OnCrew vs Deputy — which workforce management software is better?

Most businesses shopping for workforce management software, or a Deputy alternative specifically, are trying to escape the same thing: spreadsheets that don’t talk to each other, a group chat full of “who’s covering Thursday?”, and a folder of expired licences nobody noticed until a client asked for proof. Add in last-minute shift changes, no-shows, and a casual workforce that grows and shrinks by the week, and it’s easy to see why rostering and labour hire management software has become a serious buying decision rather than an afterthought.

OnCrew and Deputy both sit in this category, and both are genuinely capable platforms. But “workforce management software” is a broad label, and the two products were not built to solve identical problems. Deputy grew up solving scheduling, time and attendance, and labour-law compliance for businesses with a relatively stable team working out of one or more fixed venues — think a café, a retail chain, or a hospital ward. OnCrew was built specifically for labour hire agencies and crew-based businesses, where the “team” isn’t fixed at all: shifts are set by client demand, and the job is to find, dispatch, and keep compliant a pool of workers who might be on a different site every week.

This article compares OnCrew and Deputy across rostering, onboarding, compliance, crew dispatch, time tracking, pricing, and industry fit, so you can work out which one actually matches how your business operates — not just which one has more checkboxes ticked. Where we make a claim about a competitor, we attribute it and flag anything worth confirming directly with the vendor.

Quick comparison: OnCrew vs Deputy

Pricing and specific feature availability can change — always confirm current details directly with each provider before making a decision.

What is OnCrew?

OnCrew (oncrew.com.au) is workforce management software built by Sydney-based Platform 360 for labour hire agencies and businesses that run crews across multiple sites in Australia and New Zealand. Rather than assuming a fixed team turns up to the same venue each week, OnCrew is built around the opposite assumption: the shifts are known, but the people who fill them have to be found, checked for compliance, and dispatched — often at short notice, often to a site they haven’t worked at before.

The onboarding engine lets a new worker self-onboard from their phone in roughly five steps — personal details, photographing tickets and licences, a custom induction, medical information (encrypted), and tax/super/bank details — so a worker can go from signed-up to compliance-ready without back-and-forth paperwork.

Compliance sits at the centre of the product rather than as an add-on. Every ticket, licence, medical record and induction is catalogued with expiry tracking and automatic reminders, and OnCrew applies a hard compliance gate — meaning a worker who isn’t currently qualified for a job’s requirements can’t actually be placed on it, not just flagged.

Shift filling runs through Smart Fill, which reads a shift’s requirements and ranks the workers who are qualified, in-date on their tickets, and available, then dispatches offers by SMS with voice escalation until the shift is filled. Clock-in and clock-out are geofenced to the site. Timesheets built from those clock-ins can be approved by a supervisor in one tap and exported to Xero or Employment Hero for payroll. A live dispatch map shows every site, crew and shift at once, and a built-in client CRM tracks prospects through to placed clients, sites and supervisors. A rule-based layer called Axis reads real activity data to surface insights and recommendations for coordinators — such as a worker-reliability score (based on completion, no-shows and lateness) and shifts at risk — helping them act before problems escalate.

OnCrew serves construction and trades, transport and logistics, healthcare and aged care, hospitality, events and security, cleaning and facilities, NDIS and disability support, and mining. For a labour hire or multi-site crew business, the value proposition is straightforward: less manual matching, fewer compliance gaps, and faster replacement when someone doesn’t show.

What is Deputy?

Deputy is a widely used workforce management platform serving businesses across retail, hospitality, healthcare and other shift-based industries worldwide. It’s built around a core set of workforce tools: employee scheduling, shift management, time and attendance, and timesheet management, with shift swapping, leave and availability management layered on top.

Scheduling includes a drag-and-drop shift builder and an AI-assisted auto-scheduler that can generate rosters based on factors like sales, demand and labour budgets — useful for businesses whose staffing needs track predictable patterns like foot traffic. Clock-in and clock-out are supported via GPS geofencing or biometric facial recognition through the mobile app, web browser, or an iPad kiosk. Deputy’s compliance tooling is aimed at labour-law and award compliance — tracking breaks, overtime, fair workweek rules and minor work-hour restrictions — rather than tracking individual worker licences or tickets against job requirements.

Deputy also offers add-on modules: Deputy HR and Hire cover onboarding, document management and applicant tracking, while a Payroll add-on and integrations with 300-plus payroll and POS systems (including Xero, ADP, Gusto and Square in various markets) connect timesheets to pay runs. Deputy is commonly recommended for businesses with a relatively stable, shift-based workforce operating out of one or more fixed venues — retail chains, hospitality groups, healthcare facilities — where the main job is organising the time of a team that’s already known.

OnCrew vs Deputy: the core difference

The simplest way to frame the difference is this: Deputy manages a roster you already know. OnCrew manages a workforce that has to be assembled and re-assembled, site by site, shift by shift.

Both products can build a schedule, track hours, and produce a timesheet. Where they diverge is the starting assumption. Deputy assumes the people are set and the job is to organise their time — which describes a huge number of businesses well. A restaurant knows its kitchen and floor staff. A retail store knows its team. In that context, Deputy’s forecasting, break compliance, and payroll integrations are directly useful, and there’s no need for a compliance gate that blocks unqualified workers from a job, because the workforce doesn’t rotate through different qualification requirements from one week to the next.

A labour hire agency’s reality looks different. The shifts are set by client demand, not by an internal roster, and the question every morning is “who’s available, qualified, and reliable enough to send to this site today?” That’s an operational workflow — dispatch — layered on top of scheduling, and it’s the part general rostering tools weren’t built to handle. This is the gap OnCrew is built to fill.

Which platform is the better fit depends entirely on which of these two situations describes your business, not on which one has more total features.

OnCrew vs Deputy for labour hire agencies

This is where the distinction has the most practical weight, and it’s usually the point where “rostering software” and “labour hire rostering software” stop being interchangeable terms. A labour hire agency isn’t managing one team — it’s managing a pool of workers against a shifting set of client requirements, sites, and compliance obligations, often simultaneously across multiple clients.

Consider what a labour hire coordinator actually needs day to day: a live view of which workers are available this week, which of them hold the specific tickets or licences a particular site requires, which sites those workers have already been inducted for, and a fast way to fill a shift when a client calls with two hours’ notice. They also need a reliable way to handle the inevitable no-show — someone doesn’t turn up, and a replacement has to be found, checked, and dispatched before the client notices a gap in coverage.

OnCrew’s Smart Fill engine is built directly around this workflow: it reads what a shift requires, filters the worker pool down to who’s qualified, in-date and available, ranks them by role fit, site history and proximity, and dispatches offers automatically. The hard compliance gate means a worker who’s let a ticket lapse simply cannot be assigned to a job requiring it — the system enforces it rather than relying on a coordinator to remember. No-show detection and automatic chasing add a second layer of protection when things go wrong on the day.

Deputy’s scheduling tools can certainly organise a roster, and its shift-swap and availability features cover a genuine amount of ground for businesses with looser staffing needs. But it wasn’t built with a labour-hire coordinator’s specific problem in mind — matching a job’s compliance requirements against a fluctuating worker pool, across multiple client sites, isn’t the primary workflow the product is designed around. Agencies using Deputy for this kind of work often end up supplementing it with manual processes — spreadsheets for licence expiry, phone calls for last-minute replacements — the exact overhead that purpose-built labour hire software is meant to remove.

For a business managing one relatively fixed team, this distinction matters far less. For a business whose entire operating model is “find and place compliant workers across shifting client demand,” it’s close to the whole decision.

Rostering & scheduling comparison

As employee rostering software and staff scheduling software, both platforms let you build shifts, assign workers, and manage recurring patterns. Deputy’s scheduling is strong where the workforce is known in advance: its auto-scheduler can generate a roster from sales or demand data, which is a genuine time-saver for retail and hospitality businesses trying to match staffing to predictable foot traffic. Shift swapping and availability management are mature, well-used features for teams filling their own gaps.

OnCrew’s rostering starts from the same building blocks — creating shifts, setting requirements, checking availability — but is oriented toward filling shifts from a wider, less fixed pool rather than optimising the hours of an existing team. Smart Fill’s automated matching and dispatch becomes more valuable as the number of possible workers, sites and compliance requirements grows, and as more of those shifts need filling on short notice rather than being set weeks in advance.

If your scheduling problem is “optimise the hours of the team we have,” Deputy’s tools are built directly for that. If it’s “find who can fill this shift, right now, and confirm they’re allowed to,” that’s closer to OnCrew’s core design.

Worker onboarding comparison

Good worker onboarding software matters more in a labour-hire context than it might seem — it’s a different task to onboarding a single new retail employee. A labour hire worker typically needs their identity, banking and tax details captured, plus one or more tickets and licences verified, a site-specific or general induction completed, and often medical information recorded — all before they can legally be placed on a job. Doing this well matters because a worker who isn’t fully onboarded simply can’t be deployed, and an agency’s revenue depends on how quickly workers become deployable.

OnCrew’s onboarding engine is built around this exact sequence: a worker completes a roughly five-step, phone-based process covering personal details, photographed tickets and licences, a custom induction, encrypted medical information, and tax/super/bank details, arriving compliance-ready without paper forms or manual chasing.

Deputy handles onboarding through its HR and Hire add-on modules, covering document collection, applicant tracking, and the general new-hire process. This is well suited to onboarding a permanent or semi-permanent employee into a single business. It’s less clearly built around the specific labour-hire sequence of capturing multiple licences per worker, verifying them against site-specific requirements, and re-checking that verification every time a worker is offered a new job — the details that make labour-hire onboarding more complex than standard employee onboarding.

Compliance & licence tracking

Compliance means different things depending on the business. For a retail or hospitality employer, compliance is largely about labour law — correct breaks, no unauthorised overtime, minors not working outside permitted hours, fair workweek rules. Deputy is built around exactly this: automated alerts for break and overtime risk, configurable pay-rate rules, and audit-ready digital records of schedules, timesheets and payroll exports.

For a construction, mining, civil, traffic management, security, or healthcare labour-hire business, compliance means something more specific: does this individual worker currently hold the ticket, licence, certification or medical clearance this particular job requires, and can that be proven if a client or regulator asks? This is a credentialing problem as much as a labour-law one, and it’s the problem OnCrew’s compliance engine is built to solve — catalogued licences and tickets with expiry tracking, automatic reminders, and a hard compliance gate that physically prevents an unqualified worker from being placed on a job that requires a credential they don’t currently hold.

Neither platform should be treated as a substitute for your own regulatory due diligence — compliance requirements vary by industry, state and job, and businesses should verify their own obligations rather than relying solely on any software vendor’s claims. But the type of compliance each platform is oriented around is genuinely different, and it’s worth checking which one matches the compliance risk your business actually carries.

Crew dispatch & shift filling

Crew dispatch software solves an operational sequence that sits underneath a lot of labour-hire work: a client requests workers, the agency identifies who’s available, those workers are checked against the job’s requirements, suitable workers are offered the shift, they receive the shift details, attendance is monitored once the shift starts, and if someone doesn’t show, a replacement has to be found and sent — often within the hour.

This is a distinct workflow from scheduling a known team, and it’s one OnCrew is built directly around. Smart Fill automates the matching and offer steps — reading the shift’s requirements, ranking eligible workers, and dispatching offers via SMS with voice escalation until the shift is filled — while the live dispatch map gives a coordinator visibility over every site, crew and shift at once.

Deputy’s shift-publishing and swap functionality can offer shifts to a set roster and let staff pick them up, which covers a genuine amount of ground for a business with a known team filling its own internal gaps. It isn’t built as a dispatch engine matching an external client’s job requirements against a fluctuating worker pool across multiple sites — because that isn’t the problem it was designed to solve. For an agency doing high-volume, short-notice dispatch across several clients at once, this is one of the more material gaps between the two products.

Managing worker no-shows

A no-show is expensive in ways that go beyond the missed shift itself. There’s the immediate coverage gap on a client site, the risk to client relationship and reputation, the scramble of phone calls trying to find someone else who’s available and qualified, and the lost productivity of a coordinator’s morning spent firefighting instead of running the business.

OnCrew’s no-show handling is built to shorten that window: a missed clock-in is flagged the moment the window passes, an automatic SMS and voice chase goes out to the worker, and Smart Fill can identify and offer the shift to a replacement from the qualified, available pool — all without a coordinator manually working the phones first.

Deputy will show a missed shift in its attendance and timesheet records, giving visibility after the fact, but a dedicated automated chase-and-redispatch workflow specific to no-shows isn’t a feature confirmed in current product documentation — worth verifying directly if this is a priority for your business. For businesses where no-shows are a rare exception, this gap matters less. For labour-hire operations where covering a no-show quickly is a daily operational reality, it’s a meaningful difference in how much manual intervention is required.

Time tracking & attendance

Both platforms cover the fundamentals well. OnCrew uses geofenced GPS clock-in and clock-out, stamped in local time, feeding directly into payroll-ready timesheets that a supervisor can approve in one tap, with a missed clock-in correctable in seconds. Deputy offers GPS and biometric facial-recognition clock-in options across mobile, web and kiosk, with real-time attendance visibility and timesheet approval workflows, plus deeper labour-cost reporting such as sales-versus-labour percentage tracking.

Where this matters is what happens after the clock-in. Time tracking alone tells you who worked and for how long. It doesn’t tell you whether that worker was qualified to be on that site in the first place, or automatically find a replacement if they don’t turn up. For a labour-hire business, time and attendance data is only one layer of a bigger operational picture that also includes compliance status and dispatch — which is why OnCrew treats it as one module among several connected ones, rather than the centrepiece of the product.

Industry comparison

Workforce compliance software needs look different from one industry to the next — here’s how the fit breaks down by sector.

Construction

Crews move between sites, tickets (white cards, high-risk licences, machinery tickets) are non-negotiable, and a worker turning up without current certification is a real liability. OnCrew’s compliance gate and site-based dispatch line up with this directly; Deputy’s scheduling can handle shift planning but doesn’t natively gate placements on ticket status.

Mining

Remote sites, strict compliance obligations, and worker readiness (inductions, medicals, specific tickets) make credential tracking especially high-stakes. This favours a platform built around hard compliance enforcement rather than general scheduling.

Civil

Similar to construction — multiple sites, shifting crews, and shift-by-shift worker allocation depending on which job is running where. OnCrew’s dispatch-first design suits this pattern; Deputy suits a civil contractor’s back-office team with a fixed schedule better than its site crews.

Security

Guard scheduling depends heavily on licensing (security licences, specific certifications) and availability across multiple client sites — closer to the labour-hire pattern than the fixed-venue one, favouring OnCrew’s compliance-gated dispatch for the guarding workforce itself, while Deputy can suit a security firm’s own fixed office staff.

Cleaning

Distributed teams, recurring shifts across many sites, and frequent need to replace absent workers quickly — the no-show and dispatch workflows matter more here than pure scheduling optimisation.

Healthcare & aged care

Worker availability and qualification currency (certifications, checks, specific clinical competencies) both matter, and shifts are frequently filled from a casual or agency pool rather than a fixed roster — a pattern that suits OnCrew’s model, while Deputy remains a strong fit for a facility’s core, fixed rostered staff.

In every case, the deciding factor isn’t the industry label — it’s whether the workforce for that part of the business is fixed and known, or fluid and dispatched.

Feature-by-feature comparison

Ease of use

For a labour-hire operations manager or coordinator, OnCrew’s value comes from workflows that map directly onto daily tasks — filling a shift, checking a licence, chasing a no-show — which reduces the number of separate systems a coordinator has to touch. For a supervisor or worker, the phone-based onboarding and offer-and-accept dispatch flow are designed to require minimal training.

For a retail or hospitality manager, Deputy’s drag-and-drop scheduling and mobile clock-in are well established and widely reviewed as approachable, with a shorter learning curve reported by users managing a stable team. Businesses with straightforward, single-venue scheduling needs may find Deputy’s simpler feature set easier to adopt quickly, since there’s less specialised functionality to learn.

Neither platform is objectively “easier” in the abstract — the honest answer depends on whether your day-to-day tasks look more like organising a known team’s hours, or matching and dispatching a fluctuating pool of workers against compliance requirements.

Automation & administrative efficiency

Both platforms reduce manual admin, but in different places. Deputy automates shift creation via demand forecasting, timesheet-to-payroll syncing, and compliance alerts for break and overtime risk — removing a meaningful amount of manual roster-building and payroll reconciliation for a business with a known team.

OnCrew automates the steps specific to assembling a workforce: matching qualified workers to shift requirements, dispatching offers, chasing no-shows, and blocking non-compliant placements before they happen — removing the manual phone-calling and spreadsheet-checking that otherwise falls on a labour-hire coordinator every time a shift needs filling or a worker’s ticket needs verifying.

The efficiency gain in each case is proportional to how much of your operational time is currently spent on that specific task — worth mapping honestly against your own week before assuming either platform will deliver the same time savings for your business.

Reporting & workforce visibility

Standard employers generally need visibility into attendance, labour cost, and shift coverage against a known headcount — the reporting Deputy is built around, including labour-cost-versus-sales analysis and an Analytics+ add-on for more customised reporting and audit trails.

Labour-hire agencies typically need an additional layer: workforce utilisation across multiple clients and sites, compliance status across the entire worker pool, and real-time visibility into staffing gaps that need filling right now rather than at the end of a pay period. OnCrew’s live dispatch map and compliance dashboard are built around this operational, real-time view rather than a purely retrospective reporting one.

Pricing comparison

Pricing for both platforms is structured per user/worker, and both change their plans periodically, so treat the figures below as a starting point to verify directly rather than a locked-in quote.

OnCrew pricing

OnCrew’s published pricing runs per worker with no worker caps, and every plan includes Smart Fill, compliance tracking and the full crew app: Essentials from $5/worker/month (minimum $99/month) for a small crew moving off spreadsheets; Starter from $6.50/worker/month (minimum $199/month) for a growing crew across multiple jobs or sites; Growth from $8/worker/month (minimum $399/month, the most popular tier) for a full desk or larger agency; and custom Enterprise pricing for large operators. Confirm current pricing at oncrew.com.au/pricing.html before budgeting.

Deputy pricing

Deputy’s Australian pricing (billed in AUD) has recently been structured as three tiers — Lite, Core and Pro — at roughly $6.75, $8.75 and $13 per user per month respectively. Several genuinely useful features are sold as separate paid modules rather than bundled in — a Payroll add-on ($5 AUD per user/month) and an HR add-on ($3.50 AUD per user/month) among them — meaning the effective cost of a fully featured setup can run noticeably higher than the headline per-user price. Confirm current tiers and add-on pricing directly with Deputy, as plans and pricing structures have changed more than once in recent years.

Total cost of ownership

Total cost of ownership for either platform should account for more than the subscription line: implementation time, admin training, worker training, and — critically — the cost of whatever manual process the software is meant to replace. A cheaper subscription that still requires a coordinator to manually chase licences or phone around for no-show replacements may cost more in labour time than a higher subscription that automates those tasks away.

OnCrew vs Deputy: pros & cons

OnCrew pros

Purpose-built for labour hire and multi-site crew dispatch; hard compliance gate reduces the risk of placing an unqualified worker; fast phone-based onboarding; automated shift matching and no-show chasing reduce manual coordinator work; per-worker pricing with no worker caps.

OnCrew cons

Businesses should assess whether the platform fits their existing workflows before switching, particularly if they’re migrating from another system with established processes. Businesses with very simple, single-venue scheduling needs may not need — or benefit from — advanced labour-hire-specific functionality like compliance gating and dispatch automation. Companies should verify required integrations (payroll, accounting, existing HR systems) before committing.

Deputy pros

Mature, widely used platform with strong scheduling and demand-forecasting tools; broad payroll and POS integration ecosystem (300+); solid labour-law and award compliance tooling for breaks, overtime and fair workweek rules; multiple clock-in methods including facial recognition; well established in retail, hospitality and healthcare.

Deputy cons

Several useful features (payroll, HR, deeper analytics) are separate paid add-ons rather than included, which can raise the effective cost. Compliance tooling is oriented around labour law rather than individual worker credential tracking, so businesses needing licence/ticket gating may find this a gap. Not purpose-built for dispatching a fluctuating worker pool across multiple external client sites.

Which businesses should choose OnCrew?

Labour hire agencies placing workers across multiple clients need dispatch and compliance gating a general scheduler doesn’t provide. Staffing agencies juggling several client accounts benefit from OnCrew’s client CRM alongside worker management. Construction workforce providers need ticket and licence enforcement tied directly to job placement. Mining labour hire operations carry high compliance stakes where a hard gate reduces real operational risk. Civil labour hire businesses moving crews between multiple job sites need dispatch, not just scheduling. Industrial staffing businesses with rotating, multi-skilled worker pools benefit from requirement-based shift matching. Security workforce providers need licence currency verified before a guard is ever placed. Cleaning workforce providers managing many small, recurring sites benefit from fast no-show replacement. Healthcare staffing providers filling shifts from a casual or agency pool need qualification checks built into the placement process itself.

Which businesses should choose Deputy?

Businesses whose core need is employee scheduling for a known, relatively stable team are well served by Deputy’s drag-and-drop and demand-forecasting tools. Businesses prioritising time tracking and attendance, especially with facial-recognition or kiosk clock-in, will find Deputy’s options mature and flexible. Businesses needing standard workforce management — leave, availability, shift swaps within an existing team — get solid coverage without needing labour-hire-specific functionality. Shift-based employee management in retail, hospitality, or single/multi-venue healthcare settings, where the workforce doesn’t rotate through varying external compliance requirements, is Deputy’s core strength. If your business can name its full team today and expect it to look broadly similar next month, Deputy’s model fits that reality well.

OnCrew vs Deputy: decision matrix

Real-world scenarios

Scenario 1: construction labour hire agency

A civil labour hire business supplies crews to five active construction sites, each requiring different combinations of white cards, machinery tickets and site inductions. Coordinators currently track ticket expiry in a spreadsheet and phone around when someone doesn’t show. OnCrew’s compliance gate and Smart Fill directly address both pain points — an unqualified worker can’t be booked in the first place, and a no-show triggers an automatic chase and replacement offer. This is close to the scenario OnCrew was purpose-built for.

Scenario 2: retail business

A five-store retail chain needs to roster a known team of 60 staff around predictable weekend and holiday demand, track hours accurately, and keep labour costs within budget. There’s no client-side compliance gating to manage — every worker is a direct employee with the same basic requirements. Deputy’s demand-based auto-scheduling and labour-cost reporting are a strong, arguably sufficient fit here; OnCrew’s dispatch and compliance-gating features would be more capability than the business needs.

Scenario 3: security staffing company

A security firm places licensed guards across a dozen client sites, with shifts that change week to week based on client contracts. Guard licences must be current for the specific site and role. OnCrew’s dispatch model — matching licensed, available guards to shift requirements and blocking placement if a licence has lapsed — maps closely onto this operational reality, while Deputy’s roster-based model assumes a more stable weekly pattern than this business typically has.

Scenario 4: mining labour hire

A mining labour hire provider sends workers to remote sites requiring specific tickets, medicals and site inductions before deployment, with heavy compliance and safety stakes if a gap is missed. The hard compliance gate and automated readiness tracking in OnCrew reduce the operational risk of a manual oversight; a general scheduling tool without credential gating leaves that risk resting entirely on manual checking.

Scenario 5: cleaning workforce

A commercial cleaning company services 40 small sites with recurring nightly shifts and a workforce that changes fairly often due to natural churn. Fast replacement when a cleaner doesn’t show is the single biggest operational pain point. OnCrew’s no-show detection and automated redispatch shorten that gap; Deputy could schedule the recurring shifts but offers less built-in support for the fast-replacement problem specifically.

Migrating from Deputy to OnCrew

Switching platforms is a real project, not a toggle switch. A sensible sequence:

• Audit existing workflows — document how shifts, onboarding and compliance currently work before assuming they’ll map across directly.
• Export existing workforce information — worker records, contacts, stored documentation.
• Review employee/worker records — clean up duplicates rather than migrating as-is.
• Review compliance information — consolidate scattered licence and ticket records, typically the most fragmented data in a manual setup.
• Map existing rosters — recreate recurring shift patterns and site requirements.
• Configure workflows — compliance requirements per site/job, dispatch rules, approval chains.
• Train administrators — on Smart Fill, the compliance gate, and dispatch before go-live.
• Train workers — a short heads-up on the phone-based onboarding flow reduces support queries.
• Test before launch — pilot with one site or client first.
• Run a transition period — keep both systems accessible briefly in case of data gaps.
• Monitor the first few weeks — confirm compliance data migrated correctly and dispatch is filling shifts as expected.

Migration isn’t automatic — the clean-up required depends on how complete your existing data is. Verify this directly with OnCrew before committing to a timeline.

Questions to ask before choosing workforce management software

• Does it support our workforce model — fixed team or fluctuating pool?
• Can it handle casual and temporary workers at the volume we operate at?
• Can it manage multiple sites and multiple clients at once?
• Can it handle labour-hire-specific workflows like dispatch and offer-and-accept?
• Can we track individual worker licences and tickets, with expiry alerts?
• Can compliance actually be enforced, or only flagged after the fact?
• Can we see real-time worker availability across our whole pool?
• Can we fill an urgent shift quickly, without manual phone calls?
• Can supervisors see the workforce information they need, when they need it?
• Does it support the specific industries and compliance requirements we operate under?
• Can it integrate with our existing payroll, accounting, and HR systems?
• Is implementation realistic given our team’s time and technical capacity?
• What is the total cost, including add-ons, minimum spend, and any manual work the software doesn’t remove?

Final verdict: OnCrew vs Deputy

There isn’t a universally “better” platform here — there’s a better fit for your operating model.

Choose OnCrew if your business assembles and re-assembles a workforce across multiple sites or clients, needs licence and ticket compliance enforced rather than just tracked, and needs to fill shifts and cover no-shows quickly from a pool of workers rather than a fixed team. This is the daily reality for most labour hire agencies, and much of construction, mining, civil, security and multi-site healthcare staffing.

Choose Deputy if your business runs a relatively known, stable team at one or more fixed venues, and your priority is efficient scheduling, accurate time tracking, and labour-law compliance around breaks, overtime and fair workweek rules. This describes a large share of retail, hospitality and single-venue healthcare operations well.

The right choice depends on which of those two operating realities actually describes your business — not on which platform has the longer feature list. If your work looks like assembling a compliant crew across shifting client demand, it’s worth exploring OnCrew directly and assessing it against your own workflows before deciding.