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 Team Lead
Approves leave for twelve people across two shifts and finds out about clashes too late. Wants requests and approvals on the phone, a named substitute on every request, minimum-staffing warnings before approval, and a team calendar that shows who is away without showing why.
Vacation Tracker
This judge's pick
WhosOff
Criterion by criterion
Entitlements & German leave rules
Vacation Tracker
Yearly quotas per role and per location, seniority-based extra leave, half-day and hourly requests, accruals, and carry-over with an expiry date are all documented, which covers the balance bookkeeping for my twelve people. I found no public information on proration for part-time working days or for joiners and leavers, holidays per German federal state or Austrian region, or automatic notices to employees before carried-over leave lapses, so the German rulebook is not reached.
WhosOff
Per-person entitlements with opening and remaining balances for this year and next, unlimited custom leave types with per-type calendar-year limits, and leave tracked in hours or days are all documented. We found no public information on part-time proration, public holidays per German federal state or Austrian region, or carry-over with an expiry date and notices before leave lapses, so this stops well short of computing leave the way German contracts do.
Requests, approvals & team calendar
Vacation Tracker
This is the part that works for me: requests via a Slack command or Teams bot with iOS and Android apps, two sequential approval levels where any one approver per level acts and the second level sees who approved first, substitute approvers that an admin can also set on an absent approver's scheduled leave, maximum-users-away limits, blackout periods, and notifications that list other scheduled leaves in the same period. A leave request report logs who requested what, when, and who approved. What I could not find is a substitute named on the request itself for shift coverage, calendar visibility per role that hides the absence reason, Outlook or Google calendar sync, or reporting on pending and overdue approvals beyond approval reminders.
WhosOff
This is the flow I need: full request and approval from iOS and Android apps, approvers configurable per team with multiple levels and back-ups, a central calendar every team member can check before booking, calendar feeds into Outlook, Google and Office 365, plus minimum staffing departments and rules that stop close colleagues booking the same time off. Named substitutes on the request, Teams or Slack integration, and a per-role calendar view that hides the absence reason (leave types carry visibility settings, but no such statement) are not documented, which keeps it just under the top band.
Sick leave, eAU & continued pay
Vacation Tracker
Sick leave is tracked as its own type alongside vacations and days off, with notifications mentioning prolonged sick days — enough to mark someone off on the roster, nothing more. I found no public information on the eAU and its retrieval route, counting towards the six-week continued-pay limit, BEM flags, child-sick days, or certificate upload.
WhosOff
Sickness is tracked as one of the unlimited leave types with its own rules, and that is where the evidence ends. We found no public information on eAU retrieval, counting sick days towards the six-week continued-pay limit, child-sick days, or certificate upload; the privacy policy states no health data is collected at all.
Payroll handover, time tracking & API
Vacation Tracker
Approved leave syncs into ADP Workforce Now, leave requests and balances export to CSV or Excel including a monthly balance report with Employee ID for payroll cross-referencing, and the API is documented with published rate limits, key rotation, webhooks and write permission templates. Only one payroll system is named, however, and I found no public information on absence types mapped to payroll codes, a monthly closing that locks past periods, or a German payroll route such as DATEV.
WhosOff
A RESTful API is documented in depth — endpoints for leave, leave type lookup, user allowances, overtime and reporting, with bearer-token authentication, IP restriction, sandbox and webhook support — so absences can be pulled into other systems. We found no public information on any named payroll system such as DATEV, payroll code mapping, monthly period locks, or published API limits.
Health data, access & works council
Vacation Tracker
Employee, approver and administrator roles govern the data, a data processing agreement is offered, and a hide-leave-type control exists in the policy settings. I found no public information on restricting sickness reasons and certificates to named roles, on colleagues being shown only that someone is absent without the reason, on access logs for health-related records, retention rules per record type, or documentation aimed at a works council.
WhosOff
Permission roles for staff, approvers and super users govern who manages leave, leave types carry their own visibility settings, and the online system applies cross-department viewing rules; retention is stated only as keeping data as long as reasonably necessary, with no fixed period. We found no public information on access logging for sickness records, automatic deletion, field-level permissions per leave type, or documentation aimed at a works council.
European sovereignty
Vacation Tracker
The privacy policy states that European accounts are stored in Frankfurt and remain in Europe at all times, an EU GDPR representative in Bonn is named, a data processing agreement is offered, and subprocessors including Anthropic, Customer.io, Crisp and HubSpot are listed, though without their locations. The contracting entity is the Canadian Vacation Tracker Technologies Inc. under Quebec law, and the site's certified claim is made without naming a standard such as ISO 27001.
WhosOff
The contracting entity is X:Drive Computing Limited, registered in England and Wales with a UK VAT number, regulated by the ICO, with the terms setting out its processor role and transfers governed by UK adequacy decisions or UK-approved standard terms. That places the entity outside the EU; hosting location, ownership and subprocessors are not established by the captured pages, so no EU hosting or subprocessor transparency can be credited.
Pricing transparency
Vacation Tracker
Both paid tiers are priced publicly — Core at €2 per user / month with a €50 minimum, Complete at €4 per user / month with a €100 minimum, both billed monthly — plus a free plan, a 14-day trial with no setup costs, a roughly 10% yearly saving, and tier contents clear enough to place multi-level approvals and accruals in Complete and the API at no extra cost. The pricing page shows euro figures while the terms state all payments are in U.S. dollars, and I found no public information on add-on prices beyond the API or which tier includes the ADP payroll sync.
WhosOff
Only the free trial is priced publicly — up to eight weeks with no credit card required — and the captured pricing page gave no price figures. We found no public information on tier prices, the per-employee or per-user rate, the billing period, minimum users or minimum term, so a buyer cannot compute the real annual cost 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.