Sling

Sling, now Sling by Toast, is an employee scheduling and team communication app that has staked its position on price: core shift scheduling is free for up to 30 users, and paid plans start lower than almost any competitor in this category. Founded in 2015 in Reykjavik by CEO Helgi Hermannsson and later run from New York, Sling says it now serves tens of thousands of businesses across more than 30 industries and 150 countries – treat those as vendor-reported figures, but the free tier alone explains the adoption.

The scheduling core covers the workflows hourly managers run weekly: shift templates, availability and unavailability tracking, time-off requests, shift swaps and offers, auto-assigning, day parts, and long-term scheduling months in advance. Employees get shift alarms by app notification or SMS, and schedules sync to personal calendar apps. A built-in time clock, task assignments, labor cost tracking and reports round out the operational side, while the communication layer – private and group messaging, announcements and a newsfeed – keeps work talk out of personal text threads. Desktop access comes through the web app and a Microsoft Store app alongside the iOS and Android apps, so managers and staff can work from whatever device they have.

The free plan is the headline: scheduling and communication for an unlimited number of locations with up to 30 users at no cost. Premium runs $2 per user per month billed monthly or $1.70 billed annually, and Business $4 or $3.40 on the same terms, adding features like mandatory breaks, newsfeed restrictions and deeper reporting. A 15-day free trial lets new accounts test the paid tiers, and annual billing saves 15 percent. Toast customers can buy through the Toast Shop, and the official integration list includes Toast, Shopify, Square and several restaurant POS systems, with a public API portal at api.getsling.com for custom connections.

Where it falls short: the free plan caps at 30 users, so growing teams will need a paid tier; payroll is not built in (Sling points to integrations instead); the deepest labor-cost and reporting features sit behind the Business plan; and support is help-center-led with no published support email. Businesses that want hiring, onboarding or HR document workflows will need a second tool. Teams on the free plan should also confirm which messaging restrictions apply, since some newsfeed controls are paid-tier features.

Overall, Sling is the budget pick of employee scheduling: a genuinely usable free plan, the lowest per-user paid pricing in the category, and enough scheduling, time clock and messaging depth for most small hourly businesses. Restaurants and hospitality get extra value from the Toast ecosystem tie-in.