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Congratulations: if you’re here, reading this page, it means you’re very close to choosing the right HR platform for your business! You’ve shortlisted CharlieHR and Personio, and now you have to make a final decision. This guide will help you do just that.
Yes, both Charlie and Personio are HR automation platforms, but the needs they target are a bit different.
Charlie is the ideal HR software for small businesses and startups who need a simple and effective solution to cut down on admin tasks and put solid HR foundations in place.
Personio’s complex functionalities help bigger businesses level up their Human Resources, once those foundations are already in place.
Let’s have a look at what that means in terms of actual feature offering and pricing.
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The most immediate difference between Charlie and Personio is in their packages:
The small businesses I talk to on a daily basis appreciate the fact that Charlie’s plan and pricing are clear and straightforward. The fact that it’s all-inclusive takes a lot of stress out of the decision-making process: you don’t have to choose which add-ons to spend your budget on: it all comes in one package.
Charlie’s offering has been carefully designed to meet all the needs of small businesses and startups with up to 200 employees — you know you’ll get everything you need, nothing more and nothing less.
With Personio, on the other hand, you need to carefully consider the features you need in order to pick the right plan for your business. The Professional and Enterprise packages are obvious picks for larger businesses that need advanced reporting and management tools across multiple countries and sub-companies.
Smaller businesses may instead consider Personio’s Essentials package — so let’s see how it compares to Charlie in meeting the needs of companies with under 50 team members:
✅ Charlie’s all-in-one plan includes onboarding, performance reviews, engagement surveys and perks, and there is no extra fee for setting it up.
❌ Charlie doesn’t have a payroll management feature, but it integrates with payroll tools such as Pento (and soon Xero).
The different ways Charlie and Personio package their offering reflects on their pricing structure too.
Charlie’s pricing is very simple:
Personio’s pricing is a bit more complex:
In conclusion, in order to compare Charlie and Personio’s pricing, you’ll need to consider your company size and decide what Personio plan and extra features you’d like to go for.
Personio’s pricing can become harder to afford if your user count is on the lower end of their pricing brackets. Plus, you’ll have to take into account that each added feature will considerably increase your final bill.
Because of the complexity of Personio’s HR platform, it can take months to roll it out to your team, vs the almost immediate set up you get with Charlie. Plus, Personio’s advanced features require a bigger learning curve compared to Charlie’s.
Companies that choose Charlie are quite different from those using Personio, and that is reflected in the platforms’ ease of use too.
Businesses that choose Charlie are smaller: often the person responsible for HR wears many other hats (they may also look after finance, or even be a startup founder). Small business leaders don’t have time to invest in a long set-up process: they want an HR tool that they can roll out to their teams in seconds, and be confident that everyone will find their way around it.
Charlie does give them just that. It takes a few minutes to set up your Charlie account and invite your team to the platform. Once you’re live, the hassle-free interface means your employees can easily perform any HR tasks independently (like booking time off or creating onboarding checklists) — no need to go through any sort of training or intro demos.
On the other hand, Personio was built for bigger companies: its wide range of advanced HR features makes it the best pick for businesses with more complex HR needs. Software setup is therefore much longer: it can take months to set up Personio and roll it out to your team, and you’ll have to pay an implementation fee to cover training and onboarding.
You should also expect a bit of a learning curve when it comes to understanding how to get the most out of Personio’s multi-faceted HR platform — hence why you may consider paying extra for premium customer support.
Charlie is super intuitive, which means we learned how to maximise its benefits to the organisation really quickly.
I hope this guide helped you understand what HR software may be best for your company!
If you’d like to take Charlie out for a spin, you can start a 7-day free trial, no credit card required.