A free staff holiday planner, with no account
Most "free" holiday planners are free for five people, or free for fourteen days, or free until you want to see the year. This page is about what you can genuinely get for nothing — a shared wall chart with everyone's leave on it, balances that look after themselves, and your data back out again — and about where the honest paid line sits, which is the point at which somebody else has to run a server for you.
What "free" usually means in this category
Three shapes, and it is worth knowing which one you are looking at.
Free up to N people. The number is picked just below the size of a team that would find the tool useful. It works beautifully until you hire somebody.
Free for a trial period. Which is not free, it is later. The cost of discovering that is a leave year half-entered into a tool you then have to leave.
Free because the hard part costs nothing to run. A chart, the arithmetic, the public holidays and the export can all happen in your own browser. Nobody is paying for storage or accounts, so nobody has to charge for it.
The third one is the only one that stays free, and it is the shape Leavebook's front page takes.
What you get without paying anything
The whole chart. One row per person for the entire leave year, approved leave in blue, requests waiting on somebody in amber, weekends and public holidays greyed out because they are not anybody's leave.
A balance per person that maintains itself: the allowance plus whatever was carried over, minus what has been approved. A day only counts if it is a day that person works and is not a public holiday where they work, so a three-day week comes out right without anybody calculating a fraction.
The public holidays for your country, filled in from Nager.Date, across nineteen countries and regions — including the four separate sets of UK bank holidays, because 2 January is a holiday in Glasgow and a working day in Manchester.
CSV in and CSV out, and an iCalendar file for one person or the whole team that opens in Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar.
No sign-up, no email address, nothing installed. The chart on the page is the product.
Where the free version genuinely stops
It lives in your browser, on your device. That is what makes it free, and it is also its limit.
It means the chart is not at an address your team can open, there is no email link inviting people to it, and no approve-or-decline link arriving in an inbox. It means clearing your browser data clears the chart — so export the CSV occasionally and keep the file.
Those are the parts that need somebody to run a server, hold the data and send the mail, and that is the only honest reason to charge. When Leavebook does, it charges once for the company rather than once per head, so putting the Saturday-only person on the chart never costs anything.
Getting your existing holidays into it
Open whatever you keep now and export it as CSV.
A sheet with a name column and a number column becomes the team, each person starting on their allowance. Add a carry-over column and it reads that too. A sheet with start and end dates becomes leave already booked, matched to people by name, with anybody new added as they appear.
Lines it cannot read are reported rather than silently dropped, so you can see what did not come across. And everything goes back out the same way: the team and their balances as one CSV, every request as another.
Frequently asked questions
Is it free for any number of people?
Yes. There is no cap on how many people go on the chart, and no paid tier that would lift one. The free version is limited by living in your own browser, not by headcount.
Do staff need to create accounts?
Not for the free version — there are no accounts at all. On the shared version people are invited by an email link rather than by buying them a login each, which is why the price is per company rather than per employee.
What happens if I clear my browser data?
The chart goes, because that is where it lives. This is the real trade-off of a planner with no account. Export the CSV every so often and keep the file somewhere ordinary.
Can I put it in Google Calendar or Outlook?
Yes. Download the iCalendar file for one person or for the whole team and open it in Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar. On the shared version it is a live feed instead of a file, so it keeps itself up to date.
More guides
Other things we made
Also in English, made by the same people.
Also in English, made by the same people.
Also in English, made by the same people.
Also in English, made by the same people.