DeputyReviews of deputy.com

I hate Deputy with a passion. Their support is worse than Zero. You spend hours in the chatbox and get no answers apart from cut and paste standard answers.

I am now embarking on a mission to spread the word of how UNBELIEVABLY AWFUL Deputy support is.... It has gotten to the point where my only logical explanation for this nightmare is I am being made a fool for their inner office antics. I have been using them for 3 years. In December 2025 I had an issue adding in new customer locations for staff to clock into. I messaged support that began my journey of ZERO answers, ZERO service, ZERO support, and ZERO progress for the last 4-5 months. Now I need to find another time management software for my company. I get an email every week from someone named Callum on their "support team" who literally says, "This is still under investigation, no new updates". DO NOT use Deputy!!!

Avoid Deputy. This is a billing model that relies on being unclear. You are charged around $57 in a way that presents exactly like a normal monthly subscription. There is no clear or prominent point where it is made obvious that you are entering a fixed 12 month commitment with a large cancellation liability. Only when you cancel do you find out you are expected to pay $572 for the remaining term for services that will not be used. That is not transparency. It is a setup that depends on customers not realising what they have been signed into. When raised, support does not address the way this is presented. The response is simply to point to terms and conditions after the fact. The invoice even shows charges for future months after cancellation. If your billing relies on this level of ambiguity, that says everything about how the service is being sold. Proceed with caution.

Since their major update the application is now terrible (prior to this it was fantastic). Slower, clunkier and now very expensive when compared to other platforms. We’ve had multiple support requests open with them for many months, when we asked for a timeline or any understanding to when issues might be fixed, we got not real answer or help. Despite sending videos of our issues and evidence, we had no offer for any compensation and we did ask as well. Has many silly little flaws as well, like allowing scheduling of staff who are marked as unavailable, or how data is rendered on a page making it almost impossible to do anything without having to scroll or open another tab. To be fair, they were brilliant, but since this update and ongoing issues, we had to explore other platforms and have now jumped ship. Deputy for us offered poor support, poor customer service, and extremely expensive. We’ve moved now, paying a third of what we used to pay and have a new product that does the same things for us and without any issues. The support as well from the new company is amazing.

My department has been using Deputy for about 2 years at this point. We switched from a cheaper scheduling software after experiencing too many glitches and reaching limitations as our staff size grew. The positives: It allows you to build out shifts pretty quickly. You can create and save templates for later use. There's also auto-scheduling features: Auto-schedule regular working hours, Auto-build shift structure, and Auto-fill empty shifts. You can customize a lot, such as setting required training for certain areas or setting "stress profiles" to limit how many hours a day/week an employee is scheduled, how many hours between shifts, etc. You can do timesheet approval in Deputy and export them if you use another app for payroll. The negatives: There are little things, like employees can't offer shifts to other employees if they're marked unavailable or it would conflict with their stress profile. The system for adding availability is a little complicated/unclear for employees and causes confusion. (They can add both availability and unavailability, one-offs override everything set up in recurring availability, they have to be very specific about when these availabilities are in effect--not necessarily negatives, but it is hard to navigate and understand.) But the biggest negative aspect of Deputy, which we have just come to learn after using it for 2 years, is that AUTO-SCHEDULING DOESN'T TAKE EMPLOYEE AVAILABILITY INTO ACCOUNT. Somehow, we are just now realizing this. I think it's because we have a team of college student employees and they just haven't spoken up about it. I still need to investigate. But we are in disbelief. The most basic requirement for scheduling software would be to schedule around employee availability, would it not? So for all the wonderful features and granular control that Deputy offers, it is unable to deliver on the most critical requirement. I'm absolutely baffled. If you are interested, here's the reply I received from Deputy staff: "You are correct that, at present, the auto-fill empty shifts feature in Deputy does not ensure that employees are scheduled exclusively when marked as available, nor does it automatically identify conflicts or display warning icons in such cases. The green dot adjacent to an employee's name signifies their eligibility for the shift; however, it does not consistently represent their recorded availability. To minimize these conflicts, we advise thoroughly reviewing the schedule after utilizing the auto-fill function and prior to publishing shifts. Currently, there is no automated method to highlight or filter shifts that conflict with employee availability following auto-scheduling. We acknowledge that this limitation may be frustrating, particularly if you depend on auto-scheduling to save time. Since we don’t currently offer this feature, I would encourage you to submit a feature request using the instructions found in the following guide: Submit feedback to Deputy or request a new feature. While we can’t guarantee implementation, customer feedback is an important part of how we improve our platform and all suggestions are taken into consideration."

Mostly works well, but is certainly not without its faults. The biggest issue for us is support. When something goes wrong, it is extremely difficult and time-consuming to reach a resolution because there is no option to speak to someone over the phone. Everything must go through the online chatbot first, and only once the issue can’t be resolved do you eventually get escalated to a real person via chat or email. For simple problems this may be fine, but for more complex or technical issues, trying to explain everything through typed messages is frustrating, inefficient, and often leads to delays or misunderstandings. Being able to speak directly to a support person would make it far easier and quicker to explain issues and resolve them properly. Because of this lack of accessible, real-time support, we sometimes find that problems take much longer to fix than they should, which can be stressful when payroll or compliance is involved. I find myself just not wanting to even try fix some issues because of how long it will take which just leaves me frustrated. Deputy has a lot of potential, but improved customer support—particularly phone support—would make a significant difference to the overall experience.

Honestly cannot understand how this app appears to be so successful. Now used for almost 1 year. UI/UX is horrendous, dated, laggy loading at times and not a cohesive feeling ecosystem. Odd features/behaviour, for example: 1) If a user is logged into the mobile app, they won't get an email when an employee has requested leave, instead they get an app notification instead meaning inconsistency in action outputs (why even make this the case, or atleast allow the instance to be able to choose or have both email/notification at all times). 2) You cannot really have "approvers" in the traditional sense - you assign a location manager role to a profile, what this means is that all users, irrespective of location, see all "location managers" when they are going for approvals. Very difficult to do something simple like have a single approver for a single employee. The Admin (a passive oversight role) is visible in the manager drop down for employees, meaning leave requests often go to the wrong account. Generally companies have a hierarchy and nested approvers, but this seems alien in deputy world. Philippines support feels very much 1st line support, quotes the web docs which anyone can read, don't understand more deeply customer UX or frustrations. Awful app and genuinely do not understand the glowing reviews.

They have changed their payment tiers to Lite, Core, Pro. In other words they had a price increase disguised as a feature that nobody asked for. Then it was released as opt-out rather than opt-in. Continual development of features we dont want, and the users keep get price increases. Basic features removed from lite to core so we have to pay more to get what we already had.