It depends on what sits around your HR. If you need payroll and multi-entity HR at scale, Personio is a serious platform and this page will not talk you out of it. If your HR sits next to customers, invoices and projects, Growee is the stronger alternative: employees, leave, timesheets, projects, onboarding, goals and evaluations are free for up to 3 people, €2 per person per month adds client invoicing, expenses, project budgets, eSignature and REST API access, and a sales CRM is free up to 100 leads then €49 a month flat. BambooHR suits HR-led teams buying the rest separately, and Rippling fits larger companies consolidating HR with IT.

Its pricing page publishes one number: Core "starts from €7.60 per month/employee" (as of August 2026, per personio.com/pricing). Everything past that figure is demo-gated. There are two tiers, Core and Core Pro, Core Pro carries no published price, both show only a "Book a demo" button, and Personio's own FAQ says the quote depends on your employee count and which Apps you add. Yearly billing has a 12-month minimum run-time and a 10% discount for paying annually up front. Growee publishes its full price instead: free up to 3 people, then €2 per person per month or €20 per person per year, with the CRM at a flat €49 a month above 100 leads.

Personio has no free plan — its pricing page routes every tier to a demo booking (as of August 2026). Growee's free plan has no time limit and no card: up to 3 employees, covering employee management and the org chart, leave tracking and planning with custom policies and exports, time tracking and timesheet approval, projects and teams, documents and templates, asset and client management, meetings, onboarding templates, goals and evaluations, automatic national holidays for 99 countries, a CRM up to 100 leads, a Knowledge Base up to 10 documents and MCP access for AI assistants. Client invoicing, expenses and REST API access start at €2 per person per month.

No, and the gap is worth naming. Growee has no payroll module, while Personio ships Preliminary Payroll in Core. Personio also gates real scale features behind Core Pro that Growee does not try to match: unlimited legal entity management, position management, workforce planning, geofencing, and Okta and Microsoft Entra ID sign-on (as of August 2026). What Growee covers is the day-to-day: employee records, leave, timesheets, documents, onboarding, goals and evaluations, plus the sales CRM, client invoicing and expenses that are not among the Apps Personio's pricing page names.

Personio prices Recruiting, Surveys, Performance and development, Compensation management and Whistleblowing as separate Apps on top of Core or Core Pro, and it holds API access for custom integrations back for Core Pro (as of August 2026, per personio.com/pricing). In Growee, goals and OKRs, feedback and evaluations are on the free plan, and REST API access comes with the €2 plan. Hiring is our one pay-per-use add-on at €10 a job post plus €1 a candidate, with the applicant tracking and careers page included, so you pay for it in the months you are hiring and nothing in the months you are not.

Employees come across through their own sheet import, and your sales pipeline arrives as a CSV: download Growee's leads template from the CRM import dialog, match your columns to its headers and import in files of up to 200 rows, with every imported lead landing in your default stage for you to move from there. Contacts are not a separate import today, so company details ride along as fields on each lead. On the way out, time reports, leave data and CRM reports export as CSV, and the €2 plan adds REST API access. Book a demo if you would rather have a hand with the move.