Most HR software for small business is priced two ways at once: a monthly base fee plus a per-employee rate. Comparisons quote one number and skip the other, which is why the quotes you get back never match the article you read.
Gusto is "$6 per person" — and $49 a month before the first employee. OnPay is "$6 per worker" — and $49 base. Eddy's Starter is $4 a person plus $50. At ten employees, the base fee is roughly half your bill.
This guide prices every platform at real headcounts, states which free tiers are genuinely usable, and flags the two products that comparison articles still list as live but aren't. Every figure comes from the vendor's own pricing page, verified September 2026.
TL;DR — What You'll Actually Pay
Genuinely free tiers
- Zoho People — free up to 5 users. The most complete free HRIS here.
- Homebase — free for 1 location and up to 10 employees. Scheduling and time tracking.
- OrangeHRM Starter — free and open source, no user cap. Onboarding and payroll are paid.
- Jibble — free forever, unlimited users. Time tracking only.
Payroll-led, base fee plus per person
- Gusto — $49/month + $6 per person. Simple tier.
- OnPay — $49/month + $6 per worker. Single plan, everything included.
- ADP RUN — not published on the packages page. Quote only.
Full HRIS
- BambooHR — $10/employee/month Core; flat from $250/month under 25 employees.
- Eddy — $4/person + $50/month base. Built for hourly teams.
- Rippling — $8/user/month platform floor, modules on top.
- Factorial — from $8/user/month; higher tiers quoted.
- Personio — not published. 12-month minimum plus a setup fee.
PEO — you're outsourcing employment, not buying software
- Justworks — Payroll $8/employee + $50 base; PEO Basic $79/employee/month.
- TriNet — not published, quote only.
The Base Fee Nobody Puts in the Comparison
Per-employee pricing sounds proportional. It isn't, because most small-business HR platforms charge a fixed monthly fee first.
At 10 employees, monthly:
- Zoho People: $0 free to 5 users; $60 on the US Talent tier, or $35 on the global Premium tier
- Eddy Starter: $90 — $50 base + $40
- Gusto Simple: $109 — $49 base + $60
- OnPay: $109 — $49 base + $60
- BambooHR: $250 — the flat rate under 25 employees
- Justworks PEO Basic: $790
At 50 employees, monthly:
- Eddy Starter: $250
- Gusto Simple: $349
- OnPay: $349
- BambooHR Core: $500
- Justworks PEO Basic: $3,950
The pattern: base fees dominate below about 20 people, per-employee rates dominate above it. BambooHR's flat $250 is poor value at 8 employees and good value at 24. Run your own headcount before you compare anything — the ranking changes completely between those two numbers.
Genuinely Free HR Software
Free is a real option at this size, but every free tier has a wall. Here's where each one hits it.
1. Zoho People — Best Free HR Software Overall
Zoho People's free plan is the most complete on this list: a real HRIS with employee records, leave management and self-service for up to five users.
Free tier: Up to 5 users, 30-day trial of paid features, no credit card.
Paid: Geo-split, and the difference is large. Globally, Essential HR is $1.50/user/month ($1.25 annually) and performance sits in Premium at $3.50 ($3.00). In the US, Essential HR is $4 ($3) and performance requires Talent at $6 ($5). Five-user minimum.
Best for: Companies under 5 people wanting a proper system, and cost-sensitive teams outside the US.
Watch out for: US pricing is roughly double the global lineup. Performance is not in the cheapest tier despite what several comparison sites claim.
2. Homebase — Best Free Option for Shift Teams
If your team clocks in and out, Homebase's free tier does the job properly rather than teasing you toward an upgrade.
Free tier: $0 for 1 location and up to 10 employees — both caps apply. Includes basic scheduling, time tracking, POS integrations, job posts with applicant tracking, and the employee mobile app.
Paid: Essentials $30/location/month ($24 annually), Plus $70/$56, All-in-One $120/$96 — priced per location with unlimited employees from Essentials up. Payroll is a separate add-on at $39/month + $6 per paid employee.
Best for: Restaurants, retail and services with one location and ten or fewer staff.
Watch out for: PTO and time-off tracking is Plus. Onboarding and HR compliance are All-in-One. Payroll is never free.
3. OrangeHRM Starter — Best Open-Source Option
OrangeHRM's free edition is genuinely free with no user cap, available self-hosted or on their cloud, and covers more than most paid entry tiers.
Free tier: Employee database and profiles, directory, custom roles and reports, job posting with careers site, leave requests with approval workflows, clock in/out, timesheets, and 360° reviews. Support is community forum only.
Paid (Advanced): Not published. Per-employee-per-month and modular, quoted only. 30-day trial.
Best for: Technically comfortable teams that want a full HRIS at zero licence cost.
Watch out for: The paid wall is wide — onboarding and offboarding, shift scheduling, payroll integrations, PTO accruals, org chart, e-signatures, report exports, MFA, goals and 9-box are all paid. You'll also be maintaining it yourself.
4. Jibble — Best Free Time Tracking
Jibble is narrow and honest about it: free forever, unlimited users, for time and attendance.
Free tier: Unlimited users, mobile and web clock-in, basic timesheets, Slack, Teams and QuickBooks integrations.
Paid: Not published — Jibble removed its pricing page entirely. Paid tiers are in-app or quoted, and the free-versus-premium feature matrix is no longer public either.
Best for: Teams that only need attendance tracking and want it free at any headcount.
Watch out for: Not an HRIS. And with no published feature matrix, you can't tell in advance which features sit behind the paywall.
Payroll-Led Platforms
5. Gusto — Best for Most US Small Businesses
Gusto is the strongest all-round pick under 100 employees: payroll, benefits, onboarding and compliance in one place, with an interface people actually like.
Key features: Full-service payroll with tax filing, benefits administration, onboarding checklists and offer letters, e-signature, time tracking, employee self-service.
Pricing: Simple $49/month + $6 per person. Plus $80 + $12; Premium $180 + $22. Month-to-month, no minimum. Performance is a $3/person add-on. You pay nothing until you run payroll.
Best for: US companies of 5–100 that need payroll and HR together.
Watch out for: Custom document signing — bespoke offer letters and handbooks — is flagged as a higher-plan feature. G2 4.6 from 12,786 reviews, the strongest validation here.
6. OnPay — Best Value Single-Plan Payroll
OnPay has one plan with everything in it, which removes the tier-guessing that makes this category tedious.
Key features: Unlimited pay runs, all federal, state and local tax filings, W-2s and 1099s, multi-state payroll, benefits administration, free setup and data migration.
Pricing: $49/month + $6 per worker. One plan. Add-ons: HR +$15 base +$2/worker; Compliance Resources +$10; Live HR Support +$75. First month free.
Best for: Small businesses that want complete payroll without tier management.
Watch out for: HR features beyond payroll are add-ons. G2 4.8 from 415 reviews — the highest score in this guide.
7. ADP RUN — Best for Complex Compliance
ADP RUN is built for 1–49 employees and brings the compliance depth of the largest payroll provider in the US.
Key features: Payroll and tax filing, HR support, compliance monitoring, benefits, employee self-service, extensive integrations.
Pricing: Not published on the packages page — every tier ends in "Get Pricing." ADP does publish "as low as $39/month plus $5 per employee" in an article dated November 2025, but not as a current list price. Treat it as a floor, not a quote.
Best for: Businesses in complex regulatory environments, or multi-state employers.
Watch out for: No published pricing means a sales call before you can compare. G2 4.7 from 6,338 reviews.
Full HR Platforms
8. BambooHR — Best HRIS for 25–200 Employees
BambooHR is the category default for good reason: the employee record, onboarding and reporting are all solid, and it's the tool most HR people already know.
Key features: Employee records and self-service, onboarding with new hire packets and e-signatures, ATS, PTO, reporting, payroll and benefits.
Pricing: Core $10/employee/month — onboarding is included here, not in the higher tier. Pro $17 adds performance management. Elite $25. Under 25 employees, a flat rate from $250/month. Free trial.
Best for: Companies of 25–200 replacing spreadsheets with a real system.
Watch out for: The flat $250 makes it expensive below about 20 people. Core caps you at 5 open job postings. G2 4.4 from 6,646 reviews.
9. Eddy — Best for Hourly and Deskless Teams
Eddy is built for small businesses with hourly workers — construction, hospitality, manufacturing — where the HR problem is hiring, documents and time, not headcount analytics.
Key features: Employee records and documents, hiring and onboarding, time tracking and PTO, e-signature, training tracking.
Pricing: Starter $4/person/month + $50/month base. Growth $8/person + $75. Payroll add-on $6/person + $50. Hiring add-on $199/month. Monthly billing, no long-term contract.
Best for: Hourly-workforce SMBs of 10–150.
Watch out for: Every tier carries a base fee, and hiring is a $199/month add-on rather than included. G2 4.7 from 102 reviews.
10. Rippling — Best If IT and HR Overlap
Rippling's pitch is one system for HR, IT and finance — provisioning laptops and app access alongside payroll and records.
Key features: HRIS, payroll, benefits, device management, app provisioning, time tracking, spend management.
Pricing: From $8 per user per month as a platform floor. Every module is purchased separately on top and module prices aren't published. No free trial for HR products.
Best for: Tech-forward companies of 50–1,000 where onboarding means hardware as well as paperwork.
Watch out for: $8 is the floor, not the price. Expect a quote. G2 4.8 from 13,362 reviews.
11. Factorial — Best for European Small Businesses
Factorial is a modular HRIS with strong traction in Europe, covering the core HR stack without the US-payroll bias of most of this list.
Key features: Employee directory, onboarding and offboarding, document management and e-signature, time tracking, PTO, payslip distribution.
Pricing: From $8 per user per month — the only published figure. Everything above the Core tier is a tailored quote. Free trial, no free plan.
Best for: European SMBs of 20–200.
Watch out for: Only the entry rate is public, so real budgeting needs a conversation. G2 4.4 from 111 reviews.
12. Personio — Best for Mid-Market European Teams
Personio is the most established European HRIS, aimed slightly above the classic small business but often shortlisted by growing ones.
Key features: Full HRIS, recruiting, onboarding, absence management, performance and development, payroll integrations.
Pricing: Not published. Two tiers, demo only. Published terms: 12-month minimum runtime, 10% discount for paying annually upfront, licences count all active users, and a one-time setup fee scaled to company size.
Best for: European companies of 100–1,000.
Watch out for: The setup fee and 12-month minimum mean the first-year cost is meaningfully above the run rate. G2 4.4 from 948 reviews.
PEOs: A Different Purchase Entirely
A PEO isn't HR software — it's co-employment. You outsource payroll, benefits, workers' comp and compliance liability to a partner who becomes the employer of record for those purposes. It costs several times what software costs, and buys you benefits buying power and risk transfer instead of a dashboard.
Justworks publishes real numbers, which is rare: Payroll plan $8/employee/month + $50 base, PEO Basic $79/employee/month, PEO Plus $124, EOR $599. Time tracking is $8/employee, dedicated HR consulting $30. No implementation fee. G2 4.6 from 1,127 reviews.
TriNet is quote-only — the pricing page is a three-step funnel. It confirms only that pricing is a flat per-employee-per-month fee rather than a percentage of payroll. G2 4.2 from 1,988 reviews.
Consider a PEO if you're under about 50 employees, want better health benefits than you can negotiate alone, and would rather not own compliance. Otherwise buy software.
Two Products Comparison Articles Still List Incorrectly
GoCo no longer exists as a standalone product. It was acquired by Intuit in 2025; goco.io/pricing now redirects to QuickBooks pricing and its G2 listing has been delisted. Any 2026 article recommending GoCo hasn't checked.
Zenefits is not a current product. TriNet sells PEO and HR Plus; "Zenefits" survives only as a login label. If an article offers you Zenefits pricing, it's working from old data.
What HR Software Doesn't Cover
Everything above handles the administrative half of HR: payroll, records, time, compliance, benefits. That's the half with a legal deadline attached, so it gets bought first, and rightly.
The half that doesn't have a deadline is the half about whether people are any good and whether they're getting better. Most HRIS platforms treat performance as a checkbox module — BambooHR puts it behind the $17 Pro tier, Gusto charges $3 a head extra, Zoho puts it two tiers up. It's an afterthought in an admin system, and it usually shows in how little it gets used.
If reviews, 360° feedback and goals matter to you, it's worth pricing them separately rather than accepting whatever's bundled. Effy AI does that half at $3 a seat per month, free up to 5 users — written by an interested party, so compare it against the bundled module rather than taking our word for it. Our comparison of performance review software covers the alternatives.
Buy the HRIS for the admin. Just check what the performance module actually does before you assume it's covered.
How to Choose HR Software for Your Small Business
Price it at your actual headcount, including the base fee. At 10 people Gusto is $109 a month, not $60. At 8 people BambooHR is $250 flat. The per-employee rate alone will mislead you at every size under about 25.
Decide software or PEO first. They're different purchases at different price points. A PEO at $79 per employee per month isn't expensive software — it's cheap co-employment.
Check what's genuinely free before paying. Zoho People to 5 users, Homebase to 10 employees on one location, OrangeHRM with no cap. If you're a five-person company, you may not need to buy anything yet.
Find the wall on the free tier. Homebase gates PTO tracking. OrangeHRM gates onboarding and payroll. Jibble no longer publishes its matrix at all. Know where you'll hit it before you build a process on it.
Verify anything you read against the vendor's page. Two of the most-recommended small business HR products in 2026 comparison articles — GoCo and Zenefits — aren't independently purchasable any more.
