Best free attendance apps in India, 2026, and where each free tier stops

The short answer

If you want to spend nothing and everybody works at one address, take Kredily. It is the only free tier on this page with no headcount limit, and it covers an employee database, web clock-in, leave and statutory PF, ESI, PT and TDS calculation at Rs 0. We make a paid competitor and we are still telling you to take it, because for that requirement it is the right answer.

Free stops at two predictable places: paying people, and proving where they were.No free tier on this page includes GPS or geofencing, and none can run a payout, a PF or ESI challan or a Form 16. Kredily's cheapest tier that can pay somebody is Rs 14,988 a year and still has no GPS. factoHR's free plan excludes attendance altogether. Connecteam caps at 10 users and Clockify at 5, so neither reaches the 25-employee team the table below prices.

We are seventh on this page, because we have no free tier.That is the honest ranking against this page's criterion and we have not fudged it. The case for paying us is in the arithmetic instead: once you need a payout or a location, Rs 5,999 a year with GPS included is less than the cheapest Kredily tier that can pay anybody without it.

What each plan costs at 25 employees, free tiers included

Which free tiers include location verification

• IncludedShiftelioIncluded in every paid plan including the Rs 999 one. We have no free plan to exclude it from
• Costs extraKredilyNot on the free tier. Selfie and GPS start at Professional, Rs 1,749 a month, and continuous tracking is Rs 50 per user per month more, Android only
• Costs extrafactoHRNot on the free tier, and not on the cheapest paid tier either. Geofence starts at Premium, Rs 5,999 a month. Selfie is a further add-on priced in US dollars
• Costs extraClockifyNot on the free tier. GPS requires Pro at $7.99 a seat per month. Geofencing is not mentioned in their GPS documentation at all
• Costs extraConnecteamGPS stamps on Basic but no geofencing. Geofencing starts at Advanced and is capped at 10 sites
• IncludedAttendFirstIncluded in every plan including the free one, which nothing else here does. Their table marks GPS, QR and selfie check-in as standard and geofencing as yes through QR and GPS
• Costs extraZoho PeoplePaid tier only, and their own two pages disagree about which tier
• Costs extragreytHRAdd-on at Rs 140 per user per month, on Growth and Premium only. No free tier at all

How this list was ranked

• What a free tier excludes is the whole story. Every entry below lists the exclusions from the vendor’s own comparison table rather than the inclusions from its marketing page. The inclusions are the easy half and they are what the headline already told you.
• A headcount cap is an exclusion too. A free plan capped at 5 or 10 users is not a cheap option for a team of 25, so the cost table says so in the row rather than letting a Rs 0 sit there looking competitive.
• We rank seventh and we have not moved ourselves. Shiftelio has no free tier, so against this page’s criterion it loses to six products, three of which we recommend outright in their entries. The argument for paying us is made by the cost table, where a reader can check it, rather than by the ordering.
• Three obvious candidates were left out on purpose. Jibble publishes its prices only through JavaScript, so no figure for it could be sourced, and the third-party numbers contradict each other three ways. StaffApp claims everything is free forever including GPS and full statutory payroll, which would make it the most important entry here, but the one page that would confirm it returns a 403. Neither goes in until somebody can read the live page. Waggex was checked in the same pass and left out for the same reason: waggex.com/pricing renders its plan grid in the browser and the served page carries no figure, and the Rs 2 per employee that circulates appears only in blog posts on their own site rather than on their price list.

Best in each category

The question that tells you whether free will do

Does the software need to move money, or prove a location?

If the answer is neither, free is genuinely enough and you should stop shopping. A record of who was present, a leave balance and a set of employee documents is a solved problem at Rs 0, and Kredily solves it at any headcount. Nothing on this page is worth paying for if that is the requirement.

If the answer is either, free ends. Payouts, challans and Form 16 sit behind a paid tier everywhere here, and so does GPS. That is not a coincidence: both are the parts that carry liability, and liability is what vendors charge for.

The whole list at a glance

1 of 8

Kredily

Best free tier in India, and the only one with no headcount limit

Keeping proper employee records, at any team size, for nothing.

Choose it when

You want an employee database, self-onboarding, web clock-in, leave and statutory PF, ESI, PT and TDS calculation, you have no budget, and everybody works at one address. No other free plan here has no headcount cap, and that single fact makes it the right answer for a great many Indian businesses. If that describes you, take it and stop reading.

Look elsewhere when

You expected free to mean payroll. Read their comparison table rather than the headline. Free Forever excludes salary payouts, PF and ESI challans, Form 12BB, Form 16, overtime, daily wages, mid-month payouts, analytics and exit settlements. For a shop or a site paying daily wages, the missing overtime and daily-wage rows are the entire job. All of those start at Payroll OS, Rs 1,249 a month, Rs 14,988 a year for 25 people, which is more than most paid attendance products cost and still has no GPS. One more thing to check before you build a plan on a Rs 0 line: the free offer carries an asterisk on their own page reading subject to active usage policy, and that policy is not published anywhere we could find, so what keeps you inside it is at their discretion.

2 of 8

Connecteam

Best free tier for a team of ten or fewer

A genuinely broad free plan for very small deskless teams.

Choose it when

You have ten people or fewer. The free plan is unusually generous by the standards of this list and the vendor describes it as all features for up to 10 users. If you are a small crew who mainly need scheduling, checklists and a chat channel that is not WhatsApp, it is hard to beat at nothing.

Look elsewhere when

You have eleven people. The free plan is capped at 10 users, hard, so it is unusable at the 25-employee size the table above prices, and the step up is to a paid hub. Two other things to know before you commit. Geofencing, as opposed to a GPS stamp on a punch, is not in the cheapest paid tier: it starts at Advanced and stops at 10 sites. And there is no Indian statutory payroll of any kind. Their payroll integration page lists ADP products only, with no mention of India, EPF, ESI, professional tax or Form 16, so a bookkeeper still has to do that part somewhere else. The free plan carries an asterisk pointing at a feature comparison we could not extract, so treat all features as the vendor’s wording rather than ours.

3 of 8

AttendFirst

The only free tier here that includes GPS, if three people is enough

Proving where somebody was, at no cost, on a very small team.

Choose it when

You have three people or fewer and what you actually need is proof of location. Every other free tier on this page either caps you higher and withholds GPS, or withholds it at every headcount, so on this page’s own criterion nothing else gives you the thing you came for at Rs 0. It is also refreshingly plain about what it is not, which is rarer in this market than it should be.

Look elsewhere when

You need to pay anybody. AttendFirst prints the exclusion on its own pricing page in so many words: no salary calculation, no payslip generation, no bank file export, no PF, ESI, TDS, PT or LWF filing, and no Form 16 or Form 24Q. It is attendance data and nothing beyond it, deliberately. So it is a clean answer if a payroll already exists elsewhere and a dead end if you hoped this was the one product. The free cap of 3 is also the tightest here by some way, and the per-head rate above 10 is a launch offer with the standard rate visible next to it, so budget on Rs 599 rather than Rs 499 if you are planning past this year.

4 of 8

Clockify

Best free time tracker, if five people is enough

Tracking hours and billable time, not running an Indian payroll.

Choose it when

You are five people or fewer and the question you need answered is how many hours went to which client or project. As a free timesheet it is well built and widely used, and the free tier is not crippled for that job.

Look elsewhere when

You are an Indian employer rather than a consultancy billing hours. The free tier caps at 5 users, and it excludes GPS, time off, approvals, scheduling, expenses, invoicing, screenshots, kiosk and custom fields. More fundamentally, Clockify does no Indian statutory payroll at all: nothing on its pricing or plan pages mentions EPF, ESI, professional tax or Form 16, because it is a time tracker rather than a payroll engine. It also publishes no INR price, so an Indian buyer is paying in dollars on a card.

5 of 8

factoHR

Best free tier for generating letters and payslips

Employee records and documents at zero cost, for up to 20 people.

Choose it when

You have twenty people or fewer and what you actually need is somewhere to keep employee data and generate offer letters and payslips without paying for it. For that narrow job the free tier is real and it is useful.

Look elsewhere when

You want free attendance, because there is none. The free tier covers Employee Data, Letter Generation and Payslip Generation and excludes attendance, payroll processing, the mobile app and employee self-service, and geofence. It is a document generator rather than an attendance product, which makes its appearance on best free attendance lists elsewhere misleading. And note the shape of the paid ladder: the base fee buys 50 employees whether you have 5 or 50, so a 25-person business pays the full fifty-employee price, and the tier that adds geofencing is Rs 71,988 a year.

6 of 8

Zoho People

Best free tier if you already live inside Zoho

HR records for a very small team already using Zoho for something else.

Choose it when

Your business already runs on Zoho for mail, CRM or books, and you want employee records, leave and document management at no extra cost for a handful of people. The integration is the reason to pick it and it is a good reason.

Look elsewhere when

You want a number you can plan against. We could not obtain one first hand, and we are not going to repeat the figures circulating in comparison round-ups: the highest-ranked of those is published by HROne, a direct competitor of both Zoho and us, which is exactly the kind of source this site does not cite. Zoho People also does not include Indian statutory payroll; Zoho Payroll is a separate product with separate pricing. If you are seriously considering it, get a quote and read the tier gates yourself.

7 of 8 · our product

Shiftelio

Best value once free has run out, not a free product

GPS-verified attendance and payroll for 5 to 100 people across sites.

Choose it when

Free has stopped being free for you. That happens at a specific and predictable moment: when you need the software to pay somebody, or to prove where they were. Every free tier on this page excludes one or both. Once you are comparing paid tiers rather than free ones, the arithmetic changes completely, because Rs 5,999 a year with GPS included is less than the cheapest Kredily tier that can run a payroll without GPS, and a fraction of the Rs 71,988 factoHR wants for the tier that adds geofencing.

Look elsewhere when

You genuinely want to spend nothing, and that is a legitimate thing to want. We have no free tier and we are ranked seventh on this page for that reason. If everybody works at one address and you need a record rather than a payout, Kredily is free at any headcount and is the better answer; take it. If you have ten people or fewer and want scheduling and messaging more than payroll, Connecteam is free and is the better answer. We are also the wrong product if you need a full HRMS with performance cycles and applicant tracking, which we do not build.

Disclosure: this is our product and this page is on our website, which is exactly why the criterion is written out above, why every rival figure is dated and sourced, and why the paragraph above this one exists. Our prices are on the pricing page and there is nothing behind a "contact us". How we rank is set out on the methodology page. Two free competitors rank above us on this page and their entries tell you to take them instead.

8 of 8

greytHR

The one people keep listing as free that is not

Deep Indian statutory payroll, sold entirely on paid plans.

Choose it when

Never, if free is your requirement, which is why it sits last here. It earns its place on this page only because so many round-ups still list it as free. On its own merits it is a serious product: if the hard part of your month is statutory payroll rather than attendance, it has more depth there than most of this list, and our main comparison ranks it accordingly.

Look elsewhere when

You are here at all. greytHR publishes no free plan, only a seven-day trial. Our own main comparison page previously stated it was free for up to 25 employees; that was wrong, and we corrected it. If you find a comparison still saying so, check greythr.com/pricing directly rather than the blog.

Questions people ask before choosing

Work the numbers yourself

• The full ranked comparison, by real annual cost
• All free tools
• PF and ESI calculator
• Professional tax calculator
• Overtime calculator
• Attendance register generator
• What Shiftelio costs
• How we rank, and where these numbers come from

Other comparisons on this site

Each of these ranks against a different question, so they reach different answers. The one you want is the one whose question is yours.

• Best attendance apps in India: Annual cost at 25 employees with GPS verification working
• Best GPS attendance apps in India: Which tier gates which kind of location proof: stamp, geofence, live trail, anti-spoofing
• Best attendance apps for field staff in India: Site caps, offline capture and the cost of a continuous trail, for staff never at one address
• Best attendance apps for construction sites in India: Workers who own no smartphone, whether a daily wage can be paid at all, and whether the pricing shape survives a headcount that moves with the project
• Best attendance apps for restaurants in India: Whether a two-part day can be rostered at all, whether each outlet gets its own boundary, and how fast a new hire can punch
• Best payroll software for small businesses in India: Whether the statutory output is actually produced, not merely calculated