Homebase review (2026): pricing, features and who it's for

Per location pricing changes the math at ten people

Most time tracking tools charge a base fee plus a fee for every user. ClockShark, as one example in the same category, is $42 a month plus $9.50 per user, so ten people cost $137 a month (as of September 2026). Homebase Essentials covers those same ten people, and thirty more, for $30 a month billed monthly or $24 billed yearly, as long as they all work out of one location.

That is the whole argument for this tool. It is at its strongest in a shop with a lot of hourly staff at one address. A cleaning company with twenty part-timers. A landscaping outfit that staffs up in April. Any shop where people come and go often enough that you are always adding and removing logins.

It flips the other way if you have several locations. Each yard or office is its own bill. Two locations on Plus is $112 a month yearly, or $140 monthly, before anyone counts heads. Paying yearly cuts about a fifth off every tier, so the yearly rate is the number to compare, and the monthly rate is the number to pay while you decide.

The free plan is real, and here is where it stops

Basic costs nothing and does not expire. One location, up to 10 employees, basic scheduling, a time clock and 90 days of timesheet history. For a two-truck shop that mostly wants to stop texting the schedule around, that is enough software.

One thing is missing from the free plan, and it is the thing most trade owners came for. Location-based clock-in sits inside advanced scheduling and time tracking, which starts on Essentials. So on the free plan a tech can punch in from bed. GPS verification and geofencing, which stops the clock starting before someone reaches the site, both need $24 a month per location.

That is a fair place to draw a line, but it changes the honest starting price for a trade business. If where they clocked in matters to you, treat Essentials as the real entry point and treat Basic as a long free trial with no clock running on it. There is also a 14-day trial of All-in-One that asks for no card if you want to see the top tier first.

There is no job number to hang the hours on

Homebase tracks labor cost by role or by department and compares labor against sales when it is wired to a point-of-sale system. That works in a coffee shop. It answers a different question than the one a trade owner asks.

You want to know that the Wilson repipe ate 19 hours against the 14 you bid. Homebase has no work order and no job number to hang those hours on. It will tell you what your crew cost you last Tuesday. It will not tell you which customer that money went into.

The controls that come closest also sit at the top. Labor cost management, overtime limits, auto clock-out and multiple pay rates are All-in-One features, at $96 a month yearly or $120 monthly. Overtime tracking is on the cheaper plans, but the alert that warns you before you have paid the overtime is on that top tier. So the cheap plans record the problem and the expensive plan prevents it, which is a pattern worth naming when you are pricing tiers.

Where the hours go afterwards

Timesheets sync out to Gusto, ADP RUN and QuickBooks Online, and the Gusto connection carries employees, hours, overtime, wage rates and time off rather than hours alone. You can also export timesheets and hand them over. For a shop already running payroll somewhere else, that is the whole job: crews punch in on their phones, hours land in payroll, nobody retypes anything.

Homebase sells its own payroll on top, at $39 a month plus $6 per person paid on monthly billing. Owners who run that combination describe it as unglamorous and fine. One six-employee shop moved over after ADP got too expensive and reports no complaints since, which is close to the warmest thing anyone says about payroll software.

That is a reasonable summary of the whole product. It is not the deepest tool in any one area. For a six-person shop, deep is not what you are shopping for.

Everyone punches their own PIN

On a shared tablet, each person enters their own PIN and the app takes a photo. That design exists to stop one worker punching in for another, and it does. It also rules out the workflow a lot of crews want, where a foreman clocks the truck in at the first stop and out at the last. No bulk or crew clock-in is documented anywhere in Homebase's own material. A manager can fix a missed punch afterwards, which is not the same thing.

Crew adoption is the one thing owners agree on. The app is easy enough that field people use it without a training session: "If you want something crew members will actually use on site, tools like Clockify or Homebase make it stupid simple to punch in/out and snap receipts."

The recurring complaint in customer reviews is app-level flakiness rather than missing features. Crashes, login trouble, problems switching between accounts, the odd timekeeping error. None of that is fatal on a free or $24 plan. It is worth knowing before you make it the only record of who worked when.

Who it fits, and what to know about the name

The fit is narrow and clear. One location. Hourly staff, ideally more than about six of them, because that is where per-location pricing starts beating per-user pricing. Payroll already running somewhere else, or a willingness to add the payroll module. Cleaning, landscaping and shops with a yard everyone reports to are the trades where this lands best.

Who should skip it: any shop that dispatches trucks to different sites all day and wants to know what labor each job consumed. That is a job costing question, and a crew time tracking tool built for the trades answers it. Also skip it if a foreman clocking in the whole crew is how your mornings work, because that is not how this software is built.

One practical note on hunting for other opinions. Homebase is also the name of a British hardware chain, so most of what comes back under that word is about shower taps and light switches, not time clocks. Attach "scheduling" or "time clock" to the search and the owner accounts do surface, and they agree with each other. An owner eight years in across two businesses called it fine, said it "seems reasonable for the cost and does what I need it for", then named the weakness everyone else names: "Customer service is kind of nonexistent." A more recent owner put that same failing far harder, saying they spend more time on the phone or in chat with Homebase than on submitting payroll and clock-ins. Against that, a two-location owner said the crew took to the mobile app fast, with shift trades and location-fenced clock-in working as sold, and a multi-store operator reported a couple of clean years. Our read is that the software does the job and the support behind it is the risk you accept. If you want more voices before you commit, the free plan costs you nothing and tells you more than another hour of searching will.

What owners actually say