Restaurant scheduling software
For an independent restaurant, the shortlist is Homebase if you want free and simple, 7shifts if you want the category standard, and SavorCrew if you want the schedule drafted from your own sales history with the tip math shown to the person being paid. Everything below is what actually separates them.
| Option | Price | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| SavorCrew | $9.99 / venue / mo | Independents who want the draft built from their own sales and events, tip pooling with the math shown to staff, and checklists and practice health inspections in the same app. |
| Homebase | free tier; paid from ~$24.95 / location / mo | A single location that wants scheduling and time tracking at no cost and can live without deeper labour forecasting. |
| 7shifts | free tier; paid from ~$29.99 / location / mo | Restaurants that want the category standard with deep POS integrations and a large support organisation behind it. |
| Sling | free tier; paid from ~$1.70 / user / mo | Teams that want per-user pricing rather than per-location — cheaper with a very small staff, more expensive as you grow. |
| When I Work | from ~$2.50 / user / mo | Businesses outside hospitality that want general shift scheduling without restaurant-specific tip or labour-cost logic. |
| Deputy | from ~$4.90 / user / mo | Multi-site operations with complex compliance requirements and the admin capacity to configure them. |
Prices characterised 2026-09-25 from vendor sites. Watch the billing unit: per-location pricing is predictable as your team grows, per-user pricing is cheaper at five staff and more expensive at forty. SavorCrew's price is published on this site and is the price you sign up at.
Copying last week forward is not forecasting. Ask whether the tool reads your own trailing sales for the same weekday and the events already on the books. On a brand-new venue there is no history to read, and an honest tool says so rather than inventing a busy Friday.
Tip pooling is where trust is lost. A number with no working shown gets challenged every fortnight. Ask whether staff see the derivation — hours, points, sales — or just the total.
Patios, basements and walk-ins. If punches do not queue offline and reconcile later, somebody is fixing timesheets by hand on Monday.
The shift is also checklists, temperature logs, waste, and the training somebody has to acknowledge. If those live in three other places, the cost of the scheduling tool is not the whole cost.
Per-user pricing looks cheap at five staff and stops looking cheap at forty. Per-location pricing is flat as you hire. Work out the number at the headcount you expect in a year, not today.
Homebase has a genuinely free tier and suits a single location that wants scheduling and time tracking with nothing else. 7shifts is the category standard with the deepest POS integrations. SavorCrew is $9.99 per venue per month and drafts the schedule from your own sales history, shows staff the tip math, and carries checklists and practice health inspections in the same app.
Free tiers exist at Homebase, 7shifts and Sling with real limits. Paid plans run from about $9.99 per venue per month at the low end to roughly $30 per location per month for the established tools, and per-user tools run $1.70–$4.90 per person per month, which overtakes per-location pricing somewhere around fifteen to twenty staff.
Only by changing a decision before it is made. A tool that shows projected labour percent while you can still move a shift is worth more than one that reports last week accurately. Ask to see the labour number on the draft, not in the report.
It helps and it is not mandatory. An integration makes sales history automatic; without one you can type a day in. The thing to check is whether the tool can forecast at all without the POS, or whether it simply has nothing to say.
Most tools allow a swap request; the difference is what is checked before it reaches you. Ask whether the rules — who holds the role, who is already over hours, who has approved time off — are applied before the request lands, or whether you are the one applying them.