How we compare HR software
We list 16 HR platforms sold to UK businesses, and 10 providers publish a rate card we can cost from. Where a vendor quotes instead, the table says so rather than showing a figure we invented on its behalf.
The calculator is driven by headcount, because that is the axis nearly every vendor here actually prices on. Ranking is arithmetic on the published rate at the number of employees you enter. We do not sell prominence or placement, and the cheapest row is whatever the arithmetic returns.
Prices are what each vendor publishes to a UK buyer, in pounds. Some are true monthly prices and some are the monthly equivalent of an annual commitment, which is why the billing basis matters as much as the rate.
Working out what HR software costs at 50 employees
The most-asked question in UK HR software search is what a named product costs at a stated headcount, and it has no answer on the vendor's pricing page, because the page publishes a rate while you are asking for a bill. The bill is the rate, your headcount, and whatever the vendor does at the two ends of the range.
Three mechanisms cover almost the whole table.
A straight per-employee rate. Access PeopleHR charges £3/emp/mo against a platform fee of £0, Sage HR charges £5/emp/mo and Factorial From £5.40/emp/mo. Where the platform fee is zero, the bill really is the rate multiplied by the number of people on the system, and it moves by exactly one rate every time you hire.
A flat band covering a range of headcounts. Breathe and CharlieHR both work this way: their per-employee row reads £0 (flat tiers), and the subscription is set by which band you fall into. Breathe's entry band is £24/mo (up to 10) and CharlieHR's is £21/mo (1-4). The consequence is worth being precise about: inside a band, hiring costs you nothing at all, and at the boundary the whole subscription steps up. So the marginal cost of one particular hire is not a seat, it is the gap between two bands, and a business sitting just under a boundary should price the band above it rather than the one it is in.
A monthly floor. BambooHR lists a minimum of £200/mo alongside a per-employee rate of From £8.10/emp/mo. A floor and a rate do not add together. Below the crossover headcount the floor is the entire bill and the rate is irrelevant; above it the rate governs and the floor never applies again. Employment Hero carries a floor too, at £40/mo against £4/emp/mo. Connecteam is a variant of the same idea, where £22/mo (Basic) covers the first 30 users and everyone after that costs £0.37/user/mo above 30. Deel is the counter-example worth knowing about, because it used to work that way and no longer does: its HR rate of £4/emp/mo applies from the first employee, its free plan row reads No, and it lists its minimum as None.
Four things decide whether the figure you calculate is the figure you are invoiced.
Who counts as an employee. Part-timers, seasonal staff and anyone on a career break usually still hold a record, and a record is what most vendors bill for. Leavers you have not archived are billable too. Count the people who need to exist in the system, not the full-time equivalents on your payroll report.
What is a module rather than an inclusion. Recruitment, time tracking, learning and performance are sold separately more often than not. Breathe lists recruitment as Add-on and time tracking as Add-on, while Sage HR lists performance reviews as Module and time tracking as Module. If a module is the reason you are shopping, the entry rate is not your price.
The billing basis. BambooHR lists its contract as Annual and HiBob as Annual, whereas Breathe lists No and Sage HR No. An annual commitment changes what a bad first quarter costs you, and it usually changes the headline rate as well.
Whether a price exists at all. 6 providers in this table quote rather than publish. At fifty employees that group is genuinely in scope, so treat a missing figure as a conversation rather than a disqualification.
Where HR software stops and payroll begins
UK buyers search for HR and payroll as one phrase, and the software does not divide along the same line. HR software owns the employee record: contracts, personal data, holiday balances, absence, documents and reviews. Payroll turns that record into gross-to-net pay and the filings that go with it. The join between the two is a small set of data flows, and it is always the same set: starters and leavers, salary and hours changes, and any absence that alters what somebody is paid.
Vendors sit in one of three positions on that line.
Payroll built in. Employment Hero lists payroll as Native (UK PAYE), HiBob as Native (UK PAYE) and Rippling as Native (UK PAYE). Their auto-enrolment rows read Yes, Yes and Yes respectively, which is the practical test: pension duties live where payroll lives, not where the HR record lives.
Payroll as a paid module or a sister product. Access PeopleHR lists Native (add-on) and handles auto-enrolment Via payroll module. Sage HR lists Via Sage Payroll, so the answer depends on whether you already run the sister product.
Payroll by integration only. Breathe lists Integration, CharlieHR Integration, Factorial Integration and Connecteam No (integration). BambooHR is the clearest case in the table of a capable HR system that is not a UK payroll product: its payroll row reads None (UK) and its auto-enrolment row reads N/A (UK).
If you land in that third group, the question to put to a salesperson is not whether the product integrates with payroll. It is which fields cross, in which direction, and what still has to be typed twice. New starter details and bank details are the two that most often do not cross. Our payroll comparison covers the filing side of the same purchase.
Employment law, right to work and employee data in UK HR software
A system designed for another country can be excellent software and still leave you doing the UK-specific parts by hand.
Statutory leave has to be modelled, not just tracked. Statutory holiday entitlement in the UK is 5.6 weeks, which is 28 days for somebody working a five-day week and may include bank holidays. Leave tracking is table stakes across this table, so the thing to test in a trial is not whether it records holiday but whether accrual, pro-rating for part-timers and irregular hours, and carry-over follow UK statute rather than an American paid-time-off pool.
Right to work is a process, not a document store. Access PeopleHR lists Yes and Personio Yes (share-code), while Breathe and CharlieHR both list Yes (documents) and BambooHR Limited. Filing a scan of a passport is not the same capability as running a share-code check and holding the evidence with a follow-up date on a time-limited permission. If you hire people with visas, that distinction is the whole feature.
Employment law depth means templates and process, not a legal opinion. The rows reading Strong on Breathe, CharlieHR, Sage HR, Access PeopleHR and Personio point at contract templates, probation and notice handling, and structured disciplinary and grievance processes that reflect the Employment Rights Act. BambooHR's equivalent row reads Limited, which is a fair description of a product built for another jurisdiction.
Employee data is the most sensitive data most small businesses hold. Under UK GDPR you are the controller of it, and a subject access request from a departing employee is the moment you find out how your system stores things. Breathe and CharlieHR both list Yes (UK servers) and Factorial lists Yes (ISO 27001). Where the data physically sits matters to some buyers, and it is worth asking before you migrate rather than after.
Support hours are a compliance feature in disguise. Access PeopleHR, Breathe, CharlieHR and Sage HR all list support as UK-based, while BambooHR lists US hours. A question about a dismissal process on a Friday afternoon is not one you want to hold overnight.
The UK HR software vendors buyers shortlist, and what separates them
Search demand here is vendor against vendor rather than category-level, and the shortlists fall into four recognisable groups.
UK-built tools for small businesses. Breathe, CharlieHR, Sage HR and Access PeopleHR all list their origin as United Kingdom. Breathe and CharlieHR price in flat bands per business, which suits a stable headcount and punishes a lumpy one. Access PeopleHR and Sage HR price per employee and sell more of the surrounding modules: Access PeopleHR lists recruitment as Yes and Sage HR as Add-on.
European and international HR platforms. Factorial is from Spain, Personio from Germany and HiBob from Israel. These are broader systems aimed at businesses that are scaling. Personio lists recruitment as Yes (strong), which is the reason it usually appears on a shortlist. HiBob runs UK payroll natively but does not publish a rate, so it can only be compared on capability here.
Deskless and shift-based teams. Connecteam is the outlier in the table because it is priced per hub rather than per person, and it is built for staff who do not sit at a desk. Its time tracking reads Yes (Operations Hub), learning Yes and recruitment No. Hospitality, retail and trades businesses usually want a rota and a time clock more than they want a performance module.
Cross-border employment. Deel lists global hiring as Yes (150+ countries), Oyster HR as Yes (EOR in 120+ countries, contractors in 180+) and Payoneer Workforce Management as Yes (EOR, AOR and contractors in 160+ countries; payroll in 70+ currencies). These are not really competing on HR software pricing at all: their published Employer of Record rates run £448/emp/mo on Deel, £522/emp/mo on Oyster HR and £149/emp/mo (from) on Payoneer Workforce Management, which is a different order of spend for a different problem. If everybody you employ is in the UK, this group is not your shortlist.
One row cuts across all four groups. Check that your ledger and your payroll system appear on the integration list before you shortlist anything: Rippling lists Xero, QBO, Slack, 650+, Personio lists Slack, Xero, 200+, Breathe lists Xero, Sage, QBO, Slack and Sage HR lists Sage Payroll, Slack. A tool that cannot reach your accounts is a tool somebody will be rekeying out of.
Outgrowing small-business HR software without overbuying
The two ways buyers get this wrong are mirror images, and both are avoidable by pricing the business you expect to be in a year rather than the one you are in today.
Outgrowing shows up in three places at once. The flat-band products publish a top band, and above it you are in a quote conversation or a migration. The modules you skipped at purchase become the reason you are shopping again, because recruitment, performance and learning are add-ons on much of the cheap end. And a business crossing into a second country needs employment capability its HR system was never built to provide.
Overbuying is quieter and more expensive. A quote-only mid-market platform sold on analytics and workflow is a genuinely good product that a fifteen-person business will use about a fifth of, and the floor mechanism means small teams pay near the minimum regardless of how few records they hold.
If you have under about ten employees, a shared drive and a spreadsheet honestly do cover holiday and documents, and you probably do not need this category yet. What forces the purchase is rarely headcount on its own. It is a specific event: an absence dispute nobody can evidence, a subject access request, a handbook nobody can find the current version of, or the first hire who needs a right-to-work check with an expiry date attached.
When the purchase does come, two practical points survive every shortlist. Ask what your data export looks like on the way out, because an HR system holds records you are obliged to keep long after you stop paying for the software. And enter your real headcount into the calculator rather than reading the entry figure off the table: on most of this list that figure is the bottom of a ladder, not a price.