Comparison

Formclock vs Deputy

Deputy pioneered compliance-aware scheduling. Formclock takes the next step: an agent that actually closes the gaps, not just flags them.

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Formclock vs Deputy: feature by feature
FeatureFormclockDeputy
Compliance pre-publish gateYes, blocking conflicts stop publishYes
Autonomous gap-fillingCoverage agent auto-fills with reasonsManual with suggestions
Reversible automation + audit logOne-tap undo, every action loggedLimited
Single app for the whole teamSchedule, clock, timesheets, messagesYes
Fairness scoringBuilt in, transparentNot native

If you want compliance plus automation you can trust and undo, Formclock is the closer.

Where Deputy is the better choice

Deputy has been doing this for far longer, and it shows in the places maturity shows: a deep integration catalogue, payroll connections that already exist rather than being planned, and a support organisation sized for enterprise rollouts. If your decision hinges on connecting to a specific payroll provider this quarter, check their catalogue first. We are pre-launch and ours is short.

They also pioneered compliance-aware scheduling as a category. The idea that a scheduling tool should know the rules before it publishes is theirs before it was anyone else's, and this page would be dishonest if it pretended otherwise.

Flagging a gap and closing one are different products

Both tools will tell you Friday night is short. The difference is what happens next. A warning hands the problem back to a manager who now has to work out who is qualified, who is available, and who will not tip into overtime or break a rest rule by taking it.

Closing the gap means ranking the people who could actually take it against those constraints, and either proposing the answer or acting on it at an autonomy level you set. That is the product difference worth evaluating, and it is worth evaluating sceptically: ask both vendors what happens in the ninety seconds after a call-out, not what appears on the dashboard afterwards.

What auditable automation has to mean before it is worth trusting

Any tool can fill a gap automatically. The question is whether you can live with what it did. Three things make that answerable: it records why each person was ranked where they were, every action it takes can be undone, and it never crosses a compliance rule to solve a coverage problem.

Without those, automation is a thing you turn on for a week and then switch off after it puts the wrong person on a Sunday. With them, the failure mode is a decision you can inspect and reverse rather than a mystery you have to unpick from the schedule afterwards.

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Why it holds

The same engine underneath.

1 app
scheduling, time clock, and timesheets
Every pick
explained and reversible
< 4 min
to a running demo workspace
Questions

Formclock and Deputy, answered.

Pricing figures on this page were read off Deputy's own pricing page on 2026-08-12.

Is there a free plan?+
Formclock is free for up to 5 people with no time limit. Deputy has no free plan and its paid tiers started at $5 per user per month with a $30 monthly minimum when we checked on 2026-08-12, so a five-person team pays from the first month.
What does Deputy do better?+
Demand forecasting. Deputy's Core tier includes forecasting and auto-scheduling driven by sales data, and Formclock has no equivalent. If your rota is built from projected covers or transactions rather than from fixed coverage requirements, that gap will matter to you.
How does compliance differ?+
Both check schedules against labour rules before publishing. Deputy covers US states in depth and has a broad international footprint. Formclock covers eight jurisdictions including Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa, cites the statute behind every rule, and publishes the thresholds it enforces so you can check them without signing up.
What happens to my data if I leave?+
Schedules, timesheets and cost data export as CSV, and the audit log is exportable too. Nothing is held to make leaving harder.

See it with your own schedule

Set up a workspace, add your team, and build a week. It takes about ten minutes and costs nothing.

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