Four HR Platforms Compared, and Why Cascadia Runs Yours for You

Start with what each one does well and what you need done. Personio names two plans and publishes a full feature table. Paylocity describes every module it sells in detail. ADP Workforce Now marks which of its three packages each capability lands in. Paycor organizes its offer by company size. Then compare them at your own headcount, and ask who will configure the system and keep it current after go live.

Rarely on the software. It goes wrong on the policy, which no license includes. The platform gets bought, each manager approves leave the way they always did, and nine months later the system says one thing, the handbook says another, and an employee has noticed. The license bills the whole time. Ask who is writing the rules the system will enforce before you ask what it costs.

You do, and it is not a clause we negotiated for you. The Zoho account is in your name and billed to you, we do not resell the licenses, and every policy, workflow, form, and report we build stays inside it. Stop paying us and nothing switches off. That matters more with employee records than with most systems, because the obligation to hold them correctly stays with you no matter who configured the thing.

It depends on your headcount and what you need. For a very small employer the answer is almost certainly yes, and that if you need American payroll filed for you then three of the four are doing a job we do not do at all. What a software license will not include is somebody writing the leave policy, keeping the approvals matched to who actually works here now, and maintaining it after the implementation consultant has gone.

Personio names Core and CorePro and publishes a full comparison table, with a one-time setup fee that depends on company size. Paylocity documents every module in detail, so you can start with what you need and add more later. ADP Workforce Now spreads roughly seventy capabilities across three packages and runs payroll inside them. Paycor organizes its offer by company size and brings recruiting, payroll, and benefits together. What none of them includes is a team that runs the HR system for you, which is what our fee covers.

On a license the software is supported and the configuration is not, and almost everything that goes wrong is configuration. A leave rule accruing at the wrong rate for one office is not a bug their support desk can fix, because somebody chose that setting. Here it is one company and one published monthly plan, fixes come out of your monthly hours rather than being quoted for, and when Zoho ships a change that breaks a workflow you depend on, that is our problem before it is yours.

No, and most should not. The usual order is the active employee records and the leave balances first, because those are the two things people notice immediately if they are wrong. Onboarding workflows and review cycles follow once the records are trusted. Historic files for people who have left can be imported later or held where they are, subject to whatever retention rule you are working to. Moving everything on the same Monday is how a payroll cutoff gets missed.

Often, and it is real work rather than a tidy up. We read the employee forms, the leave types and accrual rules, the approval chains, the onboarding checklists, and the automations nobody remembers writing, then say plainly what is worth keeping. Leave balances get checked against what people believe they have, because that is where inherited systems are usually wrong and where being wrong costs the most.

Four to eight weeks for most businesses, and longer where attendance, timesheets, and review cycles are all in scope. The records and the leave rules come first, then the workflows, then the reporting that makes the whole thing worth having. Configuration starts the week we begin rather than after a discovery phase that bills separately. What people notice first is rarely the software. It is that nobody is arguing about leave balances any more.

Quite possibly nothing, and that is a fine answer. A good HR manager who owns the policy is most of this. Where we tend to be useful alongside one is the parts that are not HR work at all: the form and field design, the approval logic, the integration into the rest of Zoho so a new hire reaches the systems they need on day one, the reporting that answers what the owner keeps asking, and the automations nobody has time to maintain. Plenty of clients keep their HR manager and hire us for the system around them.

Two cases, and both are common. If you need American payroll run and filed, that is the job three of these four do and we do not, so buy one of them. And if you employ six people who all sit in one room, an HR platform of any kind is probably solving a problem you do not have yet, and a shared calendar plus a written leave policy will hold for another year.

We will say so before taking your money. HR functions that feel chaotic are usually chaotic because the policy was never written down properly, not because the system is slow. A fair number of these conversations end with a rewritten handbook, one person made responsible for approvals, and no new software at all.

One published monthly plan, from $250 a month and priced by hours of Zoho work rather than by users. It covers the employee record structure, onboarding and offboarding workflows, attendance and leave, timesheets, performance review cycles, document compliance, and integration with the rest of your Zoho environment. Your Zoho licenses sit outside that and are billed to you by Zoho, because we do not resell them. Nothing in our figure moves when you hire somebody.

Cancel any time and the service runs to the last business day of that month. There are no partial refunds. Nothing is stranded. The Zoho account, the employee records, and the leave history were always yours and always billed to you, so there is no migration and nothing to hand back. What stops is us. Payroll cutoffs, leave approvals, and onboarding carry on exactly as they did the day before, which where people’s pay and time off are concerned is the only acceptable answer.

Wherever employee records live now, read access to them, your current leave policy in whatever state it is in, and an hour with whoever people actually ask when they have a question. Once you sign up, we start by reviewing what you have, and you get a plain answer about whether Zoho People suits the business or whether you are better off where you are.