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 Payroll Accountant
Closes payroll in DATEV every month and corrects whatever arrived late. Wants absences exported with the right payroll codes, the eAU result attached to the sick day, the six-week continued-pay limit counted per illness, and past months locked once they are paid.
Vacation Tracker
This judge's pick
WhosOff
Criterion by criterion
Entitlements & German leave rules
Vacation Tracker
Policies are set per location with yearly quotas in days or hours, accruals monthly, biweekly or weekly based on hours or days worked, seniority top-ups, half-day requests and carry-over with a cap, reset or expiry date — a solid entitlement engine. We found no public information on public holidays per German federal state, on prorating entitlements for joiners and leavers, or on automatic notices to employees before rolled-over leave lapses, so I cannot confirm it computes leave the way German contracts and the BAG require.
WhosOff
Entitlements are per employee with opening and remaining balances that super users amend for the current or next year, leave types are unlimited and configurable with per-type yearly limits, and leave can be tracked in hours as well as days. That covers the basic bookkeeping, but we found no public information on part-time proration, public holidays per German federal state, or carry-over with expiry and the notices German courts expect — none of this is German leave law.
Requests, approvals & team calendar
Vacation Tracker
Multi-level approval runs two sequential levels where any approver at a level acts first, substitutes can be named or set by an admin, blackout periods and a maximum-users-away rule guard staffing, and approvers act from Slack, Teams, email or the dashboard. The leave request report logs who requested what, when and who approved. We found no public information on calendar visibility per role that hides the absence reason.
WhosOff
Requests and approvals run from iOS and Android apps with email notifications, per-team approvers in multiple approval levels with primary and back-up, minimum staffing departments and rules stopping close colleagues booking the same days. Approved leave feeds Outlook, Google Calendar, Office 365 and iCal, and approvers can be granted permission to add, edit or cancel leave on a staff member's behalf. We found no public information on substitutes named on the request or a Teams or Slack tie-in, which is what holds it below the top of this scale.
Sick leave, eAU & continued pay
Vacation Tracker
Sick leave is recorded as its own leave type, with a dedicated sick-leave tracker and notifications that mention prolonged sick days. We found no public information on certificate upload, eAU retrieval from the statutory health insurers, counting sick days towards the six-week continued-pay limit per illness, or child sick days — nothing here supports the EFZG side of my monthly run.
WhosOff
Sickness is one of the trackable leave types with its own rules and visibility settings, so sick days can at least be kept apart from holiday. We found no public information on eAU retrieval from the health insurers, on certificates uploaded by the employee or on child-sick days, and nothing anywhere on counting sick days towards the six-week continued-pay limit — for a German payroll run none of the regulated sick process is documented.
Payroll handover, time tracking & API
Vacation Tracker
Approved leave syncs into ADP Workforce Now, and the leave balance report exports entitlement, taken, brought-forward and remaining balance per leave type per user with Employee ID for cross-referencing in payroll, in CSV or Excel including a monthly report. The API is documented with webhooks and published rate limits, v1 read-only and v2 able to read and change data. We found no public information on DATEV, LODAS or Lohn und Gehalt, on mapping absence types to payroll codes, or on locking past periods once a month is paid.
WhosOff
There is a documented RESTful API with leave, overtime, user-allowance and reporting endpoints, bearer-token authentication, a sandbox and IP restrictions, plus webhooks, so absences can be pulled out of the tool. But no payroll system is named anywhere — DATEV included — and we found no public information on payroll codes per absence type, a monthly period lock for past months, or published API limits; export is otherwise mentioned only in a customer testimonial.
Health data, access & works council
Vacation Tracker
Employees, approvers and administrators have distinct roles, a leave policy can hide a leave type, colleagues see a team availability overview, and a data processing agreement plus a GDPR-drafted privacy policy are offered. We found no public information on restricting sickness reasons or certificates to named roles, on access logging, on retention rules per record type, or on works-agreement guidance; the privacy policy names Anthropic for AI-powered analysis of service and business data, and we found no public information on whether that analysis touches sickness records.
WhosOff
Roles govern who sees what — super users, approvers with graduated extra permissions, staff — and each leave type carries its own visibility settings, with two-factor authentication offered and audit trails claimed for compliance reporting. The privacy policy states that no health information is collected while the features pages list sickness among the trackable leave types, retention is only 'as long as reasonably necessary', and the named regulator is the UK ICO. We found no public information on access logs for health records, automatic deletion runs, or documentation aimed at a works agreement.
European sovereignty
Vacation Tracker
For European accounts the privacy policy states data resides and remains in Europe at all times, hosted in Frankfurt, an EU GDPR representative in Bonn is named, and a data processing agreement is offered. The contracting entity is Vacation Tracker Technologies Inc. in Canada under Quebec law with payments in U.S. dollars, and the subprocessor list names Anthropic, Customer.io, Crisp and HubSpot without locations. We found no public information on named hosting infrastructure, on ownership, or on a certification standard — the site says it is "certified" without naming which certification.
WhosOff
The contracting entity is X:Drive Computing Limited, registered in England and Wales with a Canterbury address, and a privacy policy plus a data-processor clause in the terms of service are published; transfers outside the UK use UK adequacy decisions or UK-approved standard contractual terms. Hosting location and the subprocessor chain are not established on the captured pages, so what is proven is a UK entity with a privacy policy and processor clause, and nothing about EU hosting.
Pricing transparency
Vacation Tracker
Both paid tiers are public with basis and billing period — Core at €2 per user / month with a €50 minimum, Complete at €4 per user / month with a €100 minimum, billed monthly, plus a free plan, no setup costs, cancel anytime and roughly ten percent off yearly. Tier gating is documented: multi-level approval needs Complete, accruals, hourly tracking and TOIL sit in Complete, and the Open API add-on is included at no extra cost on Core and Complete. The terms state sales tax will be added and that all payments shall be in U.S. dollars, while the pricing page shows euro prices — the captured pages give different currencies for the same tiers.
WhosOff
Only a free trial is public — up to eight weeks with no credit card — and the captured pricing page carries no price figures at all. We found no public information on per-user or per-employee prices, which features sit in which tier, minimum users, minimum term or VAT treatment, so an annual cost cannot be worked out from these 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.