HollyHR vs BrightHR

HollyHR fits a small team that needs focused core HR, accepts controlled early access and values the current £0/£2 price and bounded self-serve archive. BrightHR fits a team that needs rota, clocking, overtime, expenses, native mobile, performance, reports or optional advice, safety, wellbeing and payroll services. The products are not like-for-like; choose by the jobs you would otherwise have to replace.

HollyHR's current controlled early-access Free plan is £0 for up to 10 active people; Standard is £2 per active person per month before tax. On BrightHR's 36-month online journey checked on 16 July 2026, Core/Enhanced/Full monthly totals before tax were £83.35/£106/£156.50 for 5 people; £107/£203/£304 for 10; £225/£430/£665 for 25; £275/£510/£915 for 50; and £330/£620/£1,280 for 100. Insurance and payroll are separate.

BrightHR's free demo and Lite rota or incident tools are not an ongoing free Core HR package. BrightHR publicly offers 24-, 36- and 60-month fixed terms, with 36 months used online. Current public terms describe same-length automatic renewal unless written notice reaches BrightHR at least 90 days before term end, and allow renewal fees to rise by up to 7%. The signed agreement governs; do not infer a general early-exit right from third-party comparison pages.

Only when HollyHR's focused shipped core covers the whole job. It is not equivalent for rota and shift planning, Blip clocking, overtime, expenses, native mobile or push, performance, recruitment, learning, custom reports, perks, BrightHR-style document acceptance and follow-ups, 24/7 advice, BrightSafe, EAP, insurance, payroll, Zapier/Entra breadth or a complete migration. HollyHR leave lacks historical/blended FTE and several statutory automations; sickness lacks retrospective entry, fit-note, return-to-work, trigger and SSP casework.

HollyHR onboarding is manually launched with no automatic enrolment, reminders, escalations or provisioning, and its current future-starter controls are unsuitable for confidential starters. HollyHR accepts 10 files per batch and 10 MB per file but has no BrightHR-equivalent read receipt, acceptance, follow-up reminder, custom document report or native mobile flow. Aggregate HollyHR sickness charts are visible to every signed-in member and can identify sickness in a small team. BrightHR document acceptance should not be mislabeled as a legal e-signature claim.

BrightHR's current public Customer API documents employee, Blip and approved-absence reads plus a write for an employee external reference; do not infer broad CRUD, document, payroll or expense APIs without testing the live docs. BrightHR also publishes Zapier reach and Microsoft/Entra SSO. HollyHR beta reads are approved and organisation-scoped; safe reads exclude document bytes, download links and compliance records. Writes are Standard+, separately approved and controlled, and MCP writes are environment-disabled by default. HollyHR makes no BrightHR MCP parity claim.

No. HollyHR has no BrightHR adapter. Its importer manually maps 12 people fields and accepts up to 500 rows and 2 MB. Its 14-area archive is broad rather than a complete round trip: eligible binaries are capped at 25 MB each and 100 MB total, while working-pattern history, onboarding journeys, leave-policy and balance ledgers, custom fields, full compliance state and audit history are excluded. BrightHR's employee, absence and document reports also do not prove one complete account-and-files archive; preserve files, acknowledgements and specialist evidence separately.

BrightHR is the older software-and-service organisation. Enhanced and Full include 24/7 HR or safety advice; that is different from technical product support, whose current public terms distinguish self-help from staffed weekday channels. BrightHR publishes UK/Azure data storage, role access, 2FA and testing claims. Its security page also uses certification wording whose currently linked documents do not evidence every current label, so request renewed certificates rather than assuming either certification or non-certification. HollyHR is controlled early access and does not sell advice, safety or wellbeing services.

There is no honest universal time. Check the remaining term and 90-day notice window, then measure the people CSV and every leave, document, acknowledgement, rota, clocking, expense, performance, report, payroll, integration, advice, safety and wellbeing dependency. Keep BrightHR available until retained evidence reconciles, unsupported jobs have named owners and a parallel run passes. If those operational or service jobs remain valuable, keeping BrightHR may be the better decision.