Deputy vs Planday

Deputy

The pages promise auto-scheduling, demand forecasting, labor optimization and wage and labor budgets, plus location hierarchies for multi-site businesses — clearly more than a blank grid. But we found no public information on staffing requirements per shift, coverage gaps before publication, open shifts, qualifications, or which data source the forecasting actually draws on, so how a plan gets decided stays opaque.

Planday

The planner side looks real: week and day templates with a draft step before publishing, an auto-schedule tool on the top plan, and shift suggestions that filter by department, employee group and skills and flag conflicts like exceeding contracted hours. But the revenue forecast is only a word on the price page with no data source named, and I found no public information on labour cost shown against budget while planning or on sharing staff across locations.

Deputy

Every tier lists labor law compliance and the feature list adds break planning and fair workweek compliance, but we found no public information naming any specific German rule — the ArbZG daily maximum, the 11-hour rest period, Minijob earnings limits, Tarifvertrag surcharges. For someone stacking a second job, whether the roster checks my rest time before publishing is the whole question, and the captured pages answer it only with a marketing phrase.

Planday

You can build rules for maximum hours per day or week, hours off between shifts and consecutive working days, violations are flagged while assigning with statuses like "will exceed contract rules by 2h", and the pages state plainly that rules only warn and never block a shift. But no German law is named anywhere — the captured pages never mention the ArbZG, an 11-hour rest period, breaks or a Minijob earnings limit — and I found no public information on Tarifvertrag surcharges or youth protection.

Deputy

The bones of a good floor-level app are there: a mobile app with leave and availability management, shift swap with find-replacement, a time clock including biometric clocking, and messaging with a news feed so shift talk has a home outside private group chats. We found no public information on whether swaps are checked against qualifications and rest rules before approval, on interface languages, on offline clock-in, on push notification of changes, or on employees seeing and exporting the data held about them.

Planday

The app is genuinely built for someone like me: I can set availability by whole days, preferred hours or shift type, bulk-edit it on my phone, see open shifts in a widget and request them, and take over a shift a colleague is selling — and open shifts stay hidden when I lack the skill or already have a conflict. But every request still waits for a manager's approval, and I found no public information on the app's languages, on push notification when my roster changes, or on offline clock-in at a shared terminal.

Deputy

Custom access levels in Pro, audit reporting in the Analytics+ add-on, and a privacy centre with GDPR resources and sub-processor change notifications are real building blocks. But we found no public information on retention or deletion periods for availability, absence and time records, on location or activity tracking and whether it can be switched off, or on documentation a works council could use — and this product holds exactly the kind of employee data co-determination covers.

Planday

There are admin and schedule-manager access levels plus custom permissions and user roles on the top plan, but that is where it ends. I found no public information on who can see absence reasons, on retention or deletion of my availability and leave data, on any log of who viewed my data, or on a data processing agreement.

Deputy

An API is offered, the Lite tier lists payroll and HR integrations as a feature, and a payroll add-on exists on annual Core and Pro plans in the US with a monthly base and per-employee fee that "varies by business size". We found no public information on a DATEV, Lohn und Gehalt or other named European payroll handoff, no named POS or HR system, and no surcharge handling, so the German tax-adviser month is undescribed.

Planday

The DATEV Lohn und Gehalt connection is documented in real detail — salary codes distinguishing normal hours, extra hours and payroll supplements, per-employee salary identifier mapping, and payslips flowing back into the app for me to read. Around it sit a documented open API and large collections of payroll, POS and HR integrations, but no individual POS or HR system is named, and I found no public information on a lock step before transmission or an HR master-data sync.

Deputy

Deputy is an Australian vendor with a US contracting entity in San Francisco named for at least some regions, and we found no public information on where employee data is hosted, on the contracting entity for a European customer, or on named sub-processors and their locations — the privacy centre only offers notifications when sub-processors change. My availability and clock-in times are exactly the data I had no say in handing over, and the captured pages leave unstated where they are processed.

Planday

Planday is a Danish company, but it is owned by Xero in New Zealand and its legal documents are hosted on Xero infrastructure; beyond that I found no public information on where my availability and leave data is hosted, who the subprocessors are, or which entity I would actually be contracting with. For an app that knows when I am free and when I am sick, that silence weighs heavily.

Deputy

The headline maths is public: $5 per user per month for Lite, $6.50 for Core and $9 for Pro, in USD excluding all applicable taxes, billed monthly or annually with 10% off annual — that much I can check against my hours. But the payroll add-on's fee only "varies by business size", the Flexi plan for short-term events is described without a price, and we found no public information on how inactive or seasonal staff are counted or what the AI costs once "introductory free" ends.

Planday

Starter at €2.99 and Plus at €4.99 per user per month are public, with monthly or quarterly billing, minimum user counts and five-user pack rounding all stated plus a tier comparison. But the top plan that holds automatic scheduling is "Individuelle Preisgestaltung" with no number, the per-SMS fee and onboarding services are unpriced, and I found no public information on VAT treatment or how seasonal staff are counted.