People · Rostering
VanVed vs Keka
for Rostering
Why businesses choose VanVed over Keka
The scheduling rules here are stricter than the marketing-level comparison suggests: overlap is computed against the real datetime interval a shift occupies, so an overnight shift assigned yesterday correctly blocks an early one today, and that same rule is used by create, bulk assign, copy-week and the swap re-check rather than being reimplemented in four places. The weekly-hours cap can hard-block, and the hours over it become a priced overtime record that reaches payroll in the same product. Keka gates advanced shift rotation behind a paid add-on and publishes no price at all; every rostering feature VanVed has is in the module you switch on.
Capability by capability
Every row below is what our 2026 research found — including the rows we lose.
| Capability | VanVed | Keka |
|---|---|---|
| Building a week | Templates, bulk assign across a date range, and copy last week forward — but no rotation patterns and no auto-assignment | Recurring shifts, rotations and auto-fill by availability and skill — though advanced rotation is a paid add-on, not in any tier |
| Conflict detection | Yes — true overlap that understands overnight shifts, clashes with approved leave, and a per-role headcount shortfall panel | Under-staffing and overlap alerts |
| Shift swapping | Yes — colleague then manager, re-validated at commit | Yes, raised from the mobile app |
| Open shifts staff can claim | None | Yes, auto-filled against availability and skill tags |
| Weekly hours cap that blocks the assignment | Yes, per tenant, warn or block | Rest-period and night-premium rules; no published weekly cap that blocks |
| Labour cost | Never shown — headcount only, no money anywhere in the roster | Overtime-cost dashboards after the fact; no pre-publish budget either |
| Publishing a roster and telling people | Published, logged, and every affected employee notified in-app — by email too where they have opted in, but never by push | Publish and notify |
| Scheduled versus actual | Yes — a per-employee, per-day comparison of the shift they were on against the punches they made | Yes, with shift-fulfilment dashboards |
| Mobile | Read-only week view — no swap, no claim | Swap requests and shift actions from the phone |
Where Keka is ahead of us today
Keka schedules; VanVed assigns. There are no open shifts, no availability, no rotation patterns and no auto-assignment, so a manager places every person on every day by hand or copies last week. Publishing does now notify the people affected. The phone app still shows the week and nothing else, so the people on the roster cannot act on it. And the roster never talks about money: there is no cost of a week before you commit to it, which is the number a multi-site operator schedules against.
We publish this because a comparison that only flatters us is worth nothing to you. If one of these gaps is the thing you actually need, Keka may well be the better buy.
What VanVed's Rostering module does
- Weekly roster
Build and publish a weekly shift roster.
- Shift assignment
Assign employees to shifts.
- Swap requests
Let employees request shift swaps instead of asking a manager directly.
- Templates
Save roster templates for weeks that repeat.