All three answer "who is off, since when, and how many days do they have left". Vacation Tracker is a Slack-native PTO app; BambooHR is a full HR suite where leave is one module among time-off, payroll and records; ours is a local MCP server where an employee requests leave and a manager approves it, and balances, the who-is-out view and a calendar export are computed from the same ledger. The suite and the Slack app live in the cloud and reach the whole team; ours keeps the ledger on your machine and answers in the client you already have open.
| Fact | Ours | Vacation Tracker | BambooHR |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it tracks | Employees, leave requests with half-days, approve/reject with a note, per-type balances, an out-range view and lists | PTO requests and approvals in Slack, leave types, per-department calendars and Slack reminders | Time-off requests with policies and accruals inside a full HR record (payroll, benefits, files) |
| Approval flow | Requests pending until leave_approve or leave_reject; a balance snapshot is frozen at approval | Approvals happen in Slack with configurable approvers and notifications | Multi-level approvals routed per policy in the HR system |
| Balances | leave_balance per employee per leave type, integer days, computed from the ledger | Automatic per leave type, visible in Slack | Accrual policies compute balances per policy year |
| Network | No network. Local files under your data directory | Cloud; Slack integration | Cloud |
| Install/entry path | One-click leave.mcpb bundle or a hosted URL from /mcp/connect. No account, no key | Install from the Slack Marketplace; free plan for unlimited team sizes | Cloud sign-up; flat monthly rate up to 25 employees |
| Price | Requests, approvals, balances, out view and lists free and unlimited; Pro $19 once for import and the .ics export | Free plan (unlimited team size); paid Core and Complete tiers above it | Core $10, Pro $17, Elite $25 USD per employee/month; flat rate at 25 employees or fewer |
| Licence | MIT | Proprietary | Proprietary |
Pick Vacation Tracker if your team already lives in Slack and you want requests and reminders to happen where they chat; its free plan covers unlimited team sizes and its paid tiers add leave types and reporting. Pick BambooHR when leave must sit in the same system as payroll, benefits and employee records, with per-policy accruals; pricing is per employee per month ($10 Core, $17 Pro, $25 Elite), with a flat rate for 25 employees or fewer.
Pick ours when you want the leave ledger where the work happens and no employee data in another cloud account. A request, an approval with a note, a balance and a who-is-out answer are all one tool call from any MCP client, free and unlimited, and the .ics calendar export on Pro feeds the calendar you already keep. It suits a single operator or a small firm that has decided against per-employee HR pricing: $19 once, not $10 per head per month.
Ours, one click: download leave.mcpb from
the latest release and open it in Claude Desktop. No JSON, no terminal.
Or by URL, with nothing installed. /mcp/connect mints a free token and prints the ready line:
claude mcp add --transport http leave https://mcp.zovo.one/mcp/leave/t/<token>The npm package is not published yet, so the line below returns a 404 today. It is here because it is what the config becomes the day that changes:
claude mcp add leave -- npx -y @theluckystrike/mcp-leaveExact config file paths per client are on the setup pages.
Vacation Tracker is designed around Slack; BambooHR is a web product. Ours runs in any MCP client, including ones with no UI at all, and keeps the ledger local.
Vacation Tracker has a free plan for unlimited team sizes, with paid Core and Complete tiers above it. BambooHR has no free tier. Ours is free and unlimited for the whole request/approve/balance flow; Pro $19 once adds only bulk import and the calendar export.
Vacation Tracker supports partial days per its own material; BambooHR handles partial-day time off inside its time-off module. Ours models a half day as date plus half (am or pm) on the request itself.
Vacation Tracker's plans are at vacationtracker.io/pricing and its Slack listing is on the Slack Marketplace; BambooHR pricing is at bamboohr.com/pricing. All read on 2026-09-19.
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