Homebase vs When I Work vs Deputy vs 7shifts vs Sling

We build a scheduling tool that competes with all five of these. You should read everything below with that in mind, and it is the reason this post exists at all: comparing Homebase to When I Work is not our job, so nobody in this market does it without a thumb on the scale.

What our conflict of interest actually buys you is that we have read every one of these pricing pages more carefully than a buyer ever will, because we had to price against them. So here is the comparison with the thumb taken off — including the part where three of them beat us at something.

The finding: they do not charge on the same axis

Almost every "X vs Y" article in this category puts two monthly prices side by side. Those two numbers are not comparable, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of degree.

Homebase and 7shifts bill per location. Your headcount does not appear on the invoice. Hiring six people for the summer costs nothing; opening a second site doubles the bill.

When I Work, Deputy and Sling bill per user. Your site count barely matters. Those same six summer hires are six new line items, every month, until they leave.

This is why the "cheapest scheduling software" lists are useless: two businesses with identical software needs get opposite answers, and neither list asks the question that decides it.

Those are public list prices as of the date in the last column, and the links go to our own comparison pages for each — which are, obviously, written from our side. The tiers here are not.

Turning the axis into a number, in about thirty seconds

There is one piece of arithmetic that decides most of these comparisons, and it takes a napkin:

1. Take the per-location price of the plan you would actually be on, and divide it by the per-user price of the competing plan.
2. The result is a headcount per site. Below it, the per-user vendor is cheaper. Above it, the per-location vendor is.

Run it across the table above and, at the prices listed there, the crossovers spread from about five people per site (Homebase Essentials against Deputy Lite) to about eighteen (Homebase Plus against Sling Business). The spread is the finding. There is no break-even for the category — only one for the specific pair you are choosing between, and a rule of thumb you read somewhere else was computed from a different pair.

What does hold across every pairing is the direction: per-user pricing is built for many small sites, per-location pricing for fewer dense ones. A twelve-kiosk operation with three staff each and a single restaurant with forty are not shopping in the same market, whatever the category page says.

Two things break the napkin, both of which we have watched buyers miss:

• The ratio is per site, not company-wide. Sixty staff across two locations is thirty per site. The same sixty across ten is six. Those are different answers from the same headcount.
• Minimums quietly re-shape the low end. Deputy's published tiers carry a monthly minimum spend per invoice, which means the smallest teams do not get the small per-user bill the sticker implies. Check for a floor before you multiply.

And the axis is not a detail of the invoice — it is a standing incentive. We wrote about why we switched our own model and what the shape of a bill does to the way managers behave, including the bit where we argued the opposite four months earlier.

Free tiers are not comparable either

Three of the five publish a genuinely free plan; two do not, and lead with a trial instead.

• Homebase: Basic free (1 location, up to 20 employees)
• When I Work: no free plan in their published price list.
• Deputy: no free plan in their published price list.
• 7shifts: Comp free (1 location, up to 30 employees)
• Sling: Free (basic scheduling, time clock)

Read the parentheses rather than the word. Two of those free plans are capped on both locations and headcount, which means the free tier expires the day you open a second site — not the day you outgrow a feature. A free plan with a location cap is a trial with a longer fuse, and it is the single most common reason a small operator has to migrate twice.

Homebase vs When I Work, since that is the one everybody asks

It is far and away the most searched pairing in this category, and the two products are less alike than the search volume suggests. They are not really competing for the same buyer.

Homebase — Generous free tier (1 location, 20 employees). Strong US payroll + team chat. Per-location pricing scales fast for chains.

When I Work — 10M+ users. Strong mobile + time tracking. Lighter on AI and modern collaborative editing.

Reduced to one sentence: Homebase is an all-in-one for a US small business that wants payroll, HR and scheduling on one bill, and When I Work is a time-tracking-first scheduler with the more mature mobile experience. If your real problem is running payroll, that decides it before any feature comparison starts. If your real problem is that nobody clocks in reliably, that decides it the other way.

The pricing axis then cuts across that choice: Homebase per location, When I Work per user. A single site with thirty staff and a chain of eight with five each will disagree about which one is expensive, and both will be right.

Where each one genuinely wins

These are the conditions under which we would tell a prospect to buy the other product. They are the same lines we publish on our own comparison pages, which is deliberate — if we would not repeat them somewhere the vendor might read, they are not honest enough to be useful.

The pattern worth noticing is that four of the five win on breadth — payroll, time clock, POS, award interpretation, team chat — and the fifth wins on price. None of them wins on the schedule itself. That is not an accident of how we wrote the list; it is what the category has been optimising for, and it is the gap we went after.

Two we are not going to pretend to know

People search for ClockShark and Square Team against this list, and we do not track either one. ClockShark is field-services-shaped — construction and trades, GPS-stamped crew clock-ins — which is a different job from covering a rota. Square Team is bundled with Square POS, so for most people evaluating it the real question is whether they are staying on Square, not whether the scheduler is good.

Beyond that we have not audited their pricing or feature set, so we are not going to rank them. A comparison written from a competitor's marketing site is worth exactly what it costs to write.

Where we fit, stated plainly

Weekwright drafts the week. You describe the constraints in plain English and an AI agent proposes a full schedule that respects availability, skills, time-off, compliance rules and how much weekend and late work each person has already absorbed — then attaches a sourced reason to each assignment. Every vendor above stores and edits schedules well; none of them writes one.

The honest other half: we do not run payroll, we have no POS integration, and we have no app in either store today — employees use the responsive web app from their phones. Against Homebase on payroll, 7shifts on Toast integration, or Deputy on Australian award interpretation, we lose, and we would rather you find that out here than in month two.

If the axis discussion above landed: we bill per location, and headcount is not an input on any tier. The pricing page has the tiers, and the comparison index has all twelve vendors we track side by side with us — including the rows where the answer is no.