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 HR IT Integrator
Wires the absence tool to payroll, time tracking, the identity provider and the calendar. Wants a documented API and webhooks, maintained connectors for the named German payroll systems rather than a CSV, SSO, and balances that agree with the time-tracking system on both sides.
Vacation Tracker
This judge's pick
WhosOff
Criterion by criterion
Entitlements & German leave rules
Vacation Tracker
Entitlements in days or hours, half-day and hourly requests, accruals with caps, seniority and role-based entitlements, and carry-over with an expiry date and rollover options are all documented, configured per location with custom leave types. But I found no public information on part-time proration, joiner and leaver recalculation, or public-holiday calendars per German federal state — the contract arithmetic I need before I trust balances into payroll. That is solid basic entitlement tracking, one step short of German-contract territory.
WhosOff
Super users can amend each staff member's annual entitlement for the current or next year, with opening and remaining balances and a recorded comment, and leave types — sickness, parental, custom — carry their own allowances, per-year limits, visibility and minimum-notice rules, with leave also trackable in hours instead of days. We found no public information on public holidays per German federal state, part-time proration, or carry-over with an expiry date, so the German entitlement mechanics are not documented.
Requests, approvals & team calendar
Vacation Tracker
Two sequential approval levels where any one approver per level suffices, blackout periods, a maximum-users-away limit, substitute approvers covering absent approvers with notification of both parties, requests from Slack, Microsoft Teams, email and mobile apps, and a leave request report logging who requested what, when, and who approved. I found no public information on role-based calendar visibility that hides the absence reason or on naming a stand-in on the request itself, and multi-level approval sits behind the top paid plan — otherwise this flow is close to what a real organisation runs.
WhosOff
Requests and approvals run from iOS and Android apps, with approvers configurable per team, department or individual, multi-level chains using primary and back-up approvers, minimum staffing departments, rules against close colleagues booking the same time, per-leave-type visibility settings, email notifications and audit trails, plus calendar feeds into Outlook, Office 365, Google Calendar, Apple iCal and iPhone. We found no public information on naming a substitute on the request or a Microsoft Teams or Slack integration.
Sick leave, eAU & continued pay
Vacation Tracker
Sick leave is recorded as its own leave type, with notifications about prolonged sick days, and that is all the public pages show. I found no public information on eAU retrieval — neither by the tool itself nor via a named payroll system — nor on certificate upload, child-sick days, or counting sick days towards the six-week continued-pay limit. For a German payroll handover, the regulated half of absence management is simply not documented.
WhosOff
Sickness appears only as one of many configurable leave types with its own rules and visibility, which is the extent of what the captured pages show. We found no public information on eAU retrieval, counting sick days towards the six-week continued-pay limit, child sick days, or certificate upload by the employee.
Payroll handover, time tracking & API
Vacation Tracker
The developer side is genuinely good: a documented API v2 with bearer auth, scoped permission templates, key rotation, published rate limits, webhooks for leave decisions and full sync, plus a maintained sync that pushes approved leave straight into ADP Workforce Now, and CSV/Excel balance exports with entitlement, taken, brought-forward and employee ID for payroll cross-referencing. But ADP Workforce Now is the one named payroll system in the captured material — I found no public information on DATEV or any other German payroll connector, on mapping absence types to payroll codes, on period locks and monthly closing, or on balances shared with a named time-tracking system.
WhosOff
There is a documented RESTful API with a sandbox, bearer-token authentication, IP allow-listing and a long endpoint list covering leave, user allowances, overtime and reporting, plus webhooks, overtime tracking and single sign-on via Azure, Okta, OneLogin, Auth0, Google Business Apps and Active Directory. We found no public information on a maintained integration or export for DATEV or any other named payroll system, absence-to-payroll-code mapping, or a monthly closing that locks past periods.
Health data, access & works council
Vacation Tracker
Employee, approver and administrator roles govern who acts on absence data, and a data processing agreement plus a GDPR-postured privacy policy naming an EU representative are published. I found no public information on restricting sickness reasons or certificates to named roles, on access logging for health-related records, on retention rules per record type, or on documentation for a works agreement — and the policy control to hide a leave type is a toggle on the leave type itself, not role-based visibility. For data that is health data in law, that leaves the hard questions unanswered.
WhosOff
Roles run from staff through approvers to super users, approvers receive configurable extra permissions, each leave type has its own visibility settings, and the terms state X:Drive acts as data processor with access limited to those with a business need — though retention is stated only for as long as reasonably necessary, with no fixed periods. The privacy policy states that no special categories of personal data including information about health are collected, while the product pages list sickness among the leave types; we found no public information on access logging for health-related records or documentation for a works agreement.
European sovereignty
Vacation Tracker
The privacy policy states that European accounts' data resides and remains in Frankfurt, Germany, an EU GDPR representative in Bonn is named, and a data processing agreement is offered — but the contracting entity is Vacation Tracker Technologies Inc. in Quebec under Quebec law, and the named subprocessors (Anthropic, Customer.io, Crisp, HubSpot) appear without locations. The terms of service also state that continued use of the site transfers your data to the United States, which a buyer will want to weigh against the European-hosting statement for European accounts. EU hosting plus an EU representative with a DPA, and the contracting entity outside the EU — the middle of the scale, and no certification details are published.
WhosOff
The contracting entity is X:Drive Computing Limited, registered in England and Wales with a Canterbury address, the UK Information Commissioner's Office is named as regulator, and transfers outside the UK rely on UK adequacy decisions or UK-approved standard terms, with a privacy policy and processor role in the terms. The captured pages do not establish where absence data is hosted or which subprocessors sit behind it.
Pricing transparency
Vacation Tracker
Both paid plans carry public prices with basis and billing period — "Core €2 per user / month €50 minimum" and "Complete €4 per user / month €100 minimum", billed monthly, alongside a free plan, a roughly 10% yearly saving, and the Open API stated as included at no extra cost on Core and Complete. A buyer can compute the base cost, though the terms state payments are in U.S. dollars while the pricing page shows euros, sales tax "will be added" as the vendor deems required, prices may change at any time, and I found no public information on a minimum term or which tier carries the payroll integration. eAU does not appear in the pricing at all, so there is nothing to place in a tier.
WhosOff
The only public pricing information is a free trial of up to eight weeks with no credit card required. We found no public prices per employee or per user, tier contents, minimum users, minimum term or VAT treatment, so an annual cost cannot be computed 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.