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 Managing Director
Runs a forty-person company in two federal states without an HR department and is liable when leave is calculated wrong. Wants part-time entitlements prorated correctly, the right public holidays per site, carry-over that lapses only after employees were told, and the eAU handled without a phone call to every health insurer.
Vacation Tracker
This judge's pick
WhosOff
Criterion by criterion
Entitlements & German leave rules
Vacation Tracker
Quotas in days or hours, half-day requests, seniority and role-based entitlements, holidays and policies set per location, and carry-over with a configurable expiry date are all publicly documented, which covers the basics for my two sites. But we found no public information on proration for part-time working days or for joiners and leavers, on holiday calendars at German federal-state level, or on automatic notices to employees before carried-over leave expires — and that expiry notice is exactly where I carry the liability.
WhosOff
Entitlements are held per employee with opening and remaining balances that super users can amend for the current or next year, leave types are configurable with names, colours and per-type limits, and leave can be tracked in hours as well as days. I found no public information on part-time proration, public holidays per German federal state, or carry-over with an expiry and automatic notice to employees before leave lapses — exactly the points I am personally liable for.
Requests, approvals & team calendar
Vacation Tracker
Requests from Slack, Teams, email or the mobile apps, two sequential approval levels with any one approver per level sufficing, substitutes covering absent approvers, blackout periods, a maximum-users-away rule, and a leave request report logging who requested what and who approved — that is a genuinely usable flow for a company my size. We found no public information on calendar sync with Outlook or Google, on calendar visibility per role that hides the absence reason, or on reporting for pending and overdue approvals.
WhosOff
Requests and approvals run from iOS and Android apps with email notifications at request, approval and cancellation, approvers configurable per team with primary and back-up levels, and calendar feeds into Outlook, Office 365, Google and iCal. Minimum staffing levels per department and rules to stop close colleagues booking the same days are documented, and the vendor describes complete audit trails. I found no public information on substitutes named on the request, blackout periods, or a Teams or Slack integration.
Sick leave, eAU & continued pay
Vacation Tracker
Sick leave is tracked as its own leave type, with notifications about prolonged sick days, and that is the extent of what is public. We found no public information on eAU retrieval, on counting sick days towards the six-week continued-pay limit, on BEM thresholds, on child-sick days or on certificate handling — as things stand I would still be phoning every health insurer myself.
WhosOff
Sickness appears only as one entry in the list of configurable leave types, tracked in days or hours like any other. I found no public information on certificate upload by the employee, eAU retrieval by the tool or via a named payroll system, counting sick days towards the six-week continued-pay limit, or BEM thresholds. In my company this would still mean phoning every health insurer myself.
Payroll handover, time tracking & API
Vacation Tracker
CSV and Excel exports of requests and balances carry payroll-relevant fields, approved leave syncs live into ADP Workforce Now, and there is a documented API with webhooks and published rate limits — solid, but ADP is the only named payroll system. We found no public information on DATEV or other German payroll systems, on mapping leave types to payroll codes, or on a monthly period lock, so the closing discipline for my payroll office stays with me.
WhosOff
A documented RESTful API offers leave, allowance, overtime and reporting endpoints with IP restriction, a sandbox and webhooks — real plumbing for a forty-person firm without an HR department. But I found no public information on an export or integration for DATEV or any other named payroll system, on mapping absence types to payroll codes, or on a monthly period lock, so the handover to my Lohnbüro would be hand-built through the API.
Health data, access & works council
Vacation Tracker
A data processing agreement is offered, roles for administrators, approvers and employees govern access, a hide-leave-type setting exists, and employees see their own records on a self-service dashboard. We found no public information on restricting sickness reasons and certificates to named roles, on logged access to health-related records, on retention rules per record type, or on documentation a works council could work with.
WhosOff
Staff, approver and super-user permissions govern who manages leave and each leave type carries its own visibility settings, and the terms acknowledge the vendor's processor role; retention is stated only as 'as long as reasonably necessary' with no fixed period. The privacy policy states that no health data is collected, while the feature pages list sickness as a trackable leave type — the captured pages give different accounts of health data. I found no public information on access logging for sickness records, automatic deletion, or documentation for a works agreement.
European sovereignty
Vacation Tracker
European accounts are stated to reside in Frankfurt and remain in Europe, an EU GDPR representative in Bonn is named, and a data processing agreement is offered — the minimum I can actually contract against. The contracting entity is a Canadian company under Quebec law, subprocessors such as Anthropic, Customer.io, Crisp and HubSpot are named without published locations, no named certification is given, and the captured pages give different statements on data location, with the privacy policy asking for consent to transfers to the United States while the hosting statement says European accounts' data remains in Europe.
WhosOff
The contracting entity is X:Drive Computing Limited, registered in England and Wales at a Canterbury address, with the UK Information Commissioner's Office as regulator and UK adequacy decisions or UK-approved terms governing transfers out of the UK; a privacy policy and a processor clause in the terms are published. Hosting location, ownership and any subprocessor list are unknown from the captured pages. For my German company the entity sits outside the EU and nothing on these pages evidences EU-side hosting of the data.
Pricing transparency
Vacation Tracker
Both paid tiers are priced publicly with basis and period — Core at €2 per user / month and Complete at €4 per user / month, billed monthly, with a €50 and €100 minimum, a yearly saving of ~10%, no setup costs and cancellation at the end of the current paid term — and feature placement such as multi-level approvals on Complete and the API included at no extra cost is stated. We found no public information on which tier carries the ADP payroll sync, and the only tax statement is that sales tax will be added, so a German invoice is not fully computable from the public pages.
WhosOff
The only pricing information the captured pages provide is a free trial of up to eight weeks with no credit card required. I found no public information on a price per employee or per user, tier prices, the billing period, minimum users, minimum term or which features sit in which tier. I cannot begin to compute an annual invoice from this.
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.