Recharge vs Vacation Tracker: an honest comparison

If you’ve searched for a “Vacation Tracker alternative”, you’ve probably noticed it’s a genuinely strong product — 2,500+ teams, deep Slack and Teams integration, a real free plan with no seat cap. It’s the closest thing to a category leader in chat-native leave tracking. What follows is a straight comparison: where the two products are the same, where the free plan quietly stops short, and where Vacation Tracker still wins outright.

What Vacation Tracker gets right

Vacation Tracker’s slash-command requests and one-click Slack/Teams approvals are genuinely well built — for a team that lives in chat all day, booking leave without opening a separate tab is a real convenience, not a gimmick. The free plan has no seat cap either, which is rare in this category. If a chat-native leave request flow is all your team needs, it’s a safe, well-run choice.

The thing that pushes people to look elsewhere almost always comes down to one word: TOIL. It isn’t on the free plan, and it isn’t on the next plan up either — it’s gated behind Complete, which floors at $100 a month no matter how small your team is.

The free plan is real — TOIL just isn’t on it

Vacation Tracker’s Free plan covers basic requests, approvals, and calendar integration for unlimited seats — that part isn’t marketing spin. But TOIL and accrued leave live on Complete, at $4 a seat a month with a $100/month minimum. For a 10-person team, that’s $100 a month the moment TOIL enters the picture — Core, the $2 middle tier, doesn’t include it either. Recharge includes TOIL in the base Team plan, which floors at £15 a month for the same team size.

Vacation Tracker’s free plan is real. TOIL just isn’t on it.

The feature-by-feature breakdown

Line by line, here’s what each plan actually includes, checked against Vacation Tracker’s public pricing and features pages.

Where Vacation Tracker still wins, said plainly

None of this means Recharge is strictly better. Vacation Tracker has native iOS and Android apps and SSO on its paid plans; Recharge is an installable web app and doesn’t offer SSO yet. Vacation Tracker also supports per-location leave policies for teams spread across offices — Recharge assumes one org-wide policy. If SSO, dedicated mobile apps, or multi-location policies are a hard requirement today, Vacation Tracker Complete is the more honest recommendation.

Switching over

The biggest reason people stay on a leave tracker they’ve outgrown is dread of the migration. Here’s what it actually looks like.

1. 1

   Export

   Pull your team's leave history out of Vacation Tracker — its scheduled reports cover the standard fields (name, dates, leave type). No native report you need? Send us whatever you can export.

2. 2

   Map

   Import it under your org's Import page in Recharge. Start date, end date, and leave type map to Recharge's fields in a couple of clicks.

3. 3

   Go live

   Your history is in Recharge, ready to book against. Prefer a person to do it? Send us the export and we'll map it with you on a screen-share, usually the same day.

Migrating someone whose contract changed mid-year? Our free UK holiday entitlement calculator handles part-year starters, term-time staff, and irregular hours.