Yes, a free scheduling tool can serve a small restaurant, but not an AI one. 7shifts' free Comp plan covers one location and up to 15 employees; Homebase's free Basic plan covers one location and up to 10. Both build and publish rotas. The AI scheduling features sit on paid plans, and a free chat assistant can draft a rota instead.
The limits that matter are not the headline ones. A headcount cap is obvious; what catches owners out is that break rules, overtime warnings, forecasts and automatic schedule building are all paid features, so a free plan fills your rota but never warns you when it is wrong. Below, each free plan's limits are read from its pricing page (27 October 2026), then applied to one restaurant, with the exact moment each one stops being enough.
What 7shifts Comp and Homebase Basic include for nothing
| Limit or feature | 7shifts Comp (free) | Homebase Basic (free) |
|---|---|---|
| Locations | One ("for single locations") | One |
| Employees | Up to 15 | Up to 10 |
| Build and publish schedules | Yes | Yes (basic scheduling) |
| Open shifts, trades and claims | Yes: staff can offer up, trade and claim open shifts | Not listed for Basic; test it in the trial |
| Availability and time off | Tracked | Check inside the app |
| Time tracking | Listed as a separate feature group; check it on Comp | Basic time tracking included |
| POS integration | Budgeting from POS sales data is a paid feature | Point-of-sale integration included |
| AI scheduling | No | No (Scheduling Assistant is on Plus) |
| Cost of first paid step | Essentials from $39.99 a location a month on annual billing (page also shows $44.99) | Essentials $30 a location a month, unlimited employees |
Read the table twice, because two rows reverse the usual assumption. 7shifts' free plan is the more restaurant-specific, with shift trading built in, but its headcount cap is higher while its paid entry price is higher too. Homebase's free plan includes time tracking and POS integration but holds only 10 people, and its next step costs less and removes the employee cap altogether.
A 17-person restaurant meets the caps
An illustration. A small restaurant has 17 on the books: 2 managers, 5 kitchen, 8 floor and 2 part-time dishwashers. It rotates 11 to 13 working each week.
- Homebase Basic: 17 exceeds 10, so free is out. Essentials at $30 a month removes the cap.
- 7shifts Comp: 17 exceeds 15. Whether "employees" counts managers and inactive staff is a question to ask before relying on it. If you can trim to 15 active people by archiving leavers, Comp fits; otherwise Essentials is $39.99 a month on annual billing for up to 30 employees.
- Chat assistant plus spreadsheet: no staff cap at all, and no cost. It also has none of the scheduling tool's safeguards.
The sum to do before choosing: $30 a month is $360 a year. If the manager spends 3 hours a week building and re-building the rota and the paid tool cuts that to 2 hours, that is about 4 hours a month saved. At $22 an hour the saving is $88 a month, nearly three times the $30 fee. If the saving is only 20 minutes a month the fee is not earned, and the free route holds.
Where free plans stop on staff, sites and rules
Headcount and locations
Both free plans are for a single location and have hard caps. Count everyone who might appear on a rota in a busy month, including weekend-only staff. Seasonal hires push many restaurants over the line in a single week, and the upgrade then arrives as an emergency rather than a choice.
Break rules and overtime warnings
7shifts lists adding paid and unpaid breaks to the schedule under its advanced scheduling features, and break tracking, overtime notifications and labour-compliance warnings among its paid time-clocking and compliance features. On Comp none of those are present. That means a free tool will happily let you roster someone for a ten-hour shift with no break. Rest-break rules differ widely between places and between ages of staff, so check the rules that apply to you with your payroll adviser or the relevant authority, and treat the rota software as a reminder, not a legal check.
A manual workaround: add a "break" column to the rota template with the minute each person's break is due, and write the rule once at the top of the sheet in plain words that your adviser has agreed. It is dull but it works, and it is what your free tool will not do for you.
Forecasts, labour targets and auto-built schedules
7shifts lists labour targets on projected sales, hourly forecasts and labour recommendations, and schedules created for you from those targets in its paid comparison, not in Comp. Homebase places its AI-powered Scheduling Assistant on Plus, alongside time-off controls and permissions; the page shows Plus at about $70 a location a month, with a promotion on display. Both are real features, but both assume you have a POS feeding sales data in and a few months of history. A restaurant with unstable trade gets less from an AI schedule than one with a steady week.
The free AI route: a chat assistant as a rota drafter
If you want "AI" scheduling without a subscription, a free chat assistant can produce a first draft from a table of availability. It is not a scheduler: it does not remember last week, enforce rules or notify staff. Used carefully it saves the first twenty minutes of a rota.
A prompt you can copy
Draft a one-week rota for a small restaurant. Open Tuesday to Sunday.
Shifts: lunch 11:00-16:00, dinner 16:00-22:00.
Cover needed per shift: 2 kitchen, 3 floor on weekdays; 3 kitchen, 4 floor Fri-Sun.
Nobody works more than 5 days or 40 hours.
Nobody works dinner then an opening lunch the next day.
Each person must have a 30-minute break on any shift over 6 hours; mark it with (B).
Availability (first names only):
Sam (kitchen): Tue-Sat any shift
Priya (kitchen): Wed-Sun dinner only
Jo (floor): Tue-Sun lunch only
Lee (floor): Thu-Sun any shift
[...rest of the team...]
Output as a table with days across and shifts down.
List any shift you could not cover.What comes back, and what you fix
A typical output (illustrative) is a neat table. You then check it against the rules you actually care about:
- It might put Priya on a Wednesday dinner and a Thursday lunch, ignoring that she is dinner-only. Ask it to re-check each person against availability and list violations.
- It may count Sam's hours incorrectly. Add them up yourself for anyone near the cap.
- It will often fill a shift with the right number of people and the wrong mix, such as two junior floor staff and no one who can close. Add a "at least one closer per dinner" rule and say who counts as a closer.
- Break marks may appear on short shifts and be missing on long ones. Check each shift over six hours.
Treat the table as a draft. The saving is that you edit a mostly-right rota rather than start from a blank grid.
Data care when using a free chat tool
Use first names or initials, leave out phone numbers, home addresses and pay rates, and check the chat tool's data and training settings before pasting any staff information. Free consumer plans have different default settings from business plans; see how to stop AI tools training on your business data. Staff availability is not secret, but it is personal.
Free plan or paid plan: the triggers
Write the triggers into the manager's notes, so the decision is made by a rule and not by irritation on a busy Saturday.
- Headcount passes the cap. 15 on 7shifts Comp, 10 on Homebase Basic. Move up before the next hiring wave.
- A second location. Both free plans are single-location.
- A near miss on breaks or overtime. The first time someone works past their allowed hours unnoticed, you have paid the fee already in risk.
- More than an hour a week fixing swaps. Paid plans add the shift tools and messaging that reduce group-chat chaos. 7shifts lists group chat and automatic SMS schedule reminders in Essentials.
- You want forecast-based rotas. Only worth paying for if your POS data is steady. See building a rota from AI demand forecasts.
A before and after: the Sunday rota scramble
Before: the manager texts 14 people on Thursday for availability, gets nine replies, builds the rota in a spreadsheet on Friday night, and fields five swap requests by message over the weekend. After a switch to a free scheduler: staff enter availability in the app, the rota is published to everyone's phone, and swaps happen through the app with a manager approving. The saving is not the rota itself but the thread of messages. If the plan you are testing lacks swap approvals, the benefit shrinks, and that is a reasonable reason to move up.
Test both free plans for a fortnight before you commit
Both vendors let you try more than the free plan. 7shifts says that when its 14-day trial ends you can carry on with the free Comp plan or subscribe, and Homebase advertises a free 14-day trial of its All-in-One plan with no credit card needed. That is useful, because you can see the paid features, then decide whether you miss them once they switch off. Use the trial like this:
- Day 1: enter every current staff member and count them against the cap. Note which roles the tool asks you to define.
- Day 2: send the availability request through the app, not a group chat, and see how many people answer without a nudge.
- Days 3 to 4: build next week's rota from scratch and time it with a stopwatch. Compare with your usual time.
- Days 5 to 10: let staff trade at least two shifts through the app and watch what the manager sees.
- Day 12: write down every feature you used that is not on the free plan. If the list is empty, stay free. If it has three items, price the first paid tier.
The stopwatch matters more than it sounds. A manager who cannot say how long the rota takes today cannot tell whether any tool saved time.
A full cost sum for a year: free, paid and chat assistant
Illustrative figures for a restaurant with 17 staff, one location, and a manager whose time costs $22 an hour. The manager currently spends 3 hours a week on rotas and swap messages.
| Route | Software cost a year | Manager hours a week | Time cost a year | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spreadsheet only (today) | $0 | 3.0 | $3,432 | $3,432 |
| Free chat assistant plus spreadsheet | $0 | 2.5 | $2,860 | $2,860 |
| Homebase Essentials at $30 a month | $360 | 2.0 | $2,288 | $2,648 |
| 7shifts Essentials at $39.99 a month on annual billing | $480 (rounded) | 2.0 | $2,288 | $2,768 |
The hours in the middle column are assumptions, not measurements, and that is the point: replace them with your stopwatch figures from the trial. The shape is the useful part. At these numbers the paid routes win by about $600 to $800 a year over the spreadsheet, and the chat assistant is nearly as good as them for nothing. If your measured saving is half an hour a week instead of an hour, the paid routes cost roughly what they save and you can stay free with a clear conscience.
What a chat-assistant rota looks like, and the three errors in it
Here is an illustrative draft for part of one week from the prompt above, with the problems marked. It is the sort of table you will get back.
| Shift | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lunch kitchen | Sam (B), Priya | Sam (B), Lee | Sam (B) |
| Dinner kitchen | Priya (B), Sam | Priya (B) | Priya (B), Sam |
| Lunch floor | Jo (B), Lee | Jo (B), Lee | Jo (B) |
- Priya is placed on Friday lunch kitchen, but she is dinner-only. The assistant ignored a stated constraint.
- Sam works Friday lunch and Friday dinner, a double of eleven hours with one break mark at lunch only.
- Lee is placed on kitchen lunch on Saturday although Lee is listed as floor staff. The assistant mixed up the roles.
Re-run with "check every person and shift against the availability and role list, and list any violation before giving the table" and the draft improves, but you still read it. Expect to fix two or three cells in a draft for a team of this size. That is a respectable result for ten minutes of work, and it is exactly the sort of error a paid scheduling tool prevents by refusing the entry.
The message that gets availability back on time
Whatever tool you use, the rota fails if availability arrives late. Here is a short message you can adapt (illustrative, with placeholders):
Hi [first name], next week's rota goes out Thursday at 3pm.
Please reply by Wednesday 6pm with:
1) Days you cannot work
2) Any shift you would like extra of
3) Holiday dates in the next month
No reply means I will schedule you on your usual pattern.The last line is the useful one: a default pattern removes the "I forgot" excuse and the manager's Thursday panic. Pair it with a standing deadline so the rhythm becomes habit.
Break and rest rules: what to ask your adviser
You do not need to become an employment-law expert, but you do need a short written answer to a few questions before any scheduler, free or paid, can be set up sensibly. Ask your payroll adviser or the relevant authority for the rules that apply to your staff, then write them in plain words at the top of your rota template.
- How long can a shift run before a break is required, and how long must the break be?
- Is the break paid or unpaid, and can it be waived?
- What is the minimum rest between the end of one shift and the start of the next?
- Do different rules apply to staff under 18?
- When does overtime start, and is it counted by day or by week?
Once you have those five answers, you can tell whether a paid scheduler's break warnings are worth money to you. If your answers are simple (for example, one unpaid 30-minute break over six hours and no overtime), a "break" column in a sheet may be all you need.
Free chat assistants versus free scheduling tools
The two free routes solve different problems and are worth combining. A scheduling tool is good at the dull parts: collecting availability, publishing the rota to phones and tracking swaps. A chat assistant is good at the first draft and at tidy wording. A sensible free stack for a team under the cap is the scheduling tool for the rota itself, with a chat assistant used only to draft the first version from the availability list and to write the weekly staff message. That gets you most of what the paid AI features promise, with a human check in the middle.
Three small mistakes worth avoiding
- Counting only current staff. Archive leavers, because they may still count against the cap, and test the cap before a hiring round.
- Trusting a draft's hours total. Chat assistants add badly. Sum hours yourself for anyone close to 40.
- Treating a free tool as a compliance system. It publishes shifts; it does not know your local rest-break or minor-hours rules. Your adviser does.
For how the paid apps handle split shifts, tips and swap rules, read the paid scheduling app tutorial; for a plain comparison of AI against a spreadsheet for small teams see AI shift scheduling vs a rota spreadsheet. If you want help choosing between a free tool, a chat assistant and a paid scheduler for your own restaurant, that is what my AI implementation consultation is for; start from the contact page.
Free restaurant scheduling: questions before you commit
Is there a truly free scheduling tool for a restaurant?
Yes, with limits. 7shifts' Comp plan is free for a single location with up to 15 employees, and Homebase's Basic plan is $0 for one location and up to 10 employees. Both cover building and publishing schedules. Neither free plan includes AI scheduling or advanced break handling.
Do free plans have AI scheduling?
Not on the plans I checked. Homebase lists its AI-powered Scheduling Assistant on the Plus plan, and 7shifts lists schedules built from labour targets and projected sales on its paid comparison. The free plans stay with manual scheduling, so a chat assistant is the free route to an AI draft.
Can I paste staff names into ChatGPT to draft a rota?
You can, but use first names or initials, no phone numbers and no pay rates, and check your plan's data settings first. A free chat assistant can draft a rota from availability, but it does not know your break rules or who dislikes closing together, so you review every line.
When should I stop using a free scheduler?
When you pass the headcount cap, open a second location, need breaks and overtime warnings enforced, or spend more than an hour a week fixing shift swaps by hand. At those points the paid fee is usually smaller than the manager time it saves.
Further reads
- ChatGPT Prompts for Restaurants: 10 for Menus, Rotas and Replies — Ready prompts for rotas, menus and guest replies.
- Free AI Tools for Restaurants: 7 to Try and Where Free Stops — Six more free AI tools a restaurant can try.
- How Much Does AI Cost a Small Restaurant Each Month? — Put the scheduler beside every other restaurant AI cost.
- How Pubs and Bars Can Use AI for Events, Rotas and Stock — Rotas for pubs and bars with event peaks.
- Your First 30 Days of AI in a Restaurant, Week by Week — Sequence the first month of AI in a restaurant.
- Where AI Actually Saves Time in a Small Restaurant — See which restaurant jobs save the most time.
- Restaurant Labour Cost Percentage: Test Rota Changes With AI First — A what-if rota test from last month's takings and payroll: baseline the percentage, cost the change and find the break-even sales loss, with AI doing the sums.
- AI Automation for Restaurants: Back-of-House Jobs to Start With — Prep lists first, supplier order drafts second, kitchen rotas last: a ten-week rollout with the checks that keep each AI draft honest.
- What Toast IQ Can and Cannot Tell You About Sales and Labour — Toast IQ's real reach on sales and labour: example owner prompts, the limits Toast's pages skip, and a five-minute check before you act on a number.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: 7shifts pricing page and Homebase pricing page, fetched 27 October 2026. Prices are USD list prices and may differ by billing period.