As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates Vacation Tracker 2.5/5 and WhosOff 2/5 in Absence Management. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 6 of the 6 judges pick Vacation Tracker and 0 pick WhosOff. Vacation Tracker scores higher on 6 of 7 criteria (Pricing transparency, European sovereignty, Payroll handover, time tracking & API, plus 3 more). Provenance — Vacation Tracker: Rest of world; WhosOff: UK / wider Europe. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
No single verdict emerges: the benches lean Vacation Tracker on most criteria but by different margins, splitting or tying elsewhere. Payroll handover (6.0 vs 4.2), sovereignty (5.2 vs 3.0) and pricing transparency (7.0 vs 1.5) each show 6 judges leaning Vacation Tracker, 0 for WhosOff. Requests and approvals is closer at 7.3 vs 6.8, with 3 leans to Vacation Tracker and 3 ties; leave policies splits the same way at 4.2 vs 3.7. Sick leave and electronic certificate of incapacity sits at 2.2 vs 2.0, with 1 lean and 5 ties. Absence data protection is the genuine head-to-head: both means read 3.8, with 1 judge leaning Vacation Tracker, 1 leaning WhosOff and 4 ties. Weighted totals appear for five judges — the sixth row shows no figures — and Vacation Tracker leads in the five shown, from 5.1 vs 4.6 (team lead) to 4.7 vs 3.2 (payroll accountant).
Choose Vacation Tracker if
You need published per-user prices before you commit — Vacation Tracker's captured pricing shows Core at €2 per user / month with a €50 minimum and Complete at €4 per user / month with a €100 minimum, billed monthly, plus a free plan and a 14-day trial; pricing transparency reads 7.0 vs 1.5 with 6 judges leaning Vacation Tracker.
Your payroll runs on ADP Workforce Now — it is the only payroll system named in Vacation Tracker's payroll handover, which scores 6.0 vs 4.2 with 6 judges leaning Vacation Tracker.
You need EU data residency as an option — Vacation Tracker's data residency attribute is listed as an EU option, and sovereignty reads 5.2 vs 3.0 with 6 judges leaning Vacation Tracker.
You need two sequential approval levels where any one approver per level acts, plus substitute approvers, blackout periods and a maximum-users-away limit — requests and approvals reads 7.3 vs 6.8, with 3 judges leaning Vacation Tracker and 3 ties.
Your team raises and approves requests from Slack, Teams, email or mobile apps, the channels Vacation Tracker documents under requests and approvals.
Choose WhosOff if
You need a supplier registered in the UK — WhosOff's legal entity jurisdiction attribute reads GB, and its maker X:Drive Computing Limited is registered in England and Wales.
You want an extended hands-on evaluation before paying — WhosOff's captured pricing page shows a free trial of up to eight weeks with no credit card required, against Vacation Tracker's 14-day trial.
Your approval rules turn on primary and back-up approvers per team plus minimum staffing and conflict rules, with calendar feeds for Outlook, Google, Office 365 and iCal — WhosOff documents these, and 3 of 6 judges tied requests and approvals (means 6.8 vs 7.3).
You weight absence data protection evenly — both means read 3.8, and 1 judge leaned WhosOff there (1 leaned Vacation Tracker, 4 tied).
Your integrators build exports against a documented RESTful API rather than a named payroll connector — WhosOff's payroll handover is documented as a RESTful API naming no payroll system.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Data Protection Officer
Treats every sick day as special-category data, because the law does. Asks who can see a reason or a certificate, how long absence records are kept and deleted, whether access is logged, where the data is hosted, and which subprocessors send the push notification that says someone is ill.
Vacation Tracker
This judge's pick
WhosOff
Criterion by criterion
Entitlements & German leave rules
Vacation Tracker
Entitlements are configurable per leave type and per location, in days or hours, with accrual intervals, a carry-over option that includes an expiry date, seniority- and role-based allowances, and half-day and hourly requests — that is genuine leave accounting. But the German layer is unevidenced: I found no public information on part-time proration for joiners and leavers, on public holidays per German federal state or Austrian region, or on automatic notices to employees before carried-over leave lapses.
WhosOff
Entitlements are kept per employee with opening and remaining balances amendable for the current and next year, unlimited custom leave types with their own limits, and leave tracked in hours or days. We found no public information on public holidays per German federal state or Austrian region, part-time proration, or carry-over with expiry and advance notices. For a German buyer this is a generic allowance engine, not a rules engine for German leave law.
Requests, approvals & team calendar
Vacation Tracker
Requests come in from Slack, Teams, email and mobile apps, and a two-level approval chain is documented end to end — first level notified on submission, any one approver suffices per level, substitutes cover absent approvers, and blackout periods plus a maximum-users-away limit guard staffing. The request history exports as a log of who requested what, when and who approved. I found no public information on calendar visibility per role that hides the absence reason from colleagues.
WhosOff
Employees request leave from iOS and Android apps, approvals run through customisable and multi-level chains with primary and back-up approvers per team, minimum staffing departments and conflict rules are enforced, email notifications fire on request and decision, and calendar feeds cover Outlook, Google, Office 365 and iCal. The vendor also describes complete audit trails and approvers can add, edit and cancel leave on a staff member's behalf. We found no public information on substitutes named on the request, per-role calendar visibility that hides an absence reason, or Microsoft Teams and Slack integration.
Sick leave, eAU & continued pay
Vacation Tracker
Sick leave exists as its own leave type on a dedicated sick-leave tracker page, but the regulated process is unevidenced: I found no public information on eAU retrieval in any form, on counting sick days towards the six-week continued-pay limit, on child-sick days, or on certificate handling including for privately insured employees. Team notifications even announce 'prolonged sick days' to colleagues, with no shown restriction of who learns why someone is ill.
WhosOff
Sickness appears as one trackable leave type alongside holiday and parental, configurable in hours or days, but that is the whole documented story. We found no public information on certificate upload, electronic certificate of incapacity retrieval from health insurers, counting of sick days towards the six-week continued-pay limit, or child sick days. Tellingly for my desk, the privacy policy states that no health information is collected at all, while the feature pages list sickness as a trackable type — the captured pages give different signals on how sick-day data is governed.
Payroll handover, time tracking & API
Vacation Tracker
Approved leave syncs automatically to a named payroll system — ADP Workforce Now — and leave request and balance reports export to CSV and Excel with fields the vendor says are meant for cross-referencing in payroll or HR systems. The API is well documented, with published rate limits, scoped and rotatable keys, and webhooks. I found no public information on DATEV or other German payroll systems, on mapping absence types to payroll codes, or on time-account interaction and period locks.
WhosOff
A documented RESTful API offers leave, overtime, allowance and reporting endpoints with webhooks, IP restrictions and a sandbox, and a customer testimonial mentions pulling HR reports. We found no public information on any named payroll system such as DATEV, mapping of absence types to payroll codes, period locking with an audit trail, or sharing balances with a named time-tracking tool. The API also states plainly that it does not enforce the leave restrictions of the online system, so a payroll integration built on it carries that caveat.
Health data, access & works council
Vacation Tracker
A role model of employees, approvers, administrators and watchers governs who acts on absence data, a data processing agreement and self-service deletion are offered, and a policy setting can hide a leave type. But I found no public information on whether sickness reasons or certificates are restricted to named roles, on access logging for health-related records, on retention periods per record type, or on any documentation aimed at a works council. The privacy policy names the company itself as Data Controller and routes AI analysis of 'service and business data' to a subprocessor, without saying whether sickness records are excluded.
WhosOff
Each leave type carries its own visibility settings and approvers receive granular permissions, which bears on who sees whose absence, but retention is stated only for as long as reasonably necessary with no fixed period, deletion runs or access logging documented. The API is stated not to implement the online system's data rules such as cross-department viewing, and the privacy policy asserts no health information is collected while sickness is a trackable leave type — the captured pages give different signals on special-category governance. We found no public information on works-council documentation, a works agreement template, or employees' ability to view their own absence records.
European sovereignty
Vacation Tracker
European accounts are stated to reside and remain in Frankfurt at all times, an EU GDPR representative in Bonn is named, and a data processing agreement is offered — though the contracting entity and governing law sit in Quebec, Canada, alongside EU–US transfer clauses and a consent term covering transfer of data to the United States. Subprocessors are named, including the AI provider and the email-marketing, chat and CRM vendors, but without locations, and the hosting infrastructure is not named; a 'certified' claim appears with no certificate stated.
WhosOff
The contracting entity is X:drive Computing Limited, registered in England and Wales with a Canterbury address, a UK privacy policy naming the Information Commissioner's Office, UK adequacy or UK-approved contractual terms for transfers, and a processor clause in the terms of service; Google analytics based outside the UK is the only named third-party processor. Hosting location, any subprocessor list, and any EU contracting arrangement are unknown, so the European picture cannot be established beyond a UK entity with a UK-framed policy.
Pricing transparency
Vacation Tracker
Both paid tiers are public — €2 and €4 per user per month with €50 and €100 minimums, billed monthly, alongside a free plan, a 14-day trial, no set-up costs and a ~10% yearly saving — and tier placement is stated for multi-level approvals, advanced policies and the included API. The captured pages give different figures for currency: the pricing page shows euro amounts while the terms state all payments are in U.S. dollars, and tax appears only as sales tax added 'as deemed required by us', so a European buyer cannot derive the final invoice from public pages alone.
WhosOff
The only public pricing facts we found are a free trial of up to eight weeks with no credit card required, described as the full service for free until a stated date. We found no public information on any per-employee or per-user price, tier structure, billing period, minimum users, minimum term or which tier would carry payroll export. A buyer cannot compute an annual cost from the captured pages.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Vacation Tracker
WhosOff
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Ownership
Not determined
Not determined
Data residency
Not determined
Not determined
Subprocessors
Not determined
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 Vacation Tracker higher: 2.5/5 against 2/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 6 of the 6 judges pick Vacation Tracker and 0 pick WhosOff. 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 Vacation Tracker or WhosOff European?
Vacation Tracker is not European by provenance (Rest of world). WhosOff is European (UK / wider Europe). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Where do Vacation Tracker and WhosOff store customer data?
Per the vendors’ own pages as captured — Vacation Tracker: Default not stated; pages mention Germany and United States. WhosOff: its pages as captured do not say.