The short version. BambooHR says $10 an employee and charges a small company $250 a month flat. Lattice looks like $10 until you add the three other modules you assumed were included. Workable and Ashby both charge per company rather than per seat, which flips the maths completely. Deel ranges from $14 a worker to $599 depending on which product you land on. At ten employees, four of these five cost more than their headline number suggests.
Every price here came off the vendor’s own pricing page on 15 August 2026.
Own hiring at a company with no HR department? Our directory keeps shortlists for people and hiring leads, reviewed on a schedule.
Work out the per-employee cost before anything else
HR software has five different pricing models in one category, and at small headcount the differences are enormous. Here is the same ten-person company priced against each one:
- BambooHR lists $10 per employee, but companies with 25 or fewer employees pay a flat rate starting at $250 a month. Ten people is $250, not $100.
- Lattice sells modules separately: Performance $10 a seat, Goals and OKRs $8, Engagement $4, with Compensation and Grow as add-ons at $6 and $4. Buy the lot and you are at $32 a seat, so $320 for ten people.
- Workable charges $299 a month for the company regardless of headcount.
- Ashby charges $400 a month for up to 100 employees.
- Deel depends entirely on which product: $14 per worker for its talent product, $49 per contractor, $125 per US PEO employee, $599 per EOR employee.
So the per-seat number is close to meaningless below about thirty people. We ranked on what you will actually be billed, on whether the AI does something worth having, and on whether a company without an HR function can run it.
1. BambooHR: the system of record, and read the small print
Core $10 per employee per month. Pro $17. Elite $25. For companies with 25 or fewer employees, pricing is a flat monthly rate starting at $250. Volume and nonprofit discounts are available. Verified 15 August 2026.
Every company eventually needs one place holding contracts, start dates, time off, emergency contacts and who reports to whom. Doing that in a spreadsheet works until somebody leaves, and then it turns out only they knew where anything was.
BambooHR is the default for small and mid-sized companies for good reason. It is pleasant to use, people will actually book leave in it, and its AI does the useful unglamorous things: summarising records, drafting policy text, answering the questions employees would otherwise ask you directly.
The flat rate under 25 employees is the thing to know. Reading $10 an employee and budgeting $80 for eight people leads to a surprise. Starting at $250 a month, this is one of the more expensive items in a small company’s software budget, and it is worth being honest about whether a spreadsheet is still fine.
Who it is wrong for: companies under about ten people. At $250 a month for eight employees you are paying $31 a head for something a shared document does adequately at that size.
2. Lattice: performance, priced by the module
Performance $10 per seat per month. Goals and OKRs $8 per seat. Engagement $4 per seat. Compensation is a $6 add-on and Grow is a $4 add-on. Verified 15 August 2026.
Lattice is about what happens after someone joins: reviews, goals, one-to-ones, engagement surveys and career progression. For a company that has grown past the point where the founder knows how everyone is doing, that is a genuine gap and this is the best-known answer to it.
The AI is aimed at the part managers find hardest, which is writing. Review summaries pulled from the feedback across a cycle, and drafts that turn scattered notes into something coherent. Managers reliably underinvest in review writing because it is difficult and slow, so making it faster genuinely improves what gets written.
The modular pricing needs adding up before you commit. None of these numbers is the product on its own. Performance without Goals is half a system, and buying everything puts you at $32 a seat. Decide which module solves a problem you have today rather than assembling the full suite because it looks incomplete.
Worth knowing that Lattice discontinued its own HRIS, so this sits alongside something like BambooHR rather than replacing it.
Who it is wrong for: companies under about twenty-five people. Formal performance cycles at that size create process where a conversation was working fine.
3. Workable: hiring priced per company, not per seat
Standard $299 per month, or $3,588 a year. Premier $599 per month, or $7,188 a year. Enterprise $719 per month, or $8,628 a year. All tiers list unlimited active jobs under fair use. The Workable Agent add-on includes 3,000 AI credits, with candidate actions costing between 1 and 10 credits depending on whether it is an evaluation, a sourcing action or a chat. Verified 15 August 2026.
Workable is here because of the pricing shape as much as the product. It charges the company rather than the person, so a five-person team and a fifteen-person team pay the same $299, and everyone who touches hiring can have access without anyone doing seat arithmetic.
The AI credit model is where the real cost sits. Candidate actions cost between one and ten credits, so a high-volume hourly role burns an allowance at a completely different rate than three engineering hires. Model your actual requisition volume against the 3,000 credits rather than counting job postings.
If hiring rather than HR is your main problem, our list for recruiters covers this category in more depth alongside sourcing and interview tooling.
Who it is wrong for: companies hiring two or three people a year. $299 a month for occasional hiring is a lot, and a shared inbox with a clear process beats software nobody opens.
4. Ashby: the same trade at a larger size
Foundations $400 per month for up to 100 employees, including 1,500 AI credits a month. Plus, for 101 to 1,000 employees, and Enterprise are custom priced, with 2,500 and 12,500 AI credits per seat per year. Verified 15 August 2026.
Ashby prices by company size rather than by seat, which is the same idea as Workable at a different scale, and $400 covering up to 100 employees is genuinely good value once you are hiring continuously.
What it does better is analytics. Because ATS, CRM, scheduling and reporting sit in one system, you can answer questions most small companies cannot: which source actually produced hires rather than applications, where candidates drop out, how long each stage really takes. That matters once hiring is a process rather than a series of emergencies.
Publishing a real price for a real headcount band is also worth rewarding in a category where most vendors will not.
Who it is wrong for: companies under about twenty-five people. $400 a month for a handful of roles a year is buying a talent platform to solve a scheduling problem.
5. Deel: for anyone employed somewhere you are not
Find Talent from $14 per worker per month. Hire Contractors from $49 per contractor per month, or $325 per contractor of record. Hire Full-Time Employees from $125 per US PEO employee per month, or $599 per EOR employee. Verified 15 August 2026.
The moment you hire someone in a country where you have no legal entity, this stops being optional. Employment law, payroll, tax and benefits in a jurisdiction you have never operated in is not a thing to improvise, and the alternative is a local lawyer and an accountant per country.
Deel’s range is the thing to understand. Fourteen dollars a worker and $599 an employee are the same company selling very different products. Contractors are cheap, employer of record is expensive, and it is expensive because Deel is legally employing that person on your behalf and carrying the risk.
The compliance monitoring is where the AI earns its place. Employment rules change constantly across dozens of jurisdictions, and nobody at a small company is reading those updates.
Who it is wrong for: single-country teams. You are paying a premium for a problem you do not have, and local payroll is cheaper.
Companies this list will not help
Enterprises. Your stack is Workday or SAP and the decision involves a twelve-month implementation.
Companies under five people. Genuinely, a spreadsheet and a calendar. Most of this only pays off once you cannot remember everyone’s situation.
Agencies and firms billing by the hour. Your people problem is utilisation and margin per person, which is a different toolset.
Anyone hoping software fixes a culture problem. Engagement surveys measure the thing. They do not change it, and running one without acting on it reliably makes people more cynical than not asking at all.
Considered, and left off
Gusto and Rippling. Both serious contenders, particularly for payroll. Gusto’s pricing page returned a 403 to us on 15 August 2026 and Rippling quotes by demo, so neither is ranked.
HiBob and Personio. Strong in their markets and sold by demo. Same reason.
Culture Amp. Deeper than Lattice on engagement specifically, and priced for companies with someone whose job is engagement.
The AI HR chatbots. Products that answer employee policy questions from your handbook. Useful at a few hundred people, and at twenty the answer is that someone walks over and asks you.
Questions people leads ask us
What does this actually cost for ten employees?
BambooHR is $250 a month flat, not $100, because of the under-25 rule. Lattice is $10 a seat for Performance alone, or $320 for the whole suite. Workable is $299 regardless of headcount, Ashby is $400 up to 100 employees, and Deel depends entirely on which product. Almost nothing in this category costs what the per-seat number implies at small scale.
Do I need an HRIS at twelve people?
Probably not, and vendors will disagree. What you need is one place holding contracts, start dates and time off that is not a person’s memory. A shared drive and a calendar does that. Buy software when the admin genuinely costs more than $250 a month of somebody’s attention.
Is the AI in HR tools worth paying for?
The writing assistance is, because managers underinvest in review writing and it shows. The predictive features are worth much less than they sound, and anything claiming to flag flight risk or score performance should be treated carefully, since it is making a consequential decision about a person from thin data.
Workable or Ashby?
Workable at $299 if hiring is occasional and you want everyone to have access. Ashby at $400 if hiring is continuous and you want to answer questions about your funnel. Both charge by company rather than by seat, which is the reason they are both here.
When do I need an employer of record?
The moment you want to employ someone in a country where you have no legal entity. At $599 an employee it is expensive, and the alternative is establishing an entity, which costs more and takes months. If the person can legitimately be a contractor, that is $49.
Will AI replace HR?
It is taking the administration, which is most of the workload at a small company and none of the difficult part. What it will not do is have the conversation about someone’s performance, judge whether a complaint is serious, or decide what the company should be like. Those are the whole job, and they are the parts small companies were skipping anyway.
See our maintained directory shortlists for people and hiring leads, covering interview structure, salary bands and pay transparency.
Last reviewed: 15 August 2026. Every price was read off the vendor’s own pricing page on that date. Gusto and Rippling are unranked because their pricing was not readable at source. We review this page quarterly.
Leave a Reply