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 Skeptic
Knows "eAU supported" can mean a photo upload, "DATEV integration" can mean a CSV, and "GDPR-compliant" can mean every manager sees every diagnosis-adjacent note. Reads for who actually retrieves the certificate, which leave rules are computed rather than typed in, and whether the carry-over expiry notice exists at all.
Vacation Tracker
This judge's pick
WhosOff
Criterion by criterion
Entitlements & German leave rules
Vacation Tracker
Annual quotas in days or hours, accruals with caps, TOIL, half-day and hourly requests, carry-over rules including an expiry date for rolled-over days, and entitlements by role and length of service are all documented. The German mechanics are another matter: I found no public information on part-time or joiner and leaver proration, on public holidays per federal state, on automatic notices before carried-over leave lapses, or on special and parental leave types governed by their own rules.
WhosOff
Entitlements here are figures a super user types in: opening and remaining balances for the current and next year, amended per person with a comment box, and the balance then adjusts itself — plus unlimited custom leave types with per-type limits and leave tracked in hours or days. Nothing German is computed in the captured pages; we found no public information on part-time or joiner/leaver proration, public holidays per federal state, or carry-over with an expiry date and notice before leave lapses.
Requests, approvals & team calendar
Vacation Tracker
The everyday flow is real: requests via Slack, Teams or mobile, two sequential approval levels where any one approver per level moves the request on and a denial ends the chain, substitute approvers an admin can also set, blackout periods, a maximum-users-away limit, and a leave request report that logs who requested what and who approved. Two gaps for my taste: I found no public information on calendar visibility per role that hides the absence reason, or on syncing the team calendar with Outlook or Google Calendar.
WhosOff
The everyday flow is well evidenced: employees request from full iOS and Android apps, approval can run in multiple levels with primary and back-up approvers per team, minimum staffing departments and notice and conflict rules exist, and emails fire at request, decision and cancellation, with calendar feeds into Outlook, Google Calendar and Office 365. We found no public information on substitutes named on the request, a Teams or Slack integration, or calendar visibility that explicitly hides the absence reason — though leave types do carry their own visibility settings.
Sick leave, eAU & continued pay
Vacation Tracker
Sick leave exists as its own configurable absence type, with notifications about prolonged sick days — that is the entirety of what the pages show. I found no public information on certificate upload, on retrieval of the electronic certificate of incapacity (eAU) from health insurers, on counting sick days towards the six-week continued-pay limit, on BEM thresholds, or on child-sick days.
WhosOff
Sickness appears once, as one of many configurable leave types in a feature list, and the vendor's own sick-leave page yielded no confirmed detail on any regulated process. We found no public information on eAU retrieval from health insurers or via a payroll system, certificate handling, child sick days, or counting towards the six-week continued-pay limit.
Payroll handover, time tracking & API
Vacation Tracker
Approved leave flows into ADP Workforce Now automatically, the balance and request reports (CSV, Excel) are explicitly built for cross-referencing in payroll or HR, and the API is documented to an unusual degree — endpoints, rate limits, pagination, webhooks, key rotation and expiry notice. For a German payroll run, I found no public information on DATEV or any other German payroll system, on absence types mapped to payroll codes, on time-tracking account sharing, or on a monthly period lock.
WhosOff
The API is genuinely documented — authentication with IP restrictions, a sandbox, and endpoints for leave, allowances, overtime and reporting — with webhooks and in-product overtime tracking alongside. But nothing connects it to payroll: we found no public information on DATEV or any other named payroll system, absence-to-payroll-code mapping, or a monthly period lock, so the handover route is whatever a customer builds itself.
Health data, access & works council
Vacation Tracker
Employee, approver and administrator roles exist, a DPA is offered, an EU GDPR representative is named, and users can export and delete their data. I found no public information on who may see a sickness reason or certificate, on access logging, on retention per record type, or on works-council-facing documentation — and the privacy policy lists Anthropic for 'AI-powered analysis of service and business data' without saying whether that reaches sickness records.
WhosOff
Role-based access is real — approver permissions, cross-department viewing restrictions, and leave types with their own visibility settings — and employees see their own balances and request history. But the privacy policy states no special-category health data is collected, with the vendor acting as processor for customer-entered data per its terms, retention is stated only as 'as long as reasonably necessary' with no fixed periods, and we found no public information on access logging for sickness records or any works-council documentation.
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 DPA is offered — hosting, representative and DPA together are what the pages prove. The contracting entity is Vacation Tracker Technologies Inc. under Quebec law, the subprocessor list names Anthropic, Customer.io, Crisp and HubSpot without locations, and the 'certified' claim names no standard; I found no public information on ownership or on named hosting infrastructure.
WhosOff
The contracting entity is named and established — registered in England and Wales, Canterbury address, UK ICO as regulator — which sits outside the EU, with a privacy policy and processor terms placed in the conditions of service. Hosting location, ownership and subprocessor locations are unknown; the policy names only categories such as Google analytics 'based outside the UK' and IT service providers, with transfers governed by UK adequacy decisions or UK-approved contractual terms.
Pricing transparency
Vacation Tracker
Every tier is priced publicly with its basis and billing period — a free plan, Core at €2 per user / month with a €50 minimum, Complete at €4 per user / month with a €100 minimum — plus no setup costs, a 14-day trial, and clear feature gating: multi-level approvals, accruals, hourly tracking and TOIL on Complete, the Open API included on Core and Complete at no extra cost. Two frictions: the pricing page prices in euros while the terms state 'All payments shall be in U.S. dollars' — the captured pages give different figures for the currency — and sales tax is only said to be 'added to the price of purchases as deemed required by us'.
WhosOff
The only public pricing facts captured are a free trial of up to eight weeks with no credit card required, and a signup page offering the full service free until a fixed date. Beyond that we found no public information on per-user or per-employee prices, tiers, billing period, minimum term or which features sit in which plan — the captured pricing page produced no quotable figures.
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.