Is there free employee scheduling software, or can I just use an Excel / Google Sheets template?

Free scheduling software is good enough for a single location with roughly 10 to 30 hourly workers, depending on the vendor, and a spreadsheet is good enough below that when the roster barely changes. Both routes are legal. Neither one removes the federal recordkeeping duties that come with paying hourly staff, which is the part most free-versus-paid comparisons skip.[8]

What free actually buys in 2026

The free plans still on the market are working products rather than stripped demos. Connecteam's Small Business Plan is free for life for up to 10 users and opens all three of its hubs, covering scheduling, the time clock, chat, forms, time off, and documents.[2] Homebase's Basic plan is free for one location and up to 10 employees, with a weekly schedule builder and clock-in on tablets, computers, and POS devices.[1] Sling gives 30 users shift scheduling, time-off requests, open shifts, long-term scheduling, and private messaging at no cost.[3] Jibble tracks time free for unlimited users.[5] ZoomShift's Essentials tier covers 20 users at one site.[4]

Where the caps bite

The headcount number is rarely the limit you hit first. Homebase stores timesheets for 90 days on the free plan,[1] while federal rules expect the underlying daily time records to survive two years [10] and payroll records three.[9] Sling's free tier schedules people without clocking them in,[3] so hours end up living somewhere else anyway. Those gaps decide whether free is genuinely free or whether you are quietly moving work back into a spreadsheet.

Free tiers get withdrawn

When I Work no longer publishes a permanently free plan and sells a 14 day trial instead, with paid tiers starting at $2.50 per user per month.[6] Deputy has no free tier either, listing Lite at $5 per user per month alongside a $30 monthly minimum per invoice that took effect on September 1, 2025.[7] Both are still described as free in older roundups, so any figure you read here is worth re-checking on the vendor's own pricing page before you build a process around it.

Homebase

Homebase Basic is free for one location and up to 10 employees, and it includes the time clock that most free tiers hold back, with timesheets stored for 90 days.[1] Export timesheets monthly if you use it, because federal rules expect daily time records to survive two years.[10]

Connecteam

Connecteam's Small Business Plan is free for life for up to 10 users and opens every hub, so the cap is on people rather than features.[2] That makes it the widest free scope on this list for a team of 10 or fewer. Budget for the 11th hire, since paid Basic starts at $29 per month for the first 30 users.[2]

Sling

Sling's free plan carries the highest free headcount here at 30 users, covering shift scheduling, open shifts, time-off requests, long-term scheduling, and private messaging.[3] Time tracking, labor cost, and overtime tracking start at Premium, $2 per user per month, so Sling free suits a floor that already records hours in a POS or a separate clock.[3]

ZoomShift

ZoomShift Essentials is free for up to 20 users at one location and publishes schedules up to two weeks ahead.[4] Check that horizon against your local rules, because covered Oregon employers have to post written schedules at least 14 calendar days in advance, which leaves no margin to publish early.[13] Starter at $2 per user per month removes the user, site, and horizon limits.[4]

Jibble

Jibble is free forever for unlimited users, covering clock-in from mobile and web, basic timesheets, and integrations with Slack, Microsoft Teams, and QuickBooks.[5] No other free tier here drops the headcount cap, which makes it a sensible pairing with a spreadsheet schedule when your real problem is hours rather than shifts. Ask for paid tier pricing in writing, since it is not shown on the pricing page.[5]

When I Work

When I Work is the clearest example of a free tier being withdrawn: it now offers 14 days of full access, then Essentials at $2.50, Pro at $5, and Premium at $8 per user per month.[6] At 15 employees, Essentials runs about $37.50 a month, which is the number to weigh against the hours a spreadsheet costs your managers.

Deputy

Deputy has no free plan, listing Lite at $5, Core at $6.50, and Pro at $9 per user per month, with a $30 monthly minimum per invoice since September 1, 2025.[7] The minimum matters at very small headcounts, because a five person roster on Lite still bills $30. Deputy is priced for multi-site rostering and rule based pay conditions, so compare it against the paid tiers of the tools above rather than against free.

A spreadsheet is a sound long-term answer when the roster is small and stable, the shift pattern repeats week to week, and changes go through one person. A shift grid takes an afternoon to build, costs nothing beyond software you already own, and gives you layout freedom no scheduling app matches. Google Sheets adds shared editing and revision history at no cost, which handles two of the classic complaints about spreadsheet scheduling. For a five person office on fixed hours, or a shop where the same four people work the same four shifts, a template is not a stopgap.

What the spreadsheet route costs you

Staff get no real mobile view, so the schedule travels as a screenshot, a printout, or a group text, and nobody can confirm who saw the current version. Shift swaps have no request or approval path, which means every trade runs through a manager by phone and reaches the sheet late or not at all. Nothing warns you as someone approaches 40 hours in a workweek, the point at which overtime becomes due at not less than one and a half times the regular rate.[11] Version drift is structural rather than a discipline problem: across 85 intensive inspections of operational spreadsheets, researchers found errors in 94 percent of them, and 14 controlled development studies covering 967 participants averaged a cell error rate of 3.9 percent.[14] And a schedule carries no audit trail, because it records what you intended rather than what people actually worked.

Federal wage and hour rules apply whether you schedule in a spreadsheet, a free app, or a paid one. For every nonexempt employee, 29 CFR 516.2 requires you to keep the "hours worked each workday and total hours worked each workweek," total daily or weekly straight-time earnings, "total premium pay for overtime hours," every addition to and deduction from wages, total wages paid each pay period, and the date of payment with the pay period it covers.[8] Payroll records have to be preserved at least three years from the last date of entry.[9] The "basic time and earning cards or sheets on which are entered the daily starting and stopping time of individual employees" have to be preserved two years.[10]

Those retention floors are why a free plan's storage window deserves a calendar reminder, Homebase's 90 day free timesheet limit included.[1] A published schedule is also not a time record, since the overtime obligation attaches to hours actually worked beyond 40 in a workweek.[11]

Thin records matter most in litigation. In Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., the Supreme Court held that where an employer has not kept adequate records, an employee who shows uncompensated work and offers "sufficient evidence to show the amount and extent of that work as a matter of just and reasonable inference" has met the burden, and then "the burden then shifts to the employer to come forward with evidence of the precise amount of work performed or with evidence to negative the reasonableness of the inference."[12] State law can require more, and this is general information rather than legal advice.

It is not free payroll

Free plans stop at the schedule and, sometimes, the time clock. Homebase sells payroll as an add-on at $39 per month plus $6 per employee on top of any plan, the free one included.[1] Moving approved hours into whatever runs your payroll remains your job.

It is not a complete time and attendance record

A free plan with a clock-in gets you raw hours, not retention, rounding rules, or break tracking. Homebase's 90 day free timesheet window sits well short of the two year federal floor for daily time records.[1][10]

It is not permanent

"Free for life" describes the current offer rather than a contract, as the withdrawn free plans at When I Work [6] and Deputy [7] show. Keep an export of your schedule and hours data so a pricing change becomes an inconvenience instead of a migration project.

It is not a substitute for scheduling judgment

Software publishes a schedule faster without deciding coverage levels, approving overtime, or telling you that Tuesday is overstaffed. Free tiers generally omit the labor cost and forecasting features that inform those calls, which is a large part of what the paid tiers charge for.[3]