Sling Scheduling Review: Is It Right for Your Business?

Sling is a scheduling and time clock software with strong communication and tasking features. Offering paid plans that start at $2 per active user, it helps small businesses manage shifts, costs, and work hours. Sling also has a free option that offers basic scheduling tools.

What We Like

• Easy to use
• Free plan
• Unlimited locations and employees per plan

What's Missing

• No forecasting tools
• Reports only in Business plan
• Limited integrations

Deciding Factors

• Charges per active user vs by location or fixed monthly rate
• Auto-scheduling only available in highest-level plan ($4 per active user)

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What We Recommend Sling For

We’ve reviewed scheduling software for several industries, and while Sling didn’t make our list of the best overall employee scheduling software, it did earn a high rating in our best restaurant scheduling software (earning 4.45 out of 5 stars). We think it has much to offer, with great pricing, strong tasking features, and competitive scheduling rules and communications tools.

In short, Sling is best for:

• Very small businesses on a budget: Because it charges by user rather than location, it’s cost-effective for businesses with fewer than 10 employees.
• Businesses that need straight scheduling: If all you need is software that lets you schedule shifts, the free version is a great choice. It also lets you offer shifts, manage time off, and send announcements.
• Seasonal businesses: With billing by active employees, your costs will adjust to the size of your seasonal labor force.

When Sling Would Not Be a Good Fit

• Highly regulated industries: While Sling offers some rules setting tools and overtime alerts to help you stay compliant, there are other scheduling software services with more robust features that also track local laws like SocialSchedules (formerly OpenSimSim), which is one of our top-rated scheduling software for small businesses.

Looking for something different? Check out our top time and attendance software.

Sling Alternatives At-a-Glance

	Visit Homebase	Visit ZoomShift	Visit SocialSchedules
Best for	Businesses that need free employee shift scheduling	Businesses that have seasonal highs and lows	Businesses operating across multiple locations and strict with labor law compliance
Monthly Fees From	Free; $24.95 to $99.95 per location	$2.50 to $5 per active user	Free; $15.99 to $39.99 per location
	Homebase review	ZoomShift review	SocialSchedules review

If you’re not sure Sling is right for you, see how it compares with our top retail employee scheduling software.

Sling Pricing

Sling offers a free plan with basic scheduling tools. After that, plans start at $2 per active user monthly. This means you only get billed for the people who use it each month. If someone you’ve already paid for is deactivated, you get a prorated credit to your account for the unused time.

Since Sling charges by employee and not location, it’s cost-effective if you have several locations but a small number of employees in each. If you only have a single location, once you start getting more than 25 employees total, you may find location-based software like Homebase more affordable.

*Get 15% discount if you opt for annual billing.

Sling Features

Setting up Sling only takes a few minutes, especially if you prepare a Microsoft Excel or comma-separated values (CSV) file to bulk import your employees. You can invite employees to download the app and join. Sling handles scheduling, shift trades, and claiming open shifts. The paid plans include individual and team messaging, auto-scheduling, and a time clock and time sheets to make payroll easier. Learn how you can use Sling scheduling for your business.

Sling offers scheduling tools for mobile and web.

Scheduling

Create a great schedule with Sling and save it as a template to use repeatedly. Sling tracks availability so that you don’t schedule someone for overlapping shifts. You can post shifts to employees and let them choose which they prefer or announce open shifts for the taking. The auto-assign shift feature, available with the Business plan, can build the schedule for you by assigning employees based on skills and availability.

The software checks for scheduling conflicts.

Time Clock

With Sling, it’s easy to track employee hours. The paid plans come with a time clock that is included in the mobile app. You can also set it up as a kiosk. It lets employees clock in and out with their personal devices. You can set rules to prevent early clock-in and clock an employee out automatically at the end of their shift. The geofencing tools ensure employees are at the correct location when clocking in or out.

Employees can also clock in and out via the mobile app.

Communications

Communicating with your team members is an important part of employee management. Sling starts with sharing schedules, setting shift alarms and notifications, and letting employees swap shifts, either on the mobile app or via desktop.

Managers can get alerts when an employee is late, requests time off, is approaching overtime, and more. In addition, Sling offers private and group messages and sends announcements and event notifications. The social media-style format lets employees “like” and comment on posts, and you can get notifications that messages are read.

Sling lets you contact employees via mobile and desktop.

Mobile App

The mobile app offers nearly all the features found on the desktop version. Managers can create and post schedules, send announcements, and get notifications and alerts. Employees can chat with co-workers, accept open shifts, request shift trades, request time off, and get reminders about shifts. While it’s common for other time tracking apps to have geofencing capabilities, Sling has a unique feature in that it can clock an employee out automatically when they leave an area or after their shift ends.

Reach out to employees with messages, alerts, and push notifications.

The app is well-regarded by users, who say it’s very easy to use and effective for scheduling. Employees liked the reminders. Some users had trouble with logging in.

User Scores

• Android: 4.6 out of 5 stars with 4,700-plus reviews
• iOS: 4.7 out of 5 stars with 22,600-plus reviews

Task Management

Sling offers a robust task management feature to help clarify shift duties. You can set up to-do lists for individuals, positions, or teams—breaking them down into specific actions using the SMART methodology (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound). You can also save recurring lists, such as for opening or closing so that you can reuse them.

You can set up tasks for teams and let employees access lists from the mobile app.

Checklists can be managed on mobile so that employees can mark off items as they complete them, wherever they are. Managers can access the lists to keep up on performances.

Integrations

Sling does not offer as many native integrations as other scheduling software, but it is working on building that list. Currently, it integrates with Toast, Shopify, Square, Gusto, Harbortouch, Restaurant Manager POS, and POSItouch. ADP is also planned for upcoming integrations.

These integrations will make it easier to pull sales information from your POS system, send time sheets directly to your payroll service, and sync employee data. This helps you streamline processes and conduct a deeper analysis of labor costs vs sales.

Additional HR & Payroll Tools

Sling’s rules setting tools can help you stay compliant with labor laws, and checklists can provide a “paper trail” of compliance for health, safety, and other industry regulations.

Sling pulls the time clock data into time sheets that managers can view and approve at the end of each pay period. Once any issues are fixed, you can export them to your integrated payroll system or as a CSV file.

You can export time sheets to payroll software.

Sling offers reports for labor, time off, sales, attendance, and payroll. In addition, you can create your own reports by filtering date ranges, locations, and other fields. You can also choose what columns of data you want in a full report and modify how you want to view time—in decimal format or by hours and minutes.

Sling Ease of Use

• Auto-scheduling and templates
• Intuitive interface
• Highly rated mobile app
• Video tutorials
• Illustrated how-to articles
• Customer support via email

Sling has an intuitive interface that works much like its competitors—no real surprises if you are already familiar with scheduling software. The online knowledge base has a good combination of video and illustrated articles, with an effective search system. It has tools to make scheduling easier, including alerts for overtime or conflicts, auto-scheduling, and pay rules for holidays.

What Users Think About Sling

Overall, employers and employees think highly of this product, both on desktop and mobile. A few users had issues with logging in but complaints were sparse and spread out—not enough for a trend. There were also some scattered complaints about slow loading, not being able to see the schedule in vertical mode, and one person getting a 404 error trying to access the current date function.

• Capterra: 4.6 out of 5 based on some 110 reviews.
• G2: 4.4 out of 5 based on 70 reviews.

Bottom Line

If you are looking for effective scheduling software that can handle multiple locations, has excellent communication features, and makes building a schedule easy, then Sling is worth checking out. It has a free plan to get you started, or you can jump in with one of its per-employee monthly plans. Give Sling a try today.

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