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Charlie offers all the HR automation you need for your small business, at a price you can afford. Our modern and easy-to-use platform is built for busy teams like yours — so you can sort all of your HR, in no time.
If you’re here, it’s because you are about to make an important decision: picking the right HR software for your business.
This guide will help you choose between two of the products on your shortlist, CharlieHR and Sage HR.
CharlieHR and Sage HR are HRMS tools helping small businesses automate their HR processes.
The difference is, whilst Charlie includes all of its features in one package, Sage HR charges extra for the following ones: shift scheduling, expenses, timesheets, recruitment and performance reviews.
Charlie also offers an HR Advice service (from £179/month) where you get access to a personal HR advisor to answer any policy or compliance questions by phone, email or live chat.
One of the hardest things to gauge when choosing HR solutions is packages.
Every tool offers a different set of functionalities, in different packages, priced using different criteria… Often, the cheapest, most basic plans don’t cover all the needs of your small business — so you’re forced to pick a premium package with the expectation to upgrade again in a few years.
I’ve worked with a lot of small businesses and I know how much of a pain it can be. That’s why at Charlie we only have:
Charlie’s pricing is simple and transparent: you pay based on your team’s size (starting from £5/month); no hidden fees or added costs.
Charlie helps you banish manual and repetitive HR tasks, so you can focus on what really matters.
On the other hand, Sage HR splits its offering into many different plans.
Yes, this gives you more flexibility — but, realistically, it means you’ll spend more to get all the functionalities you need:
While Charlie doesn’t have a mobile app, Sage HR’s app has very mixed reviews on Capterra:
Mobile application: it is very basic, almost no functionality. You can't clock in/out from the app, which is essential these days for employees who move around.
I may be a bit biased, but I believe that Charlie’s clear and simple pricing, with one plan inclusive of all essential HR tools, gives small businesses better value for money compared to Sage HR.
As a small business, you want your Human Resources software to be intuitive and user friendly. Your team has to be able to find their way around it without asking you for help or having to go through long and complex training sessions.
We built Charlie with that in mind. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never used a HR tool before — you’ll be able to book time off, complete your performance reviews or set up an onboarding workflow in no time and zero effort thanks to our intuitive user interface.
A few customers who moved to Charlie told us that their main reason for switching was Sage HR’s dated user interface.
While Sage HR has continued to update their functionalities, their design still doesn’t feel as modern and intuitive as today’s ambitious small businesses may want them to be.
Another issue ex-customers have flagged is that Sage HR, with its many packages and feature combinations, can become difficult to navigate.
The platform is part of the larger Sage Group which was born as an accounting software for single users (accountants). Past Sage customers have told us that it hasn’t adapted particularly well to be used by multiple users (all employees) as an HR management software.
You can get an idea of what Sage HR’s platform looks like on this Youtube video. And you can compare it to Charlie’s platform on this demo video.
Or, why not start a 7-day free trial to explore Charlie’s features in complete freedom?
Save yourself hours every week – and spend it building a happy, high-performing team instead.
HR software is supposed to cut down the time you spend on admin — but that only works if your chosen HR tool smoothly integrates with all the other platforms you’re using.
Otherwise, having to continuously copy-and-paste employee data across your payroll management, HRIS and benefits platforms will undo all the time-saving you thought you’d gained!
This is especially important for SMEs that often cannot afford to have one tool to look after every aspect of their operations. Most companies I talk to on a daily basis have one HR system, along with a separate payroll tool, an applicant tracking system and sometimes even a platform to manage employee benefits.
That’s why we have heavily invested to continuously add new integrations between Charlie and other popular small-business tools.
Like Sage HR, CharlieHR also integrates with Slack: you can set up Slack notifications to trigger when someone books a sick day, is away on holiday, or if it’s anyone’s birthday.
Both Sage HR and Charlie also integrate with common Calendar applications, so you can import events from your HR platform onto iCal, Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar.
That’s where Sage HR’s integration capabilities stop at though: they don’t offer any other integrations with People Ops tools. You can request them to link up with your other tools via Zapier, but it will have to be a custom job (likely at an additional price).
On the other hand, Charlie can easily be synched up with common payroll tools like Pento (and, soon, Xero!), ATS like Workable and compensation benchmark software like Pave and Figures.
Check out the full list of Charlie’s integrations or go back to our comparison table.
If your business model means a good portion of your employees work in shifts, Sage HR is definitely the best choice for your company.
Sage HR’s shift scheduling and time tracking feature allows you to create and edit shifts for your team members. Employees can signal when they are available as well as their preferred working patterns.
As a separate module, Sage HR also allows you to track hours worked and create timesheets. This is helpful if your team’s working hours are not fixed, or if you need them to clock-in and out of work.
Note that shift scheduling and timesheets are not included in Sage HR’s basic package: they come at an extra cost.
Charlie gives you much more value for your money compared to SageHR.
You get all the tools you need to save time on repetitive HR tasks, for a price you can actually sustain as you grow.
You’ll never have to worry about hidden fees or having to upgrade to a more expensive plan: Charlie gives you immediate access to all you need, at a price that you’ll always be able to afford.
This way, you’ll be able to put solid HR foundations in place for your small business to scale.
All-in one HR software
1-4
£5
£6-£24
5-14
£40
£30-£84
15-29
£100
£90-£174
30-49
£170
£180-£294
50-99
£300
£300-£594
100-149
£400
£600-£894
150-199
£500
£900-£1,194
200-249
£600
£1,200-£1,494
250+
£700
£1500+
Stop wasting time of repetitive HR admin. Charlie saves you hours on HR tasks, every day.