Three names sat at the top of this category with no gap between them: Connecteam, Homebase and Sling were each named in all six answers we measured, a clean 6 of 6. We put six buyer questions about shift scheduling software to ChatGPT and Gemini on 2026-08-03, gave each question one live web search, and recorded every product the two assistants named and every source they cited. Nothing here is our opinion. It is a count of what two AI assistants actually said.
The gap behind the top three is small but real. 7shifts and Deputy were each named in 5 of the 6 answers (83%). Shiftboard and When I Work each landed in 4 of 6 (67%). Then the drop is steep: ZoomShift appears in 2 of 6 (33%), and six more products (ezClocker, Findmyshift, Paychex, Planday, Workfeed and Zoho Shifts) show up exactly once each, a 17% share apiece. So a buyer asking a general question gets the same three names every time, with a fairly stable set of five to seven behind them.
How the shortlist changed across the six questions
This is the part worth reading twice. The three constants (Connecteam, Homebase and Sling, each 6 of 6) held their place no matter how we phrased the question. Everything below them moved when the wording moved.
The bare "best shift scheduling software" answer named eight products: Connecteam, Deputy, 7shifts, Homebase, When I Work, Sling, Shiftboard and ZoomShift. That is the widest, most generic list, and it is the one most vendors imagine they are competing in.
The "best free shift scheduling software" answer named a different six: Sling, Homebase, Connecteam, 7shifts, Zoho Shifts and Findmyshift. Framing the question around "free" dropped Deputy, When I Work, Shiftboard and ZoomShift out of the answer entirely, and pulled in two names that appear nowhere else in the whole measurement: Zoho Shifts (1 of 6) and Findmyshift (1 of 6).
The "most affordable shift scheduling software" answer named yet another six: Homebase, Deputy, Sling, Connecteam, Shiftboard and Workfeed. Note the swap. Deputy and Shiftboard, both absent from the "free" list, came back for "affordable," while 7shifts, which made the "free" list, dropped out. Workfeed (1 of 6) shows up here and only here.
So the two price-framed questions split two of the strongest names cleanly. 7shifts (5 of 6 overall) was read as free-friendly but not "most affordable." Deputy (5 of 6 overall) was read as affordable but not free. If you sell one of those two, the exact word a buyer types decides whether you are in the answer at all.
When I Work is the clearest casualty of price framing. It was named in 4 of 6 answers, present in every general question (best, small teams, what should I use, recommendations), yet it dropped out of both the "free" and the "most affordable" cuts. A vendor watching only the generic "best" query would think it is safe and completely miss that it disappears the moment money enters the question.
The single-appearance products each belong to one question. "Best for small teams" is the only place ezClocker and Paychex surfaced (1 of 6 each). "What should I use" is the only place Planday appeared (1 of 6). "Best free" is the only home of Zoho Shifts and Findmyshift (1 of 6 each). "Most affordable" is the only home of Workfeed (1 of 6). None of these six is failing. Each is winning one specific question and invisible in the other five.
Where the answers came from
Five domains fed all 6 of the 6 answers: connecteam.com, joinhomebase.com, peoplemanagingpeople.com, reddit.com and zapier.com. If you want to understand why the top three are the top three, this is the line to read.
Reddit was cited in all 6 answers (100%), the only community forum in the set. Quora did not appear once. Neither did the review directories the industry treats as the scoreboard: G2 and Capterra are nowhere in the sources. The pages these assistants actually read were one community forum (Reddit, 6 of 6), two independent roundups (peoplemanagingpeople.com and zapier.com, 6 of 6 each), YouTube (4 of 6), and vendors' own sites.
Here is the key insight. Two of the five ever-present sources are vendor domains: connecteam.com (6 of 6) and joinhomebase.com (6 of 6). Their products, Connecteam and Homebase, are two of the three named in every single answer. Their own published pages are part of the reason the assistants name them. Deputy shows the same pattern more quietly: deputy.com was cited in 4 of 6 answers and Deputy was named in 5.
Shiftboard is the cleanest demonstration of the whole thesis. shiftboard.com was cited in exactly 4 answers, and Shiftboard was named in exactly those same 4 and no others. When its page was in the reading list, it was in the answer. When it was not, it vanished. The citation, not the brand, carried it.
The counter-example is Sling. Sling was named in all 6 answers, but getsling.com was cited only once, in the "free" question. Sling rides the roundups and Reddit rather than its own domain. So there are two roads into these answers: your own well-cited pages, or a strong presence in the third-party pages the assistant already trusts. Sling took the second road all the way to 6 of 6.
What a vendor here would do to get named
Nothing on this page rewards market share directly. The assistants did not consult a rankings table. They read a handful of pages and repeated what those pages said. So the work is concrete: be in those exact pages.
For this category on this day, "those exact pages" means Reddit (cited in 6 of 6 answers), peoplemanagingpeople.com and zapier.com (6 of 6 each), and YouTube (4 of 6). A vendor absent from those four is relying entirely on its own domain being read, which worked for Connecteam and Homebase (both with well-cited sites and 6 of 6) but is a thin single point of failure for everyone else. Chasing a G2 or Capterra profile, by contrast, did nothing measurable here, because neither was cited once.
The other lesson from the fan-out is to check the answer you actually care about. Being named in "best" (8 products) tells you little about whether you survive "most affordable" (6 products) or "best free" (6 products). Deputy, 7shifts and When I Work each pass one of those tests and fail another. You cannot see that from a single query. You see it only by measuring the specific questions your buyers ask.
The full list, counted
Share is the percentage of the six answers that named each product.
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Connecteam | 6 of 6 | 100% |
| Homebase | 6 of 6 | 100% |
| Sling | 6 of 6 | 100% |
| 7shifts | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Deputy | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Shiftboard | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| When I Work | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| ZoomShift | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| ezClocker | 1 of 6 | 17% |
| Findmyshift | 1 of 6 | 17% |
| Paychex | 1 of 6 | 17% |
| Planday | 1 of 6 | 17% |
| Workfeed | 1 of 6 | 17% |
| Zoho Shifts | 1 of 6 | 17% |
We do not sell shift scheduling software, so Glotier is correctly absent from every one of these 14 names. That is the honest result and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But the measurement above is exactly the thing we run for a customer's own category: the real questions, the real assistants, the products named, and the sources behind each answer. If you sell in a category like this one, you can see your own version of this page. The check is free, no account, and takes about a minute.