Shiftie Review

If you run a café, a visitor attraction or a mid-sized retail floor, the weekly rota is probably the single most annoying thing on your plate. Shiftie is a UK-built platform that tries to fix that, pairing drag-and-drop scheduling with a time clock, timesheets and light HR in one place. The pitch is not that it does more than everyone else, it is that it does the shift-work basics cleanly and charges one flat rate for every feature.

So the real question is not whether Shiftie can build a rota, because most tools can. It is whether the flat £2.75 per employee price and the 30-person billing floor add up for your team size, and whether its shorter integration list holds you back versus heavier names like Deputy or When I Work. This review works through the product, the day-to-day experience, the honest pricing math, and where a competitor fits your situation better.

Shiftie is a cloud-based staff scheduling and workforce management platform aimed squarely at shift-based businesses: hospitality (restaurants, cafés, bars, nightclubs), retail, visitor attractions, leisure centres, hotels and healthcare settings like dental practices. It is a British product, and that shows in the details, from holiday-allowance handling to the language and the integration partners it picks.

At its core sit five things. Scheduling is the headline: a drag-and-drop rota builder with shift templates, open shifts staff can claim, shift swaps, conflict detection and grouping by role or department across multiple venues. The time clock adds mobile and portal clock-in with GPS-based restrictions and an on-site overview of who is currently working. Timesheets generate automatically from clocked hours, then flow through edit, review and approval before a payroll export. Leave and HR cover holiday allowances, absence tracking and a document store for policies and contracts. Team messaging handles bulk and targeted announcements, and reporting tracks labour cost against target hours.

What Shiftie is not is a full HRIS or payroll engine. It schedules and tracks time, then hands clean data to your payroll system rather than running payroll itself. Think of it as the operational layer between your staff and your back office.

Getting started is genuinely quick because there is only one plan to pick and a 28-day trial with no card required. You add venues, create roles and departments, import staff, then build your first week. The rota builder is where people spend most time, and it holds up: you drag shifts onto a grid, save common patterns as templates, and copy a week forward instead of rebuilding it. Open shifts let you post uncovered slots that employees claim from their phones, and conflict detection flags double-bookings and availability clashes before you publish.

Day to day, staff live in the mobile app: they check rotas, set availability, request leave, swap shifts and clock in and out. Managers get the on-site view of who is clocked in, approve timesheets, and export hours to payroll. The interface is clean and modern rather than dense, which shortens the learning curve for non-technical shift managers. The honest rough edge is that the integration list is short, with ticketing and one POS but no native Xero, QuickBooks, Slack or the big payroll platforms, so payroll is an export rather than a direct sync. Deeper connections lean on the API, which means developer time.

Shiftie publishes one plan at £2.75 per employee per month, with every feature, unlimited 7-day support and a 28-day free trial with no card, and it has no Starter, Pro or Enterprise tier. You pay monthly for staff marked active the month before, on a 30-employee minimum, so the floor is £82.50 even with twelve people.

A 15-person team still pays the £82.50 floor, an effective £5.50 a head, 60 staff costs £165, and teams over 200 move to a custom quote with no advertised annual discount. Deputy, RotaCloud, Planday and When I Work publish starting points rather than firm quotes.

The lowest stated prices are Connecteam (free for up to 10 users), When I Work at $2.50 per user per month, and RotaCloud from £10 a month for up to five employees. Costs jump at Deputy Pro, $9 per user per month, and past Connecteam's first 30 users at $0.80 per extra user, per hub, on yearly billing.

Shiftie is a strong fit for UK shift-based businesses with roughly 30 to 200 staff across one or several sites: think a growing restaurant group, a visitor attraction, a leisure centre or a multi-store retailer. If you want clean scheduling, honest time tracking and light HR without decoding a tiered price sheet, the flat model is easy to budget and quick to roll out to non-technical managers.

It is a weaker fit for very small teams under about 15 people, who will feel the £82.50 floor as a steep per-head cost, and for companies that need payroll run inside the tool or deep native links to Xero, QuickBooks, Slack or a specific payroll provider. US-heavy operations that want a large app marketplace are better served by Deputy or When I Work. And if you are a micro café or single small store, Connecteam's free tier for up to 10 users, or RotaCloud, which starts at £10 a month for up to five employees, will cost less while covering the same rota basics.