Comparison · HR and agency ops

The European Personio Alternative That Publishes Its Price

Growee HR is an HR platform for agencies and service companies that combines employee management, leave, documents, performance reviews, time tracking, projects, employee cost and billing rates, project profitability and client invoicing, plus an open API and native MCP integration.

Personio is the European HR incumbent and it is good at being one. This page is 16 rows on where the two products actually differ, with every Personio cell quoted from Personio's own site or help centre and dated. The rows Growee loses are rows here, not footnotes.

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Free for up to 3 employees, with the current per-employee figure on the pricing page. Every Personio claim below carries the page it came from and the date it was read. More comparisons on the compare hub.

What is actually different between Growee and Personio?

16 rows. Growee wins 2 of them outright, Personio wins more than that, and several are a tie. Where a cell reads "not stated", no wording for that capability was found on the pages we read, which is a statement about the documentation and never a claim that Personio ships nothing.

Capability	Growee	Personio
Price and the employee record
Price basis and free tier	Free for up to 3 employees, and the free plan carries employees, leave, documents, performance reviews, time tracking, timesheet approval, projects and the MCP server. Above 3 employees the base plan is charged per employee, with no seat minimum and no platform fee. The current figure is on the pricing page.	Quote based, with no figure published. Two tiers are named, Core, "Everything you need for a foundation for HR excellence.", and CorePro, "Powerful core features with advanced settings." The pricing page answers its own "How much does Personio cost?" with "Our pricing depends on several factors, including the number of employees at your company and whether you choose to add any extra features" and "To get a custom quote, book a demo with one of our product experts who can help tailor your package to your needs." No currency amount appears anywhere on the pricing page in the snapshot checked. There is no free plan, but there is a self-serve trial rather than a demo wall: "Once you've registered above, you can use all core functions of Personio free of charge for 14 days", with "no cancellation, commitment or credit card needed". Yearly billing carries "a minimum run-time of 12 months" and "a 10% discount on software services", and "All active users of the software count towards the number of licenses."Source: personio.com/pricing, Wayback snapshot 17 April 2026; personio.com/free-trial, Wayback snapshot 14 January 2026
Employee records and custom fields	Yes, on the free plan. One employee record with positions, departments, levels, work locations, contract types, benefits and custom fields you define.	Yes, and this is its core. "There are two categories of attributes: preset attributes and custom attributes.", "You create custom attributes to fit your specific needs." and "Every attribute has a type that determines the data it stores. Attributes support different data formats. These include text, numbers, dates, selections, and employee links." Preset attributes cannot be removed, "You can't edit, archive, or delete them", while "You can edit, archive, or delete custom attributes." Personio matches Growee on this row.Source: support.personio.de, "Manage attributes and sections", updated 8 September 2026
Documents with expiry dates and templates	Yes, on the free plan. Document types you define, filed on the person with an expiration date, plus templates that fill themselves from employee data.	Yes, and the expiry side is stronger. Reminder workflows ship ready made: "You can create reminder workflows for any of the following events, which are already set up in the system:", and the list that follows covers contract end, probation period end, visa expiry, termination date, hire date, last day of work, last salary change, next time off and birthday. Past that preset list, "You can also create a reminder workflow triggered by any custom attribute of the type Date.", so any date field you add can drive a reminder. Templates and signing sit together: "Use templates to create them and, with the click of a button, have them signed directly in Personio with a simple e-signature." The signing allowance is tier gated, "eSignature Workflows" reading "8% of employees" on Core against "Unlimited" on CorePro. Personio wins this row.Source: support.personio.de, "Create reminders", updated 24 June 2026; support.personio.de, "Manage document categories and templates", updated 1 September 2026; personio.com/product/electronic-signature, Wayback snapshot 12 March 2026; personio.com/pricing, Wayback snapshot 17 April 2026
Leave requests, policies and balances	Yes, on the free plan. Requests with approve, reject and cancel, policies per leave type, balances by year and type, calendar events, and CSV or XLSX export.	Yes. "Personio automatically calculates vacation and instantly shows all employees how many days they have taken and how many they have left.", with a shared calendar view, "Managers and HR can view absences in one simple calendar overview to accommodate easy planning." Time-off policies are customer-defined and documented in its help centre. The two products match on this row.Source: support.personio.de, "Create time off policies", updated 17 September 2026; personio.com/product/absence-management, Wayback snapshot 9 March 2026
Public-holiday calendars	One calendar per workspace. Legal holidays are scoped to the workspace with no country field, so a team spread across countries gets a single public-holiday calendar, never one per employee country. This is the clearest row Growee loses.	Several calendars, assignable per office. "When you set up your company's basic information or a workplace, you must select a bank holiday calendar that applies to your employees.", and beyond the system calendars, "While you can't add or remove a holiday from these system calendars, you can create your own." Assignment is per location: "Once you've created a custom bank holiday calendar, you can assign it to your whole company or to specific workplaces. If your company and offices have different bank holiday calendars assigned, the system uses the calendar assigned to the office for employees based there." Personio wins this row.Source: support.personio.de, "Create and manage custom bank holiday calendars", updated 31 August 2026
Performance reviews	Yes, on the free plan, and the review types are yours to define. Apart from sample types in the demo data, which Clear Demo Data removes, Growee ships no preset evaluation types, so the cycle matches how you already run reviews.	Yes, as a separately priced App rather than in the base plan. "The Performance Review Cycle Builder in Personio allows you to create and trigger performance review cycles across your organization.", and the cycle is assembled from three activity types, "Manager review", "Self review" and "Peer review". The questions are yours: "Before you can create a performance review cycle, you need to set up forms to collect standardized feedback across the organization." No price for the App is published on the pages checked.Source: support.personio.de, "Setup and launch a performance review cycle", updated 31 August 2026
Time, rates, profit and the client bill
Time tracking	Yes, on the free plan. Start and stop timers, entries stored in worked minutes, weekly submission and approval with a weekly approval report behind it. No rota and no shift scheduling.	Yes, and aimed at compliance rather than at billing. "Employees can use Time Clock to record hours, no matter where they work.", "Easily set up advanced policies for working hours, including fixed break times and overtime limit reminders. Ensure compliance with local regulations." and a kiosk mode, "Turn any tablet or laptop with a camera and internet connection into a time-tracking device". On shift planning, a help-centre search for shift, rota and scheduling wording returned individual "Create work schedules" articles and no team rota or roster feature, so on the pages checked neither product ships one.Source: personio.com/product/attendance-tracking, Wayback snapshot 9 March 2026; support.personio.de help centre, searched 19 September 2026
Billable rate and internal cost rate per timesheet row	Both, on the timesheet row itself. Time tracking and projects are on the free plan, and the profitability those rates feed is on the paid plan. Each row carries a billed hourly rate and an internal cost hourly rate, and each project member carries a billed rate, a cost type and a per-project internal cost.	A billable flag and a cost centre, not a pair of rates. Project time tracking exists, "you can create projects in Personio and enable specific employees to track the time they spend on them", and a project carries "a description, ID, cost center, billable status, start and end dates, project type, and client." Reporting is in hours, "The number of hours spent on different types of projects filtered by client, cost center, billable status, date, etc." No numeric hourly billable rate and no internal cost rate appears on the project or on a time entry in the help-centre articles checked.Source: support.personio.de, "Set up project-based time tracking", updated 7 September 2026
Project profitability and billing models	On the paid plan, with six named billing models: retainer, fixed price, time and materials, PPC passthrough, revenue share and internal. The revenue basis follows the model rather than assuming every project is billed by the hour, and an internal project returns no revenue at all. Who sees it matters: the margin, the billed rates, the budget and the billing model need the payroll or salary permission, which no default role except the admin holds, so in a new workspace this is admin only until an admin grants it.	Not stated on the pages checked. Searches of the help centre for profitability, margin and hourly-rate wording returned no article describing a project margin or a profit view, and the project reporting documented there counts hours by project, client, cost centre and billable status rather than money. That is a statement about the documentation we could read, not a claim that Personio ships nothing.Source: support.personio.de help centre, searched 19 September 2026
Client invoicing, payments and reminders	On the paid plan. Invoices with lines, recorded payments, history and a tax field, late marking, payment reminder emails configured per workspace, and Romanian e-Factura filing.	Not stated on the pages checked. Every invoicing article in the help centre concerns Personio billing you for Personio, reviewing your own subscription invoices and managing payment methods, rather than you billing a client. No product page describes outbound client invoicing, payment collection or payment reminders.Source: support.personio.de help centre, searched 19 September 2026
Payroll, benefits and identity
Payroll	None. Payroll in Growee is a module flag and a permission name, never a calculation and never a payslip. If payroll is the thing you are buying, Growee is the wrong tool.	Yes, and worth reading carefully, because two different products share the label. The native payroll run is one country: "Personio Payroll is currently only available in Germany." The other, everywhere else, is a preparation and export tool rather than a payroll engine, titled "Preliminary Payroll: Payroll Document Preparation" and described as "HR and salary data in one place and always up to date. With one click, aggregate into one file for your payroll accountant or software." Personio wins this row either way.Source: personio.com/product/personio-payroll, Wayback snapshot 14 January 2026; personio.com/product/payroll, Wayback snapshot 13 March 2026; support.personio.de, "Personio Payroll About", updated 17 July 2026
Benefits	Records, not administration. A benefits catalogue and a link to the employee. No carriers, no eligibility rules, no enrolment.	Compensation management, yes. Benefits enrolment, not stated. What is published is a compensation product, "Create fair and easy compensation reviews" with "visible performance data, salary bands and built-in guidelines" and "Reduce bias with salary bands, performance ratings and compa-ratios." A separate benefits administration or enrolment module does not appear on the pages checked; the benefits wording that does appear is German payroll categories such as company car and benefits in kind. Personio wins the compensation half outright, and Growee has no answer to salary bands.Source: personio.com/product/compensation-management, Wayback snapshot 5 March 2026; support.personio.de help centre, searched 19 September 2026
SSO, SAML and SCIM	None. No SAML, no SCIM, no Okta or Azure AD connector. Microsoft and Apple sign-in exist and are not the same thing.	SAML yes, and tier gated. Its help centre ships setup guides for SAML 2.0, Okta and Microsoft Entra ID. On the pricing comparison table "Google Single Sign-On (SSO)" sits on both tiers, while "Okta & Microsoft Entra ID Integration", "Open Authorisation (OAuth)" and "Custom Integrations" carry a dash against Core and are included on CorePro. On SCIM specifically Personio is explicit that it does not use it: its Microsoft Entra ID guide says that integration "uses a proprietary sync mechanism" and "it doesn't use SCIM". Personio wins this row.Source: support.personio.de, "Set up single sign-on (SSO) with SAML 2.0", updated 8 September 2026; support.personio.de, "Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory)", updated 10 September 2026; personio.com/pricing, Wayback snapshot 17 April 2026
API, AI access and mobile
REST API	Yes, on the paid plan. 138 paths and 265 operations across 24 tags, bearer authentication, 60 requests a minute per API key and 180 a minute per user. An API key carries the intersection of its own scopes and the live permissions of whoever created it.	Yes, on the upper tier only, and account wide rather than per user. The gate is stated plainly: "Marketplace partner integrations are available on all Core plans. You need Core Pro only if you want to build your own custom integration using the Personio public API." Auth is client credentials, "Bearer tokens are valid for 24 hours.", there are two generations live, "Personio has two API versions with different API endpoints", with "The v2 API is currently in Beta, apart from the Recruiting API which is generally available." and a dated deprecation, "After 31 January 2027, we'll deprecate certain v1 API endpoints for Attendances and Projects." Two things Growee does not match: webhooks, "Webhooks send data from Personio to your app or database when specific events happen.", and a paid sandbox, "Personio doesn't offer a free sandbox environment for API development." One thing to weigh the other way: "Anyone with access to API credentials can retrieve almost all data from the Personio account through the API, regardless of their permissions in Personio." No endpoint count and no numeric rate limit is published on the pages checked.Source: support.personio.de, "Frequently asked questions about integrations and APIs", updated 17 September 2026; support.personio.de, "Overview of Personio public APIs", updated 15 September 2026; support.personio.de, "Generate and manage API credentials", updated 15 September 2026
Native MCP server for AI assistants	Yes, first party, and on the free plan. OAuth 2.1 with discovery and Dynamic Client Registration, or a personal access token, one scope, and 1,000 successful MCP tool calls a month free on fully free workspaces with the meter off on any paid plan. The tools reach the MCP-enabled repositories, 75 of 106, through one execute-operation tool, bounded by the acting user's permissions.	Yes, in beta, and narrower by design. "The Personio MCP server is currently in beta and isn't available for everyone yet.", reaching "Anthropic Claude (web, desktop, Cowork, IDE/CLI)", "Google Antigravity" and "Visual Studio Code (GitHub Copilot)". Reads are broad, "Read access for connected AI tools to retrieve data such as employee profiles, time off, compensation, and performance information.", while writes are deliberately few and off until you turn them on: "Limited write operations that initiate Personio-controlled workflows, for example, requesting time off. Write access is off by default." It adds two controls Growee does not have, "Tool-level controls that let you turn individual capabilities, such as reading compensation or listing time off periods, on or off for every connected AI tool." and "Person attribute-level controls that let you hide specific employee fields, such as address or IBAN, from connected AI tools." Permissions bind it the same way ours do, "Access mirrors your own permissions." Personio also states the limits: "The MCP server is disabled by default.", it needs an administrator to switch on, and "The Personio MCP server isn't a replacement for automation or integrations."Source: support.personio.de, "Personio MCP server - Beta access overview", updated 2 September 2026
Mobile apps	iPhone only, and partial. One iOS app with a timer widget, covering the assistant, the dashboard, leave, the team and time. No Android app, and no projects, invoicing or documents inside it.	Both platforms, and wider. "Download the native app for iOS & Android on the App Store and Google Play.", covering "Clock in, request time off, process approvals and access documents on the go", with documents in it, "Enable employees to directly upload documents such as medical certificates." One thing was still ahead on the snapshot checked: push notifications are labelled "Coming soon". Personio wins this row.Source: personio.com/product/mobile, Wayback snapshot 17 April 2026

Price and the employee record

Price basis and free tier

Growee: Free for up to 3 employees, and the free plan carries employees, leave, documents, performance reviews, time tracking, timesheet approval, projects and the MCP server. Above 3 employees the base plan is charged per employee, with no seat minimum and no platform fee. The current figure is on the pricing page.
Personio: Quote based, with no figure published. Two tiers are named, Core, "Everything you need for a foundation for HR excellence.", and CorePro, "Powerful core features with advanced settings." The pricing page answers its own "How much does Personio cost?" with "Our pricing depends on several factors, including the number of employees at your company and whether you choose to add any extra features" and "To get a custom quote, book a demo with one of our product experts who can help tailor your package to your needs." No currency amount appears anywhere on the pricing page in the snapshot checked. There is no free plan, but there is a self-serve trial rather than a demo wall: "Once you've registered above, you can use all core functions of Personio free of charge for 14 days", with "no cancellation, commitment or credit card needed". Yearly billing carries "a minimum run-time of 12 months" and "a 10% discount on software services", and "All active users of the software count towards the number of licenses."Source: personio.com/pricing, Wayback snapshot 17 April 2026; personio.com/free-trial, Wayback snapshot 14 January 2026

Employee records and custom fields

Growee: Yes, on the free plan. One employee record with positions, departments, levels, work locations, contract types, benefits and custom fields you define.
Personio: Yes, and this is its core. "There are two categories of attributes: preset attributes and custom attributes.", "You create custom attributes to fit your specific needs." and "Every attribute has a type that determines the data it stores. Attributes support different data formats. These include text, numbers, dates, selections, and employee links." Preset attributes cannot be removed, "You can't edit, archive, or delete them", while "You can edit, archive, or delete custom attributes." Personio matches Growee on this row.Source: support.personio.de, "Manage attributes and sections", updated 8 September 2026

Documents with expiry dates and templates

Growee: Yes, on the free plan. Document types you define, filed on the person with an expiration date, plus templates that fill themselves from employee data.
Personio: Yes, and the expiry side is stronger. Reminder workflows ship ready made: "You can create reminder workflows for any of the following events, which are already set up in the system:", and the list that follows covers contract end, probation period end, visa expiry, termination date, hire date, last day of work, last salary change, next time off and birthday. Past that preset list, "You can also create a reminder workflow triggered by any custom attribute of the type Date.", so any date field you add can drive a reminder. Templates and signing sit together: "Use templates to create them and, with the click of a button, have them signed directly in Personio with a simple e-signature." The signing allowance is tier gated, "eSignature Workflows" reading "8% of employees" on Core against "Unlimited" on CorePro. Personio wins this row.Source: support.personio.de, "Create reminders", updated 24 June 2026; support.personio.de, "Manage document categories and templates", updated 1 September 2026; personio.com/product/electronic-signature, Wayback snapshot 12 March 2026; personio.com/pricing, Wayback snapshot 17 April 2026

Leave requests, policies and balances

Growee: Yes, on the free plan. Requests with approve, reject and cancel, policies per leave type, balances by year and type, calendar events, and CSV or XLSX export.
Personio: Yes. "Personio automatically calculates vacation and instantly shows all employees how many days they have taken and how many they have left.", with a shared calendar view, "Managers and HR can view absences in one simple calendar overview to accommodate easy planning." Time-off policies are customer-defined and documented in its help centre. The two products match on this row.Source: support.personio.de, "Create time off policies", updated 17 September 2026; personio.com/product/absence-management, Wayback snapshot 9 March 2026

Public-holiday calendars

Growee: One calendar per workspace. Legal holidays are scoped to the workspace with no country field, so a team spread across countries gets a single public-holiday calendar, never one per employee country. This is the clearest row Growee loses.
Personio: Several calendars, assignable per office. "When you set up your company's basic information or a workplace, you must select a bank holiday calendar that applies to your employees.", and beyond the system calendars, "While you can't add or remove a holiday from these system calendars, you can create your own." Assignment is per location: "Once you've created a custom bank holiday calendar, you can assign it to your whole company or to specific workplaces. If your company and offices have different bank holiday calendars assigned, the system uses the calendar assigned to the office for employees based there." Personio wins this row.Source: support.personio.de, "Create and manage custom bank holiday calendars", updated 31 August 2026

Performance reviews

Growee: Yes, on the free plan, and the review types are yours to define. Apart from sample types in the demo data, which Clear Demo Data removes, Growee ships no preset evaluation types, so the cycle matches how you already run reviews.
Personio: Yes, as a separately priced App rather than in the base plan. "The Performance Review Cycle Builder in Personio allows you to create and trigger performance review cycles across your organization.", and the cycle is assembled from three activity types, "Manager review", "Self review" and "Peer review". The questions are yours: "Before you can create a performance review cycle, you need to set up forms to collect standardized feedback across the organization." No price for the App is published on the pages checked.Source: support.personio.de, "Setup and launch a performance review cycle", updated 31 August 2026

Time, rates, profit and the client bill

Time tracking

Growee: Yes, on the free plan. Start and stop timers, entries stored in worked minutes, weekly submission and approval with a weekly approval report behind it. No rota and no shift scheduling.
Personio: Yes, and aimed at compliance rather than at billing. "Employees can use Time Clock to record hours, no matter where they work.", "Easily set up advanced policies for working hours, including fixed break times and overtime limit reminders. Ensure compliance with local regulations." and a kiosk mode, "Turn any tablet or laptop with a camera and internet connection into a time-tracking device". On shift planning, a help-centre search for shift, rota and scheduling wording returned individual "Create work schedules" articles and no team rota or roster feature, so on the pages checked neither product ships one.Source: personio.com/product/attendance-tracking, Wayback snapshot 9 March 2026; support.personio.de help centre, searched 19 September 2026

Billable rate and internal cost rate per timesheet row

Growee: Both, on the timesheet row itself. Time tracking and projects are on the free plan, and the profitability those rates feed is on the paid plan. Each row carries a billed hourly rate and an internal cost hourly rate, and each project member carries a billed rate, a cost type and a per-project internal cost.
Personio: A billable flag and a cost centre, not a pair of rates. Project time tracking exists, "you can create projects in Personio and enable specific employees to track the time they spend on them", and a project carries "a description, ID, cost center, billable status, start and end dates, project type, and client." Reporting is in hours, "The number of hours spent on different types of projects filtered by client, cost center, billable status, date, etc." No numeric hourly billable rate and no internal cost rate appears on the project or on a time entry in the help-centre articles checked.Source: support.personio.de, "Set up project-based time tracking", updated 7 September 2026

Project profitability and billing models

Growee: On the paid plan, with six named billing models: retainer, fixed price, time and materials, PPC passthrough, revenue share and internal. The revenue basis follows the model rather than assuming every project is billed by the hour, and an internal project returns no revenue at all. Who sees it matters: the margin, the billed rates, the budget and the billing model need the payroll or salary permission, which no default role except the admin holds, so in a new workspace this is admin only until an admin grants it.
Personio: Not stated on the pages checked. Searches of the help centre for profitability, margin and hourly-rate wording returned no article describing a project margin or a profit view, and the project reporting documented there counts hours by project, client, cost centre and billable status rather than money. That is a statement about the documentation we could read, not a claim that Personio ships nothing.Source: support.personio.de help centre, searched 19 September 2026

Client invoicing, payments and reminders

Growee: On the paid plan. Invoices with lines, recorded payments, history and a tax field, late marking, payment reminder emails configured per workspace, and Romanian e-Factura filing.
Personio: Not stated on the pages checked. Every invoicing article in the help centre concerns Personio billing you for Personio, reviewing your own subscription invoices and managing payment methods, rather than you billing a client. No product page describes outbound client invoicing, payment collection or payment reminders.Source: support.personio.de help centre, searched 19 September 2026

Payroll, benefits and identity

Payroll

Growee: None. Payroll in Growee is a module flag and a permission name, never a calculation and never a payslip. If payroll is the thing you are buying, Growee is the wrong tool.
Personio: Yes, and worth reading carefully, because two different products share the label. The native payroll run is one country: "Personio Payroll is currently only available in Germany." The other, everywhere else, is a preparation and export tool rather than a payroll engine, titled "Preliminary Payroll: Payroll Document Preparation" and described as "HR and salary data in one place and always up to date. With one click, aggregate into one file for your payroll accountant or software." Personio wins this row either way.Source: personio.com/product/personio-payroll, Wayback snapshot 14 January 2026; personio.com/product/payroll, Wayback snapshot 13 March 2026; support.personio.de, "Personio Payroll About", updated 17 July 2026

Benefits

Growee: Records, not administration. A benefits catalogue and a link to the employee. No carriers, no eligibility rules, no enrolment.
Personio: Compensation management, yes. Benefits enrolment, not stated. What is published is a compensation product, "Create fair and easy compensation reviews" with "visible performance data, salary bands and built-in guidelines" and "Reduce bias with salary bands, performance ratings and compa-ratios." A separate benefits administration or enrolment module does not appear on the pages checked; the benefits wording that does appear is German payroll categories such as company car and benefits in kind. Personio wins the compensation half outright, and Growee has no answer to salary bands.Source: personio.com/product/compensation-management, Wayback snapshot 5 March 2026; support.personio.de help centre, searched 19 September 2026

SSO, SAML and SCIM

Growee: None. No SAML, no SCIM, no Okta or Azure AD connector. Microsoft and Apple sign-in exist and are not the same thing.
Personio: SAML yes, and tier gated. Its help centre ships setup guides for SAML 2.0, Okta and Microsoft Entra ID. On the pricing comparison table "Google Single Sign-On (SSO)" sits on both tiers, while "Okta & Microsoft Entra ID Integration", "Open Authorisation (OAuth)" and "Custom Integrations" carry a dash against Core and are included on CorePro. On SCIM specifically Personio is explicit that it does not use it: its Microsoft Entra ID guide says that integration "uses a proprietary sync mechanism" and "it doesn't use SCIM". Personio wins this row.Source: support.personio.de, "Set up single sign-on (SSO) with SAML 2.0", updated 8 September 2026; support.personio.de, "Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory)", updated 10 September 2026; personio.com/pricing, Wayback snapshot 17 April 2026

API, AI access and mobile

REST API

Growee: Yes, on the paid plan. 138 paths and 265 operations across 24 tags, bearer authentication, 60 requests a minute per API key and 180 a minute per user. An API key carries the intersection of its own scopes and the live permissions of whoever created it.
Personio: Yes, on the upper tier only, and account wide rather than per user. The gate is stated plainly: "Marketplace partner integrations are available on all Core plans. You need Core Pro only if you want to build your own custom integration using the Personio public API." Auth is client credentials, "Bearer tokens are valid for 24 hours.", there are two generations live, "Personio has two API versions with different API endpoints", with "The v2 API is currently in Beta, apart from the Recruiting API which is generally available." and a dated deprecation, "After 31 January 2027, we'll deprecate certain v1 API endpoints for Attendances and Projects." Two things Growee does not match: webhooks, "Webhooks send data from Personio to your app or database when specific events happen.", and a paid sandbox, "Personio doesn't offer a free sandbox environment for API development." One thing to weigh the other way: "Anyone with access to API credentials can retrieve almost all data from the Personio account through the API, regardless of their permissions in Personio." No endpoint count and no numeric rate limit is published on the pages checked.Source: support.personio.de, "Frequently asked questions about integrations and APIs", updated 17 September 2026; support.personio.de, "Overview of Personio public APIs", updated 15 September 2026; support.personio.de, "Generate and manage API credentials", updated 15 September 2026

Native MCP server for AI assistants

Growee: Yes, first party, and on the free plan. OAuth 2.1 with discovery and Dynamic Client Registration, or a personal access token, one scope, and 1,000 successful MCP tool calls a month free on fully free workspaces with the meter off on any paid plan. The tools reach the MCP-enabled repositories, 75 of 106, through one execute-operation tool, bounded by the acting user's permissions.
Personio: Yes, in beta, and narrower by design. "The Personio MCP server is currently in beta and isn't available for everyone yet.", reaching "Anthropic Claude (web, desktop, Cowork, IDE/CLI)", "Google Antigravity" and "Visual Studio Code (GitHub Copilot)". Reads are broad, "Read access for connected AI tools to retrieve data such as employee profiles, time off, compensation, and performance information.", while writes are deliberately few and off until you turn them on: "Limited write operations that initiate Personio-controlled workflows, for example, requesting time off. Write access is off by default." It adds two controls Growee does not have, "Tool-level controls that let you turn individual capabilities, such as reading compensation or listing time off periods, on or off for every connected AI tool." and "Person attribute-level controls that let you hide specific employee fields, such as address or IBAN, from connected AI tools." Permissions bind it the same way ours do, "Access mirrors your own permissions." Personio also states the limits: "The MCP server is disabled by default.", it needs an administrator to switch on, and "The Personio MCP server isn't a replacement for automation or integrations."Source: support.personio.de, "Personio MCP server - Beta access overview", updated 2 September 2026

Mobile apps

Growee: iPhone only, and partial. One iOS app with a timer widget, covering the assistant, the dashboard, leave, the team and time. No Android app, and no projects, invoicing or documents inside it.
Personio: Both platforms, and wider. "Download the native app for iOS & Android on the App Store and Google Play.", covering "Clock in, request time off, process approvals and access documents on the go", with documents in it, "Enable employees to directly upload documents such as medical certificates." One thing was still ahead on the snapshot checked: push notifications are labelled "Coming soon". Personio wins this row.Source: personio.com/product/mobile, Wayback snapshot 17 April 2026

What does Growee hold that Personio does not?

The money side of client work. Personio holds the employee, the absence and the payslip. What it does not describe on any page we read is the rate on the hour, the margin on the project and the invoice to the client.

A billable rate and a cost rate on the same timesheet row

Every timesheet row carries a billed hourly rate and an internal cost hourly rate, and every project member carries a billed rate, a cost type and a per-project internal cost. Personio tracks time against a project with a billable flag and a cost centre; the pair of numeric rates that turns hours into a margin is not on the pages we read.

See projects and profitability

Project profitability, on six billing models

Retainer, fixed price, time and materials, PPC passthrough, revenue share and internal. The revenue basis follows the model rather than assuming every project is billed by the hour. It is on the paid plan, and the margin, the rates and the billing model are admin only until an admin grants the permission.

See how profitability is calculated

The client invoice, on the same record as the hours

Invoices with lines, recorded payments, history and a tax field, late marking, payment reminder emails per workspace, and Romanian e-Factura filing. No invoicing feature appears on the Personio pages we read; the invoices its help centre documents are the ones Personio sends you.

See invoicing

A sales pipeline behind the same login

Leads, stages, client records, campaigns and a shared inbox, free up to the CRM lead limit and a flat monthly add-on above it. Personio sells HR; a sales CRM is not among the Apps its pricing page names.

See what the CRM covers

The whole setup, from the timesheet row to the client invoice, is written up on Growee for agencies.

Who should buy Personio instead?

Five cases where Personio is the right answer and switching is the wrong call. Each one is a row Growee loses in the table above. We would rather you read them here than find them in week three.

You need payroll actually run, not prepared

Personio runs payroll natively in Germany and prepares payroll data for an external provider everywhere else. Growee runs no payroll at all and issues no payslips. If payroll is the thing you are buying, this decides it before any other row.

Your workforce spans countries, and holidays differ

Personio lets you build custom bank-holiday calendars and assign them per office, falling back to the office calendar for the people based there. Growee scopes legal holidays to the workspace with no country field, so a multi-country team gets one calendar. This is the row we lose most clearly.

Your identity provider is non-negotiable

Personio ships SAML 2.0, Okta and Microsoft Entra ID sign-on, with Okta and Entra on its upper tier. Growee has no SAML and no SCIM, and Microsoft and Apple social sign-in is not a substitute. It also holds no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification and will not claim otherwise.

Half your team works from a phone, on Android

Personio ships native iOS and Android apps covering clock-in, time off, approvals and document upload. Growee is iPhone only and partial: no Android, and no projects, invoicing or documents inside the app.

You want salary bands and structured compensation reviews

Personio sells a compensation product with salary bands, compa-ratios, approvals and multi-currency handling. Growee holds benefits as records and has no compensation-review machinery at all.

What does each one cost?

One side publishes the whole ladder on a public page. The other quotes it after a demo. That difference is the thing to weigh before any feature row.

Growee

Free for up to 3 employees, with employee records, leave, documents, performance reviews, time tracking, timesheet approval, projects and the MCP server on that free plan. Above 3 employees the base plan is charged per employee, with no seat minimum and no platform fee, and client invoicing, expenses and project profitability sit on the paid plan. The current figure, monthly and annual, is on the pricing page.

See Growee pricing

Personio

Two tiers, Core and CorePro, and no published figure for either. Its pricing page answers "How much does Personio cost?" with "Our pricing depends on several factors, including the number of employees at your company and whether you choose to add any extra features", then routes to a custom quote after a demo. Performance and development, recruiting, compensation management and whistleblowing are separately priced Apps on top, none of them with a published figure either.

What is published is the contract shape: "For the yearly subscription, there is a minimum run-time of 12 months.", "Annual subscription with annual upfront payment benefit from a 10% discount on software services." and "All active users of the software count towards the number of licenses." Before you commit, there is a self-serve trial rather than a demo wall: "you can use all core functions of Personio free of charge for 14 days", with "no cancellation, commitment or credit card needed".

Source: personio.com/pricing, Wayback snapshot 17 April 2026; personio.com/free-trial, Wayback snapshot 14 January 2026

We do not publish a euro figure for Personio because Personio does not publish one. If a third-party site quotes you a per-employee number for it, that number is not on Personio's own pricing page in any capture we could read.

Personio alternative: frequently asked questions

What is the best Personio alternative for an agency?

It depends on which half of the problem is bigger. If payroll, multi-country public holidays or enterprise identity are the reason you are shopping, Personio is the stronger product and this page will not argue otherwise. If the gap is the money side of client work, Growee is the better fit: a billed hourly rate and an internal cost hourly rate on the timesheet row itself, project profitability across six billing models, and the client invoice on the same project record, none of which appears on the Personio pages we read on 19 September 2026. Growee is free for up to 3 employees, and the current per-employee figure is on the pricing page. See the full agency setup.

How much does Personio cost per employee?

Personio does not publish a figure. Its pricing page names two tiers, Core and CorePro, and answers the question with "Our pricing depends on several factors, including the number of employees at your company and whether you choose to add any extra features", routing you to a custom quote after a demo. We found no currency amount anywhere on its pricing, Core plan or pricing FAQ pages (personio.com/pricing, Wayback snapshot 17 April 2026). What is published are the contract terms: yearly billing carries "a minimum run-time of 12 months" and "a 10% discount on software services", and "All active users of the software count towards the number of licenses." Growee publishes its own figure on the pricing page instead, with a free plan for up to 3 employees.

Is there a free Personio alternative, and does Personio have a free plan?

Personio has no free plan, but it is not demo-only either: it runs a self-serve trial, "Once you've registered above, you can use all core functions of Personio free of charge for 14 days", with "no cancellation, commitment or credit card needed" (personio.com/free-trial, Wayback snapshot 14 January 2026). Growee's free plan has no time limit and no card: up to 3 employees, covering employee records, leave requests with policies and balances, documents with expiry dates and templates, performance reviews with types you define, time tracking with timers and weekly approval, projects, and the MCP server. Client invoicing, expenses, project profitability and REST API access start on the paid plan.

Does Personio have an MCP server, and how does it compare to Growee’s?

Yes, it does, and anyone telling you otherwise is working from stale notes. Personio shipped one in beta: "The Personio MCP server is currently in beta and isn't available for everyone yet.", reaching Claude, Google Antigravity and VS Code with GitHub Copilot (support.personio.de, "Personio MCP server - Beta access overview", updated 2 September 2026). The difference is shape, not existence. Personio's is read-first with "Limited write operations that initiate Personio-controlled workflows", write access off by default, an administrator needed to enable it, and two controls we do not have: per-tool toggles and per-attribute field hiding. Growee's is on the free plan, authenticates with OAuth 2.1 including Dynamic Client Registration or a personal access token, and reaches the MCP-enabled repositories, 75 of 106, through one execute-operation tool, so an assistant can write whatever the acting user's own permissions already allow. Both bind to the acting user's permissions. Read how ours is secured.

What does Growee do that Personio does not?

Two things, both on the money side of client work. First, the rate pair: a billed hourly rate and an internal cost hourly rate live on the timesheet row itself, so the same hours produce the client bill and the project margin. Personio's project tracking carries a billable status and a cost centre and reports hours, not money (support.personio.de, "Set up project-based time tracking", updated 7 September 2026). Second, the client invoice: lines, recorded payments, a tax field, late marking and reminder emails, on the same project record. Neither project profitability nor client invoicing appears anywhere on the Personio pages and help-centre articles we read on 19 September 2026, which is a statement about the documentation we could read rather than a claim that Personio ships nothing.

How do I move from Personio to Growee?

Employees come across through their own sheet import. 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. Contacts are not a separate import today, so company details ride along as fields on each lead. Going the other way, Personio's own export route is its API, which needs the upper tier, "You need Core Pro only if you want to build your own custom integration using the Personio public API." (support.personio.de, "Frequently asked questions about integrations and APIs", updated 17 September 2026), so check what your plan lets you take out before you pick a cutover date. Book a demo if you would rather have a hand with the move.

Where do these Personio facts come from?

Every Personio claim on this page comes from a page Personio publishes itself. Nothing here comes from a listicle, a review site or recalled knowledge, and no Personio capability is written that those pages did not show. Two dating schemes appear in the source notes, and the reason is worth stating plainly.

Personio's help centre and developer site, read live on 19 September 2026. support.personio.de answered every request, so the cells resting on it are dated by each article's own last-updated date, most of them within the last few weeks. This is where the custom bank-holiday calendars, the project time tracking, the API tier gate, the SSO guides, the performance review cycle, the document reminders and the MCP server beta all come from. These are the freshest and the most authoritative sources on this page.
personio.com marketing pages, by archived snapshot. www.personio.com returns HTTP 429 with a security checkpoint to every automated request, direct or proxied. The Internet Archive's crawler has been getting the same 429 since 10 August 2026, so the freshest readable capture of each marketing page is the snapshot named in its source note, between 14 January and 17 April 2026. Those cells are dated by the snapshot and never by today. Our own inability to fetch a page is never reported as vendor silence: where a capability is missing we say which pages we read and when.

Two consequences you should weigh. The pricing and mobile rows rest on captures five to eight months old, so treat them as the most recent published position rather than as today's. And a per-employee starting figure for Personio that has circulated elsewhere could not be reproduced: no currency amount appears on its pricing, Core plan or pricing FAQ pages in any capture we could read, so this page states no Personio price rather than repeating one it cannot source.

Growee's own cells come from the product itself, from the shipped configuration and from the pricing page, which is where the free and paid split in every Growee cell is set. The free tier covers up to 3 employees. No Growee price appears on this page on purpose: the pricing page is the single place that figure lives, so this comparison cannot drift from it.

One record for the person, the hours and the invoice

Keep the employee record, the leave balance and the review. Add the rate on the hour, the margin on the project and the invoice to the client. Free for up to 3 people.

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