WhosOff vs Leave Dates vs LeaveKit: Best Holiday Planner for UK Teams

The short answer

All three do the same core job: an employee requests leave, a manager decides, a balance updates. If that is genuinely all you need, pick on price and stop reading — the differences below will not change your outcome.

They diverge on one question: what the tool does when a request is about to leave a team short. WhosOff and Leave Dates record the booking and leave coverage to whoever thinks to check the calendar. LeaveKit checks at booking time and warns before the request reaches an approver.

Disclosure, since it matters when reading any comparison: LeaveKit publishes this page. We have listed our own gaps below rather than only the competitors’.

WhosOff

The longest-established of the three and the most spreadsheet-like in a way that suits some teams: a clear list of who is off, straightforward approvals, and very little to learn. Teams that adopt it tend to stay because nobody has to be trained.

It handles UK bank holidays, custom leave types and reporting, and has mobile access. Where teams outgrow it is depth: allowance rules for irregular working patterns need more manual handling than a modern tool, and the interface shows its age when you are scanning a busy month.

Best fit: teams who want something dependable and unfussy, and whose staff mostly work standard patterns.

Leave Dates

The most integrated. Native iOS and Android apps, Slack, Zapier, API access on higher tiers, and SSO. As published on their site in August 2026, pricing started at roughly £0.75 per user per month — check their page, vendors change this — which makes it the cheapest per seat of the three.

The catch for very small teams is the five-user minimum, so a three-person company pays for five. That still works out inexpensive, but it distorts the comparison if you are genuinely tiny.

Best fit: teams who need leave to talk to other systems, or whose staff want a real app to download.

LeaveKit

The newest and the narrowest. It is built around coverage rather than record-keeping: when someone books, it checks who else is already off on those dates and surfaces the clash at booking time. The wall chart is built for the same question, with month, week, 30-day and day views and department filtering.

It also handles TOIL logging, CSV export, half-days, and public holidays for 11 countries with UK dates checked against gov.uk for 2026–28. There is a demo workspace that needs no sign-up.

What it does not have, stated plainly: no Slack, no two-way calendar sync (the iCal feed is one-way), no payroll connector, no public API or Zapier, no SSO, no historical leave import. The mobile app is built but not released, and there is no Android version. It is in early access — a 30-day trial with no card, no permanent free tier, and no published pricing yet.

Best fit: UK teams of roughly 5 to 50 whose actual problem is holiday clashes, and who do not need integrations today.

A worked example: where the difference shows up

A support team of six covers Monday to Friday, and their own rule is that four people must be on shift for the queue to stay inside its response target.

In the last week of July, two people book the same Thursday and Friday. Both requests are individually reasonable — both have the days available, neither is on a deadline — and both are approved on the day they arrive, by two different managers who each see only their own direct report.

That leaves four, which meets the rule exactly. Then someone calls in sick on the Thursday morning, and the team is at three on the day it least wants to be.

Nothing in that sequence was an individual mistake. The second approval was made without visibility of the first, so the decision that broke cover looked identical to the one that did not. With WhosOff or Leave Dates you would find this by checking the calendar before approving — which works exactly as often as people remember to do it. This is the specific gap LeaveKit was built to close, and it is reasonable to decide it is not your problem.

How to decide between them

Do not compare feature tables, including this page’s. Write down the five things your team does most often with leave, in your own words, then time each one in each tool during a trial: “book a half-day on a Friday”, “approve while on a phone call”, “check July coverage for one department”, “correct a booking after approval”, “export a quarter for payroll”.

Run the trial against a real month rather than demo data, because demo data contains no conflicts and conflicts are the entire question. One real month will surface at least one awkward case: a clash, a part-timer, a cancellation after approval, or a sickness conversion.

Then check the calculation nobody checks. Ask each tool to work out entitlement for someone on three days a week. Statutory holiday is 5.6 weeks per leave year per gov.uk holiday entitlement guidance, so three days a week is 5.6 × 3 = 16.8 days — not a share of 28 estimated by eye. If your policy deducts bank holidays, someone who never works Mondays should only lose the ones falling on their working days. Tools differ here, and the difference is a real underpayment.

Verdict

Choose Leave Dates if you need Slack, an API, SSO or downloadable mobile apps. Those are genuine capabilities that LeaveKit does not have, and no amount of coverage checking replaces them.

Choose WhosOff if your priority is something dependable that needs no training, and your team mostly works standard patterns.

Choose LeaveKit if holiday clashes and understaffed weeks are the specific pain, and you can live without integrations while it is in early access.

Choose none of them yet if you have fewer than about eight people who all sit together. A shared spreadsheet works at that size. What breaks it is not headcount but concurrency — the moment two people edit it or two managers approve against it, it stops being a record and becomes a rumour.

Useful LeaveKit resources

Staff leave planner for teams replacing spreadsheets.
Leave Dates alternative for teams comparing holiday planners.
Best leave management software guide for buyer research.
Free tools for calculators and planning templates.
Start a free LeaveKit workspace to test the workflow.

Try LeaveKit today

LeaveKit helps UK teams run staff leave with a live wall chart, booking-time conflict warnings, one-click approvals, TOIL tracking and public holiday imports for 11 countries. Open the demo workspace to try it with no sign-up, or start a 30-day trial.

Get started free →

Frequently asked questions

Which is best: WhosOff, Leave Dates or LeaveKit?

It depends on the constraint. Leave Dates if you need Slack, an API, SSO or downloadable mobile apps. WhosOff if you want something dependable that needs no training and your team works standard patterns. LeaveKit if holiday clashes and understaffed weeks are the specific pain and you can live without integrations while it is in early access.

Is there a free option available?

LeaveKit runs a 30-day free trial with no card required. That covers the whole workflow: wall chart, booking, approvals, TOIL and UK bank holiday data verified against gov.uk.

How quickly can I get started?

With LeaveKit you can be up and running in under 15 minutes. The free demo lets you explore before creating a real workspace.

Does this work for UK businesses specifically?

Yes. LeaveKit was built for UK teams with automatic bank holiday data for all regions, statutory leave calculations, and UK employment law compliance.

What makes LeaveKit different?

LeaveKit is built around coverage: when someone books leave it checks who else is already off on those dates and warns before the request reaches an approver, so understaffing is visible up front rather than discovered later.