An HRMS for attendance. A CRM for clients. A board for tasks. A drive for documents. A website builder for the page that says you exist. Each one bills separately — and the person answering your client still opens all five, because none of them knows the others are there.
Free while we onboard · No card · No sales call.
Pick what you’d be switching from. Every cell is marked honestly — including the payroll and enterprise-suite rows, where a specialist tool goes deeper than we do.
Spreadsheets & WhatsApp. Free, familiar, and already open on everyone’s phone — until the team grows past what one person can keep in their head.
| Capability | HireMaze | Spreadsheets |
|---|---|---|
| One login for your team and your clients | Yes | No |
| A client portal on your own branded page | Yes | No |
| Client records — CRM-lite (contacts, notes, trail) | Yes | Partial |
| Tasks, tickets & projects on one board | Yes | Partial |
| Your public company page + job posts, no separate site | Yes | No |
| Attendance, leave & month history | Yes | Partial |
| One permission model across everything | Yes | No |
| Payroll processing (salary, payslips) | No | No |
| Statutory filing — PF / ESI / PT / TDS | No | No |
| Deep HR suite — performance, ATS, analytics | No | No |
Where HireMaze wins
The moment a second person needs the same source of truth: real logins and permissions, a client portal, and work that doesn’t scroll off the top of a chat.
Where Spreadsheets is the better pick
If it’s genuinely just you, a spreadsheet is fine. HireMaze earns its place when a team and clients need to see the same thing.
Keka. A polished mid-market HRMS with real payroll and a performance suite — built for the employee side of a growing company.
| Capability | HireMaze | Keka |
|---|---|---|
| One login for your team and your clients | Yes | No |
| A client portal on your own branded page | Yes | No |
| Client records — CRM-lite (contacts, notes, trail) | Yes | No |
| Tasks, tickets & projects on one board | Yes | Partial |
| Your public company page + job posts, no separate site | Yes | No |
| Attendance, leave & month history | Yes | Yes |
| One permission model across everything | Yes | Yes |
| Payroll processing (salary, payslips) | No | Yes |
| Statutory filing — PF / ESI / PT / TDS | No | Yes |
| Deep HR suite — performance, ATS, analytics | No | Yes |
Where HireMaze wins
Your clients get a login — a branded portal, CRM records, tasks and tickets in the same place your team works. Keka stops at the employee boundary.
Where Keka is the better pick
If your priority is in-house payroll, statutory filing and a full performance/ATS suite, Keka is built for exactly that — HireMaze does no payroll.
greytHR. The SME payroll-and-compliance workhorse — PF, ESI, PT, TDS, Form 16 — and one of the few here that publishes its prices.
| Capability | HireMaze | greytHR |
|---|---|---|
| One login for your team and your clients | Yes | No |
| A client portal on your own branded page | Yes | No |
| Client records — CRM-lite (contacts, notes, trail) | Yes | No |
| Tasks, tickets & projects on one board | Yes | No |
| Your public company page + job posts, no separate site | Yes | No |
| Attendance, leave & month history | Yes | Yes |
| One permission model across everything | Yes | Yes |
| Payroll processing (salary, payslips) | No | Yes |
| Statutory filing — PF / ESI / PT / TDS | No | Yes |
| Deep HR suite — performance, ATS, analytics | No | Partial |
Where HireMaze wins
Everything client-facing — portal, CRM, project and ticket boards, your public page — none of which greytHR does. It ends at the employee.
Where greytHR is the better pick
For deep, compliance-grade payroll (PF/ESI/PT/TDS, Form 16/24Q) at a transparent price, greytHR is the specialist — HireMaze doesn’t run payroll.
Zoho People. Deep, configurable HR with a free tier for five users — but the client portal, CRM, boards and website are each a separate Zoho product.
| Capability | HireMaze | Zoho People |
|---|---|---|
| One login for your team and your clients | Yes | No |
| A client portal on your own branded page | Yes | No |
| Client records — CRM-lite (contacts, notes, trail) | Yes | No |
| Tasks, tickets & projects on one board | Yes | No |
| Your public company page + job posts, no separate site | Yes | No |
| Attendance, leave & month history | Yes | Yes |
| One permission model across everything | Yes | Yes |
| Payroll processing (salary, payslips) | No | No |
| Statutory filing — PF / ESI / PT / TDS | No | No |
| Deep HR suite — performance, ATS, analytics | No | Yes |
Where HireMaze wins
One app, one shared login for team and clients. Matching HireMaze in Zoho means People + CRM + Projects + Desk + Sites — five subscriptions, and still no shared client login.
Where Zoho People is the better pick
For deep, configurable HR (performance, onboarding, LMS) and a clean path to Zoho’s payroll and ATS, Zoho People goes further on the employee side.
Kredily. Free-forever HR and payroll for Indian SMBs — unlimited employees, with statutory calculations included.
| Capability | HireMaze | Kredily |
|---|---|---|
| One login for your team and your clients | Yes | No |
| A client portal on your own branded page | Yes | No |
| Client records — CRM-lite (contacts, notes, trail) | Yes | No |
| Tasks, tickets & projects on one board | Yes | No |
| Your public company page + job posts, no separate site | Yes | No |
| Attendance, leave & month history | Yes | Yes |
| One permission model across everything | Yes | Yes |
| Payroll processing (salary, payslips) | No | Yes |
| Statutory filing — PF / ESI / PT / TDS | No | Yes |
| Deep HR suite — performance, ATS, analytics | No | Partial |
Where HireMaze wins
The entire client-facing side — portal, CRM, boards, tickets, your public page — plus one login for team and clients. Kredily is inward-facing HR only.
Where Kredily is the better pick
If you need to actually run payroll — free, unlimited employees, with PF/ESI/TDS calculations — Kredily is hard to beat on price. HireMaze does no payroll.
Darwinbox. An enterprise HCM for 1,000-plus-employee organisations — powerful, and priced and scoped for exactly that.
| Capability | HireMaze | Darwinbox |
|---|---|---|
| One login for your team and your clients | Yes | No |
| A client portal on your own branded page | Yes | No |
| Client records — CRM-lite (contacts, notes, trail) | Yes | No |
| Tasks, tickets & projects on one board | Yes | No |
| Your public company page + job posts, no separate site | Yes | No |
| Attendance, leave & month history | Yes | Yes |
| One permission model across everything | Yes | Yes |
| Payroll processing (salary, payslips) | No | Yes |
| Statutory filing — PF / ESI / PT / TDS | No | Yes |
| Deep HR suite — performance, ATS, analytics | No | Yes |
Where HireMaze wins
Right-sized and self-serve for a 5–100-person firm, with a client portal, CRM and boards built in — no enterprise sales cycle, no per-module contract.
Where Darwinbox is the better pick
For a 1,000+-employee enterprise needing deep HCM, analytics and multi-country payroll, Darwinbox operates at a scale HireMaze doesn’t target.
Partial means it works, but a tool built to do only that one job goes deeper. Marks reflect each vendor’s public product and pricing pages as of August 2026; features change — tell us if we’ve got one wrong. HireMaze does no payroll or statutory filing, and the table says so.
Not price this time, but what each setup can actually do. Everything in the core below lives in one login. Scroll, and watch it come apart into the five separate tools you’d otherwise juggle.
One honest trade A dedicated project tool still goes deeper on specialist analytics — Gantt, portfolios. Breadth in one login is the trade, and usually the right one for a 10–100 person firm.
Five subscriptions, a per-posting fee when you hire, and email doing the client portal's job. Vendor names link to their published pricing. Where we couldn't verify a current INR figure on the vendor's own page, the cell stays number-free — a blank beats a guess.
| What you need | What firms use | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| Attendance & leaveCheck-in, leave balances, month history | An HRMS — greytHR, Zoho People or Keka | Monthly plans that scale with headcount1 |
|
Worth saying plainly greytHR has a free starter plan for small teams — if yours qualifies, you're not saving money on attendance by switching. The problem it can't solve is that it only does attendance. |
||
| Client recordsContacts, notes, activity trail | A CRM — Zoho Bigin or Zoho CRM | ₹400–₹2,400 per user, per month2 |
| Tasks & ticketsWho's doing what, by when | A kanban board on somebody's personal login | Free tier or per-user plan — either way, another login |
| DocumentsStorage, sharing, sign-offs | Google Workspace | ₹270 per user, per month3 |
| Job postingGetting a role in front of candidates | Naukri | ₹850 per posting4 |
| Client portalWhere clients see status and send documents | Nothing. Email, and hope. | — |
| Company websiteA page that says you exist | Wix or GoDaddy | Paid site plans5 |
| HireMazeAn HRMS with a client portal built in — all seven rows above | One login, one permission model | Free while we onboard. What's included → |
Sources — vendor-published pricing, checked August 2026
Vendor prices change, vary by billing term, and mostly attract GST on top. Treat the column as what it says it is — roughly — and check the linked pages before you sign anything.
Not because any one tool was bad — because five of them, none talking to the others, was the actual problem.
Your team and your clients sign into the same place. No more provisioning the same person across five separate tools — and forgetting to remove them from three.
One renewal date, one support queue, one invoice — instead of five subscriptions that each creep up a little every year on their own schedule.
A branded portal at hiremaze.in/your-firm where clients see status and send documents themselves — instead of "let me check and get back to you."
Tasks, tickets and projects on one shared board the whole team can see — not a group chat where "who's doing this?" scrolls off the screen by lunch.
Daily check-ins, leave balances and a month view, built into the same login — so late and absent surface themselves instead of someone asking around.
Claim hiremaze.in/your-firm at signup — a real page with your open roles that goes live instantly. No site builder, no separate hosting bill.
Attendance, clients, tasks, documents, job posts and your own page — one login for your employees and your clients, one permission model, and a portal they actually log into. HireMaze is free while we onboard our first firms. See exactly what's included.
No card required.