Ownware

Leavora — Staff Leave & PTO Tracker (PHP + MySQL, Self-Hosted) vs. renting SaaS

Self-hosted staff leave & PTO — accruals, working-day requests, approvals, and live balances.

The subscription math

Leavora — Staff Leave & PTO Tracker (PHP + MySQL, Self-Hosted) — yours
$99.00
one-time · self-hosted · your data, your server
Buy once
Factorial — rented
One figure renders to a plain fetch: "Factorial starts at $8 per month, per user". No plan ladder, allowance or billing term is published to a fetcher, so none is recorded here [1]
Break-even: 13 months of Factorial equals the one-time price.
Assumption: The vendor's own starting price, per user per month, and deliberately nothing more: the plan cards render nothing to a fetch, so no tier, allowance or annual discount is claimed. Read it as a floor rather than a price. Leavora is $99 once, for any number of staff, with no per-head meter above it.
How their pricing grows: Factorial meters per user per month and publishes only where that meter STARTS — the rest of the ladder is not rendered.
“factorial starts at $8 per month, per user” — read 2026-09-03
What Factorial does that we don't: Factorial is a whole HR platform — leave, time, documents, onboarding and payroll in one hosted account.
Stay with Factorial if you want HR records, onboarding and payroll together. Leavora answers one question completely — who is off, what they have accrued, and what the balance is today — on your own server, bought once.
Vacation Tracker — rented
From about $2 (EUR 2)/user/month with an EUR 50/month minimum; upper tier EUR 4/user with EUR 100 minimum [2]
Break-even: 2 months of Vacation Tracker equals the one-time price (competitor bills in EUR — approximate).
Assumption: Re-read 2026-09-05 and the $25-vs-$50 question is SETTLED: both are real, in different toggle states. Monthly billing shows '$50 minimum' with $2/user; YEARLY shows '$25 minimum' with $1/user. Earlier reads that disagreed were reading different states, not misreading one. Crossover is 25 people either way. Page served USD on 09-05 where it served EUR on 09-03. The badge reads 'Save ~ 10% yearly' while both rate and floor halve.
How their pricing grows: Vacation Tracker charges per user, with annual-plan rates set by which team-size tier the buyer's headcount falls into.
“Annual plans are priced in user tiers, so your rate is based on the range your team falls into rather than your exact headcount.” — read 2026-08-11
What Vacation Tracker does that we don't: Vacation Tracker gives each employee their own self-service login to view balances and submit leave requests without going through an admin.
If you need employees to log in themselves and submit their own leave requests, stay where you are — Leavora does not do that (it is admin-managed, with no separate per-employee self-service login in this version).
Timetastic — rented
Business $1.50/user/month, Pro $2.50/user/month, Rota and Time Clock $5.50/user/month; 30-day trial, no free tier [3]
Break-even: 22 months of Timetastic equals the one-time price.
Assumption: Per-seat monthly and the cheapest anchor on the market. Figure shown for 3 staff - break-even shortens with team size (10 staff: about 4 months). Leavora is one payment for unlimited staff. Re-read 2026-09-07, unchanged: three plans, one rate each, no annual toggle and no free tier - 'Three super simple price plans, each with a 30-day free trial, no credit card required.'
How their pricing grows: Timetastic bills per user per month on every plan, so the cost rises as headcount grows.
“$1.50 per user per month” — read 2026-08-11
What Timetastic does that we don't: Timetastic sells a dearer Rota and Time Clock tier that turns phone clock-ins into payroll-ready timesheets.
If you need payroll-ready timesheets and wage calculations bundled with leave tracking, stay with Timetastic — Leavora tracks leave only and never calculates or pays wages.

Savings calculator

SaaS figures use the cited plan price above (see the sources below); per-seat plans scale by the seat count from the same cited price. This is arithmetic, not a quote.

Also in this category

absence.io [4]

Starter €2.99 per user/month, Pro €4.99, Complete €7.99, with a monthly/annual toggle marked "-10%". Priced per user, in euros, on every tier
Priced in euros, so no cents are stored and no dollar saving is computed — the Pleo, Soldo, Vizito and Trail rule. The shape is the comparison: absence.io meters per user on every tier, so a growing team pays more for the same leave calendar, while Leavora is $99 once for unlimited staff.

How their pricing grows: absence.io meters per user per month on all three tiers, and holds single sign-on back for the middle one.

“pro €4.99 per userper month”

What absence.io does that we don't: absence.io publishes its whole ladder openly, in prose and in the page's own structured data, which most of this category will not do.

Stay with absence.io if you want time tracking, expenses and a digital personnel file around the leave calendar. Leavora is the leave record itself — accruals, working-day requests, approvals and live balances — bought once and kept on your own server.

Why owning beats renting here

  • One payment. No per-month, per-seat, or per-location fees — the license is perpetual.
  • Your data stays on your server. Customer records never live in someone else's cloud.
  • No plan ceilings. Records, users, and usage are limited by your hosting, not a pricing tier.
  • It keeps working if the vendor doesn't. Self-hosted software can't be sunset out from under you.

Fair trade-offs: you host it, you back it up, and updates are yours to apply — see the product page for honest limitations.

Sources

  1. Factorial — price checked 2026-09-03 — source
    “factorial starts at $8 per month, per user”
  2. Vacation Tracker — price checked 2026-09-05 — source
    “EUR 2 / month - EUR 50 minimum - Billed monthly ... EUR 4 / month - EUR 100 minimum (page shows EUR to EU visitors)”
  3. Timetastic — price checked 2026-09-03 — source
    “$1.50 per user per month (Business); Pro $2.50 and Rota and Time Clock $5.50 per user per month”
  4. absence.io — price checked 2026-09-03 — source
    “starter €2.99 per userper month ... pro €4.99 per userper month ... complete €7.99 per userper month ... "name": "starter", "price": "2.99"”

Competitor prices change — always confirm on the linked page. We only print figures we could verify on the date shown.

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