Calamari Reviews

We have decentralized operations, and our managers and HR love being able to see presence and location statuses of our employees in real time, and at a high level.
The Calendar function in the leave module allows for great oversight and enables more efficient resource management and allocation.
The time-sheet and leave reports available are robust and we love the download to excel feature, this perfect tabular format allows for deeper dives on trends, pivot tables etc within Excel.
It really is simple to use for employees and managers. The app keeps things simple to enable clocking in/out and applying for leave.
Really just very easy to navigate, after training our managers, no one has had to come back to us on how to navigate the system.
There are several clock in methods which allows for flexibility, eg smartphone clock-in, QR scans, and browser check-ins.
I must also commend the support team for providing excellent back-end support for our administrators! Keep up the great work and service

A few improvements could be made, such as allowing for attachment uploads from a smartphone for leave applications and for locations to be tagged when clocking in with a QR code.

This software is clean, simple and easy to use. it integrates well with Slack and outlook calendars. It's easy for employees to use and keep track of their own time off reporting in an organized way. It's very customizable to out companies accrual rules, holidays, birthdays, working hours and PTO. I really love that our employees do not have to leave the Slack pap to request PTO and check their balance.

There is little that is missing from this software and they are always making updates! I would say if you have a lot of employees it takes some time to set them all up initially.

I like the leave and sick leave tracking features and the integration with Outlook calendar

I have not come across anything I do not like

i signed up. received the email, followed the link and only get a green screen asking you to "wait for a while".

and after a few HOURS ( you get it right, hours ), that so-called "while" is still there. refresh / quit browser do no help. same link goes to same screen with same words.

i received the mail at 0100, tried it on 0300, get the same result. so i contacted them via the webform.

i checked back on 0700. my mailbox got nothing - not even a acknowledgement of receiving my email, and surely nothing about why the while is still staying. and yes - same signup link still goes to the same page with the same words.

i'm still hopeful, so tried again on 1900 on the same day. now the best part arrived - the same link i tried said "my license expired and my account is blocked".

so, what Calamari suggesting, is that my signup license is "looking at their green screen and wait for a while" - but hey, i haven't looked at that for 14 days yet, why have my license expired SO SOON???

is Calamari a hoax for getting my email? the other "positive" reviewers sound SO TRUE, i just can't tell how can that be. i'm not suggesting fake accounts with fake reviews, but i doubt for this kind of performance and stability, how can i handle the attendance / leave management thing of my whole company to it ?

- Really helpful regarding compliance. You don't have to remember about all those required by the labour law requests. You have them all inside one app!
- Gives you plenty of customization options. We added a few custom made types of leave like Anniversary Vacay Days. It was super easy to configure.
- Great integrations with Google calendar and slack. You can see all the most important information, not login in.
- All in one virtual place! No more checking paper to verify PTOs!

I can't think of any! Calamari changed my life :)

- Easy of use and implementation
- Easy of customization

- Clock in and leave management have to be paid separately and are expensive.

Very user friendly interface encourages our team members to use Calamari regularly.
The tool is also very simple to use so all in-house communication is strengtened because of that.
The Success team writes back within minutes and helps with literally everything so the communication between us/ our team and Calamari is great.

There are still some HR-friendly feautres to add. For now we find that Calamari is more intuitive for team members rather than Administrators.
For example, the ability to see the history of different kind of contracts and calculate the leaves accordingly, or setting reminders about medical check-ups and OHS is something we still hope to see.

it is easy to use and understand. Even a non tech person like me can work comfortably

Nothing as such that I could find which I least like...

How easy it is to navigate around the system

It would be great if employees are able to update their personal information via Calamari but that's the only thing I can think of.

Easy to use & setup customized to our policies

You can have a ready online tutorial for admin to access

I wanted a product that fit in our budget, that could keep track of time off requests online. I was tired of paper floating everywhere! Calamari fit that bill.

There is no way to edit your time off request. If you make a mistake, the entire request has to be deleted, then the manager has to approve the cancellation, then you can resubmit the request. It's a lot of steps.

When the company is small, managing the time-off management is not that hard. However, when the company grows, it becomes very time-consuming and gets harder every day. Imagine, you have to count annual leaves of 50+ people on your own! It takes a lot of time and it is easy to make mistakes. Additionally, you have to remember to add info about it to calendar and keep an eye on it. Additionally there are questions: how many free days do I still have? Sounds like a hard unnecessary work.
We have discovered Calamari and it was one of the best platforms we have discovered. Users can easily apply for the leave, check how many free days they still got, it is integrated with Gsuite so whenever an annual leave is accepted, it appears in our calendar so we can check whether someone is there or not. Teams can easily check who is not gonna work on a specific day and who can replace that person. From the backoffice side, we can check everything about whole teams, specific people or even set up the acceptance flow for specific absence. No more excel sheets or counting :)

Nearly every problem we spotted was solved by Calamari team. What could be improved? Some options are not possible to change once set - it can be really problematic, for example settlement of annual leave is either in whole days (with minimum 1/4 od the day) or in hours. Also, if we add a specific type of absence, it is impossible to tick people and move their free days from one absence to another - we had to do it on our own, person after person. It took quite long.

Months ago, we scoped out our requirements for a PTO management tool. Calamari checked off every box! Coupled with outstanding and responsive customer service, we couldn't have asked for a better experience.

The process of requesting and approving time off requests, particularly the Slack integration, are a MAJOR upgrade from our previous platform.

The .csv upload tool can be a little tricky to figure out, but the customer service response is immediate and helped resolve the issues. Onboarding couldn't have gone any more smoothly.

- thanks to Calamari shared calendars being easily added to GCal we can automatically see any planned absences in the team (holidays, remote work, business trips, sick leave etc) directly in our GCals (previously we had to keep a separate shared team GCal for these and add absences manually)
- everyone is able to check their current entitlement anytime with just a couple of clicks and request their time off on the go
- no need to send emails to multiple people in the company to request time off and have it registered (this was solved with a customised approval flow)
- appointing the substitute can be done at the stage of requesting time off
- you can send all notifications to Slack and track status of your request from there
- multiple, customisable approval flows and absence types
- customised holiday calendars which can be linked to individual users or teams (very helpful especially in Germany)
- no need to track the absences manually: it takes a couple of clicks to generate absence reports and requests required for payroll
- very responsive and competent support

I only wish that we used Calamari on the company level. With other team being first to register for it, we can't fully integrate with GSuite and it takes up to 24 hours for the Calamari shared calendar to sync with GCal.

Calamari's calendar is a great way to see who is in the office, traveling or on vacation. We also use it to track who is reserving conference rooms and company vehicles.

Creating reports to track people's absences is a nice feature but it is not as robust as it could be. We like to track when salespeople are visiting customers and we have to put the customer name in the "reasons" box when it would be nice if it could be a dropdown of our customer list.

I like that I don't have to think about it much, love the Slack integrations for my team and how easy it was to transition from our old process into Calamari. It's simple, clear, and for a small team it has everything I need. The customer support team has always responded promptly when I need anything, and we were even able to extend our trial period in the beginning and converted to a paying customer shortly after.

So the most annoying thing, and this is a small issue, is not being able to select a range of dates on the calendar by clicking on the days themselves. Again, it's a small thing, but it's something I'm used to in other situations, and so I frequently make the mistake of forgetting it's not possible on Calamari. I suppose the other thing is that it's not always immediately clear how to make use of some of the finer features, and so I simply haven't been bothered to find out if they're even there. For example, I spent a little while searching once for whether we could only make it possible for employees to request annual leave in the future if they will have accrued it by the specified date (and not just if they have already accrued it, if that makes sense), but it wasn't obvious how to do so or even if it were possible, so I just kind of left it. These relatively minor complications are the kind of thing that someone in a rush will just leave in the moment, because they've more important things to do, but will be annoying over time.

I truly like that this tool is really complete. It has almost everything you can think of regarding the employees schedules, if you need the users to punch from different locations or to punch from different means like mobile phone or web browser, this tool has it all, it even has the option to print QR codes, you can print the code and place them strategically on your office so the employees can go and scan the code to punch. I also like that it has integration with G Suite and Slack, you can use these tools to import your employees, which makes it really easy to start.

The only thing that I don't like is that you need to enter the work days of the employees, you need to specify the time the employees work a day, but if you work in a company where the schedules are updated a lot, this part might be a little cumbersome. Apart from that, all good, the tool has it basically all you need for maintaining your employees schedules.

The software is very flexible with regards to being able to track a variety of leave methods. We have different people at different levels of the company who get various entitlements and Calamari was able to handle it all. We also are able to track our business travel of our sales managers through the system which is helpful too.

The app is fairly easy, but the user interface could be a bit easier for users who are not as computer savvy. It could be a little more clear on what time they have less what time is scheduled for their net time leftover.

We like this tool, because it's synchronized with other tools used in our organization (e.g. outlook Calendar, Jira, Optima, Slack, Office365). It is very userfriendly and intuitive and can be customized the way we need. We have a lot of different types of agreements and hence a lot of different absence types - and the system enables to configure everything the way we need. Additionally we are delighted with a customer support.

Lots of possibilities to customize ( absence types, calendars, working shifts, approval processes etc.) makes the system more complex to configure and it looks difficult at the beggining, but - when you start to udnerstand different dependancies and how it's built - is stops to be a problem. Customer support is of absolutely marvelous, always responsive and very, very helpful.

it is easy to adapt to any situation, easy to modify and very easy to use. The implementation of the software might take quite long at the beginning, but once it's working, it takes less than 5 min to add new users, adapt their activity rate or week types. The leave module is very practical, especially because anyone can check the absence/presence of all team members. The integration with Outlook and Microsoft Office is a great advantage.

The only thing that could be improved is to add the possibility to set up a date when there is a change of activity rate or week type for an employee.

As a startup, I was looking for a perfect solution for leaves and attendance management. By using Calamari,
you can approve your employee’s leaves from your fingertips. And every detail you need is available on their dashboard.

Having issues sometimes with the attendance management as the beacon system doesn't work with us well yet. Hopefully, they will fix it in future as I have faith in them.

We use Calamari for a range of HR activities. The most useful features that we use on a daily basis include:
1. Absence Requests: Employees are able to request paid time off / vacations / unpaid leave etc in a formal and structured manner. The approval process is easy to calibrate and set up for managers. Provides an easy process where documentation can be added to support requests (such as medical leave notes).

2. Calendar feature: When payroll exceptions need to be considered, the calendar feature is an easy way to make any adjustments that need to be made. It also enables you to plan for staggering of vacations for employees inside the same department.

3. Employees: Easy to create a database of all employees where information from starting dates, salary etc. can be recorded and quickly accessed.

4. Reports: Functional and and easy to prepare using this feature.

As far as the requirements of our business go, Calamari offers all the necessary features (and additional ones) that we need. We have no complaints regarding the software that have come up in the time we have been using it.

This is the easiest software there is for my employees, who often struggled with more complicated ones. Also my favourite part is the ease of contact with customer service who are very fast, helpful and friendly and always solve my problems even when it's something specific for my organisation.

I have no negatives here. I can see that things that might be done a bit better (but don't disturb daily work) are developed and introduced to make everything better :)

We were looking for a tools that helped to keep our staff able to manage their hours and leave but also remain within a system that was SSO. Functionality, the more integrated with our identity provider (Microsoft 365) the better for our managment and for staff ease of adoption. Calamari has worked out great.

We also appreciate that Calamari worked with us in our unique position to put together a pricing option that considered the blended nature of our staff needs. This was a large value-add.

We like that Calamari remains under development. It would be nice if it was able to integrate further with the growing system of time and shift managment in Microsoft Teams. This may be a limitation of Microsoft’s structure but we would love to see it nonetheless.

We could build in our leave policies so that Calamari enforces the rules automatically (e.g., who is eligible to take school visitation leave, awarding some leave annually and some by days worked, different minimum durations for different leave types, etc). It offers very granular control over the setup, and is very intuitive and smooth once setup.

The downside of having such detailed control options is the steep learning curve in the implementation process. Fortunately, the customer support staff are great and really helpful with figuring everything out. I'd like Calamari to implement an "edit" feature for approved leave requests, which would be more convenient than cancelling and resubmitting.