HollyHR vs PeopleHR

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. PeopleHR fits a team that needs native mobile, AI, learning, signatures, expenses, performance, time, automation, ATS, broad integrations, payroll routes or mature backup tools. The products are not like-for-like; choose by the jobs you would otherwise have to rebuild.

HollyHR's current controlled early-access Free plan is £0 for up to 10 active people and Standard is £2 per active person per month before tax. PeopleHR publishes from-prices per employee per month of £3 for Starter, £5.50 for Core, £8 for Pro and £9.50 for Elite+, plus add-ons and HR/payroll bundles. Confirm applicable tax, entitlements, headcount, discount and the signed term in the quote.

Its pricing page says customers can pay monthly or yearly, but payment frequency is not the same as cancellation flexibility. The current standard Access terms default to a 36-month initial term, 12-month renewals and at least 90 days' end-of-term notice unless applicable Website Customer Terms or the signed Statement of Work say otherwise. Access may increase fees once per subscription period, says they will not reduce during the licence term, and may revert to its then-current list price at renewal. The signed order governs your case, so read it before treating a per-month price as a monthly-cancellable subscription.

Only when HollyHR's focused shipped core covers the whole job. It is not equivalent for native mobile, Copilot or learning, electronic signatures, expenses, performance, custom surveys, timesheets, rota publishing, clocking, rotating-shift scheduling, Ripple automation, advanced analytics, ATS, broad integrations, Access payroll or a complete migration. HollyHR does support effective-dated contracted patterns repeating over 1–12 weeks. Its leave lacks historical/blended FTE and several statutory automations; sickness lacks retrospective entry, certificate, 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 profile files per batch and 10 MB per file but has no immutable signing version/digest, provider-backed e-signature, automatic reminder delivery or custom file ACL. Aggregate HollyHR sickness charts are visible to every signed-in member and can identify sickness in a small team.

PeopleHR publishes a broad REST API that can read and maintain employee, absence, document, time, performance and recruitment data, plus a sandboxed developer utility and many advertised integrations. 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 hosted MCP is a developer preview for supported external assistants with writes environment-disabled by default. Neither product should get a blanket webhook tick without checking the implemented event contract.

No. HollyHR has no PeopleHR adapter. Its importer manually maps 12 people fields and accepts up to 500 rows and 2 MB. Managers, working patterns, pay and bank data, leave balances and history, documents and signatures, expenses, performance, timesheets, workflows, applicants, payroll, integrations and specialist state require separate retention or rebuilding.

PeopleHR documents query-based Excel exports and a Windows-compatible Offline Backup Tool that bulk-downloads employee documents and preserves signatures. Its security page promises a leaving export and removal from its systems within 30 days; a separate PeopleHR article says copies may be retained for legal or business purposes. HollyHR's 14-area archive is broad rather than complete: 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. Test both routes, confirm retained PeopleHR copies and keep an omissions list.

PeopleHR is the established Access product. Its public FAQ distinguishes 24/7 application access from a human support desk open 9–5 on UK working days, while the pricing page says support and implementation are included; confirm the exact FlightPath, consulting and training scope. It states London hosting, SIEM, roles and ISO 27001, but the public page still references the 2013 edition and no current certificate scope. PeopleHR offers Paycircle and managed payroll routes. HollyHR has UK-hours email support with no public response-time SLA and provides payroll-review packs plus a Xero file—not payroll calculation, RTI, payslips or a native connection.

There is no honest universal time. Check the remaining term and notice window, then measure the people CSV and every role, leave, document, signature, expense, performance, time, workflow, applicant, payroll, integration and reporting dependency. Keep PeopleHR available until its query and document backups are retained, unsupported jobs have named owners, privacy checks pass and a parallel run reconciles. If the broader jobs remain valuable, keeping PeopleHR may be the better decision.