Four HR Platforms That Will Not Print a Price, and One Where Cascadia Does

You compare what each one is willing to tell you before you talk to a salesperson, because for now that is the only thing you can actually see. Personio names two plans and publishes a full feature table with no price in it. Paylocity describes every module it sells and ends the page in a form. ADP puts a pricing request button beside the product in eleven places. Paycor redirects its pricing address to a page about company size. Ask each one for a written figure at your headcount and see which answers fastest, because how long that takes tells you something about the rest of the relationship.

Rarely on the software. It goes wrong on the policy, which nobody quotes for. 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.

We cannot tell you, and neither can they until you call. That is the honest answer and it is the reason this page exists. What we can say is that 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 no quote you receive will 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.

No. Not one of the four, which is unusual enough to be the reason this page is organized the way it is. Personio gets closest by naming Core and CorePro and publishing a full comparison table, then leaves both price cells reading Book a demo and adds a one-time setup fee described only as depending on company size. Paylocity documents every module in detail under a Get Pricing button. ADP repeats a pricing request button eleven times beside Workforce Now. Paycor sends its pricing address to a page about how many employees you have. Our figure is seven hundred dollars a month and it is on this page.

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 number, fixes sit inside the fee 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, and the fit review costs nothing. 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 flat monthly rate of seven hundred dollars, listed on the managed Zoho People page and on this one. 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.

Thirty days’ notice ends it and 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. The walk through takes a few days and costs nothing, and it ends with a plain answer about whether Zoho People suits the business or whether you are better off where you are.