Guides
Free rota software
Darouta’s free plan is a complete rota builder for teams of up to 50 employees: draft schedules in a spreadsheet-fast editor, catch working-time risks before you publish, and share a live rota link your staff can open on any phone — without entering a card.
What the free plan includes
Free rota tools usually mean cut-down editors, tiny seat caps, or trials that quietly expire. Darouta’s Essentials plan is sized for a real single-venue operation:
- Up to 50 employees on the rota — enough for a full restaurant, café, bar, salon, care home, or shop floor team.
- Up to 100 rotas, so roughly two years of weekly scheduling before you hit a limit.
- The Advanced Rota Editor — spreadsheet-native keyboard shortcuts to navigate, copy, paste, and edit shifts without touching the mouse.
- Labour Law Guardrails — automated working-time checks that flag insufficient daily rest, missing breaks, and weekly-hours risks while you schedule.
- Sharable live rotas — staff open a link and always see the current published version; no accounts needed.
- PDF exports for printing or messaging.
- Works on your phone — install Darouta like an app and manage the rota from anywhere.
- Two-factor authentication — protect your account with an authenticator app, and your staff can do the same with theirs. It is opt-in, it is on every plan including this one, and it comes with recovery codes so a lost phone is an inconvenience rather than a lockout.
- 10 MB of secure document storage.
A free plan, not a free trial
There is no expiry date and no payment card involved. The plan exists so a single-venue team can run its whole scheduling workflow — draft, check, publish, share — and only pay when the operation itself grows: more than 50 staff, more than one venue, or managers who need their own scoped access.
When you outgrow it
The Pro plan (£2 per employee per month, with an automatic 30-day free trial) removes the employee and rota limits and adds the multi-site framework: multiple venues, departments within venues, collaborator permissions scoped to exactly what each manager runs, rota parsing from spreadsheets and photos, and natural-language and voice input. Because pricing is per employee, it scales with your headcount rather than a flat tier jump — see pricing.
Try it without an account
The playground runs the real rota editor with up to 10 employees, no sign-up required. If it fits, create a free workspace and your first rota is a few minutes away.