Homebase

Where Homebase sits

Homebase is built for a specific business: one or a few locations, hourly workers, shift schedules that change weekly, and an owner-manager who does the admin between customers. Restaurants, retail shops, salons, clinics, coffee bars. It bundles scheduling, time clocks, team communication, hiring, PTO tracking and — as a paid add-on — payroll, and it prices per location rather than per employee, which makes it unusual in a category where per-seat pricing is the norm. The company says it works with more than 150,000 small businesses and that 3.5 million employees logged 1.2 billion hours on the app in 2025 (joinhomebase.com/methodology — vendor figures). Its free tier is the reason most people find it: one location, up to 10 employees, no credit card.

What Homebase actually does

The plan ladder at time of writing (joinhomebase.com/pricing): Basic is $0 per month for one location and up to 10 employees, with basic scheduling, basic time tracking and point-of-sale integration. Essentials is $30/month per location (annual billing brings it to the $20–24.95 range depending on the page) with advanced scheduling, advanced time tracking and team communication. Plus is $70/month per location ($56 billed annually) and adds AI-assisted scheduling, hiring tools, PTO and time-off controls, departments and permissions. All-in-One is $120/month per location and folds in the fuller HR toolset. All paid tiers cover unlimited employees; the employee cap only binds on the free plan.

Payroll is an add-on on any tier: $39/month plus $6 per employee per month on the current page ($49 base in some listings and after promotions), covering full-service payroll with tax filings, with Tip Manager at $25/month per location (pulling tips from your POS into timesheets) and background checks at $30 each. A promotional offer at the time of writing gives six months of Payroll and the Plus plan free. The mechanics behind the clock matter for this audience: employees clock in from their phones (with geofencing), from a tablet kiosk, or from a web browser; managers get alerts for missed clock-ins, late arrivals and overtime thresholds; hours flow into timesheets and then into payroll.

PCMag's testing of the payroll side is worth citing because it is one of the few lab reviews of this specific configuration: they found the payroll run details simple to fill out and the scheduling and time-import tools thorough, called Homebase the best app they had tested for customizing shift work rules, and rated it 3.5 overall — dinged for costing more than alternatives and for thin payroll preview detail and custom reports.

My testing notes

Four observations. First, the free plan is genuinely usable, which is rare. For a single-location shop with under 10 people, you get scheduling and time tracking with POS integration at no cost, and I know operators who have run on it for years. The 10-employee ceiling is the moment the business case changes — at 11 people you need Essentials at $30/month per location, and payroll adds $39 + $6/person on top. (One Homebase page still advertises the free plan at up to 20 employees — the vendor's pages disagree, and I would plan around the lower number.)

Second, the shift-rule customisation is the deepest I have used in this class of product. Break and overtime rules, role-based scheduling, availability and shift-trading controls, and the alert layer (no-show after N minutes, approaching overtime, missed break) are configurable per location rather than globally, which matches how multi-site operators actually think. Building a weekly schedule with labour-cost visibility and publishing it to the team took me minutes, and the employee-side app makes shift claims and swaps self-serve.

Third, the payroll add-on is competent but the pricing model creates a comparison problem. Because payroll requires the core subscription first, the effective cost of Homebase payroll is the plan fee plus $39 + $6/person. PCMag's reviewers make the same point — that the two-part model makes Homebase more expensive than payroll services that bundle the same functionality — and my own spreadsheet against Gusto's Simple plan confirms it for small teams: the free Basic tier plus payroll is competitive, but Essentials-plus-payroll against Gusto Simple is close enough that the scheduling depth becomes the deciding factor rather than price.

Fourth, the manager experience on mobile is a real strength. Owners I spoke with and my own testing agree that the app handles the tasks that actually happen away from a desk — fixing a missed clock-out from a phone, approving a shift swap, checking who is late — without needing a laptop. That sounds small, but for hourly businesses it is most of the daily interaction with the software.

The hiring module is a small pleasant surprise worth a sentence. Job posts, an applicant tracking flow and onboarding checklists are included from the Plus tier (hiring appears in Essentials listings on some pages), and for a business that staffs up seasonally — a ice-cream shop, a holiday retail crew — posting a role, collecting applicants and moving them into onboarding without a separate system is a genuine time saver. Background checks run $30 each through the add-on.

Where it falls short

The payroll engine is good, not great. Payroll preview detail is limited, custom reporting is thin until higher tiers, and PCMag's test noted that the earnings-type columns require horizontal scrolling on the payroll worksheet. If payroll is the main thing you are buying, Gusto or OnPay give you more depth for a similar or lower all-in price at small headcounts.

Geography is a hard limit: Homebase is US-only, designed around US payroll taxes and US labour rules. There is no international employment, no EOR, and the hiring tools are US job-board centric.

The free plan's employee cap (10, per the current pricing page) makes the free-to-paid transition happen exactly when a small business is most price-sensitive. Multi-location businesses pay per location across every tier, so a five-site operator pays five times the base — the model is fair but it is not cheap.

Feature gating between tiers is aggressive in places: AI-assisted scheduling, PTO controls and departments sit on Plus; HR and compliance tools sit on All-in-One. And while integrations cover POS, accounting and benefits partners, payroll benefits administration is thinner than Gusto's brokerage model.

Finally, support quality is the usual small-business-software story: email and help centre first, with phone and priority paths gated to higher tiers.

One buying tip from my trial period: start on Basic and export your timesheets weekly until you decide to pay. The free plan also makes a fine trial environment for the payroll add-on, since the timesheet data you build up carries straight into the first paid run. The export path is clean, it keeps your records portable, and it costs nothing.

Verdict

Homebase is the best fit I have seen for the single-site hourly business — the free tier is real, the scheduling and time-clock tooling is deeper than the price suggests, and the mobile manager experience matches how this work actually happens. Payroll is a solid add-on rather than the star, and the two-part pricing means it loses standalone payroll comparisons at small headcounts. Rated 4.0 — core functionality 4.2 for scheduling, time tracking and shift-rule depth, value 4.2 given a free tier that genuinely works, usability 4.3 for both manager and employee apps, support 3.6 for gated support paths, and reliability 3.9 on the strength of scale figures and PCMag's lab testing. If you run a restaurant, salon or retail shop with hourly staff, start with the free plan and add payroll when the schedule alone stops being enough.

Sources

• https://www.joinhomebase.com/pricing
• https://wf.joinhomebase.com/pricing
• https://www.joinhomebase.com/homebase-pricing
• https://pcmag.com/reviews/homebase
• https://uk.pcmag.com/payroll/157990/homebase
• https://joinhomebase.com/methodology
• https://joinhomebase.com/reviews
• https://connecteam.com/homebase-vs-7shifts
• http://joinhomebase.com/solutions
• https://tech.yahoo.com/apps/articles/homebase-154424889.html