HR and payroll software

HR and payroll software pays employees and contractors, withholds and files payroll taxes, produces W-2s and 1099s at year end, and keeps the employee records around payroll: onboarding paperwork, time off, timesheets and benefits. Small businesses, startups and growing companies use it instead of an accountant or an in-house payroll team. The products differ in what they started as (a payroll service, an HR system, a global hiring platform, a PEO), in how they bill (a base fee plus a price per person, a price per employee, a flat price for small teams, or a quote), and in whether they can also pay people abroad or co-employ your staff through a PEO.

We compare them on the same six indicators, read from each vendor's pricing, security, legal, help center and developer pages:

• Pricing clarity: whether the plan you need has a published price, can be bought without a sales call or quote, runs month to month, and whether the pages leave prices out or contradict each other.
• Free plan and trial: a permanent free plan, a free account you can set up before the first payroll, or a trial and whether it needs a card.
• Price for 10 employees: the monthly cost for 10 employees on US payroll in one state, on the cheapest plan that files and pays payroll taxes, billed monthly, with the arithmetic shown; 0 when the pages cannot price it.
• Who you can pay: multi-state payroll, US contractors, contractors abroad, employees abroad through an employer of record, and a PEO plan, and on which plan each one sits.
• HR tools: time tracking, time-off policies, onboarding with documents signed online, health benefits administration and performance reviews.
• Security, API and data export: the vendor's own SOC 2 Type II report, ISO 27001, two-factor sign-in, a documented API and a self-serve export of payroll records.

How accurate or how quick a payroll run is depends on the data a company enters and its bank, so we do not score it. Each review says which pages it was written from and when. Where we have run a product hands-on, the evidence is on its page.