Managing and streamlining payroll and HR operations is crucial for businesses of all types and sizes in India. Whether you’re a startup or a large enterprise, payroll can quickly become complex without the right tools and processes.
From calculating taxes and salaries to complying with labor laws and statutory regulations, payroll isn’t a straightforward task anymore, and handling these tasks manually leads to errors, non-compliance, delayed payments, and time-consuming processes.
Hence, it is crucial to invest in payroll software that automates these tasks, particularly given the rapidly growing businesses and organizations in India.
According to a report, 67% of Indian companies currently use payroll automation software as of 2024, and this figure is expected to increase to more than 85%, as suggested by experts, according to the payroll statistics.
This is testimony to companies realizing the long-term benefits of payroll software in India, including cost savings and compliance benefits.
So, the next question is, which payroll software should you choose, and how do you choose one? This article will guide you through the 14 best payroll software in India and which option you should choose depending on your company size and requirements. Let’s go!
Payroll software is a tool designed to streamline and automate payroll management tasks, such as calculating salary and tax deductions, setting up recurring payment cycles, calculating bonuses and overtime, and ensuring timely and accurate payment disbursement.
Payment software includes features such as tax compliance, leave integration, customizable reports, and more, in addition to payment processing and calculations.
Thus, payroll software significantly reduces manual errors and benefits businesses by
Before getting to the list, let’s look at some of the top features that make the best payroll software.
The HR payroll market size, which was valued at $7.3 billion in 2023, is projected to grow to $18.9 billion by 2032—showing the company’s and business’s growing investment in payroll software.
Here is a list of the best payroll software in India if you’re looking to streamline and automate your business’s payroll processes.
Darwinbox, a unified, end-to-end HCM platform, offers a 100% online payroll solution that streamlines payroll processing for businesses of all sizes—across departments, pay groups, and regions—using a simple 4-step process.
The solution is built on the RIVeR framework, which ensures seamless payroll execution through four key steps: Review Inputs, Initiate Process, Verify & e-approve, and Release & Report—delivering accuracy and efficiency at every stage.
Darwinbox provides a truly integrated payroll system. It enables real-time sync between HR, payroll, and workforce management (WFM), ensuring automatic and real-time data flow for attendance, leave, and other HCM inputs—making payroll processing effortless and error-free.
Moreover, Darwinbox ensures audit readiness with automated record-keeping, standardized reports, and real-time audit trials, making it easier for businesses to ensure compliance and complete transparency across payroll operations.
In addition, it also removes dependency on emails by enabling all payroll actions, such as finance approvals and adding comments to be recorded on a single platform. This makes the payroll process 100% digital and traceable.
Key features:
Best-suited for: Businesses of all types and sizes
PeopleStrong is an intuitive and unified payroll software that unifies payroll and HR systems but doesn’t offer APIs for other WFM and core employee data, like leave and attendance data.
Besides, the unified solution comes with several data discrepancies related to data sync. However, it provides analytics and real-time insights with 350+ pre-defined reports for better decision-making.
In addition, it comes with a custom report builder, which provides IT declarations, variance reports, etc., and configurable dashboards for deeper insights via data visualization.
The approval process is part of the workflow but isn’t connected to the entire payroll process.
Key features:
Best-suited for: Medium to large-sized enterprises
Keka provides a simple user interface that makes HR payroll simple and efficient.
It aims to make payroll management easier for non-finance roles, such as HR, allowing HR teams to manage salary operations effortlessly without requiring prior knowledge to revise and plan compensation.
However, while it facilitates these processes, delta processing is an issue. To perform delta processing, the admin would have to perform a payroll rollback if the payroll cycle is locked, which can lead to calculation errors.
Key features:
Best-suited for: Small-to-medium-sized businesses
FactoHR offers a streamlined payroll processing solution. Its wizard-driven approach guides you through every step of payroll processing, ensuring that you don’t miss any steps and remain stress-free.
It’s best known for its simplified salary arrears and calculations, which track retroactive changes made in compensation or attendance and support different arrears scenarios, such as unapproved leaves, missed attendance, holidays, salary revisions, and unclaimed overtime. It also provides over 200+ pre-built payroll reports and custom report builders to take data-driven actions.
It also automates statutory calculations and deductions while displaying the total arrears, making it easier to incorporate pending payments into the payroll process. This streamlines salary finalization, ensuring accuracy, reducing manual effort, and simplifying payroll operations.
Key features:
Best-suited for: Small-to-medium-sized businesses
HRone provides an effective payroll management process that facilitates and automates payroll tasks for HRs, allowing them to focus on other critical tasks.
It helps HR professionals process salaries with a tap while making it easier to configure the salary structure according to pay groups. It also automatically assigns salary structures to new employees or joiners, eliminating salary delays and ensuring timely disbursements.
In addition, to ensure error-free payroll calculations, HRone comes with a CTC calculator that automates salary calculations for maximum accuracy.
However, while HRone claims to provide an easy and user-friendly interface, many consider it overwhelming due to the large number of features, which increases the potential learning curve for complex functionalities.
When it comes to integrations, HRone integrates with over 15+ platforms, including SAP, Tally, and ERP systems.
Key features:
Best-suited for: Startups and small-to-medium-sized businesses
ADP offers cloud-based payroll processing software that integrates payroll with HR for streamlined payroll processing. While it aims to provide a unified interface, many businesses and professionals find the user interface difficult to navigate and non-intuitive, with limited customization options.
Besides, unlike other robust payroll software, ADP makes data sync and transformation complex and adds additional charges. Moreover, it only handles data corrections during the delta processing process before running the payroll cycle.
Several occasional complaints have also been observed regarding navigation complexities, which make it less than ideal for new users and small businesses.
Key features:
Best-suited for: SMBs and large enterprises
Oracle provides payroll software as part of its Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) suite, which includes features for managing payroll needs and requirements across multiple regions.
It offers high scalability, processing high-volume payrolls quickly, making it easier to meet the demands of evolving business requirements. It also claims to have a track record of processing payrolls for over 16 million employees monthly worldwide.
While Oracle is recognized for its high processing capabilities and scalability—supporting multiple currencies and delivery methods across 60+ countries—it comes with complex, tedious, and often confusing configurations that add to its complexity.
Additionally, while it facilitates report generation, its limited customization capabilities make it challenging to configure complex payroll rules, posing difficulties for organizations with unique payroll requirements.
Key features:
Best-suited for: Large organizations with varied salary structures and complex compliance needs
Zimyo aims to provide error-free, compliant, and swift payroll tax processing to reduce payroll tax penalties by 98%.
It handles and manages compliance requirements, including TDS, PF, ESIC, EDLI, Professional tax, etc., to ensure accurate tax deductions and TDS computation.
In addition, it streamlines expense management and settles employee expenses five times faster, using an efficient reimbursement approval workflow to help manage multiple expenses.
While Zimyo seamlessly automates payroll processing, it comes with potential limitations regarding advanced dustomization options depending on specific business needs and requirements.
Key features:
Best-suited for: Small-to-medium-sized businesses
SAP SF provides a cloud payroll management system that facilitates global payroll for businesses operating in multiple countries to ensure accurate and timely payments to local and international employees.
By offering payroll localization for over 48 locales the payroll platform reduces payroll costs for harmonizing processes on a single platform.
However, one of the major cons of SAP SF is that while it looks like a unified payroll solution on the outside, in reality, data sync presents several issues and discrepancies in EC and ECP. Due to this, data sync requires technical expertise and assistance.
In addition, several users find the set-up, configuration, and user interface complex, especially the timesheet setup—making configuration more challenging than other payroll software.
Key features:
Best-suited for: Medium to large enterprises and MNCs
Ramco provides a unified payroll solution—Payce, that helps organizations save time and improve organizational performance.
It comes with a centralized payroll workspace that streamlines payroll tasks and end-to-end payroll processing operations. This includes reviewing inputs and arrears, bulk uploading data, addressing integration issues, processing payroll, verifying anomalies, approving payroll, authorizing payroll and downloading reports—all in one place.
It also simplifies employee self-service by providing an intuitive and modern portal. The portal allows employees to track expenses, payslips, leaves, approvals, and My Information. However, real-time information and data sync can take up to an entire day.
Key features:
Best-suited for: Medium-to-large-sized businesses and enterprises with global payroll and compliance requirements.
sumHR provides a payroll solution that helps you set up your payroll software within 5 clicks in 5 minutes. However, unlike other reliable payroll software, like Darwinbox, sumHR doesn’t provide a unified payroll solution for HR, payroll, and WFM.
One unique feature of this payroll software is the ability to run a trial payroll process to test the process and ensure a good payroll performance before the actual payroll day.
It also facilitates employee self-service, enabling employees to submit and declare proof of their tax-saving investments. However, many users report the interface of sumHR to be too clunky, making the site slow and sluggish.
Key features:
Best-suited for: Small and medium-sized businesses and startups
Razorpay provides automated payroll and compliance software that fully automates TDS, PT, PF, and ESIC payments, along with tax filing. It provides a single dashboard to automate payroll tasks, including filing taxes, disbursing salaries, etc.
It ensures 360-degree payroll management, helping you calculate and transfer accurate salaries to your employees with instant settlement reimbursements.
It also comes with comprehensive HR management software with features like a CTC calculator, a self-serve dashboard for Form 16, payslips, etc., and integration with over 25 HRMS partners.
Key features:
Best-suited for: Startups and small-to-medium-sized businesses
PocketHRMS provides a machine learning-based smHRt payroll software integrated with the attendance management system.
Like other payroll software, PocketHRMS also provides customizable payroll solutions with multi-company and multi-salary structure payroll options with a conditional formula builder that helps you generate custom formulae for salary heads and structures.
You also need not worry about payroll calculations, as it automates calculations such as PF, IT, ESI, provident fund, arrears, professional tax, and F&F calculations. However, the software comes with a lack of customization options to meet tailored organizational requirements. At the same time, several users report the software to be unreliable and sluggish at times.
Key features:
Best-suited for: Startups and medium-sized businesses (SMBs)
Qandle offers payroll management software with over 40+ HR modules. It comes with customizable and configurable options, such as choosing from various salary structures, payslip formats, and periods.
You can also customize bank reports, statutory reports, and more to meet your specific business needs and requirements. In addition, Qandle comes with an ESS portal that makes it easier to apply for leave, access payslips, and update personal information through a user-friendly portal.
Key features:
Best-suited for: Small-and-medium-sized businesses with standard payroll needs
Choosing the right payroll software is essential to ensuring a smooth payroll process while meeting compliance needs and employee satisfaction. Here are a few things to consider when choosing payroll software in India.
Assess your business needs and choose payroll software that best fits your business size and industry type with specific requirements based on payment structures and pain points.
For instance, payroll software requirements for a newly established startup may differ from those of a multinational organization with diverse employees, like full-time employees, contractors, and freelancers—requiring diverse pay structures.
In addition, the industry in which you work also impacts the payroll software you choose. For example, while an IT company may need a payroll solution with global payroll capabilities, other industries, like the healthcare industry, might need tailored payroll software that specializes in payroll for variable shifts and multiple pay rates and job roles.
Lastly, it’s important to consider your company’s current payroll challenges and pain points, which could be reimbursement delays, frequent errors, or compliance issues.
While being specific with your payroll software needs is crucial, it’s also important to choose software that comes with the most essential and must-have features to make an ideal and top payroll software. These features include
If you’re a thriving business that only intends to grow its locations, customer base, and employees, choosing a scalable payroll software is a non-negotiable.
In addition to being scalable and accommodating your business growth, payroll software should also be flexible enough to customize payroll requirements, such as leave policies, pay structures, and compliance needs, depending on different company locations.
Ensuring user-friendliness is one of the most basic and primary requirements of payroll software. Choose payroll software that makes it easier for your team and HR professionals to use and get used to with minimal training—avoiding conflicts, resistance to adoption, and risks of errors.
Moreover, the payroll software should also come with user manuals and a reliable support team to support onboarding.
According to payroll statistics and a 2024 report, 55% of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in India still face issues with compliance. Companies that adopt and use payroll software in India report a 92% compliance rate compared to companies that still struggle to manage payroll manually.
Compliance is a key requirement when choosing payroll software in India. Make sure to choose software that stays up-to-date with the latest tax and labor regulations and generates customized and detailed reports on taxes, payroll records, and employee information for informed decision-making.
Some payroll software might charge premium charges for some basic and common features. To avoid choosing such options, it’s important to evaluate the ownership costs of payroll software, along with the features provided, setup costs, subscription charges, or additional costs for add-ons or upgrades.
Additionally, when you evaluate and compare these factors with multiple tools, choosing a payroll software that offers the best return on investment (RoI) with long-term benefits is beneficial and valuable.
If your company mostly operates remotely, with multiple remote or hybrid teams spread across global locations, it is crucial to choose cloud-based payroll software that enables seamless accessibility.
In addition, choosing payroll software with advanced mobile-friendly features and capabilities makes it convenient for employees and HR and payroll professionals to use the software on the go.
After analyzing the features and taking care of the factors mentioned above, it is not recommended to jump straight into purchasing payroll software. Instead, if possible, make sure to take the trial version or request a free demo to test the software and see if it seamlessly fits within your existing systems and works well with your team before committing fully to it.
To test the payroll software and confirm your specific requirements, make sure you involve all the key stakeholders and team members from the IT, HR, and finance teams.
Payroll is one business operation that businesses cannot afford to neglect. Whether processing and disbursing accurate payments to employees, calculating tax deductions, or meeting regulatory and compliance requirements, it’s crucial to manage all payroll operations efficiently and swiftly.
By analyzing your specific business needs and choosing reliable payroll software from the list mentioned above, you can overcome the risks of manual payroll processing and ensure error-free, seamless, and compliant payroll processing.
Darwinbox makes payroll processing easy and 100% accurate with a unified solution that ensures a seamless user experience. Whether you want to manage tax filings or stay at the top of payroll compliances, Darwinbox makes payroll management a breeze.
Schedule a demo today to learn more.
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, enhances payroll processing by automating payroll tasks, predicting compliance risks, reducing errors, and providing actionable insights for better payroll management.
Yes, payroll software ensures high employee retention by ensuring error-free salary calculations, employee self-service portals, and timely salary processing—improving employee trust and satisfaction.
It’s important to look out for hidden costs, such as charges for advanced reporting tools, API integrations, premium customer support, and compliance features when looking for payroll software in India.