The European Deputy alternative that scales down as easily as up.

If you are comparing these two you have already decided you want the category. Both plan shifts, track hours, handle leave, connect to a till and show wages against sales as you build. What is left to work out is which one fits how you run, and where you run it.

That last part matters more than it looks. Deputy is a San Francisco company, and the US market is where its product decisions point. Shiftbase is European. You can see the difference in four things before you buy: what the entry plan actually lets you do, what your monthly bill contains, what happens when your team gets smaller, and which currency the invoice arrives in.

What the entry plan actually lets you do

Lite at $5 per user reads well on the pricing page: scheduling, timesheets, time clocking, shift swaps, leave and availability. The limit is in the FAQ rather than the plan card. On the starter plan you can schedule up to 100 shifts a month and approve up to 100 timesheets a month.

Run the arithmetic for a real week. Twenty people working five shifts each is 100 shifts in a single week, so a normal month is around 400. Lite is built for a much smaller operation than its price suggests, which makes Core at $6.50 the realistic starting point for most shift businesses.

Core is also where the money side begins: wage and labour budgets, labour optimisation, demand forecasting and AI scheduling. Location hierarchies and single sign-on are Pro at $9. With Shiftbase there is no cap on shifts or timesheets on any plan, the rota, time tracking and absence are in every paid plan from €30 a month with six users included, and cost targets with till integration come with Premium.

What your monthly bill actually contains

The per-user rate is not the whole invoice on either side, so add up the lines that apply to you before you compare.

With Deputy, HR covering onboarding, documents and staff surveys is a $2 per user add-on. Payroll is $8 per user plus a $49 monthly base fee and runs through Paycor in the US only. SMS is billed per message, at 1 cent in the US, 5p in the UK and 7 cents elsewhere per 160 characters, and their pricing page notes many messages run longer than that. There is also a minimum monthly spend of $30, or £20 in the UK, per invoice.

With Shiftbase you are mostly reading one line. Support, updates and onboarding belong to the plan, schedule changes reach your team as app notifications at no charge, and there is no minimum spend. One thing does sit outside: open API access through App Center+ at €20 a month. Compliance+ is coming soon and has no price yet.

What happens when your team gets smaller

Headcount in hospitality and retail is not a straight line. You run forty people over summer and eighteen in February, and the bill should follow.

On a Deputy annual plan it follows in one direction. You can add users during the term, but you cannot lower the employee count or change plan, and cancelling early brings no refund. Archiving someone still bills the full month, and unarchiving them bills a full month again.

Shiftbase has no minimum term and no minimum spend. If you drop from forty people to eighteen in January, you pay for eighteen.

Which currency the invoice arrives in

Deputy bills in Australian dollars in Australia and New Zealand, pounds in the UK, and US dollars in the United States and every other country. Run a restaurant in Amsterdam, Berlin, Madrid or Dublin and the invoice comes in dollars, with an exchange rate that moves between one month and the next.

The same pattern runs through the product. Their compliance work is built around US state law, including Fair Workweek rules, and payroll runs through a US provider. Shiftbase invoices in euros, and checks rest periods, contract limits and working time rules against European law while you build the rota.

Which one to choose

Choose Deputy if you operate in the United States, or if AI scheduling, auto-fill and biometric clock-in are the specific things you are buying. That is the market and the feature set it is built for.

Choose Shiftbase if you run in Europe. Euro invoices, European working time rules checked as you plan, no cap on the shifts you schedule, no minimum term when the team shrinks, and the rota, hours and absence in one plan instead of a base plan plus add-ons.