way a German contract or collective agreement would.
Requests, approvals & team calendar
absence.io
Requests with approval and a real-time team calendar are the documented core flow, approvals also run inside Slack and Teams, and calendars sync with Outlook and Google via ICS subscription links alongside native iOS and Android apps. We found no public information on configurable approver chains, substitutes, minimum-staffing rules, or what colleagues may see of an absence reason.
Timetastic
Requests and approvals run from mobile and desktop apps onto a shared calendar that feeds employees' own calendars, with Slack and Teams pushing daily absence updates. The vendor states the staffing-side gap itself — locked dates and maximum-absent rules are both marked coming soon on the pricing page — and we found no public information on multi-level approval chains, substitutes or per-request histories.
Sick leave, eAU & continued pay
absence.io
Sick days are their own absence type, categorised with or without a certificate of incapacity, and care of a sick child appears as a category — that is genuinely tracked, not just holiday. We found no public information on eAU retrieval by the tool or any payroll route, on six-week continued-pay counting, or on BEM thresholds, and the mechanism by which a certificate reaches the record is not described.
Timetastic
We found no public information on sick leave as a regulated process — no sick notification flow, no eAU retrieval route, no certificate handling, no continued-pay counting and no child-sick days — on the homepage, pricing, absence-management, leave-types and calendar-connections pages we read. The closest fact is a generic line about booking all types of absence.
Payroll handover, time tracking & API
absence.io
The integration page itself says the direct DATEV connection covers expenses and travel cost reports only, with absences and time tracking to be exported and connected individually via the open REST API — a named payroll system plus a documented API (v2, OAuth 2.0 and Hawk, with absence endpoints) is the honest level. Absence and time data sit in the same system; we found no public information on payroll-code mapping, monthly period locks or webhooks.
Timetastic
The pricing page names Sage 50 and QuickBooks integrations and puts a payroll data export and payroll-ready timesheets in the Rota & Time Clock plan, and an API is listed among the features. We found no public information on DATEV or any German payroll system, on absence-type mapping to payroll codes, period locking, or published API limits.
Health data, access & works council
absence.io
A data processing agreement (AVV) is offered, a data protection officer and the Bavarian supervisory authority are named, and deletion-on-purpose-end plus defined retention windows are documented — solid paperwork. But this is health data in law (sick days with certificate status are listed as processed), and we found no public information on who inside a company may see a sickness reason, whether access is logged, or anything aimed at a works council.
Timetastic
Roles exist — four preset access levels plus customisable management roles — alongside a need-to-know statement, a data processing agreement, and published retention figures (six years after closure for accounting and legal, support conversations auto-deleted at twelve months). We found no public information on sickness reasons restricted to named roles, access logging for health records or works-council documentation, and the burnout board with risk alerts and absence-trend analytics carry no stated boundary around special-category data.
European sovereignty
absence.io
A German GmbH registered at the Munich commercial court, sole owner Softgarden GmbH, servers exclusively in Germany with daily backups, and a data processing agreement offered — the anchor-five picture is proven, and a subcontractor list is stated to be published on a page we did not capture in full. It stops short of the next level: we found no public information on the named hosting infrastructure or a specified ISO standard, and marketing data does flow to Google LLC in the USA on standard contractual clauses.
Timetastic
The contracting entity is Timetastic Limited of Wilmslow, England under English law — outside the EU — with a privacy policy and data processing agreement offered, transfers outside the EEA acknowledged under adequacy decisions or standard contractual clauses, and an EU data representative named. Where absence data is hosted is not established: proudly built in the UK and Canada says where the product is made, not where the data sits.
Pricing transparency
absence.io
All three tiers are public at per-user monthly prices, net, with a 10% annual discount, monthly cancellation and no minimum term, and the tier contents for time tracking, personnel file, SSO, API and travel expenses are stated, with all integrations included at no additional cost. A buyer can nearly compute the invoice; we found no public information on minimum user counts or any setup fee.
Timetastic
All three plans are priced publicly per user per month — Business at $1.50, Pro at $2.50, Rota & Time Clock at $5.50 — with monthly billing, instant self-service cancellation, and feature lists showing the payroll export sitting in the Rota plan. VAT treatment and minimum-user numbers are not given, and the captured pages describe the free trial differently: the terms charge the card the day the trial ends, while the features page promises a month free with no card.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
absence.io
Timetastic
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Ownership
Not determined
Not determined
Data residency
Not determined
Not determined
Subprocessors
US CLOUD Act reach
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates both 2/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 4 of the 6 judges pick absence.io and 2 pick Timetastic. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is absence.io or Timetastic European?
absence.io is European (EU-Made). Timetastic is European (UK / wider Europe). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Where do absence.io and Timetastic store customer data?
Per the vendors’ own pages as captured — absence.io: Default not stated; pages mention Germany. Timetastic: its pages as captured do not say.