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.

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.

Love how it integrates with slack, very user friendly and like all the videos available

When you need to make an amendment sometimes it’s not so intuitive, like amending staff working schedule part way through year, then it requires customer support. I think just a few more FAQ videos would avoid this.

Everyone in Greece is sarcastic and loughs when he/she hears your brand name.

Absense, time management, breaks control

Everything is automated and flows easily thru the Calamari system. Integration with Outlook is also very valuable.

It was a little bit of a chore to get employee’s PTO hours set up correctly. But, after a few interactions with support and getting used to it, it was fine.

Ease of use day to day. Support very helpful.

iBeacons hit and miss but was advised recently that the code base has been re-written so hoping for improvements in this area.

The easy to manage employees vacation requests and to track time. Have a mobile app that help do some task on the go.

It is missing a MacOS and Windows app. For most of the task the web app is enough but it will be great to have a mac/windows app that is faster and can include some extra features such as:- Push notification- Task bar icon that you can see the time tracking status and also ability to start and stop time directly from the task bar. So, you don't need to open the web app just to start the time or to check if you have already started or not. Since I am a developer myself, I have done a small extension that will show an icon on the task bar that indicates if I have started the timer or not. Also, you can start, pause, resume and stop timer from there.

The setup is very quickly done and fairly easy if you know your requirements. The integration with google calender is critical and works very well.

the scheduling function for shifts could be even more flexible in terms of automation. I would love to have employees automatically login to their shifts. break automation rules should be flexible per day.

Calamari is affordable and does a fantastic job of keeping track of our employee vacation days and time off. It was very easy to set up, simple to add or remove users and integrates wonderfully with google calendars. It's easy to make changes to it and simple for our employees to use

I can't think of a negative thing to say about it.

It is user-friendly. We saved lots of time!Excellent customer service team! Calamari support is always there for you if you have questions or need additional guidance. Slack integration works great. We had a channel with daily reports on absence from Calamari, it was very useful.

No disadvantages regarding absence management features :)

- 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 :)

Simple and easy way to track daily time for each employee without the need to track time based on projects (micro-management). It took less than 48 hours to install set up all the structure. The overview for the holiday and PTO is also perfect and helps a lot everyone to schedule is time-off/holiday.

You need to understand the way that the platform is working to use it at his full potential. Missing a connexion with the Calamari Agenda and our Mac Agenda. So far, we need to update manually our booking calendar and the Calamari calendar.

We use mainly the time tracking and leave management features, and it works well.

I would like to have a feature to evaluate work performance for employees.

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.

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.

This software/too is super easy to implement, and even if you have specific cases hard to configure at first sight, the Support Team is kind, efficient, quick and offer as much time as you need to solve your issues. Moreover, our employees are 90% of the time immediately independent to use it.

Some features needs to be developed faster, but Calamari is more and more efficient

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.

it is very user friendly and easy to use for all employees even those who are not that friendly to technology. I also like the reporting of this software, it is one click and very fast way of getting your data.

i am very happy with all the functionalities of Calamari. It is very user friendly and to train employees on how to use it it is fast and smooth. I don't have cons.

The product has allowed us to bring our clocking in system alongside our Holiday requests, it gives us a better overview of which staff are working and when. The timesheet feature allows us to easily work out hours worked at the end of each month so that payroll becomes much easier to control. Having the ability to export to excel makes reporting simpler and less time consuming.

We would like to be able to set up shift patterns for staff on a rolling basis. Some staff members will work different shifts each week so rather than a project A or B we would like to see multiple shift patterns to click on to clock in and email notifications to be sent to management should staff members be late or not attend a shift.

ease of implementation, good contact with support, ease of use, mobile version , integration with Slack, Google Suite, Jira, ease of renewing the subscription, the development of the application functionalities

I only miss one functionality - the automation of moving approved hours/days from one absence type to another

We like that we modify easily how leave accruals are earned as well as the time tracking and leave management.

Editing a timesheet is a pain and takes a lot of time.

Very easy to use and it's user friendly. Perfect software for our company esp. to keep track of both PTO and PSL requests. It was very easy to learn on how to use this and easy to set up.

It doesn't integrate with ADP for PSL leave so I have to update the PSL hours manually every month.

Policies for determining the number of days off, the possibility of using various acceptance flows, and great preparation for Polish labor law - are really great elements of Calamari.

I will write it again - calendar view .... It is impossible to describe how bad, illegible and useless this element is. I haven't seen anything like this for many years - it looks like from Windows 98. With over 30 people in the team, it practically does not provide any meaningful functionality. Please, PLEASE do something with that. Just take o look at ANY OTHER software using calendar view, and change yours.

Easy, quick to learn, possibility to change different kind of project during the day.

I cannot automatically set the clock to the nearest quarter of an hour more when the employee arrives late in the morning or in the end of the day. Example, 8:03 should be automatically shifted to 8:15 or 17:38 --> 17:30

We love Calamari! From new users who find the interface very simple to use from administrators who can customize teams, approval flows, weekly schedules, accruing PTO, and reporting, Calamari does it all! There are always new updates which we are loving and find them super easy to implement and make our experience even better. Highly recommend this product!

The only improvement that I would suggest would be to allow the employee list to be sorted by your preference. Such as the ability to put the last name first; Smith, John.