PAYROLLHERO ALTERNATIVE · PHILIPPINES

PayrollHero was engineered for time and attendance, licensed per employee. Your payroll is more than a clock.

Where PayrollHero licenses you time, attendance, and payroll per employee per month, Orkids builds the payroll and back office around your actual workforce — head office, branches, field crews, contractors — and hands you the source code at cutover.

Orkids vs PayrollHero, line by line.

Orkids compared with PayrollHero across nine dimensions
Dimension	PayrollHero	Orkids
Typical PH cost	Per-employee / month	Per-engagement build · see /pricing
Time to production	Onboarding + configuration	2–3 weeks
Core strength	Time, attendance, scheduling, clean payroll run	Payroll inside a back office — costing, operations, branches
Beyond the clock	Connects loosely to the rest of operations	Reconciles to costing, operations, and reporting by design
Customization	Configured within the product	Built around your actual workforce structure
Code ownership / lock-in	Subscription + per-seat lock-in	Full source + repo transfers to you at cutover
Gov't remittances (BIR/SSS/PhilHealth/Pag-IBIG)	Native	Native
Named PH receipt	None disclosed	No payroll receipt yet — methodology-proven (a top-ranked Philippine private hospital, an Enterprise B2B Provider, 3 weeks)
Fork / self-host	No	Yes

Competitor figures are typical Philippine proposal bands shared with Orkids by clients, 2024–2026. Per-engagement pricing varies by scope.

What you’d own instead

PayrollHero is rented. Orkids is owned.

The comparison above is a cost story. Underneath it is an ownership story. With PayrollHero you rent the right to keep operating. With Orkids you own the thing you operate on.

Rented
PayrollHero keeps the source. You license access, never the code.
Owned
The full source and repo transfer to you at cutover. Yours on day one.
Rented
Per-seat licensing — every new hire adds to the bill, forever.
Owned
No per-seat fee. Headcount can grow without the cost following it.
Rented
Renewals that climb each year, plus a tax at every version bump.
Owned
No annual increase, no upgrade tax. You upgrade on your own schedule.
Rented
Multi-month rollouts gated behind a vendor or partner backlog.
Owned
Live in 2–3 weeks, built to your workflows — not a configuration ceiling.
Rented
Your data lives in the vendor's tenancy, on the vendor's terms.
Owned
Runs in your cloud, under your keys. Your data stays your data.
Rented
Customisations owned by whoever wrote them — a dependency you can't replace.
Owned
Source, schema, and deploy keys are handed over. No lock-in to walk back from.

Get the PayrollHero 2026 PH peso teardown.

One email. The PayrollHero 2026 Philippine peso teardown as a PDF, plus the Cost Index data behind it. Nothing else.

THE RECEIPT

A named Philippine engagement that beat the quote.

No payroll receipt is closed yet — we will not imply one. The methodology that shipped a top-ranked Philippine hospital's HIS in 3 weeks and an Enterprise B2B Provider's CRM in 3 weeks is the same one we would bring to a payroll-and-back-office build. Read how we ship before you decide.

Read the methodology →Explore the vertical →

When PayrollHero is the right answer.

PayrollHero is the right choice for a specific buyer profile: a Philippine business whose core need is time, attendance, scheduling, and a clean payroll run, with a workforce that clocks in on a standard schedule and no requirement for payroll to connect deeply to the rest of operations. The test: if scheduling and a compliant payroll run are the whole job, PayrollHero's time-and-attendance focus serves it well. We compete on the operation where payroll is one part of a larger back office — multi-entity, contractor-heavy, branch cycles, costing that has to reconcile to operations — and where per-employee licensing compounds faster than the headcount justifies.

If that’s you, PayrollHerois the honest call and we’ll say so on the first call. We win where scope is module-shaped, the budget is real, and you want to own the code.

Questions buyers ask.

Yes. We export your time, attendance, and payroll data and rebuild it into a back office you own at cutover.

Migration scope is set on the first call; the trigger is usually payroll needing to reconcile with costing and operations.

No. There are no per-employee fees once you own the code at cutover, so headcount growth costs nothing in licensing.

Per-employee pricing is rational at the clock; it stops being rational when payroll is one module of a larger system.

Yes. Payroll, costing, and operational reporting run on one system, so labour cost reconciles instead of living in a silo.

Connecting payroll to operations is the single change most operators feel first when they move off a time-only tool.

Orkids is a Philippine AI engineering firm that builds custom, agent-native operations software for Philippine enterprises — owned outright, with source code on day one — replacing SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, and Odoo in two to three weeks at ten to thirty percent of leading-ERP cost.

Before you sign that quote, talk to a founder.

30-minute fit call. Free prototype if we agree on scope. No procurement loop.

Talk to a founder hello@orkids.ph