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We discovered that there wasn’t a useful, in-depth guide that compared BrightHR vs CharlieHR in detail — and decided to fix that.
This guide takes you through a detailed look at CharlieHR and BrightHR, covering the pros and cons of both HR systems. We’ve done the research on the strengths and limitations, spoken to real customers, and compared features to help you make an informed decision on which is right for you.
This isn’t just an opportunity for us to talk about how great Charlie is for small businesses. We’ve also considered some of the reasons why you might prefer BrightHR, and been honest about not just the good but the limitations too.
If you’re looking for a transparent, in-depth comparison guide for BrightHR vs CharlieHR, you’re in the right place.
Many people switch from another HR tool, including BrightHR, over to Charlie. When they do, we like to ask them some questions to find out more about why they made the move and how we can serve them better.
Some of the questions we ask them include:
All the people we’ve spoken to have been working at UK-based small businesses with between 2 and 100 employees, including:
Thanks to their responses, we’ve been able to uncover key insights about BrightHR and Charlie that allow us to consider the strengths and limitations of both HRIS platforms.
Looking for a super quick guide on the best benefits of each HR platform? Here’s an introduction to the highlights of both before we dive in a little deeper.
CharlieHR and BrightHR are both well-known HR platforms that small businesses like you can use to streamline HR operations. While they both do this well, we think Charlie stands out as the right choice for a number of reasons.
Through user reviews, onboarding interviews, and customer feedback we’ve collected plenty of data about what small businesses want and need — then made this a reality within Charlie. This research has also helped us understand where other software tools are lacking, and allowed us to create features and experiences that make both simple and complex HR tasks easier.
Let’s explore some of the main reasons why Charlie is a strong choice for small businesses and startups.
We have plenty of reasons to think Charlie is the best choice, but we’ve narrowed it down to just three of the most relevant here. Discover what makes Charlie ideal for small businesses that want to streamline, simplify, and improve the way they do HR.
It can feel like there’s an endless stack of tasks to take care of when your role involves HR. There are new hires to onboard, time off and annual leave to manage, and a whole lot of data to enter, filter through, and analyse. These traditionally manual processes are time-consuming and open to error — especially if you have more than one person handling HR.
Charlie allows you to take all these tasks and automate them. With Charlie, you can get everything set up and then let the system take care of it all. You also benefit from having one place to store everything, so there’s no need to balance different spreadsheets, systems, and processes.
Use Charlie to:
Automating these HR management tasks doesn’t just speed up the process, it also gives you some valuable time back. Use the hours you’ve saved on repetitive admin tasks for a bigger purpose — like overseeing your HR strategy, working with employees on their career goals, or supporting team members with HR advice.
Working in HR shouldn’t just be about adding new employee data and managing holiday requests. It’s also about enabling managers and individuals to work at their best and achieve their career goals.
Empowering team members to set, work towards, and celebrate achieving their goals is even easier with Charlie. Our performance management feature helps you run high-impact performance reviews that feel effortless to plan and launch.
Get the most out of your performance review process with:
Charlie makes performance management not only easier, but more engaging and effective. Empower individuals to feel involved in the process, invite team members to share their experiences, and use this as an opportunity to set and make progress towards goals that positively impact your employees’ career journeys.
With some software platforms you need an instruction manual just to get started. At Charlie, it’s different. We recognise how valuable your time is and we know you don’t want to sit through a generic onboarding process call with a salesperson.
Getting started with Charlie is simple, swift, and fuss-free. Our onboarding process is self-service, so you can join and set everything when you’re ready — on your schedule, not ours.
Use our 7-day free trial period to get familiar with how the platform looks, feels, and works. Explore features, fill out your account details, and start setting up your HR processes and workflows. Customise as much as you want, when you want.
Access a library filled with useful guides, walkthrough videos, and self-service help articles when you need it. And if you have a specific question or want some customised help, our support team is quick to respond.
Every software has its pros and cons, and that’s also true for Charlie. Our goal for Charlie is to simplify the way you do HR, which means we’re not always the right choice if you want to go deep into culture, gamification, or timesheets.
In some cases, Charlie won’t be the best HR software for you. Here’s why:
HR and payroll often go together, but payroll can be complex and many small businesses already have a finance tool with an effective payroll management feature. This means that it’s often a feature that goes unused, offering you poor value for money.
That’s why we don’t offer a built-in payroll tool within Charlie, but instead we integrate with a range of popular payroll tools like Pento and Xero. Update your information within Charlie and the data will automatically sync to your chosen payroll too — saving you time and effort and reducing the chance of error.
Gamification can be a great way to motivate employees to use your HR platform, but it’s not a priority for us at Charlie. Our focus is on streamlining HR operations and making the experience feel effortless.
While we don’t have digital confetti or the chance to collect points to exchange for branded merch or perks, we do have more meaningful ways for you to engage with employees — like engagement surveys, polls, and shoutouts. You can even use our Slack integration to automatically send these shoutouts straight to your chosen channel for increased transparency and engagement.
Some small businesses need employees to clock in and out and complete daily or weekly timesheets. If that’s a must-have for you, then it’s important to know that we don’t currently offer a clocking in/out or timesheet feature.
This doesn’t mean you can’t use Charlie, though. Our integrations with other tools like Papershift mean you can clock in and out, manage schedules, and track time. Choose Charlie as your HR platform and use integrations like this to add in features you need, or enhance the way you run your HR operations.
Charlie isn’t the only HR tool out there, and we want to be completely transparent about our competitors and what their strengths are — so you can make the right choice for your small business. Next up, let’s take a look at some of the highlights of BrightHR.
BrightHR offers a wide range of features and understands the needs of UK-based small businesses well — something that we at Charlie also excel at. Here’s some of the reasons why BrightHR could be the right tool for you.
If your role includes recruitment and talent management, having a built-in candidate management feature (like the one in BrightHR) can save you time and help you cut down on software subscriptions.
With BrightHR’s candidate management tool, you can:
For teams that work with shift patterns, having a way to not only manage this but do this effectively (and without fuss) is a must-have. BrightHR has a shift and rota planning feature built in, meaning you don’t need to invest in another tool to handle this.
BrightHR allows you to:
Managing shifts and rotas from your desktop or laptop is always useful, but an area where BrightHR particularly excels is the ability to track time on the move with its dedicated mobile app, Blip.
With the Blip app, you can:
Like any software tool, BrightHR also has its downsides. Some people may find BrightHR’s extensive range of features overwhelming, or discover that it’s missing HR functionality in a key area like performance management. Others may find the approach to pricing and contracts offputting.
Here are some of the main areas to consider:
BrightHR has a huge range of features and while this is a positive for some teams, for many small businesses this can quickly become overwhelming. If you want to simplify the way you handle HR, this may not be the right tool for you.
For teams that don’t need it, all the functionality around rotas, recruitment, payroll, and employee recognition could become a distraction from your main goals. And as it’s all built into the price, you could end up feeling like you’re not getting much out of the platform compared to your subscription cost.
Despite the range of features we’ve talked about above, BrightHR doesn’t currently offer performance management or review management. This means teams that want to focus on career goals and performance reviews need to look elsewhere.
If this is a key feature for you, it might be possible to add this to your BrightHR experience through an integration, although this is somewhat limited to Microsoft and Zapier. At Charlie, this feature is already part of the platform, as we recognise how valuable it is to encourage, motivate, and support your employees through their journey.
Although many software companies (Charlie included!) are transparent about pricing and offer easy-out contracts, the same isn’t the case for BrightHR.
There’s no straightforward explanation of what each plan includes or what it costs. To get a quote, users need to engage with an automated chatbot and share their contact details for a follow-up. This means it’s difficult to fully compare BrightHR with other software tools you might be considering at this stage.
If you’re interested in signing up for BrightHR, it’s important to know that you’ll be locked into a contract with a minimum term of 12 months. For small businesses that are getting to know how they work best and how they want to operate, being tied to using a specific tool for that long can feel restrictive — especially if it ends up not being the right one for you.
Naturally we think Charlie is the best, but the answer to this question will always depend on what your goals are and what’s important to your small business.
What we can do is share some of the main reasons why we think Charlie is a better alternative to other competitors, like BrightHR or BreatheHR:
We believe that you can’t fully know if a software tool is right for you unless you’ve experienced it yourself. Sign up for a 7-day free trial today to explore everything Charlie has to offer. No commitment and no credit card required.
Free for 7 days
No credit card needed
Cancel any time