Best rota software for restaurants in the UK: what’s on offer and what it costs

What a restaurant needs from a rota

A rota for an office is a calendar. A rota for a restaurant is a labour budget. The things worth checking before you buy:

• Cost as you build. You should see what the week costs while you are still moving shifts, not after you publish.
• Labour against sales. Labour % needs your till’s sales. Ask which tills are connected by name.
• Clock in and timesheets. Check whether they are in the price or an add-on.
• Holiday and time off, requested and approved in the same place.
• Templates, because most weeks look like another week.
• The phone app your staff will use, on the phones they own.

The published UK prices

Three rota products publish a price in pounds. The figures below are as published on 13 October 2026; follow the source link for today’s.

The sum for one site and 25 people

Per-user and per-band prices are hard to compare by eye, so here is the arithmetic for one restaurant with 25 staff. The sums are ours, from the prices above.

What costs extra

The cheapest line in that table is not always the cheapest bill.

• RotaCloud: clocking in and timesheets are a paid add-on, “Time & Attendance”. For the 21–30 band the page shows 27, without a currency sign or a period. Read as pounds per month, that makes £87 with the Standard plan. There is also an SMS add-on. Confirm both on RotaCloud’s pricing page.
• Planday: Starter has a minimum of 5 users and Plus a minimum of 10, and Plus carries the £30.00 monthly fee. Payroll and till integrations, and the API, start at Plus (Planday pricing, 13 October 2026).
• Deputy: monthly Lite, Core and Pro plans have a minimum spend of £20 per month per invoice. Add-ons are per user per month: HR £2, Messaging+ £1.40 and Analytics+ £1, the last two included in Pro (Deputy pricing, 13 October 2026).

Built for hospitality, or for any shift business

Deputy, RotaCloud and Workforce.com sell to shift businesses of any kind. That is not a weakness. Deputy, for one, lists eight till integrations, among them Square, Lightspeed and Epos Now, and payroll links including Xero, Sage and QuickBooks (Deputy integrations, 13 October 2026). Planday counts hospitality as a main market.

Three more are worth knowing about, though none publishes a price:

• Rotaready (sold as Rotaready Evo) is a hospitality rota with HR, time and attendance, and sales forecasting. Demo and quote (The Access Group).
• Harri is a hospitality workforce suite covering hiring, scheduling and timekeeping, engagement, learning and payroll, aimed at multi-site and enterprise operators. Demo only (harri.ai).
• Workforce.com covers scheduling, time and attendance, HR and UK payroll with an HMRC link. Every plan says “Request Pricing”; a free trial is offered (Workforce.com pricing).

7shifts is restaurant-only but North American, with no UK pricing published (7shifts pricing, 13 October 2026).

How Yes Chef’s rota differs

Yes Chef is not a rota product. It is one app for the restaurant, and the rota is one part of it. On the rota side, what is built: a weekly rota that shows labour cost as you build it, whole-week templates, clock in and out, timesheets, time off and holiday, open shifts, team messaging, meetings, training, onboarding and probation.

The difference is what sits beside it. With a connected till, the same app shows live sales, covers and labour %, so the rota is read against what the room is taking. Food-safety checks, menus and the prep list are in there too, and you can ask the chat a question about any of it. You can see the rota working on the home page.

Where Yes Chef is not the right choice

If you only need a rota, buy a rota. Deputy, RotaCloud and Planday each let you sign up, try it free and see the price first. We offer none of those three things.

• You only want a rota. A dedicated rota tool with a free trial is the simpler purchase.
• You need stock control or supplier ordering now. Neither is built. Both are marked “coming soon”, with no date.
• Your team is on Android. There is a web app and an iPhone app. There is no Android app.
• Your till is not SumUp POS Pro. That is the one till we connect to live today.
• You want payroll run from, or linked to, the same tool. Yes Chef exports approved timesheets as a CSV file. It has no payroll integration.
• You want to sign up and try it today. There is no sign-up form and no free trial. Yes Chef is offered to a limited number of restaurants, and we set each one up ourselves.
• You need a price before you talk to anyone. We do not publish one.
• You want a long track record. Yes Chef is new. We have no customer numbers, case studies, awards or certifications to show you.

Already on Deputy and thinking of moving? Read what comes across from Deputy and what does not.

See how it works, step by step

• Publish the rota
• Save and use a rota template
• Clock in and out on the phone
• See what the rota costs