EasyHR vs Keka: A 2026 Comparison for Indian SMEs

EasyHR vs Keka — the short version

Keka and EasyHR sit in the same broad category — cloud HRMS for Indian businesses — but they’re optimized for different buyers.

Keka has spent the last seven years targeting India’s mid-market tech ecosystem and has built what’s probably the most polished all-in-one HRMS in that segment. They closed a $57M Series A from WestBridge Capital, count 10,000+ customers across 150 countries, and consistently sit near the top of G2’s HRMS category with a 4.5 / 5 rating from 800+ reviews. If you’re a 500-person SaaS company with an in-house people operations team and a six-figure SaaS budget, Keka is a defensible choice.

EasyHR is built for the rest of the SME market — the manufacturing companies, retail chains, BFSI back offices, healthcare networks, and services businesses where HR is one or two people, statutory compliance is non-negotiable, and the team can’t spend two months in implementation. We’re explicitly opinionated: less configurable surface area, faster rollout, transparent pricing, and a UX that a non-technical HR generalist can run on day three.

So the right comparison isn’t really “which one is better.” It’s which one fits the way your team actually works.

Pricing — what you’ll really pay

This is where most comparisons get hand-wavy, so we’ll be concrete.

Keka publishes three plans (Foundation, Strength, Growth) with per-employee pricing typically in the ₹150–₹250 per-employee-per-month range. The catch is that the Foundation plan starts at roughly ₹6,999–₹9,999 / month for the first 25 employees as a fixed minimum. If you have 12 employees, you’re effectively paying for 25. For a small team, that subsidy is real money.

EasyHR’s pricing is straightforward per-employee on three tiers (Starter, Growth, Enterprise) with no minimum-headcount cliff. You pay for the headcount you have, and you can move tiers without re-implementing.

For most teams under 50 employees, EasyHR comes out 20–35% cheaper on the SaaS subscription alone. Once you factor in implementation cost (typically zero for EasyHR vs paid implementation for Keka above the smallest plan), the gap is wider.

For teams over 200 employees, the per-employee subscription difference narrows. But the soft cost — admin time spent configuring, reconfiguring, and training people on the system — still favors EasyHR.

Features — what’s in the box

The honest answer: both products handle 90% of HR workloads and the overlap is substantial. Where they differ matters less than the marketing pages suggest.

Core HR

Both cover employee master data, document generation, onboarding workflows, org-structure management, custom roles, and reminders. EasyHR’s onboarding flow is simpler and faster to configure; Keka’s offers more configurable steps if you have a complex multi-stage onboarding process.

Time and attendance

Both support biometric integration, mobile clock-in, and shift management. EasyHR includes GPS / selfie attendance from the Growth tier and geofencing in Enterprise. Keka offers similar features but treats some as add-ons or higher-tier upgrades. If you have field staff, distributed sales teams, or a hybrid attendance policy, this is where you’ll feel the difference in your implementation path and your monthly invoice.

Leave management

Both products handle leave policies, balances, accruals, holiday calendars, and approval workflows. Differences here are mostly cosmetic.

Payroll and statutory compliance

Both compute Indian statutory items — PF, ESI, TDS, professional tax, LWF, gratuity — and generate the relevant returns and statutory files (Form 16, Form 24Q, ECR for EPFO, etc.). Both handle multi-state PT, multiple pay groups for legal entities, and arrears processing. There’s no meaningful compliance gap on either side — anyone who claims one is “more compliant” than the other is selling something. See our payroll software overview for the EasyHR feature list.

Performance management and L&D

Keka has a more developed performance-management module out of the box, including OKR support and a learning-management module. EasyHR offers performance management as a focused add-on module. If continuous performance management is central to your HR strategy and you want it in the same login, Keka edges this category. If you treat it as a quarterly process, EasyHR’s add-on covers it without bloat.

Mobile experience

Both have iOS and Android apps. Keka users on G2 mention the mobile app being feature-thinner than the web version — particularly for managers approving requests on the go. EasyHR’s mobile app supports the most-used flows (attendance, leave, expenses, approvals, payslips) at parity with the web.

Implementation — how fast can you go live

This is the single biggest practical difference between the two and it’s the one most comparison pages skip over.

Keka’s implementation cycle for a 100-employee company runs 4 to 8 weeks, sometimes longer if you have unusual policies or need integrations. Reviews on G2 and Gartner Peer Insights consistently flag this as a sore point — not because the product is hard, but because the configuration surface area is large. Reviewers describe getting stuck on minor configuration changes and waiting on customer success follow-ups.

EasyHR’s implementation runs 7 to 14 days for a similar-sized team. Some of that is product opinion (we make decisions for you on parts of the workflow that don’t actually need configuring), some is process (we do data migration in parallel with policy setup, not after it), and some is structural (we don’t have a 14-step approval chain you have to map every workflow into).

If you’re switching from a legacy system or another HRMS and you need to be live by next month-end, this gap matters more than any feature delta.

Customer support and reliability

Keka has the larger support organization and operates 24/7 chat in business hours. Most reviews praise the quality of support but mention slower turnaround during peak periods — particularly month-end salary processing days, which is exactly when you need it most.

EasyHR runs a smaller, dedicated support team. Typical response time is under 2 business hours during business days. We’re transparent that we don’t operate 24/7 — for what 95% of SMEs need, that’s a feature, not a limitation.

On reliability, both products have uptime SLAs in the 99.9% range and neither has the kind of public reliability incidents that would disqualify them.

Industry fit — where each one is strongest

This is the most underappreciated dimension.

Keka’s customer base, by their own published data, skews 38% combined toward IT services, computer software, and internet companies. The product’s UX, terminology, and workflow defaults reflect that. If you’re hiring engineers, doing six-month performance cycles, and tracking OKRs, Keka feels native.

EasyHR’s customer base spans manufacturing, retail, BFSI, healthcare, IT services, and professional services. The product is deliberately cross-sector and we’ve published industry-specific configurations:

• Manufacturing
• Retail
• BFSI
• Healthcare
• IT and technology services

If your team is mostly knowledge workers in front of laptops, the industry fit doesn’t matter much — both work. If you have shop-floor staff, retail outlets, field sales, or shift-based clinical staff, the field-attendance features and the lower-touch UX in EasyHR start to compound.

Switching from Keka to EasyHR

If you’re already on Keka and considering a switch, here’s what the migration looks like.

We’ve migrated customers off Keka in 5–10 working days. The standard scope:

1. Employee master data export from Keka, mapped and imported into EasyHR
2. Year-to-date payroll history (gross, deductions, net, statutory contributions) for continuity in Form 16 generation
3. Leave balances and accrual histories
4. Document attachments (offer letters, ID proofs, statutory forms)
5. Org structure and reporting hierarchy
6. Custom fields and policies
7. One full parallel payroll run before cutover so you can compare outputs against your last Keka payroll line by line

The total cost is bundled into onboarding — there’s no separate migration fee. We’ll also give you a side-by-side feature parity check before you commit so there are no surprises.

How to choose

It comes down to three questions.

One — how big is your team and how is it distributed? Under 100 employees, in-office or hybrid: EasyHR almost always wins on cost and time-to-value. Over 200, fully tech-stack-modern: Keka is competitive. Field-heavy or multi-location with shop-floor staff: EasyHR.

Two — how mature is your HR operation? If you have a dedicated HRBP and an HR ops manager who can spend two months on implementation and want every advanced module: Keka. If HR is one person and they need to be productive in week one: EasyHR.

Three — what’s your tolerance for configuration? If you want to model a unique workflow for everything: Keka has more knobs. If you want a system that has reasonable defaults and lets you customize what actually needs customizing: EasyHR.

If you’re comparing the two for an actual buying decision, start a 14-day EasyHR trial and run it in parallel with your Keka demo. The comparison gets clearer in 48 hours of real use than in any feature matrix.