Search for a free staff roster app and most of what you find is a 14-day trial with the word “free” on the button. That is not a free plan — it is a countdown.
This guide only includes tools with a permanent free tier, and for each one it answers the question the marketing page will not: what did they remove, and at what point does the free tier stop working?
Because there is always a point. Free tiers exist to get you dependent enough to pay, and knowing where the wall is before you migrate 30 people onto a tool is the difference between a good decision and a wasted weekend.
| Tool | Free for | The catch | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manage Roster | 5 agents, 1 workspace | Beta programme, 50 places, 1 year | 24/7 teams that need overnight coverage |
| Sling | 30 users | No time tracking, no overtime | The largest genuinely free headcount |
| Homebase | 20 employees, 1 location | Single location only | One physical site |
| Connecteam | 10 users | Caps hard at 10 | Small teams wanting comms + roster |
| Findmyshift | 5 people | 1 manager, limited history | Absolute simplest option |
| Google Sheets | Unlimited | Every problem is now your problem | Under 8 people, stable pattern |
| Open source | Unlimited | You are the sysadmin | Teams with a spare server and skills |
Sorting these into categories saves a lot of disappointment.
| Type | What it really is | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Permanent free tier | Capped but never expires | Sling, Homebase, Findmyshift, Connecteam |
| Free during beta | Free now, priced later | Manage Roster |
| Free trial | 14–30 days, then pay | Deputy, When I Work, Planday, RosterElf |
| Free software | No licence fee, real hosting and time cost | Open source |
The trap is category three marketed as category one. Deputy, When I Work, Planday and RosterElf have no free plan at all in 2026 — trials only — which is why none of them appear below despite being good products.
The subtler trap is category two. Free-during-beta is genuinely free today and genuinely unpriced tomorrow. That is a reasonable trade for a small team, and a bad trade if you cannot tolerate a pricing surprise in a year.
Disclosure: this is the Manage Roster blog. Manage Roster is listed first in its category and its constraints — a 5-agent cap, beta status, no time clock — are stated as plainly as everyone else’s. Competitor free-tier limits were verified against vendor pricing pages on 5 September 2026.
Manage Roster is the only tool on this list whose free tier includes the features that matter for continuous, round-the-clock rosters rather than stripping them out.
What the free tier actually includes:
Nothing is feature-gated. The cap is on people, not capability.
The limits, stated plainly:
BETA2026 at signupWhere it stops working: at agent number six, and at the end of the beta year. If you are 4–5 people running nights, this is the strongest free option available and it is not close. If you are 15 people, skip to Sling.
Sling offers the most generous permanent free tier in the category: up to 30 users, with no time limit and no credit card.
What the free tier includes:
What they removed:
Where it stops working: the moment you need to know how many hours anyone actually worked. Sling free is a publishing tool for schedules, not a management tool for labour. For a volunteer roster, a shift rota that feeds a separate payroll process, or a team where hours are fixed and salaried, that is genuinely fine. For a team where overtime is a weekly reality, the gap will hurt — and overtime is a weekly reality on almost every 24/7 roster, as reducing overtime costs goes into.
Best for: 10–30 person teams needing a shared, published schedule at zero cost.
Homebase’s Basic plan is free for one location with up to 20 employees, and it is unusually complete for a free product — because Homebase monetises through payroll rather than scheduling.
What the free tier includes:
What they removed:
Where it stops working: the instant you have two locations, or your team is remote. Homebase’s entire model assumes people show up somewhere physical. A distributed roster does not fit — there is no per-person holiday calendar and no 24-hour view, and the location primitive actively gets in the way. Options if you hit that wall are in the best Homebase alternatives for 24/7 support teams.
Best for: a single café, shop, clinic or office with under 20 staff who work on site.
Connecteam’s Small Business plan is free for up to 10 users and includes far more than scheduling — training modules, checklists, chat and a time clock all sit in the same app.
What the free tier includes:
What they removed:
Where it stops working: at user 11, and the step up is real — Basic is $35/month for the first 30 users. That is still reasonable, but it is a cliff rather than a slope.
Best for: teams under 10 who want one app for the roster, the chat and the checklists rather than three.
Findmyshift is free for up to 5 team members, permanently, and it needs almost no setup — it runs in a browser and behaves like a very good shared spreadsheet with rules.
What the free tier includes:
What they removed:
Where it stops working: at 6 people. But note where it goes next, because this is Findmyshift’s real advantage: the paid tiers are per team, not per user — $27/month for 20 people, $43/month for 100. If you expect to grow past 25, the upgrade path here is dramatically cheaper than any per-seat competitor. We ran that comparison in the 6 best roster management software tools in 2026.
Best for: a 5-person roster today that expects to be a 50-person roster later.
Most teams start here, and for a small stable roster it is a defensible choice rather than an embarrassing one. Free, unlimited, universally understood, and infinitely flexible.
Where it genuinely works: under about 8 people, a pattern that rarely changes, everyone in one or two time zones, and hours that do not need auditing.
Where it breaks — and it does break:
We documented the specific failure modes in why Google Sheets fails for 24/7 shift scheduling and ran the cost comparison in scheduling software vs spreadsheets.
Best for: under 8 people, one time zone, a pattern you rarely touch.
Self-hosted scheduling projects exist, and for teams with infrastructure skills and a spare server they are a legitimate zero-licence option.
What you get: no licence fee, no user caps, full data ownership and control, and the ability to modify anything.
What it actually costs: hosting ($5–20/month), the hours to deploy and configure it, the ongoing burden of updates and security patches, and no support beyond a GitHub issue tracker. Mobile apps are usually absent or rudimentary, which matters more than people expect for a workforce that checks the roster on a phone.
Where it stops working: when the person who set it up leaves. Open source scheduling deployments are unusually prone to becoming unmaintained the moment their champion moves on.
Best for: technical teams with a strong data-residency requirement and genuine capacity to own it.
Across every product here, the same four things get held back for paid plans. If you need one of these, plan on paying somewhere:
| Removed on free | Who charges for it |
|---|---|
| Overtime tracking | Sling (Premium), Homebase (Essentials) |
| Advanced reporting | Everyone |
| Multi-site / multi-workspace | Homebase, Connecteam, Findmyshift |
| Integrations | Connecteam, most others |
Overtime is the one that catches people out. It is the single most common reason teams outgrow a free tier — not headcount — because on a continuous roster, overtime is not an exception, it is a weekly event that needs to be visible before payroll rather than after.
Under 5 people, single site, day shifts → Findmyshift free, or honestly a spreadsheet.
Under 10 people, want chat and checklists too → Connecteam free.
Under 20 people at one physical location → Homebase free. The time clock alone justifies it.
10–30 people, just need a published schedule → Sling free. The largest free headcount available.
4–5 people running 24/7 coverage → Manage Roster beta. The only free tier where the 24-hour view, coverage gap detection and per-agent holiday groups are included.
Expecting to be 50+ people within a year → start on Findmyshift free and upgrade into its per-team pricing, rather than starting on a per-seat tool you will need to migrate off.
Is there a truly free staff roster app with no user limit? Only self-hosted open source, and the licence being free is not the same as the tool being free — you pay in hosting and maintenance instead. Every hosted product caps free usage somewhere. The highest cap in 2026 is Sling at 30 users.
What is the largest team I can roster for free? 30 people on Sling, though without time tracking or overtime. If you need overtime visibility, the practical free ceiling drops to 20 on Homebase (single location) or 10 on Connecteam.
Do free roster apps include a mobile app? Sling, Homebase and Connecteam all include full mobile apps on their free tiers. Findmyshift is browser-based and works on mobile but is not a native app. Open source projects generally have no usable mobile experience, which is a bigger problem than it sounds for shift workers.
Will I lose my data if I do not upgrade? Generally no — you lose features, not data — but retention windows differ. Findmyshift’s lower tiers keep limited history (one week back on Starter), so if you need historical rosters for payroll disputes or audits, check the retention limit before you commit. Export your data periodically regardless of which tool you use.
Is free during beta the same as a free tier? No, and the difference matters. A free tier is a published, permanent product level. Free-during-beta is a temporary state with unpublished future pricing. Manage Roster’s beta is free for one year with full features and no card, which is a real offer — but you should assume you will face a pricing decision at the end of it and pick accordingly.
Can I run a 24/7 roster on a free plan? Only carefully. Most free tiers were designed for day-shift retail and hospitality, and they show it: no 24-hour view, overnight shifts split across two days, and one national holiday calendar per account. Manage Roster’s beta and, with workarounds, Sling free are the workable options. How to create a 24/7 customer support schedule covers the rotation design that has to be right regardless of tool.
When should I stop using a free tier? Three signals: you are spending more than an hour a week on the schedule, you have discovered overtime after it was already worked, or you have missed a shift because someone was looking at a stale version. Any one of those costs more per month than the paid plan you are avoiding.
The best free staff roster app depends almost entirely on shape, not size.
Sling gives you the most people for free at 30 users, if you can live without overtime tracking. Homebase gives you the most complete free product — including a time clock — provided everyone works at one location. Connecteam bundles the most into one app under 10 users. Findmyshift is the simplest, and uniquely, its paid path is per-team rather than per-seat, which makes it the best free tier to grow out of.
Manage Roster is the one built for rosters that run through the night — 24-hour day view, live overtime events, per-agent holiday groups, coverage gap detection, none of it feature-gated — free during beta with the code BETA2026, capped at 5 agents and 50 places.
For paid options once you outgrow all of these, see the 6 best roster management software tools in 2026 — and if your team is a contact centre specifically, call center employee scheduling software covers when a roster tool is enough and when you actually need WFM.
Free-tier limits verified against vendor pricing pages on 5 September 2026: Sling, Homebase, Connecteam, Findmyshift. Free tiers change frequently — confirm before migrating your team.