Planday Review (2026)
People tools are trust-critical: they touch pay, privacy and careers, so reliability and compliance outrank features. So where does Planday actually fit?
Visit Planday → Affiliate link — the rest of this page is the honest version, including who should skip it.
What Planday does
Employee scheduling and time tracking for shift businesses, owned by Xero. Starter is €2.99 per user/month with a 5-user minimum; Plus is €4.99 per user plus a €25 monthly platform fee and a 10-user minimum. 30-day trial, no card.
Pricing (2026)
(2026-08-15, read on their own pricing page) Three tiers, two of them priced. Starter is €2.99 per user per month with a 5-user minimum, Plus is €4.99 per user with a 10-user minimum plus a €25.00 monthly subscription fee on top of the per-user cost, and Pro is custom-priced with a Book-a-demo button rather than a figure. The trial is 30 days and takes no credit card. Note the fee is only on Plus, so the step up is steeper than the €2 headline gap suggests. Plans change — always verify the live price on their site.
What the pricing page doesn’t say
The €25 monthly platform fee on Plus is the line most comparisons miss. At the 10-user minimum, Plus is €49.90 in seats plus €25 flat, so €74.90 against €14.95 for five users on Starter — the jump is not from €2.99 to €4.99, it is roughly five times the bill. That fee also does not scale down, so the smaller your team, the larger a share of it you carry. Work out your real per-head cost at your actual headcount before choosing, and check which side of the line leave management and payroll integrations fall on, because those are the two features that usually force the upgrade.
Planday vs Deputy, side by side
Both columns come from the same place: each vendor’s own published pricing, read on the date shown in the sources at the foot of this page. We do not average them into a score.
The natural comparison is Deputy — the closest like-for-like in shift scheduling, and the comparison hinges on Planday's €25 monthly platform fee on Plus. At ten users that fee is a third of the bill; at fifty it is noise. Work out your real per-head cost at your actual headcount on both before choosing, rather than comparing the per-seat headlines. Decide by which one fits the job above, not by the louder brand.
More on Planday
Everything we publish about Planday links back here — the review stays the honest hub:
The ex-banker filter — the same yardstick on every review (how we review): My ex-banker filter is simple: does Planday remove a real cost — time, errors, missed revenue — bigger than what it charges? If the job above is genuinely yours, it's worth a look. We never publish fake or “exclusive” prices, so always confirm the current plan on their site.
Frequently asked questions
Is Planday compliant with local employment rules?
Compliance is country by country, so the honest answer is: only where the vendor says it is, and only for the entity type you actually have. Ask which countries are covered by its own entities versus a local partner, who carries the liability if something is filed wrong, and how changes in local law reach you. Get those answers in the contract rather than the sales deck.
Who should not use Planday?
Skip it if you are a team of five or six who only need a rota and a clock — Starter covers that, and paying for Plus at that size means the flat fee is a third of your bill. Buying a tool to fix a problem you don't have yet just adds cost and another login to manage.
Is this a hands-on review of Planday?
This is a researched assessment, not a hands-on test — where we've used a tool ourselves, we say so explicitly. We name what each tool is genuinely good and bad at, and we earn a commission only if you sign up, at no cost to you.
- 2026-08-15, read on their own pricing page.
- A dated screenshot of that pricing page, kept on this site as the receipt.
We list our sources because most review sites do not. How we review →
Others in this category
Weighing Planday against the field? These are the hr & people tools closest to it that we have also reviewed. They overlap rather than match, so check what each one is actually built for before treating any of them as a swap:
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This is our researched assessment — not a paid placement. The “Visit” links on this page are affiliate links: we may earn a commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you, and it never changes our take. How we review →
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