Clockify Alternative for PTO Tracking (Free, No Time Tracking Required)

If you went looking for Clockify specifically to track vacation days, you likely hit the same wall a lot of people have hit recently: the free plan doesn't include it. Leave and time-off tracking now lives behind a paid tier, and the free plan itself is capped at five users — smaller than it used to be.

That's a reasonable choice for Clockify to make. Time tracking is the product; PTO is a module. But it means a five-person team that just wants a shared vacation calendar is being asked to adopt a full time-tracking system, and then pay per person, to get a feature that has nothing to do with timers.

What Clockify is actually built for

Clockify's core product is a stopwatch: start, stop, log hours, bill clients, report on where time went. That is genuinely useful for agencies and consultancies billing by the hour. PTO tracking sits inside that product as one more thing to configure, on the assumption that a team already tracking billable hours also wants its leave in the same place.

If that's your team — you're already timing work and PTO is a bonus — Clockify is a defensible pick. If you clicked around and never once needed a timer, you've picked the wrong category of tool for the actual problem.

The free-plan gap, specifically

Two limits matter if leave tracking is why you're here:

Five-user cap on the free plan. Once a sixth person joins, the free tier stops being an option regardless of whether you use time tracking, PTO, or both.

Leave tracking is a paid-tier feature. Even under five people, the free plan doesn't include it. You need the paid Basic tier — priced per person, per month — before a single vacation request can be logged.

Put together: a team that wants nothing but "let people request time off and see who's out" pays a recurring per-seat bill for a product whose main feature they don't need.

What a PTO-first tool does differently

Everything is included at every size. SimplyPTO's pricing is free up to ten people with every feature — Slack, Google Calendar sync, departments, holidays, CSV export — turned on. Nothing is held back for a higher tier, because there's no separate flagship product the leave feature is subsidizing.

The calendar is the product, not a tab. Requests, approvals, and who's-out-this-week are the first thing you see, not a sub-page inside a time-tracking dashboard.

Holidays and accrual rules are handled for you. Company holidays are calculated automatically per country rather than entered by hand, and balances follow your actual policy — flat annual, monthly accrual, or carryover — without needing a time-tracking mental model layered on top.

Feature comparison

What "every feature included" actually means

It's worth being specific about this, because "all features included" is the kind of line every pricing page uses and most don't fully mean.

On a leave-first tool, that should include the parts teams usually discover are gated elsewhere only after they've already committed: Slack so a request can be approved without opening a browser tab, Google Calendar sync so approved time off shows up where people already look for their schedule, departments so a fifteen-person team with two functions can filter the calendar instead of scrolling it, and CSV export so the record of who took what is never locked inside one vendor's dashboard.

None of that is exotic. It's the list of things a small team actually touches in a normal month, and the test for any tool — Clockify included — is whether those are available at the size you are today, not the size you'd need to be to unlock them.

The accrual question nobody asks until it matters

One more difference worth naming: accrual policy. A time-tracking-first product tends to treat leave as a static number that goes down when a request is approved. A leave-first tool is more likely to support the shapes small businesses actually use — a flat annual grant, monthly accrual that builds up gradually, and carryover rules for what's left at year-end — because that's the whole point of the product rather than a bolt-on.

If your team runs anything other than "everyone gets N days on January 1st," it's worth confirming the tool you're comparing against can express that before you commit a roster to it, rather than discovering the gap the first time someone's balance looks wrong.

When Clockify is still the right call

• You bill clients by the hour and need real timesheets, and PTO is a nice-to-have alongside that.
• You're already invested in Clockify's reporting for project costing and don't want a second login.
• Your team is under five people, doesn't need PTO tracking yet, and might grow into the timer features.

If none of those describe you — you just want to stop tracking vacation in a shared spreadsheet — a dedicated leave tool is less software to run, not more.

Switching over

The honest friction in switching tools is always the roster: names, emails, and how many days everyone has left. If that currently lives in a spreadsheet — which it does for most teams sizing up Clockify's leave feature for the first time — importing it directly turns that sheet into a working calendar without retyping anyone, including a way to note days someone already took before the switch so the running balance stays right from day one.

For the wider landscape beyond just these two tools, how to choose PTO tracking software covers the questions worth asking regardless of which product you're evaluating, and when to switch from a spreadsheet covers the timing question if you haven't committed to any tool yet.