Complys vs Deputy

Deputy is one of the best shift-scheduling and time-and-attendance platforms in the UK - polished, reliable and genuinely excellent at rostering staff across locations. If you run a business built on shift patterns - hospitality, retail, care, healthcare - Deputy is hard to beat, and its GPS-verified clock-in even lets you block a punch from outside the site.

But a construction site is not a shift rota, and that is the whole point of this comparison. Deputy is built for scheduling people into shifts and getting them clocked in and paid; it has nothing to say about the compliance a construction site is legally required to keep. Complys is built the other way round - for the site and its obligations - and includes the geofenced GPS clock-in and timesheets as part of that. So if you are a builder comparing the two, the real question is whether you need a rostering tool or a site-management tool that happens to include the clock.

On the clock itself the two are closely matched. Deputy captures GPS at clock-in and clock-out and can be set to block a punch from outside a defined geofence - a genuinely useful control that many managers want. Its timesheets are clean and flow neatly into a wide range of payroll systems.

Complys captures location, accuracy and distance from site on every punch, flags anyone outside the site radius, and shows the manager who is on which job. For the attendance question a site manager actually asks, they are on a par. The difference, again, is the destination of the data: Deputy sends it to a rota and payroll; Complys sits it beside the worker's induction, card expiry and the site RAMS. On a construction site, that context is the point.

Deputy's core genius is the shift. It builds rotas, forecasts demand, manages availability and swaps, and does it beautifully across multiple locations. On a construction project, though, work is organised around jobs, plots and tasks, not shift patterns - and the questions a site manager asks are different: is this person inducted, is their card in date, is there a valid RAMS for what they are doing, who was on site when the incident happened. Deputy is not built to answer any of those.

Complys assigns people to jobs and tasks rather than shifts, captures their geofenced clock-in, and ties every one of those questions together: the induction, the card expiry, the RAMS, the accident book. It is lighter than Deputy on pure rostering - if shift rotas are your life, Deputy wins that - but it is built for the way a construction site actually runs, which a rostering tool is not.

Deputy deserves real credit. Its scheduling is best-in-class, its interface is clean and fast, its timesheets flow neatly into a wide range of payroll systems, and it has a strong, well-supported UK presence. For shift-based teams it is a genuinely great product and often the right choice. Its geofenced clock-in is solid, and the ability to prevent clock-in outside a set radius is exactly what many managers want.

So this is not a case of Complys being better at Deputy's own game. It is a case of the two being built for different worlds. If your workforce clocks into shifts at fixed locations, Deputy is excellent. If your workforce clocks onto construction sites that each carry legal H&S obligations, that is a different job.

Here is the exposure. Under CDM 2015 a construction duty holder must show suitable risk assessments, that workers were inducted and told the risks, that hazardous substances were assessed, that incidents were recorded and RIDDOR-reported, and that high-risk work was permitted and controlled. A rostering platform, however good, produces none of that. If an HSE inspector or a main contractor asks for your compliance, a set of shift timesheets does not answer.

Complys is built around precisely those obligations. Generate a site-specific RAMS and COSHH in minutes, get the induction signed by QR on a phone with location captured, log accidents in a book that flags the RIDDOR position and deadline, issue permits with the right precautions, and keep every worker's cards and training in date. That is the difference between a tool that schedules people and a tool that keeps a construction site legal.

For a construction business the move is usually a step up rather than a sideways trade: you keep GPS clock-in and timesheets, swap shift rostering for job and task assignment that suits site work, and gain the whole compliance platform Deputy does not have. Set up your projects and site radii, add your people, and get the crew clocking in; the RAMS, inductions and accident book are then ready.

Deputy has no free tier, so the honest comparison on cost is that Complys starts free and includes the whole team on its flat plans, while Deputy charges per user. If your business genuinely runs on shift rotas you may keep Deputy for that specific strength - but a pure construction firm rarely needs a rostering engine, and consolidating onto Complys removes both the per-user cost and the separate compliance tools.

Choose Deputy if your business runs on shifts and rostering is your core need, especially across multiple fixed locations, and your compliance is handled elsewhere. Choose Complys if you run construction or trade sites - you get the geofenced clock-in and timesheets and, far more importantly, the RAMS, COSHH, inductions, accident book and permits that a site is legally required to keep, in one UK platform with a free tier.

The bottom line: Deputy is superb at what it is for, and a construction business is not what it is for. For a builder, Complys does the attendance side well enough and then covers the compliance and site management Deputy was never designed to touch - which is the part that actually keeps you on the right side of the law.