Connecteam
Built by Connecteam, Inc. · New York, United States
Connecteam charges a flat rate for the first 30 users instead of a per-seat rate, and gives teams of 10 or fewer the full product free for life. The catch sits in the packaging: that flat rate applies per hub, and there are three hubs. A business that needs scheduling, chat and HR records pays it three times.
What is Connecteam?
Connecteam is a mobile-first workforce management platform built for employees who never sit at a desk. It bundles time tracking, scheduling, internal communication and HR admin into a single app that staff open on their phones. The product is sold as three separate hubs: Operations, Communications, and HR & Skills.
Operations carries the GPS time clock, shift scheduling, forms and task management. Communications holds chat, company updates, surveys, events and the knowledge base. HR & Skills covers time off, courses, e-signed documents, recognition, hiring and onboarding.
What Connecteam does not do is run payroll. Timesheets export to Gusto, QuickBooks Online, ADP, Paychex Flex and Xero, and the pay run happens there. For a business replacing paper timesheets and a group text thread, that split is usually acceptable.
The buyer profile is narrow and consistent. Verified reviews show 97% coming from small companies, with construction the largest single sector at 13%, followed by healthcare and fitness. Cleaning crews, security firms, restaurants and field service teams make up most of the rest.
Editor’s Rating for Connecteam
Connecteam owns the low end of deskless workforce management. Nothing else in the category gives a 10-person crew the full product free for life, or a 30-person crew a working time clock and schedule for $29 a month.
The limitation is structural, not technical. Buying scheduling, chat and HR records means buying three hubs, and at 200 users on Expert that is $2,031 a month against $1,300 for Deputy Core. The all-in-one pitch inverts somewhere between 50 and 100 users.
Reviewers who churn rarely cite a missing feature. They cite the bill arriving larger than the pricing page implied, or an admin dashboard that takes longer to configure than the app took to roll out.
Best-in-class mobile experience and the cheapest entry point in the category, held back by a hub structure that triples the bill for teams that need the whole product.
The flat $29 covers 30 users, which undercuts every per-seat rival at that headcount. It applies per hub though. Three hubs at Expert runs $297 a month before a 31st user is added.
Templates, repeating shifts and bulk imports all sit behind the Advanced tier, so the $29 plan gives you open shifts, a single schedule and little else.
GPS stamps, kiosk mode and NFC clock-ins are included from Basic upward, and timesheets export cleanly to five payroll systems. Geofencing caps at 10 sites until Expert.
This is the strongest part of the product. App store ratings sit at 4.9 on iOS and 4.8 on Android. Crews adopt it in days, which is why rollout complaints are rare.
Chat, company feed, surveys, events and a help desk cover internal comms without email. Read confirmations, pinned posts and scheduled updates need Expert on that hub, at $99 a month.
Checklists and forms are unlimited on every tier, but conditional questions stop at two per form below Expert and there is no branching logic deeper than that.
Sixteen named connectors, weighted toward payroll and POS. Nothing for Slack, Teams, Sage or NetSuite. API access starts at Expert and Zapier at Advanced, so portability is a paid upgrade.
Non-technical staff pick the app up with almost no training. Admins have the harder job, and reviewers repeatedly flag buried settings and confusing permission menus in the desktop dashboard.
Connecteam wins on the two things that decide frontline rollouts: an app people actually open, and a price a 30-person crew can sign off without a procurement cycle. Model the hub math before you buy, because the number on the pricing page is a third of what a full deployment costs.
Connecteam: Strengths and Limitations
Each point below is drawn from patterns that recur across 10,463 verified user reviews and from what the vendor’s own feature matrix gates behind higher tiers.
Teams of 10 or fewer get all three hubs at no cost, for life. Homebase caps its free plan at one location, Sling strips out time tracking entirely. Connecteam gives away the working product.
App store ratings of 4.9 on iOS and 4.8 on Android are unusual for workforce software. Reviewers in construction and cleaning repeatedly describe crews clocking in correctly on day one.
One Operations hub at $29 works out to under a dollar per user at 30 people. Deputy Lite would cost $150 for the same headcount, and When I Work charges its time clock as an add-on on top of the seat rate.
GPS stamps and kiosk clock-ins ship from Basic. Expert adds unlimited geofence sites and breadcrumb tracking that logs location only while an employee is on the clock.
SOC 2 Type 2, ISO/IEC 27001, GDPR and CCPA, which is more than most tools at this tier carry. SSO and 2FA are Enterprise-only, so a regulated buyer will end up on a custom quote.
Scheduling, chat and HR records live in three separately billed hubs. A buyer who needs all three at Expert pays $297 a month, not $99. Deputy and When I Work quote one number for the whole platform.
Past 30 users each hub adds its own per-seat rate. At 200 users on three Expert hubs the bill reaches $2,031 a month, above Deputy Pro at $1,800 for a platform with a deeper compliance engine.
Timesheets export to Gusto, ADP, Paychex Flex, QuickBooks Online and Xero, and the pay run happens elsewhere. Rippling handles time tracking and payroll in one system if consolidating both matters.
Critical reviews cluster on the same two themes: settings buried in sub-menus, and slow exports of large timesheet batches. The staff-facing app is excellent, the manager-facing web console is not.
Connecteam’s Core Features
We rated ten capabilities on what a paying customer receives at the tier where the feature first becomes usable, not on whether the feature exists somewhere in the product. That distinction matters here, because Connecteam gates heavily by tier and by hub. A feature listed on the marketing site may sit two upgrades and a second subscription away from the plan you were quoted.
Location-stamped clock-ins, kiosk mode and NFC punches all ship from the $29 Basic tier, which is rare at this price.
Drag and drop building, open shift claiming and auto-assignment cover most rota patterns, though Basic allows only one schedule.
Exports run cleanly to five payroll systems, but reviewers report pay rate fields failing to carry across and lag on large batch exports.
Group chats, a company feed and engagement insights replace the WhatsApp thread most frontline businesses run on, without exposing personal numbers.
Unlimited forms on every tier including the free plan, with photo capture, GPS-required fields and PDF export for safety and inspection workflows.
Fine for recurring daily jobs and shift tasks. There is no project view, no budget tracking and no dependency logic, so anything resembling job costing needs a second tool.
Mobile courses with quizzes, completion tracking and an AI course builder. Onboarding packs scale from 2 on Basic to 12 on Expert.
E-signature is capped at 2 documents on Advanced and 10 on Expert. High-turnover employers issuing contracts every week will hit that ceiling fast.
Sixteen connectors, none for Slack, Teams, Sage or NetSuite. API access and webhooks require Expert, so data portability costs $99 a month per hub.
Custom reports and the activity dashboard start at Expert, and automated reports cap at three per form. Deputy and 7shifts both offer deeper labor cost analysis at lower tiers.
Connecteam Integrations
The grid below covers all 16 named connectors, weighted heavily toward payroll and point of sale. There is nothing for Slack, Microsoft Teams, Sage or NetSuite, and API access plus webhooks only unlock on the Expert tier of whichever hub you are paying for.
Every connector is a native build rather than a marketplace listing, and two of the physical clock integrations are still in beta. Zapier requires the Advanced tier and covers anything not on this list, while direct API and webhook access requires Expert on each hub you want to pull data from.
Who Should Use Connecteam?
Connecteam is built for businesses whose staff carry a phone and no laptop, in the 10 to 60 employee band, where the current system is paper timesheets and a group chat. That buyer gets more working software per dollar here than anywhere else in the category.
The primary disqualifier is scale combined with scope. Once a company needs all three hubs across a few hundred people, the per-hub billing model turns Connecteam’s cheapest-option advantage into a premium, and a per-seat platform like Deputy costs less for a deeper feature set.
The Small Business Plan gives all three hubs free for life at this headcount, with the one exception that payroll integration is excluded. No competitor gives away this much. A cleaning firm or single-site cafe can run scheduling, clock-ins and staff chat at zero cost indefinitely.
Construction is the single largest industry in Connecteam’s review base at 13%. GPS-stamped clock-ins, geofenced sites and breadcrumb tracking while on the clock give a supervisor location proof without calling anyone. Field service and security firms use the same tooling.
Mobile courses, quizzes and onboarding packs get a new hire productive without a classroom session. The app’s 4.9 iOS rating matters here, because a tool that needs training defeats the purpose when you onboard someone every fortnight.
Businesses running a scheduling app, a messaging thread, a forms tool and a shared drive can collapse all four into one subscription. The saving is real below 60 users. Above that, price the hubs individually before assuming consolidation is cheaper.
The same design decisions that make Connecteam obvious for those four buyers rule it out for the four below.
Connecteam produces payroll-ready timesheets and stops there. Tax filing, direct deposit and multi-state compliance all happen in a second system you also pay for.
At that scale the three Expert subscriptions plus per-user overage reach $2,031 a month. A single per-seat platform delivers deeper labor analytics for less.
There is no automated predictive scheduling notice, premium pay trigger or right-to-rest enforcement for jurisdictions like New York City, Seattle or Philadelphia. Getting it wrong costs per violation, per employee.
Single sign-on, two-factor authentication for admins and biometric app lock are Enterprise-only, which means a sales conversation and unpublished pricing rather than self-serve signup.
Connecteam Pricing: What It Actually Costs
The pricing page publishes every tier rate clearly. What it does not put in front of you is that the $29 figure buys one of three hubs, so a business wanting scheduling, chat and HR records is looking at $87 a month on annual billing, not $29.
Two costs sit outside the published rates. HIPAA-registered accounts carry additional fees the vendor never quantifies, and Enterprise pricing is quote-only. Monthly billing costs 21% more than annual, which the site frames as an 18% saving.
The crossover against per-seat rivals lands around 100 users. At 200 employees on all three hubs at Expert you pay $2,031 a month, against $1,300 for Deputy Core and $1,800 for Deputy Pro.
Scheduling sits in Operations, chat in Communications, time off and documents in HR. Needing all three means three subscriptions at the same tier price.
Basic runs $35 monthly against $29 annually. The site presents this as an 18% annual saving, which is the same gap measured from the higher number.
The feature matrix marks this as an extra charge on every tier including Enterprise. Healthcare and home care operators should get the figure in writing before signing.
All prices are USD and the vendor does not currently bill in other currencies. Monthly subscriptions can be cancelled at any time with no refund on amounts already paid, while annual subscriptions carry a prorated refund only if cancelled within the first 30 days. Seats added mid-cycle are prorated to the days remaining.
Before signing, get three things in writing: the HIPAA account fee if you handle patient data, the exact per-user rate on each hub you are buying, and confirmation of which hub every feature in your demo actually lived in. That last one causes the most billing surprises, because a sales demo moves between hubs without flagging the boundary.
How Connecteam Compares to Alternatives
We compared Connecteam against the five platforms it loses deals to most often: Deputy, When I Work, Homebase, 7shifts and Sling. Each one competes for the same shift-based buyer but prices differently, and the pricing model matters more than the sticker rate here.
Deputy and When I Work charge per seat. Homebase and 7shifts charge per location. Sling charges per seat with a genuinely free tier. Connecteam charges flat per hub. Those four models produce wildly different bills at the same headcount.
The comparison is built around four attributes: total cost at realistic team sizes, mobile and frontline usability, scheduling and compliance depth, and platform breadth beyond scheduling.
One Operations hub covers 30 users for $29, under a dollar a head. Deputy Lite bills $150 for the same team and When I Work charges its time clock separately on top of the seat rate. Sling gets close on price but withholds time tracking from its free tier.
Connecteam’s 4.9 iOS rating is the highest in this set, and adoption complaints are almost absent from its review base. The gap is narrower than it looks though. Homebase and 7shifts both ship polished employee apps.
This is where Connecteam loses. There is no fair workweek engine, no predictive scheduling notice and no premium pay trigger. 7shifts automates those rules for New York City, Seattle and Philadelphia, and Deputy carries the deepest award interpretation logic in the category.
Connecteam covers training, recognition, knowledge base, hiring and e-sign, which none of these five match on features. It charges for that breadth across three hubs. Homebase bundles HR and hiring into one per-location rate instead.
| Platform | Cost at 30 users | Mobile experience | Compliance depth | Platform breadth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Connecteam From $29/mo per hub |
Wins |
Wins |
Falls short |
Wins |
|
Deputy $5 to $9 per user/mo |
Falls short |
Competitive |
Wins |
Competitive |
|
When I Work $2.50 to $8 per user/mo |
Competitive |
Competitive |
Falls short |
Falls short |
|
Homebase $30 to $120 per location/mo |
Wins |
Wins |
Competitive |
Wins |
|
7shifts $34.99 to $150 per location/mo |
Competitive |
Competitive |
Wins |
Competitive |
|
Sling Free, then $2 to $4 per user/mo |
Wins |
Falls short |
Falls short |
Falls short |
How Connecteam Performs in Practice
Four buying situations built from the industries that dominate Connecteam’s review base: construction, cleaning, healthcare and hospitality. Two are clear wins, one works until a specific headcount and then stops making economic sense, and one is the wrong purchase from the start. Costs shown are realistic all-in figures on annual billing across every hub the scenario actually requires, not the headline rate.
One Advanced Operations hub covers this outright. Geofencing handles all four sites within the 10-site cap, timesheets export straight to QuickBooks, and the foreman stops driving between sites to collect paper. Deputy Lite would bill $110 for the same 22 people and still need a separate comms tool.
The Small Business Plan covers all three hubs free for life below 10 users, so scheduling, chat, checklists and time off cost nothing. Payroll integration is the one exclusion, meaning hours get keyed in manually until the team crosses 10 and moves to Basic.
At 40 people this works well, around $399 a month for three Expert hubs. Model it at 200 and the bill hits $2,031, above Deputy Pro at $1,800. The break-even lands near 120 caregivers, and the HIPAA account fee is unpublished on top of that.
Connecteam has no fair workweek engine, so advance notice windows and premium pay triggers get tracked by hand across six sites. 7shifts automates those rules and integrates with Toast, at $461.94 a month for all six locations on The Works.
What Users Say About Connecteam
The sample is large by category standards: 10,463 verified reviews across three public platforms, with scores clustered tightly between 4.6 and 4.7. Tight clustering usually signals a real consensus rather than one platform’s collection quirk.
Two caveats shape how much weight to give it. A significant share of recent reviews on the largest source carry an incentivized or vendor-referred label, meaning the reviewer was invited by Connecteam and offered a nominal thank you. The smallest of the three sources currently displays a notice that the company has not solicited reviews recently, so that sample may skew toward people motivated enough to write unprompted.
Critical reviews exist and are consistent. Below 4 stars accounts for roughly 4% of the largest sample, and those reviews name the same three issues repeatedly.
Owners in cleaning, retail and construction describe crews using the app correctly within a day. Several note it succeeded where a previous workplace messaging tool failed to get uptake.
The most common upgrade story is consolidation. Reviewers arriving from spreadsheets, group texts and a standalone time clock report collapsing all of it into one subscription.
Field managers cite location-stamped punches as the single feature that changed payroll accuracy, particularly where staff previously reported hours by phone at the end of a shift.
Customer service scores 4.6 across 5,080 ratings, with reviewers naming individual support staff. A recurring complaint is that the AI assistant returns nothing useful before a human takes over.
This is the largest negative cluster, at 64% negative sentiment across 301 mentions. Reviewers report delayed alerts, badge counts stuck at one, and no reliable way to confirm a message was received.
80% negative across 271 mentions on performance. Operations managers describe lag when exporting large time-tracking batches, which lands squarely on payroll day.
The pattern is consistent: buyers price the entry tier, then find the features they demoed sit in a different hub or a higher tier. Some cite exchange rate impact on the USD-only billing.
Admins want granular permission control and find it buried. Schedulers ask repeatedly for permanent recurring rotas and monthly copy, rather than duplicating the same week indefinitely.
Data pulled 27 August 2026 across three public review platforms totalling 10,463 reviews. The distribution shown comes from the largest single source, which is the only one publishing exact counts per star level. Note that many recent reviews on that source are labelled incentivized or vendor-referred, meaning the reviewer was invited by Connecteam and offered a nominal thank you, and the smallest source currently carries a notice that the company has not requested reviews recently. Ask the vendor for reference customers at your headcount and in your industry rather than relying on the aggregate, since 97% of this sample comes from small businesses.
Is Connecteam Worth It?
Users rate this product 4.62 across 10,463 reviews. We rate it 4.4. The gap is the buying decision in miniature: people who use Connecteam daily are rating an app that works, while a buyer is signing up for a packaging structure that decides what the software costs over three years. Below roughly 60 employees, both numbers point the same way and the answer is yes. Above that, the question stops being whether the product is good and becomes whether you need one hub or three.
The thing to establish before signing is which hub each feature lives in. A demo moves between Operations, Communications and HR without flagging the boundary, so the practical step is to write down every capability that convinced you and make the rep confirm the hub and tier for each one in writing. Then ask the question the marketing does not answer: what happens to the bill at double your current headcount. The per-user rates past 30 seats stack per hub, and no page on the vendor site models that for you.
A 30-person crew gets a working time clock, schedule and staff app for $29 a month. A 200-person operation running the full platform pays $2,031 and would spend less on a per-seat rival.
FAQs About Connecteam
Here are some of the important questions and answers about Connecteam that you need to know before subscribing to the product.
No. Connecteam sells three separate hubs and $29 buys one of them on annual billing. Operations holds the time clock, scheduling, forms and tasks. Communications holds chat, updates, surveys and the knowledge base. HR and Skills holds time off, courses, documents, recognition and onboarding.
A business that needs all three pays $87 a month at the Basic tier, $147 at Advanced and $297 at Expert, all on annual billing for the first 30 users.
Each hub adds its own per-user rate from the 31st user. On annual billing the Operations hub charges $0.80 at Basic, $2.50 at Advanced and $4.20 at Expert per extra user per month. Communications and HR charge $0.50, $1.50 and $3.00 at those same tiers.
Monthly billing raises every one of those rates. A 200-person team on all three hubs at Expert pays $2,031 a month.
Yes. The Small Business Plan covers up to 10 users across all three hubs with no time limit and no credit card. The one meaningful exclusion is payroll integration, so hours have to be transferred manually. Teams of 10 to 30 can instead use the free Limited plan, which strips out most paid features but stays free indefinitely.
No. It produces payroll-ready timesheets and exports them to Gusto, ADP, Paychex Flex, QuickBooks Online, Xero or PrismHR, where the actual pay run, tax filing and direct deposit happen.
Partly. Core admin actions like approving timesheets and messaging staff work on mobile, but building schedules, configuring permissions and running reports are practical only on the web dashboard. This is the most consistent complaint in the review base, since the employee app is excellent and the manager console is where the friction sits.
Sixteen native connectors, weighted toward payroll and point of sale. Payroll and accounting covers Gusto, ADP, Paychex Flex, QuickBooks Online, Xero and PrismHR. Point of sale covers Square, Shopify, Clover and Lightspeed. There is also BambooHR, Zapier, Wix Bookings, Clair for earned wage access, and two physical time clock integrations in beta.
There is nothing for Slack, Microsoft Teams, Sage or NetSuite. Zapier requires the Advanced tier and direct API access requires Expert on each hub.
It holds SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO/IEC 27001 certification and complies with GDPR and CCPA.
Two things to check before committing. HIPAA-registered accounts carry an additional fee the vendor does not publish, and single sign-on, two-factor authentication for admins and biometric app lock are all Enterprise-only, which means a sales conversation rather than self-serve signup.
Monthly subscriptions cancel at any time, but no refund is given on amounts already paid. Annual subscriptions carry a prorated refund only if cancelled within the first 30 days. After that window the year is committed.
