On Page Navigation
On Page Navigation
All four platforms here charge by the head, so the bill grows on the day you hire rather than at renewal. What none of them sells is a system your business owns outright, built around the policies you already run, with one company answerable for it afterwards.
Where to start
Most businesses shopping for HR software already know what is not working. Leave balances live in a spreadsheet one person maintains, or onboarding depends on somebody remembering the steps. Those are configuration problems rather than licence problems, and if the answer is a system you own and somebody else runs, what managed Frappe HR actually covers is set out in full.
1
Every platform here charges per employee, and the figure on the pricing page is not the figure you pay. BambooHR at ten dollars a head is two hundred a month at twenty people and eight hundred at eighty. Gusto puts a base fee underneath the per person rate. Rippling meters each module separately and quotes privately. Do that arithmetic at the headcount you expect in two years, not the one on the payroll today.
2
A subscription hands you an empty system and a login. Somebody still has to build the leave policies, the attendance rules, the salary structures and the approval chains, and on every platform here that somebody is you or a consultant you hire separately. It is the work that decides whether anybody trusts the system, and it is the work nobody quotes for. The same gap runs through every comparison we publish.
3
Getting an HR system running is the easy half, and every platform here manages it. What changes afterwards is the bill, and on a per employee model it moves the day somebody starts. Hiring ten people adds a hundred a month to a ten dollar plan and two hundred and fifty to a twenty five dollar one, before any of them has logged in. Ask what a year of ordinary growth does to the figure.
Four platforms, four different meters, and four answers to what you are actually buying.
VS
Five Hundred Thousand Businesses
Base Fee Plus Per Person
Priority Support Costs Extra
Gusto is a payroll company first and it does that job properly, including the federal, state and local filings that Frappe HR does not handle at all. Simple is forty nine dollars a month plus six per person, Plus is eighty plus twelve, and Premium is one hundred and eighty plus twenty two. What sits outside those figures matters as much as what is inside them. Priority support is a thirty dollar add on plus three per person on both lower plans, HR resources is another fifty plus five, and performance reviews are three per person. Two meters before you have bought anything optional.
Learn More
VS
Ten Dollars Per Employee
Payroll Is An Add On
Job Openings Are Capped
BambooHR is the closest thing on this page to what we run, an HR system rather than a payroll bureau, and it publishes real numbers. Core is ten dollars per employee per month, Pro is seventeen and Elite is twenty five, with a flat rate starting at two hundred and fifty a month for teams of twenty five or fewer. Payroll, benefits administration and time tracking are all add ons rather than plan features. The applicant tracker stops at five open jobs on Core and twenty five on Pro, and dedicated support arrives only on Elite. It has been in this market since 2008, and for a good number of businesses it is the right answer.
Learn More
VS
Starts At Eight Per User
Every Module Priced Separately
Quote Only Beyond That
Rippling puts HR, IT and spend management on one platform, and if you are also shipping laptops and provisioning accounts that combination is genuinely hard to match elsewhere. What it does not do is publish a plan price. The site says Rippling starts at eight dollars a month per user, then asks which services you want so it can send a quote. Their own answer on how pricing works is that each product is bought separately alongside the required core platform, most billed per employee per month, some carrying a monthly base fee as well. What you end up paying depends on how many modules you switch on.
Learn More
VS
Built For Hiring Abroad
Five Ninety Nine Per Employee
HRIS Included Free
Deel solves a different problem from the rest of this page. It is built for employing people in countries where you hold no legal entity, and at five hundred and ninety nine dollars per employee per month for employer of record that is fair for what it takes away. Contractor management is forty nine per contractor, their own PEO is ninety five per employee and global payroll is twenty nine. The HRIS comes free with any of those, which tells you where they think the value sits. If your team is in one country and on your own payroll, most of that machinery is not for you.
Learn More
About the service
Managed Frappe HR is not a subscription with our name on the invoice. Your business owns the instance, the employee records and the source code, the leave rules and salary structures are built around the policies you already have, and one company is answerable for the configuration, the Frappe Cloud hosting and the support afterwards. If you are smaller than that and want something switched on this week, our managed Zoho People service is usually the better place to start.
Every platform on this hub prices per employee, which means the comparison changes shape as you hire. At fifteen people the differences are small enough to ignore. At eighty they are the largest line in the HR budget, and the decision you made when you were small is expensive to reverse because the data and the habits have both settled. Work the numbers at the headcount you expect in three years.
The other thing worth noticing is that most of them file United States payroll taxes and we do not. That is a real limit and it is stated on every page in this hub rather than buried. For a lot of businesses the honest answer is one of them plus us, rather than one or the other, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend the categories are cleanly substitutable.
Underneath all of it is a question about who owns the configuration. On a subscription platform the vendor decides what is configurable and the answer changes when they ship. On an open source system you decide, which is more work and more control. Whether that trade is worth making depends on how unusual your business actually is, and most are less unusual than they think.
An HR system switched on changes nothing on its own. Accrual rules, carry over caps, holiday calendars, shift patterns, approval chains and salary structures decide whether anybody believes the leave balance on the screen, and every one of those is a decision rather than a setting. We read the policies you already run before any of it gets configured.
Every platform on this page prices per employee, so growth and the bill are the same event. One thousand a month covers configuration, data migration, payroll setup, training, Frappe Cloud hosting and the support queue, and hiring does not touch it. At twenty people that is more than any subscription here. At a hundred and twenty it is not.
A salary structure that has quietly stopped matching a contract does not announce itself. The payroll run still completes, the slips still look like slips, and the gap turns up when somebody reads their own payslip carefully. Watching the configuration is part of the fee rather than something bought separately afterwards.
What is the best HR software for a small business?
There is no answer that survives contact with your own headcount. What separates these four is the shape of the meter and what sits outside it. BambooHR charges ten to twenty five dollars per employee and sells payroll separately. Gusto puts a base fee under a per person rate and files your payroll taxes. Rippling quotes per module. Deel is priced for employing people abroad. Frappe HR is open source, so the software costs nothing and what you pay for is the work.
How does an HR software decision go wrong?
Rarely on the software. It goes wrong on the configuration, which nobody quotes for. The platform gets bought, a login arrives, and six weeks later the leave balances are still in the spreadsheet because nobody had a spare day to build the accrual rules. The subscription bills the whole time. Ask who is doing that work before you ask what the plan costs.
Who owns the system if you implement it for us?
You do, and on Frappe HR that is a property of the software rather than a clause we agreed to. The instance is yours, the employee records are yours, the source code is open, and every rule we configure stays with you. Stop paying us and the system keeps running. On a subscription the data is exportable, but the software itself stops.
Is it cheaper to just subscribe to one of these?
For most teams under about sixty people, yes, and we would rather say so here than argue around it. BambooHR Core at ten dollars a head is four hundred a month at forty people against our one thousand, and their Pro plan only passes us at around sixty. What none of those figures covers is somebody building the thing and keeping it right, which on their side is either your HR manager giving up evenings or a consultant billed separately.
Which of these platforms publishes a price?
Three of the four, which is better than most software categories manage. BambooHR lists ten, seventeen and twenty five dollars per employee per month plus a flat rate starting at two hundred and fifty under twenty five employees. Gusto lists forty nine, eighty and one hundred and eighty a month plus six, twelve and twenty two per person. Deel lists a figure for each product it sells. Rippling is the exception, publishing a starting point of eight dollars per user and then asking what you want quoted.
What happens when something breaks after go live?
On a subscription the software is supported and the configuration is not, and almost everything that goes wrong is configuration. A leave type accruing against the wrong calendar is not a bug their support desk can fix. Here it is one company and one number, fixes sit inside the fee rather than being quoted for, and when an upstream Frappe HR release changes something that affects you, that is our problem before it is yours.
Do we have to move everything at once?
No, and most people should not. Employee records and leave usually go first, because that is where the spreadsheet hurts and where people notice the difference within a week. Attendance, expense claims, onboarding and performance follow once somebody has defined them properly. Running leave in the new system while payroll stays where it is for a cycle or two is normal rather than a compromise.
Can you take over a Frappe HR instance somebody else set up?
Often, and it is real work rather than a tidy up. We read the leave policies, the holiday lists, the salary components, the attendance settings and every customization somebody added, then say plainly what is worth keeping. Occasionally the honest answer is a clean instance with the employee data migrated across.
How long before the first payroll runs in it?
Three to six weeks for most teams, and longer where several years of leave balances or a complicated shift pattern are in scope. Configuration starts the week we begin, not after a discovery phase that bills separately. What people notice first is rarely the software. It is that nobody is asking HR how many days they have left.
We already have someone technical. What is left for you?
Standing the software up is a morning of work and Frappe Cloud will host it for a modest monthly fee, so if that were the job you would not need us. The time goes into accrual rules, holiday calendars, salary structures and approval chains, and into the awkward cases nobody thinks about first. Unpaid leave part way through a month. A mid cycle salary change. Somebody working two shift patterns.
When should you not hire us for this?
Two cases, and both are common. If you are under twenty people, everybody shares one holiday calendar and nobody argues about leave balances, a spreadsheet is genuinely fine and we will say so. If what you actually need is somebody filing payroll taxes in eleven states, Gusto and Rippling do that and Frappe HR does not, so buy one of those.
What if the software is not our real problem?
We will say so before taking your money, and the fit review costs nothing. A system built around a policy nobody follows only records the mess more precisely. A fair number of these conversations end with a rewritten leave policy, an afternoon of tidying, and no new software at all.
What does this actually cost through you?
Two flat monthly tiers, both listed on the managed Frappe HR page. Standard at one thousand a month covers configuration, data migration, payroll setup, training, Frappe Cloud hosting and ongoing support. Priority at two thousand adds two concurrent requests, faster turnaround and a quarterly planning session. Neither tier counts employees.
What happens if we want to leave?
Thirty days notice ends it and nothing is stranded. The instance, the employee records and the source code were always yours, so there is no migration and nothing to hand back. What stops is us. That is a harder offer for a subscription platform to make, because there the software is the thing that stops.
What do you need from us to start?
Your current leave policy, whatever the employee list lives in now, and an hour with the person who actually answers holiday questions. The walk through takes a few days and costs nothing, and it ends with a plain answer about whether Frappe HR suits the business.
