7shifts vs Sling Comparison: Everything You Need to Know Before Choosing

7shifts is a team management platform built specifically for restaurants, developed in Canada and used by many thousands of restaurant locations in North America. It addresses the labour challenges that dominate restaurant operations: building schedules around fluctuating demand, controlling labour costs, complying with predictive scheduling and break laws, tracking time accurately, distributing tips fairly and keeping hourly staff informed and engaged. General-purpose scheduling tools rarely account for these specifics. 7shifts’s approach is to connect scheduling, time clocking, team communication, tip management and payroll in one system that integrates closely with restaurant point-of-sale data, so that managers can make staffing decisions based on sales forecasts and see the cost impact of each schedule before it is published. Core features include drag-and-drop scheduling with templates, availability and time-off management, sales and labour forecasting, and shift trading approved by managers. A time clock with a tablet app and GPS-enabled mobile clock-in records hours and breaks, while labour compliance tools help operators meet local regulations. Team communication features include announcements, chat and shift feedback, and an engagement module gathers sentiment from staff after each shift. Tip pooling and payout functions calculate and distribute gratuities, and 7shifts Payroll offers a restaurant-focused payroll service in the United States. The platform integrates with major POS systems including Toast, Square, Clover, Lightspeed and TouchBistro, as well as payroll and accounting providers. It is delivered as a cloud service with iOS and Android apps. Its customers range from single independent restaurants and cafés to multi-location groups and franchise operators in quick service, casual dining and fine dining. The breadth of POS integrations makes it relevant to operators who want labour data aligned with sales. Pricing starts from around USD 29.99 per month with a free trial, and a free version is available for small teams.