Planday Review: Is It Right for Your Business?

Planday is a scheduling and time-tracking software that lets you create multiple schedules for your business. It has forecasting capabilities to help you anticipate times of increased demand and rules-setting to help you stay compliant with labor regulations. While the mobile app is somewhat glitchy, users say it’s overall good software. Plans start at a monthly minimum of $12.45 for five users.

Planday Overview

What We Like

• Lots of forecasting and wage tools
• Schedule multiple departments easily
• Setting for labor law compliance
• Easy-to-use interface

What's Missing

• Plans have a required minimum number of seats
• Mobile app is glitchy
• No live support

Deciding Factors

• Plans require minimum monthly payments (bills per five users)
• Pro plan requires at least 12 months of subscription
• Mobile app requires at least Android 6.0 (Marshmallow)
• Mobile app doesn’t support Huawei phones configured after 2019

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What We Recommend Planday For

I’ve spent many hours learning about scheduling software, watching demos, poring over how-to articles, testing the products, and examining real-world user reviews as well as reviews by other professional publications. Planday is a useful scheduling software because of its international scope, ability to do forecasting, and scheduling tools.

In short, Planday is best for:

• Businesses with multiple departments: If you have a department store, a restaurant, a bookstore with a cafe, or other business with multiple teams working their own schedules, Planday makes it easy to create individual schedules for each team.
• Labor-intensive businesses needing forecasting and labor planning tools: If it’s important to your bottom line to monitor and schedule labor against expected activity, then Planday’s forecasting, salary calculation, and other labor costing tools help you keep an eye on revenue vs labor costs.

When Planday Would Not Be a Good Fit

• Businesses with a large number of employees and only one location: There are several equally feature-rich and intuitive scheduling software that charge by location with unlimited employees—and they may be a more cost-effective solution. We suggest Homebase, which also has a free plan.
• Budget-conscious businesses needing a free plan: If your budget is tight and your needs basic, you don’t need to resort to paper. There are several free scheduling software options available.
• Businesses with field employees whose staff live and die by mobile: Planday’s mobile app has not had the best track record. If you need a consistently reliable app that lets your managers and employees get everything done, check out Deputy.
• Tour guides and businesses scheduling tours: This was the only app we reviewed where users in a specific industry—in this case, tour guides—said the app does not meet their needs. Try ZoomShift instead, as it is priced per active employee and lets you place a plan on hold during off-peak seasons, which occurs in the tourism industry.

Planday Alternatives

	Visit Homebase	Visit ZoomShift	Visit Deputy
Best for	Free scheduling software with HR capabilities	Businesses with seasonal highs and lows	Compliance tracking and forecasting
Base monthly fees from	$24.95/location; has a free plan for one business location	$2.50 per active employee	$2.50 per employee
	Our Homebase Review	Our ZoomShift Review	Our Deputy Review

Check out our guide to the best time and attendance software if you need more robust options.

Planday Pricing

Planday, which has a 30-day trial, charges in bundles of five users—with a user being anyone who can log in to the account. Thus, a user may also be your HR specialist who is not on the schedule.

*Planday requires a minimum 12-month commitment for this plan.

**Get a 20% discount when you opt for annual billing.

***Pricing is obtained from the Planday Upgrade page but a representative said pricing is custom.

Planday Features

Planday has a smooth interface, and it will look familiar to those who have used scheduling software in the past. You begin by creating your account and setting up departments and employee groups. When you add employees, you can assign them to multiple departments or groups.

Once you have employees in the system, you can invite them to the Planday app or send out a bulk invite when you are done. You can then start adding other information like accrued vacation accounts, data sets for planning metrics, employee skills for positions, and breaks. The more you set up ahead of time, the longer the process takes, but the better you can take advantage of Planday’s tools.

Scheduling

Scheduling is the backbone of any scheduling and time clock software and for more organized employee management. Planday makes it easy to create schedules with drag-and-drop shifts, copy-and-paste, and templates. When you create shifts, you can assign them to specific employees or open them for the workers to accept. You can set skills to a specific shift so that only employees with that skillset can accept the shift.

Schedules include wage calculations.

You can set up compliance warnings to alert you when an employee has too many hours or the shifts are too close together—such as back-to-back or clopenings (closing in the evening and opening the next morning). Planday also lets you estimate labor costs to optimize staff levels, shows you weekly, biweekly, or monthly schedules, and calculates costs accordingly.

The Pro and Enterprise plans also come with auto scheduling, where you set the shifts and the computer fills the schedule with qualified employees, taking into account time off requests and work-hour rules and restrictions.

Time-tracking

Planday offers kiosk or mobile time clocks and even lets you use your POS system for clocking in and out. The mobile time clock includes geofencing. You can easily track employee hours as employees can clock in and out, and time sheets that managers can review, edit, and approve are created before exporting to a payroll program or saving as an Excel file.

You can set geofencing and other clock-in rules to prevent time-clock fraud.

Planday lets you round times the employee clocks in or out to the nearest 5, 10, 15, 30, or 60 minutes. You can round up or down as desired and set it for employee type, department, or position. The timesheets will flag rounded times and let you compare them with the actual clock-in/out time if desired. This helps make payroll easier and lets you analyze employee behavior as well.

Time clocks also include a notes section so your employee can make comments, such as why they are late or if something happened during the shift. It also includes a section called “Add extra shift,” which is handy when an employee gets called in to help with a rush or fill in for someone in an emergency.

Looking only for time tracking software?

Check out our guide to the best time and attendance systems for more options.

Communications

In addition to the standard SMS and messaging features Planday offers, which are typical of most scheduling software, it has a force read function that is unique. With Force Read, an employee cannot use Planday, even to clock in, until they have read and acknowledged your message. Use this for vital announcements or to make sure an employee remembers an event like a management meeting.

Planday lets you message individuals or groups.

The app lets your employees request time off, set preferred shifts, and request shift trades. You can set it so that they can find their own replacements and let your managers approve or reject the shift swap request. The home page has news and events widgets, so you can feed important information for your business, from news on the impending merger to what the daily special is to when the company picnic is taking place.

Mobile App

In the News:

Planday is discontinuing support for its app versions below 7.0.0 and now requires an Android 6 operating system or higher. Note also that the Planday app isn’t supported on Huawei devices configured after May 2019.

Planday’s mobile app has tools for managers and employees. Employees will have all the communications tools at their disposal, as well as the time clock. In addition, they can sign required forms on the app, which is great for training, compliances, and other work needs. Managers can create schedules and templates, visualize costs, track hours, approve time off, and more.

While the mobile app has a lot of features, it can be glitchy.

It is one of the glitchiest of the scheduling apps we’ve reviewed, especially on Android. In 2022, many users are still saying they had to reinstall the app several times. iPhone users in 2020 also reported a lot of issues. Problems include logging in, pulling up current information, and accessing a feature like the time clock.

Planday also had a “third-party incident” (no further information) early in 2021 that affected performance. However, when it is working, users say it’s a great app. In 2022, there were fewer complaints about the app, probably because of its frequent updates.

User Scores

• Android: 4.6 out of 5 stars with about 7,000 reviews
• iOS: 4.5 out of 5 stars with more than 3,400 reviews

Integrations

Forecasting & Reports

Planday offers multiple reports to help you keep track of labor costs and employee performance. They include overview and analysis of work hours in the schedule, vacation and overtime reports, contracted hours, and payroll reports. In addition, you can analyze employee data (including changes in labor), schedules, and labor costs and review documents to ensure all employees have read and acknowledged required readings.

You can create customizable reports for some topics.

You can create custom reports or drill down to the information you need. For example, in the schedule report, you can see how many hours and shifts a particular employee worked, when they clocked in and out, who called in sick, and the type of shift an employee worked. The reports can be used to forecast labor force needs and compare labor force to anticipated sales.

Planday Ease of Use

• Easy mobile interface
• Auto scheduling & rules
• Schedule templates
• Illustrated help articles
• Live chat support

Overall, Planday is an easy-to-use application for creating schedules and clocking in and out. The templates, rules, and auto scheduling make it easy to create schedules in minutes, and employees can easily clock in and out and get reminders about shifts. There are easy-to-follow illustrated help articles and live chat support, although you may get a bot outside of business hours.

What Users Think About Planday

While not the highest-rated app among users compared to other scheduling software we’ve reviewed, Planday still gets strong praise for ease of use and functionality. Employees say it’s very easy to use and feels like it was designed with them in mind. Employers, meanwhile, note it significantly cut their work in scheduling and payroll and most loved the communications features.

In 2022, there were several negative complaints about the interface with it being slow. Trustpilot, which has a 2.3 rating for Planday, had a lot of junk reviews, so I suspect the actual rating would be higher if they were removed. Mostly, users wanted smoother communications and more functions on the mobile app.

If you have a tour guide business or something similar, consider a different scheduler. There was more than one negative review saying it did not work well for tours.

• Capterra: 4.3 out of 5 based on 50+ reviews.
• G2: 4.5 out of 5 based on more than 80 reviews.
• Trustpilot: 2.3 out of 5 stars with 160+ reviews.

Bottom Line

Planday offers strong scheduling tools for businesses with multiple departments, especially for managers with employees may work in a different department on different shifts. Its mobile communications tools include a force read function that requires employees to read an announcement before using the app. The advanced plans let you auto schedule shifts and do sales and labor forecasting. The by-employee pricing is reasonable, but increases in groups of five. You can sign up for a free trial or get a demo.

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