Question 1

What is a Deel alternative?

Accepted Answer

Anything that holds the employee record and runs the processes around it. That covers the other platforms on this hub such as Gusto, BambooHR and Rippling, the payroll bureaus most companies start with, and open source HR systems like Frappe HR. Deel reaches furthest into employment itself, because it will become the legal employer rather than merely record one. The useful question is rarely the feature list. It is whether the employment problem or the process problem is the one you actually have.

Question 2

How is Cascadia different from Deel?

Accepted Answer

Deel is an employment company with an HR system attached. We are an HR system with people attached. They will hire, pay and keep compliant somebody in a country where you have no entity, and hand you the HRIS free while they do it. We reshape leave rules, shift patterns, approval chains and appraisal cycles around how you already work, host the result on Frappe Cloud and support it afterwards. If employment across borders is the problem, they are the answer. If the process is the problem, we are.

Question 3

How does your price compare to theirs, honestly?

Accepted Answer

We are one thousand a month for Standard and two thousand for Priority. Deel's HR system is free, so on that line alone they win outright and it is not close. What is not free is the product it comes attached to. Employer of record is five hundred and ninety nine per person per month, contractor management forty nine per contractor, contractor of record from three hundred and twenty five, the PEO ninety five and global payroll twenty nine. If you already need one of those, the HR system is a bonus. If you do not, it is a reason to buy something you were not otherwise buying.

Question 4

Is Deel cheaper than this?

Accepted Answer

On the HR system itself, yes, and by the full thousand a month. That is the honest answer and we are not going to dress it up. Where it stops being cheaper is at the point the system has to do something it does not do out of the box, because then the choice is between bending your process to suit the software or paying somebody to bend the software. We are the second of those. Plenty of companies are better served by the first.

Question 5

Does Frappe HR file our payroll taxes?

Accepted Answer

No, and it is the most important limit on this page. Frappe HR does not calculate or file United States payroll taxes and no amount of configuration changes that. It ships a complete India payroll module and handles salary structures, payslips and payroll entries in general, but federal, state and local filings are not in it. Deel does file them, with registration support in all fifty states and automated W-2, W-4 and 1099 handling. Most of our United States clients keep a payroll provider for the filing and run Frappe HR for the record, the leave, the attendance and the appraisals.

Question 6

Why not install Frappe HR and run it ourselves?

Accepted Answer

You can, and there is nothing to license. Frappe Cloud will host it for a modest monthly fee, so the software and the server were always the cheap part. The install is not the hard bit and never was. Leave accrual, holiday calendars, shift types, salary structures and approval workflows are the hard bit, and they want somebody who has built them before rather than somebody opening the documentation for the first time.

Question 7

Should we buy this at all?

Accepted Answer

Often not, and now is a far better time to establish that than month six. If you are hiring abroad, running contractors across several currencies, or you want somebody else filing your payroll, Deel is the sensible purchase and the free HR system probably settles it. The fit review exists to reach that conclusion honestly rather than to sell past it.

Question 8

Do we have to migrate everything at once?

Accepted Answer

No. Employee records and leave normally go first, because that is usually where the pain is and where the benefit shows up soonest. Attendance, shifts, recruitment or appraisals follow when they are ready. Running Frappe HR alongside your current system for a while is normal rather than a compromise, and it is how most migrations actually happen.

Question 9

Does anything break while you take over?

Accepted Answer

Nothing on your side goes dark and payroll in particular stays untouched. Whatever files your returns carries on filing them throughout. Your existing system keeps running until the balances in Frappe HR reconcile against it, nobody switches while the two still disagree, and the migration runs against a copy first.

Question 10

What if we already run Frappe HR and it was set up badly?

Accepted Answer

That is a common way people arrive here, and the work is rebuilding rather than tidying. We read the leave policies, holiday lists, shift types, salary structures, approval workflows and every customization anybody added, then say what survives and what should be rebuilt. Often enough the honest answer is a fresh instance with the data brought across.

Question 11

Do you own the system or the data?

Accepted Answer

No to both. Frappe HR is open source, so the software is nobody's property to withhold. The instance is yours, the database is yours, and every leave policy, salary structure and custom field we build is yours. Stop paying us and it carries on running, which is not something anybody can say about a hosted seat.

Question 12

What is included at each tier?

Accepted Answer

Two flat tiers with no meter behind either of them. Standard at one thousand covers implementation, configuration, migration, training, customization, development, Frappe Cloud hosting and ongoing support. Priority at two thousand adds two active requests at a time, faster turnaround and a quarterly review. Neither tier counts employees, modules or pay runs, and no feature is withheld from the lower one.

Question 13

Do you guarantee the implementation will go to plan?

Accepted Answer

No, and be wary of anybody who does. A migration turns up leave balances that never reconciled, a policy nobody documented behaves differently in month two, and a real requirement surfaces late. What we do guarantee is that the price does not move when any of that happens, and that nothing you discover puts you on a different arrangement.

Question 14

What does the monthly report actually contain?

Accepted Answer

What changed in the system, what we built or configured during the month, what is still fragile and what we intend to do about it. Anything in the upstream Frappe HR release notes that will reach you goes in too. It runs on a rolling month rather than a calendar one, so it arrives on the anniversary of your start date.

Question 15

How long before we see a difference?

Accepted Answer

Four to eight weeks to a first complete cycle in most cases, longer where years of attendance history or a complicated salary structure are in scope. What people notice first is usually not the software at all. It is that nobody is chasing a form around the building to find out who approved what.

Question 16

What if I want to leave?

Accepted Answer

Thirty days notice ends it and nothing is stranded. The instance, the database and every configuration were always yours, so there is nothing to export and nothing to hand back. What stops is us. You would need somebody else for the work we were doing, and the system itself carries on running either way.

A Deel Alternative For When The HR System Is The Job

The HR system really is free, and that is not a trick

The free part requires you to be buying the paid part

Everything Deel sells is priced per person, every month

Cascadia

Without Cascadia

The monthly figure does not move when the headcount does

The HR system stands alone, with no employment product bought alongside it

Configuration, migration, training and support all inside the one figure

Direct access to the database underneath, for reporting nobody anticipated

Behaviour changed by writing code rather than choosing from a settings menu

Whoever built the accrual rule is who answers when it misfires

Source code you can read, change, and keep running without us

One database holding the employee, the timesheet, the project and the invoice

Being told plainly when the other product is the better purchase

A cost that stays flat when twenty more contractors join next quarter

Where Deel fits

Where a free HR system stops being the cheaper one

Where Deel is strong

What one thousand a month buys that a free HR system does not

What the first sixty days look like when the system is built to fit

Nothing is built until somebody has read how the policies really operate

Data comes across, then reconciles before anybody is asked to trust it

Only the modules you will actually use get switched on

A full cycle runs inside it before anybody signs anything off

Don't Take Our Word For It

The HR system was free and the thing holding it up was not

The policy would not go into the system, so the policy changed

Dollars a month, with the build, the migration and the support already in it

Dollars of software licence, with nothing you must buy alongside it

Weeks in most cases before a full cycle runs inside Frappe HR

Deel alternative and managed Frappe HR FAQs

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