Deputy alternatives: 12 tools compared (September 2026)

Shortlist: which Deputy alternative fits which situation

Quinyx

Fits employers with many locations and fluctuating demand, especially in the Nordics, the UK or Germany. Quinyx lists Forecasting, Auto-Schedule, Auto-Assign and the Ava Assistant as live features and has run a Hamburg office since May 2018. It publishes no prices, so expect a sales process.

Papershift

Fits small and midsize German employers that want EU hosting and a payroll export to DATEV. List prices start at €4 per employee per month (€3.60 billed annually) plus a €39 monthly base fee. The AI assistant Kahru answers staff questions; there is no published auto-scheduling feature on its AI page.

Dayforce

Fits midsize and large employers in the United States, Canada or Australia that want payroll, HR and workforce management in one system. Dayforce names AI-enhanced labor forecasting and an AI agent for time off. Pricing is on request and the project is larger than a Deputy rollout.

Sesame HR

Fits small Spanish or Southern European companies that want shift planning inside a broader HR suite. Plans start at $3.75 per employee per month billed annually, with a 15-employee minimum. Sesame AI costs extra at $49 per month.

Where Deputy stops fitting: hosting, plan limits and contract terms

Deputy's security page names three hosting locations: Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, all on AWS managed services. For an employer in the EU that means personnel data leaves the Union unless a contract says otherwise. Many works councils and data protection officers ask for the hosting region in writing before they agree to a new system.

The second trigger is payroll. Deputy Payroll is sold only in the United States, on annual Core or Pro plans, at $8 per user per month plus a $49 monthly base fee. The HR add-on at $2 per user covers the US, the UK and Australia. A German, Austrian or Swiss employer therefore always exports timesheets to a separate payroll system. We found no DATEV connector in Deputy's integration directory on September 26, 2026; Xero, ADP, Gusto, Paycor and HiBob are listed.

Third, the plan ladder. Lite at $5 per user per month covers basic scheduling, timesheets and time clocking. Auto-scheduling, demand forecasting, labor optimization and wage budgets start with Core at $6.50. Single sign-on, a sandbox, location hierarchies and 24/7 live chat require Pro at $9. For an IT team that insists on single sign-on, the real entry price is Pro, not Lite.

Fourth, the contract. Since September 1, 2025, monthly Lite, Core and Pro plans carry a minimum spend of $30, AUD 30 or £20 per invoice. Annual subscriptions renew automatically unless either side gives written notice at least 30 days before the term ends, and prepaid fees are not refunded on an ordinary cancellation. Anyone who misses that date is paying for another year.

Sources: [1][2][3][4][5][6]

Matching the alternative to your situation

There is no single successor to Deputy. The right choice depends on three facts you already know: where your payroll runs, how many sites and shift patterns you plan, and whether employee data must stay in the EU. The decision tree below uses exactly those questions.

Multi-site operators with volatile demand, such as retail chains or quick service restaurants, look closest at Quinyx. The Swedish vendor, founded in 2005, lists Forecasting up to six months ahead, Auto-Schedule, Auto-Assign and the Ava Assistant as live features, and managers approve every AI suggestion. Quinyx does not publish prices or, on the pages we could read, a hosting region. Ask for both in the first call.

German employers with 16 to a few hundred staff often end up at Papershift. It hosts in the EU, sells three plans per employee and exports to DATEV and LODAS in its Professional plan. The trade off: Papershift's AI page describes the assistant Kahru for questions, documents and personal data updates, but it names no demand forecasting.

Enterprises in North America or Australia that want to retire several systems at once compare Dayforce. It combines payroll, HR and workforce management, with AI-enhanced labor forecasting and an AI agent for time off. Our directory lists an EU hosting option for Dayforce, yet the privacy statement we checked relies on standard contractual clauses for EU transfers and names no region, so European buyers need that answer in the contract.

Two lighter options round out the list. Sesame HR from Valencia includes shift planning in all four plans and suits Spanish teams; confirm the interface languages your managers need. Calamari from Warsaw is strong on leave and attendance, but its pricing page still marks shift scheduling as coming soon, so it replaces Deputy's time clock rather than its roster.

Sources: [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]

What our directory says about scheduling tools

Our directory lists 16 tools for time tracking, leave and scheduling, Deputy included. Only 4 of them state an EU hosting option, and 5 offer a free trial. That makes this a small category, and it explains why the alternative list mixes pure scheduling tools with larger HR suites.

The explorer below holds all tools of the category with five attributes we checked at the vendor. Filter by headquarters region or by company size served. The line inside each bar shows the value across the whole category, so you can see at a glance where a group is stronger or weaker than average.

Two patterns stand out. Of the tools that state an EU hosting option, two come from Europe (Calamari and Papershift) and one from North America (Dayforce), while Quinyx and Sesame HR leave the question open on their public pages. And the tools that serve enterprises tend to hide their prices: 8 tools in the category quote only on request. The full list of scheduling tools shows every profile with its sources.

Sources: [15][2][14]

What each option costs per month

Deputy publishes a full price list: $5, $6.50 and $9 per user per month for Lite, Core and Pro, with 10 percent off for annual billing. Customers in Australia and New Zealand pay in Australian dollars, UK customers in pounds. Add-ons change the total quickly. Analytics+ costs $1.50 and Messaging+ $1.95 per user, both included in Pro.

Papershift charges per employee and adds a base fee. Core costs €4, Premium €6 and Professional €9 per employee per month, or €3.60, €5.40 and €8.10 with annual billing, plus €39 per month. The DATEV and LODAS export sits in Professional. Its price calculator starts at 16 employees, so very small teams pay more per head than the list price suggests.

Sesame HR publishes $3.75, $4.25, $6.25 and $7 per employee per month for Essential, Connect, Growth and Scale with annual billing, and requires at least 15 employees. Essential costs $5.25 on monthly billing. Calamari prices modules separately: Time Off and Core HR at $2, Time & Attendance and Performance at $2.50 per employee per month billed annually, with SAML single sign-on as a paid add-on at $0.80.

Quinyx, Dayforce and UKG publish no prices. For those three, ask for a first-year total that includes implementation, every module you need and any AI features billed separately. The calculator below uses only published list prices, all in US dollars, so Papershift's euro prices are left out of it.

Sources: [1][9][13][14][16]

AI in scheduling: what is available today

Deputy includes Deputy AI in every plan. Its AI page lists a conversational agent, schedules built from past patterns, a payrun readiness check, multi-day sick cover, voice actions and proactive alerts. Deputy also states that customer data is never used to train AI models and is not processed by the underlying language model itself. The page makes no statement on the EU AI Act.

Quinyx covers the same ground with a stronger forecasting claim: demand forecasts up to six months ahead, Auto-Schedule that balances cost, coverage, skills and fairness, and Auto-Assign for open shifts. The vendor says these are live and not roadmap items, and that managers can review every suggestion. Dayforce names AI-enhanced labor forecasting, an AI assistant and an AI agent for time off, without separate launch dates on the page we checked.

The smaller tools focus on employee questions rather than roster building. Papershift's assistant Kahru answers questions about working time, absences and policies and retrieves documents from the personnel file. Calamari offers an MCP connector, so employees can file leave or log time through Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or Microsoft Copilot Studio; manager and admin functions are marked coming soon. Sesame AI drafts announcements, job ads and interview questions and costs $49 per month as an add-on.

For UKG Pro we could not open the vendor's AI product pages during our check, so we list no AI features here. Our review method explains why we publish only what we could verify at the source.

Sources: [17][7][11][10][18][19]

Leaving Deputy without losing timesheet history

Start with the calendar. Deputy's subscription agreement renews an annual term automatically unless you give written notice at least 30 days before it ends; email is enough. Customer data is made available for export only if you request it within 30 days before termination, and afterwards Deputy may delete it. Put both dates in the project plan before you sign with anyone else.

Then decide how the data leaves. Deputy's REST API returns employees, timesheets, rosters and sales data in JSON, with at most 500 records per response, and webhooks can mirror changes while both systems run. Export the approved timesheets for every open pay period, the leave balances and the award or pay rules. Keep the raw export, because the new system will not reproduce Deputy's history screen.

In the EU, the Data Act has applied since September 12, 2025. It obliges cloud providers to support switching with open interfaces and machine readable exports, and from January 12, 2027 they may no longer charge for switching or data egress. Deputy's contract for EMEA customers is governed by the law of England and Wales, so check with counsel how both fit your case.

German employers have two more items. The Federal Labor Court ruled on September 13, 2022 that employers must record the start and end of daily working time, so the records you migrate are evidence, not convenience. And the works council has a say under Section 87(1) BetrVG: No. 2 covers the start and end of working time and its distribution across weekdays, No. 3 covers temporary overtime or short time, and No. 6 covers technical systems able to monitor behavior or performance. A scheduling tool with AI touches all three. Before the pilot, give the works council the feature list of each finalist, for example from our Papershift profile.

Sources: [3][20][21][6][5][22]