irot Time as an alternative to Deputy
Both clock hours and build rotas. Two things separate them. Deputy charges per user with a £20 minimum invoice, so three people cost £20 a month rather than £9.75; irot Time charges per company-size bracket. And Deputy is a cloud product on AWS, while irot Time runs on our servers in Germany or on yours. We do not convert between currencies on this page — Deputy publishes pounds, we publish euros, and a made-up exchange rate would make the comparison look sharper than it is.
Line by line
| irot Time | Deputy | |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay | ||
| How it is billed | Advantage: Per company-size bracket. Inside a bracket, the next hire costs nothing extra. | Per user, per month. |
| Minimum | Advantage: None. | £20 minimum per invoice, in force since 1 September 2025. |
| Entry price | €9 a month for up to 5 employees, whole company. | £3.25 per user a month on Lite — but the £20 minimum means a team of three pays £20. |
| Free forever | Advantage: Up to 3 employees, no deadline, no payment details, every feature except the AI assistant. | No free plan; a free trial only. |
| Money back | Advantage: 60 days, no questions asked. | Annual plans: "there are no refunds" if you cancel before the twelve months are up. |
| Commitment | Advantage: Monthly, and what you recorded stays readable either way. | Monthly, or annual paid upfront and not downgradable mid-term. |
| Where your data sits | ||
| Servers | Our own servers in Germany (Hetzner, Falkenstein), under GDPR. | AWS in Australia, the UK or the US, depending on the account. |
| Self-hosting | Advantage: Yes — rented or bought once, with no connection back to us. | No: cloud only. |
| Separation between companies | Advantage: One application and one database per customer. | Shared cloud service. |
| What is in the base price | ||
| Leave and absence | In the base plan. | Automated leave accruals on every plan. |
| Clocking without a connection | With a card the clock keeps working and syncs later with the original time. | Offline clocking is offered; the detail depends on the plan. |
| Languages for staff | Twelve, each person picks their own when they clock in. | No list of employee languages is published. |
| Full data export | A complete ZIP any time, even without an active licence. | Not detailed on the pricing page. |
| Where Deputy is ahead | ||
| Scheduling depth | A draft rota that respects leave, rest periods and minimum staffing, plus swaps between colleagues. | Advantage: Auto-scheduling, micro-scheduling and advanced scheduling on Core and Pro — a deeper rota engine than ours. |
| Biometric clocking | PIN and card. No fingerprints, by choice. | Advantage: Biometric time clocking on Core and Pro. |
| Size and ecosystem | Small team; you talk to the people who write the software. | Advantage: A large, established vendor with a wide integration catalogue and support organisation. |
All Deputy figures come from deputy.com/gb/pricing and Deputy’s own terms, retrieved on 24 September 2026. Their prices are quoted in pounds and exclude VAT; ours are in euros, monthly, without the annual discount — the less favourable of our two. We do not convert between the two currencies anywhere on this page. irot Time prices: our pricing page. Prices may have changed since; the vendor’s own offer is what counts.
Where Deputy is the better choice
If rota-building is the hard part of your week — many sites, demand forecasting, auto-filling shifts against labour cost — Deputy does more of that than we do, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Their scheduling engine is deeper, they have been at it far longer, and the integration catalogue is broader.
They are also the better fit if you want biometric clocking. We do not offer fingerprints, and that is a decision rather than a gap: here is why.
What we built irot Time for
- Small teams. A £20 minimum invoice hits a team of three hardest — that is exactly the size we are free for.
- Up to 3 employees, free forever, no deadline and no card.
- 60 days money back. Of fifteen vendors we checked, only Hubstaff publishes a guarantee at all, at 30 days.
- Your data comes back out whole, as a ZIP, even if you stop paying.
- On your own server if you want it there, with the licence checked offline.
- Twelve languages on the terminal, one per person — on mixed teams that removes most clocking mistakes.
- No location tracking. We never store where somebody clocked in.
Try it without deciding anything
Before comparing vendors, try the thing you would actually use daily: our free tools run in the browser with no account — timesheet template, rota template and the holiday entitlement calculator. The whole field is in the fifteen-vendor comparison.
Questions we get
What does Deputy actually cost?
Lite is £3.25 per user a month, Core £4.25 and Pro £6.50, with 10% off for annual billing. The line that changes small bills is underneath: a £20 minimum per invoice since 1 September 2025. Three people on Lite therefore cost £20 a month, not £9.75. Source: deputy.com/gb/pricing, retrieved on 24 September 2026.
Is irot Time cheaper than Deputy?
We will not put a number on that, because Deputy bills in pounds and we bill in euros, and inventing an exchange rate to win an argument is exactly the trick this page exists to avoid. What we can say without arithmetic: their bill rises with every hire, ours does not until you cross a bracket, and a team of three pays a £20 minimum there and nothing at all here.
Do we have to record daily hours in the UK?
Not individually. Since 1 January 2024 regulation 9(3) of the Working Time Regulations says daily hours need not be recorded for each worker as long as you can show the limits were kept. Neither vendor changes that, and no software makes you compliant by itself. What the law does require.
Can we bring our data over from Deputy?
People, yes — irot Time imports a CSV of names, staff numbers and departments, with a preview before anyone is created. For hours already recorded, whatever you can export from your current system can usually be read in; there is no one-click Deputy import. Keep the old export either way: your records have to remain available for two years.
Does irot Time do rotas at all?
Yes, as a module: an automatic draft that already respects leave, the eleven-hour rest period and minimum staffing, plus shift swaps between colleagues. It is honest to say Deputy’s scheduling goes further. If the rota is the whole job, weigh that seriously.
Note: Deputy is a product of Deputechnologies Pty Ltd. We have no business relationship with that company. Every figure quoted comes from their own public pages, retrieved on 24 September 2026, and may have changed since. This page is not legal advice.