Deputy vs Fourth for a Restaurant Group: Which Rota System Fits?
An honest comparison of Deputy and Fourth for restaurant group rotas: who each is built for, how they price, what they cover, and where compliance software sits beside them.
Fourth is the enterprise choice: workforce, HR, payroll, inventory and rotas in one suite, sold by quote to larger groups with a head office to run it. Deputy is the mid-size choice: rota, time clock and leave, priced per user with a published rate, live in days. Neither does food safety compliance, so most groups run one of them beside a compliance platform such as Paddl, which also carries a per-site rota for groups that want one system.
Key Facts
In Detail
Deputy and Fourth answer the same question for different sizes of business. Fourth (Fourth Hospitality) is a hospitality workforce suite built for large operators: scheduling, time and attendance, HR, payroll, inventory and purchasing, with integrations to the enterprise EPOS stacks. It is bought by groups with a people team and an IT function, implemented as a project, and priced by quote. Deputy is a scheduling and time-and-attendance product used across many industries, with a published per-user price, self-serve setup, and the mobile shift-swap and leave features that hospitality staff actually use. A group of 5 to 30 restaurants is typically Deputy's customer; a group of 50 to 500 is Fourth's. What neither does is compliance. The rota tells you who was on shift; it does not tell you whether the fridge log was done, whether the person on the fryer has a current Level 2, or what the EHO will see at site 12 tomorrow. Most groups therefore run a rota product beside a compliance platform, and the questions worth asking are whether the two can share staff and sites and whether your managers will tolerate two apps. Paddl sits on the compliance side of that line and is deliberately not an enterprise workforce suite. It does carry a rota per site, with shifts, open shifts, swaps, leave and timesheets, so a group that wants one login for compliance and scheduling can have it, and its training records answer the "who is qualified to be on this shift" question that rota tools leave open. A group already on Fourth or Deputy keeps them and adds Paddl for the compliance layer; a group choosing for the first time can run rotas in Paddl and avoid a second system. Rotas in Paddl are per site, so staff are scheduled at their own location.
When Fourth is the right call
Fifty sites or more, a central payroll team, tronc across the estate, demand-based scheduling tied to EPOS sales data, and the appetite for an implementation. Fourth is built for that and its integrations with the large hospitality EPOS and finance stacks are the reason groups choose it. It is expensive and slow to change, which is the price of that depth.
When Deputy is the right call
A group that needs rotas published from a phone, shift swaps staff can do themselves, a time clock and leave requests, at a price it can read on a website, live this week. Deputy does that well for a group of a handful to a few dozen sites. It is not hospitality-specific, so anything about food safety or training compliance lives elsewhere.
Where Paddl fits
Paddl is the compliance and operations layer for the sites: daily checks, HACCP and SFBB, allergens, training records with expiry, licences and insurance per site, a daily compliance score and an audit pack. Its rota is per site and covers shifts, open shifts, swaps, leave, timesheets and labour cost against sales for that site. A group on Fourth or Deputy adds Paddl for compliance; a smaller group can run both jobs in Paddl. Paddl does not do payroll or cross-site scheduling, and does not try to.
Deputy, Fourth and Paddl for a restaurant group
| Deputy | Fourth | Paddl | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Built for | Mid-size groups, many industries | Large hospitality groups | UK hospitality, 1 to 100 sites |
| Price | Published, per user per month | Quote | £69 per site per month, published |
| Rota, swaps, leave, time clock | Yes | Yes | Yes, per site |
| Payroll and HR | Integrations | Yes | No |
| Food safety, HACCP, SFBB, allergens | No | No | Yes |
| Training records with expiry per site | No | Partly (HR) | Yes |
| Daily compliance score per site, audit pack | No | No | Yes |
| Time to live | Days | Months | Days |
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a restaurant group use Paddl and Fourth together?
Yes. Fourth runs the workforce and payroll side, Paddl runs the compliance side per site. There is no live integration between them today, so staff lists are maintained in both.
Does Paddl replace Deputy?
For a group that wants one login, Paddl's per-site rota covers shifts, open shifts, swaps, leave and timesheets. It does not schedule staff across sites or run payroll, so a group that needs those keeps Deputy or Fourth.
Which is cheaper for a 10-site restaurant group?
Deputy publishes a per-user monthly price, so the cost scales with headcount; Fourth is quote-based. Paddl is £690 a month for 10 sites with every feature, including the rota, so for a group of that size it is usually the lowest total if it replaces the rota tool.
Run every site to the same standard
Start a trial with your site count already set, or book a 30-minute group demo and see it with your numbers.