The 7 Best Employee Attendance Apps for All Budgets

ByEric Czerwonka Last Updated
cloud based attendance system

If you have a large company, multiple locations, or employees who work in the field, keeping track of employee attendance manually can be impossible. You may go an entire day without seeing all of your employees, so it’s hard to know if they’re where they’re supposed to be when they’re supposed to be there.

Attendance apps can help with that. They can show you a roster of who’s on the clock, let you know when employees clocked in late or clocked out early, and even tell you if employees were at the job site when they clocked in and out.

To compile this list, we reviewed dozens of options to find the seven best employee attendance apps. We chose the seven apps below based on their features, customer reviews, and pricing that accommodates businesses of all types and sizes. 

1. Buddy Punch

Attendance tracking is just one of the features you get with Buddy Punch. It’s an all-in-one app that helps you track time, attendance, and PTO, create employee schedules, and run payroll. All of these features work seamlessly together to make managing your businesses easier than ever.

Let’s dig into each of those features to show you what Buddy Punch can do and how it can help with not only attendance tracking but also every other part of your administrative work.

Employee scheduling

Attendance tracking in Buddy Punch starts with creating a work schedule for your team. Using Buddy Punch’s drag-and-drop schedule maker, you can quickly and easily create work schedules for all of your employees, working in all departments, across as many locations as you need to create schedules for.

You can build and publish schedules in Buddy Punch and automatically notify your team members when new schedules are published — or published schedules are changed. Your team can view their schedules at any time in the Buddy Punch app, available on the web and on iOS and Android devices.

Time tracking

Once you have schedules in place, your team will clock in and out using Buddy Punch. They can access Buddy Punch on their computers, using a tablet you set up as a central time clock kiosk, or on their smartphones if they work in the field.

Employee hours are compiled into timesheets in Buddy Punch. The app automatically calculates total regular and overtime hours worked, as well as total gross pay for the time period. Employees can see their own timesheets at any time in the app, and admins and managers can see timesheets for all of the employees assigned to them.

You can also set Buddy Punch up so that managers have to approve their team members’ timesheets at the end of a pay period. This helps ensure that all of your time records are accurate before you run payroll for any pay period.

Attendance tracking

Once you have schedules created and employees are using Buddy Punch to clock in and out, you can start using Buddy Punch as an attendance tracker.

For a quick view, you can see all employees who are currently clocked in and clocked out on the admin dashboard. The dashboard will also show important notifications next to an employee, such as if they were late and how late they were for their shift.

Additionally, you can set up notifications to alert you to the attendance events you’re most interested in. Get an email or push notification for late clock-ins, absences, and early clock-outs. This helps you resolve staffing issues quickly and identify employees who suffer from chronic lateness or excessive absenteeism.

Time off tracking

Of course, you don’t want an employee to show up as absent if they were scheduled to be on PTO, so Buddy Punch helps you manage time off for your team, too. You can set up specific PTO accrual rules, and Buddy Punch will automatically calculate earned time off for you.

Employees can see their accrued time off in the Buddy Punch web or mobile app, and they also have access to functionality that lets them submit time off requests. Those requests go to their managers for approval, and if they’re approved, that time off is automatically added to your schedules and timesheets.

Payroll

Buddy Punch also helps you automate the process of running payroll. You can use Buddy Punch for your payroll processing, or you can take advantage of one of its integrations to make the process of sending your timesheet data to your existing payroll provider automatic.

Buddy Punch has integrations for popular payroll software like QuickBooks Online and Desktop, ADP, Gusto, Rippling, Workday, and more. And if an integration with your payroll system isn’t available, you can quickly download your work hours data in Excel spreadsheet, PDF, or CSV formats.

Additional features

So far, we’ve covered Buddy Punch’s features broadly, but there are tons of optional features as well that can help you save time, prevent time theft, and lower your labor costs. Additional features that might help your business include:

  • Biometric login: If buddy punching — where employees clock in and out for each other — is a problem for your business, you can enable facial recognition at login to make sure that only the correct employee can clock themselves in and out.
  • Time clock kiosk: Set up Buddy Punch on a central computer or tablet to make it a kiosk all employees can use to clock in and out. You can speed up the process by allowing employees to log in via a PIN, QR code, or facial recognition.
  • GPS tracking: If you have employees who work in the field, you can capture their locations when they clock in and out, set up geofences to prevent them from punching when they’re not on-site, or use real-time GPS tracking to track their movements across an entire workday.
  • Customizable notifications: In addition to attendance notifications, you can set up alerts for everything you want to keep a close eye on. Get an alert when an employee is nearing overtime, when they’ve requested time off, when a timesheet needs to be approved, and much more.
  • Project tracking: If you need to sort employees’ time records to see how much time was spent on different projects for things like client invoicing, you can create job codes in Buddy Punch that employees clock into and out of.
  • Recurring shifts: If your employees work the same shifts every week, you can create recurring shifts that work as templates to make building out future schedules take only minutes.

This is still just a fraction of what you can do in Buddy Punch. Visit this page to explore all of the app’s features.

Customer reviews

Screenshot of Buddy Punch's rating on Capterra

Buddy Punch has an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5 across more than 1,000 customer reviews on Capterra. Customers praise the app’s intuitive interface and helpful customer support:

“The customer support team is super responsive, thorough, and effective. Their team is knowledgeable about my organization and the way that we use the platform. I have received many helpful suggestions on how we can best leverage Buddy Punch in our sometimes-complicated organizational structure.”

“Buddy Punch makes employee time tracking very easy. Employees just need to be within a geofence (if one is set up), log in, and punch in/punch out. They don’t have to jump through endless steps for something that should be straightforward. The user interface is also very user-friendly.”

“The product works well on iPads and PCs. It seems to be very low maintenance, and the staff are great to work with when I have questions. I work with many non-technical people, and they caught on to the app quickly.”

Pricing

Buddy Punch offers a free 14-day trial — no credit card required. Its base plan starts at $4.49 per user per month plus a $19 per month base fee.

Want to learn more about Buddy Punch? Start a free trial, take an interactive tour of the product, or request a personalized demo.

2. Clockify

Clockify’s time-tracking software is built for teams that work on client projects. It’s an all-in-one time tracking, attendance management, and project management tool that lets you track billable and non-billable hours for payroll and invoicing at the individual project level.

While Clockify does have a free plan, it doesn’t include its attendance-tracking features. To get those, you’ll have to be on the Standard plan, which starts at $5.49 per seat per month. In that plan, you also get features like:

Clockify has an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars on Capterra across more than 7,000 reviews. Here’s what one customer loves about the platform:

“What I appreciate most about Clockify is the simplicity and flexibility it offers. The interface is user-friendly, making time tracking easy even for someone with minimal tech experience. The ability to categorize tasks by projects, clients, and time intervals provides clear insights into productivity.”

3. Jibble

Jibble is the best attendance system for small businesses looking for a free option. With it, you can track time for an unlimited number of employees without paying any monthly fee. 

While you won’t get access to its attendance reports, which are only available on its $4.99/user/month plan, you can view employee timesheets to see who missed a shift, clocked in early, or clocked out late.

Features that are included in Jibble’s free plan are:

Jibble has an overall rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars on Capterra across about 1,000 reviews. Here’s what customers like about the platform:

“So far, we love it, and the ease of use is fantastic compared to other platforms. The time-tracking feature is a huge bonus for us, and the initial rollout was very intuitive. At a fraction of the price with more features than we have been offered by past systems, this was an easy choice.”

4. Connecteam

Connecteam is a great attendance tracker app for companies that think they might want to take advantage of the product’s other core offerings. In addition to being able to track employee attendance and time, Connecteam has a full suite of HR tools you can use for training, onboarding, engagement, and recognition.

Some of Connecteam’s more unique features include:

If you don’t need all of these features now, you don’t have to pay for all of them. Connecteam’s plans are set up so that you can add specific features as you need them. You can start off with just attendance tracking and then add on the communication and HR features later when you’re ready to take advantage of them.

Connecteam has an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars on Capterra across 334 reviews. Here’s what customers like about the platform:

“Connecteam has helped with managing our employee work time and scheduling tremendously. I have slowly implemented more and more features to benefit our company as a whole, and I have been extremely happy with what I have implemented so far.”

5. OfficeTimer

OfficeTimer is great if all you’re looking for is attendance-tracking software. It has none of the bells and whistles of the other apps on this list. It’s simply a cloud-based app you can use to track employee attendance.

OfficeTimer has a free plan that includes unlimited users, check-ins, and check-outs. You can also view attendance data on their web and mobile apps. If you upgrade to its paid plan, which is $0.99 per user per month, you also get access to auto check-ins/outs, manager alerts, and check-in/out reminders.

OfficeTimer has an overall rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars on Capterra across 22 reviews. Here’s what customers like about the platform:

“I’m able to manage a team of over 50 people working in several locations without much overhead to manage the software. Adding new projects is simple and is easily handled in just a few minutes.”

6. Hubstaff

Hubstaff is a great option if what you’re looking for in a tracking tool is time, attendance, and team productivity tracking. With it, you can view attendance records, see which apps and URLs employees are spending the most time on, detect when employees are idle while billing time, and take screenshots of their screens at random intervals.

Hubstaff’s most unique features include:

Hubstaff has an overall rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars on Capterra across 1,489 reviews. Here’s what customers like about the platform:

“As a company with lots of employees working remotely, we need strong software to monitor employees’ performance and act according to the efficiency analysis. Its best feature is idle time management, which helps you know if an employee is sitting idle.”

7. Zoho People

If you’re looking for attendance tracking in a more comprehensive HR platform,
Zoho People is your best choice. In addition to having all of the features of the other apps on this like, like time tracking, employee scheduling, attendance management, and payroll integrations, it has tons of HR-specific features:

Zoho People has an overall rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars on Capterra across 254 reviews. Here’s what customers like about the platform:

“This one application can pretty much do everything you need for people management. Its LMS module alone is worth over $5/month if bought as a separate application from another provider. The app is very responsive and reliable, which is a massive feature as some HR software has a web version but not an actual app.”

Choosing the right employee attendance app for your team

To further narrow down the apps you want to consider from this list, here are some final thoughts on finding the right one for your team and company.

If you’re looking for something simple and inexpensive that’s solely for attendance tracking, choose Jibble or OfficeTimer.

If your business works with clients and needs to track projects and productivity in addition to attendance, look into Clockify and Hubstaff.

If you want more HR-focused features, you’ll want to review Connecteam and Zoho People.

But if what you want is a flexible, all-in-one system that’s user-friendly, packed with useful features, has great customer support, and is reasonably priced, you can’t go wrong with Buddy Punch.