As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates absence.io 2/5 and Urlaubsverwaltung 2.5/5 in Absence Management. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 0 of the 6 judges pick absence.io and 6 pick Urlaubsverwaltung. absence.io scores higher on 1 of 7 criteria (Payroll handover, time tracking & API). Urlaubsverwaltung scores higher on 6 of 7 criteria (Health data, access & works council, Sick leave, eAU & continued pay, European sovereignty, plus 3 more). Provenance — absence.io: EU-Made; Urlaubsverwaltung: EU-Made. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
The bench splits along one line. Absence.io takes payroll handover at 5.0 to 3.7, with 6 judges leaning its way and 0 leaning Urlaubsverwaltung — its DATEV connection covers expenses and travel cost reports. Urlaubsverwaltung leads absence data protection 6.0 to 2.5 and sick leave and eAU 5.0 to 3.0, 6 judges leaning its way on each, citing sickness stored without the medical reason. It also leads sovereignty 7.3 to 6.3 and pricing transparency 7.8 to 7.0 — each 5 leans, 1 tie — plus leave policies 4.0 to 3.2. Requests and approvals genuinely split: 1 lean absence.io, 2 lean Urlaubsverwaltung, 3 ties. The five weighted totals listed each favor Urlaubsverwaltung, from 4.6 vs 4.1 to 6 vs 4.6 — yet payroll handover stands 6 to 0 for absence.io. Both list EU only data residency and US CLOUD Act reach subprocessor exposure; absence.io's legal entity jurisdiction is DE, Urlaubsverwaltung's is unknown.
Choose absence.io if
You hand payroll to DATEV — absence.io leads payroll handover 5.0 to 3.7 with 6 judges leaning its way, and its documented DATEV connection covers expenses and travel cost reports.
Your team builds custom integrations — absences and time tracking export over the open REST API (v2, OAuth 2.0 and Hawk).
You need the vendor's legal entity jurisdiction stated — absence.io lists DE, while Urlaubsverwaltung's jurisdiction is listed as unknown.
You run fewer than five active users — Urlaubsverwaltung's published pricing sets a minimum of five active users and a 10,00 € monthly minimum (plus VAT), while absence.io publishes monthly cancellation with no minimum term.
Choose Urlaubsverwaltung if
You weigh absence data protection most — Urlaubsverwaltung leads 6.0 to 2.5 with 6 judges leaning its way; sickness is stored without the medical reason and visibility is role-dependent.
Your team needs sick leave and continued pay handled — sick leave and eAU runs 5.0 to 3.0 with 6 judges leaning Urlaubsverwaltung, and the data protection judge credits a six-week continued-pay reminder.
You need documented leave policies — Urlaubsverwaltung leads 4.0 to 3.2, with 5 judges leaning its way and 1 tie.
Subprocessor documentation matters to your review — sovereignty runs 7.3 to 6.3 (5 leans, 1 tie), with hosting in Hetzner's ISO 27001 certified datacentre in Germany and a published subprocessor list.
Your payroll accountant weighs the whole rubric, not just handover — their weighted total is 5.1 for Urlaubsverwaltung versus 4.2 for absence.io.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Managing Director
Runs a forty-person company in two federal states without an HR department and is liable when leave is calculated wrong. Wants part-time entitlements prorated correctly, the right public holidays per site, carry-over that lapses only after employees were told, and the eAU handled without a phone call to every health insurer.
absence.io
Urlaubsverwaltung
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Entitlements & German leave rules
absence.io
Requests, approvals and always-current remaining leave are documented, and the privacy notices list holiday, parental leave, transfer periods, extra days for company tenure or special leave, and sick days as stored absence data — entitlements and balances clearly live in the product. We found no public information on proration for part-time working days or joiners and leavers, on public holidays per federal state, or on carry-over expiry with automatic notice before leave lapses, which is precisely the liability I carry.
Urlaubsverwaltung
The holiday engine is genuinely German: the country and federal state are set centrally and can be overridden per employee from their own country and region, regional specials such as the Augsburger Friedensfest are included, Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve can be configured as half workdays, and custom types such as further training, cures and home office sit beside holiday; overtime reduction is booked by hours with a configurable minimum per request. For my two federal states, that per-employee holiday rule is exactly what I need. We found no public information on part-time proration, on proration for joiners and leavers, or on carry-over with an expiry date and automatic notice to employees before leave lapses.
Requests, approvals & team calendar
absence.io
The everyday flow is there: leave requests approved with a few clicks, a real-time team calendar, approvals handled directly in Slack or Microsoft Teams with a daily broadcast of current absences, and personal sync with Google or Outlook plus subscription links per team, department, location or the whole company, reachable from native iOS and Android apps. We found no public information on approvers configured per team or department, on email or push notifications for requests, or on substitutes, minimum-staffing rules and delegation while an approver is away.
Urlaubsverwaltung
Employees request and view absences from mobile apps, and the team calendar syncs into Outlook and Google Calendar via iCal with own, department and company scopes, the company calendar being available only to special roles and the department view showing only absences for which one has a legitimate interest. Roles such as department head and the person responsible for approvals exist, and email notifications are documented. We found no public information on multi-level approval chains, named substitutes on the request, or minimum staffing rules and blackout periods.
Sick leave, eAU & continued pay
absence.io
Sick days are their own recorded type, and the privacy notices show they are stored categorised by whether a certificate of incapacity exists and separately for a child needing care. We found no public information on eAU retrieval from the statutory health insurers, on counting sick days towards the six-week continued-pay limit, or on BEM thresholds — the parts that decide whether my office must phone every health insurer.
Urlaubsverwaltung
Sickness is recorded as its own type with child sickness as a switchable variant, employees can submit sick notes themselves once enabled, and the certificate period of the AU-Bescheinigung is captured; the tool reminds both the employee and office-permission holders when a continuous sickness period exceeds six weeks of continued pay, which is precisely the liability I carry without an HR department. We found no public information on retrieval of the eAU from the health insurers, by the tool itself or via a payroll system, and sickness during booked holiday currently has to be corrected by hand.
Payroll handover, time tracking & API
absence.io
DATEV is named, but the direct connection is scoped to expenses and travel cost reports; absences and time tracking are to be exported and connected to DATEV or other accounting systems through the open REST API v2 (JSON, OAuth 2.0 and Hawk authentication) that exposes absences, users, remaining leave, departments and locations, with the API key generated in the profile and the API part of the Complete plan. Time tracking with overtime balances is in the product from the Pro plan, so absences and working time sit in one system; we found no public information on mapping absence types to payroll codes, a monthly closing lock, or webhooks.
Urlaubsverwaltung
An export for Excel and per-employee reports as CSV download are documented, absences and overtime synchronise automatically with the vendor's own named time-tracking module, which also supports locking of time entries — the module itself is priced as an add-on. We found no public information on integrations with payroll systems such as DATEV, on mapping absence types to payroll codes, or on a documented API with published limits, so for our payroll office the handover stays a manual export.
Health data, access & works council
absence.io
A data processing agreement is offered, personal data are deleted once the purpose of storage ends with statutory retention of up to ten years, and the privacy notices openly list sick days, the with-or-without-certificate categorisation and sick-child data among processed categories. Apart from the request-and-approval flow implying employee and approver roles, we found no public information on restricting sickness reasons or certificates to named roles, on logged access to health-related records, or on documentation aimed at a works agreement.
Urlaubsverwaltung
Sick notes are stored without the medical reason, visibility of absence reasons is role-dependent, the company-wide calendar is disabled by default, the processing agreement is publicly viewable without request, a data-protection impact assessment is described for high-risk processing, and deletion is documented with automated processes and log files capped at seven days; employees can view their own absences in the app. Not storing the sickness reason at all is the cleanest answer to Art. 9 I have seen on these pages. We found no public information on field-level permissions per absence type, on logged access to health-related records being exportable, or on documentation aimed at works councils or a works agreement.
European sovereignty
absence.io
The captured pages establish the German core: absence.io GmbH with a Munich commercial register number and German VAT ID, Softgarden GmbH as sole owner, servers exclusively in Germany and ISO-certified, a Munich data protection officer, the Bavarian supervisory authority named, and an online subcontractor list referenced. We found no public information naming the hosting infrastructure or giving per-subprocessor locations, and no data processing agreement text shown that treats sickness data as special-category processing. The privacy notices name Google LLC in the USA as a recipient of personal data, which is why I stop short of the top band.
Urlaubsverwaltung
Hosting is documented in the ISO 27001 certified Hetzner datacenter in Germany, the contracting entity is Focus Shift Software GmbH of Karlsruhe registered at the Mannheim court (HRB 737998), and a public processing agreement comes with a subprocessor list showing locations: Hetzner in Gunzenhausen for hosting, MailJet in Berlin for e-mail, and Microsoft in Dublin for communication, with the US service Gravatar marked optional and limited to the e-mail address. Encryption is described with reference to Art. 9 GDPR and a DPIA process is stated. Ownership is not established by the captured pages, so the picture stops short of end-to-end European ownership.
Pricing transparency
absence.io
Nearly computable: all three tiers are public — Starter 2,99€, Pro 4,99€, Complete 7,99€ per user per month — stated as net, with a 10% annual discount, monthly cancellation and no minimum term, automatic billing of new users, and tier placement for time tracking (Pro), single sign-on (Pro), the API and expenses (Complete). We found no public information on a minimum user count, or on which tier, if any, includes eAU retrieval or a payroll export.
Urlaubsverwaltung
The captured pricing page publishes what I need to plan a forty-person budget: a per-user price of "2,00€ (zzgl. MwSt.) pro Monat", a minimum order of five active users with a monthly minimum of "10,00 € (zzgl. MwSt.)", the time-tracking add-on at "Zeiterfassung (+ 2,00 € pro Mitarbeitende)", "Jährliche Zahlung 10 % Rabatt", notice periods for monthly and annual terms, and an individual offer only above 250 employees — one full-feature plan, so the annual invoice is computable from public pages. The captured pages differ in that the later capture of the pricing page shows it moved to focus-shift.de with the prices no longer present at the old address. We found no public information on setup fees.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
absence.io
Urlaubsverwaltung
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Ownership
Not determined
Not determined
Data residency
Not determined
Not determined
Subprocessors
US CLOUD Act reach
US CLOUD Act reach
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 Urlaubsverwaltung higher: 2.5/5 against 2/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 0 of the 6 judges pick absence.io and 6 pick Urlaubsverwaltung. 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 Urlaubsverwaltung European?
absence.io is European (EU-Made). Urlaubsverwaltung is European (EU-Made). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Where do absence.io and Urlaubsverwaltung store customer data?
Per the vendors’ own pages as captured — absence.io: Default not stated; pages mention Germany. Urlaubsverwaltung: Default not stated; pages mention Germany.