Humavera vs Namely

Most HR platforms upgrade in one direction: you pay more, you get more software.

Namely's ladder works differently. The entry plan is HCM with payroll and HR. The next adds talent and time. Above that, Namely Plus People adds managed payroll and managed benefits — their people doing the work rather than yours. And at the top, Namely Complete is a professional employer organisation arrangement, where the provider becomes a co-employer of your staff for HR and tax purposes.

That's a legitimate model and it genuinely suits some companies. But it's worth knowing before you start, because it means the answer to 'we need more' is increasingly more service, not more capability in your own hands.

Co-employment in particular is a bigger commitment than a software subscription. Your employment arrangements, your tax registrations and your benefits sit with the provider. It works well while it works. Unwinding it later is a different order of project from switching software.

Humavera upgrades in the ordinary direction. Free, Starter at $6, Growth at $12, Enterprise at $16 per employee per month. Every tier is the same software, run by your team, with your data in your tenant. Moving up gets you more capability. It never gets you a different relationship.

Namely is built for companies from around fifty employees upward.

Humavera starts at your first employee, with a free tier you can sign up for directly and no minimum headcount. The same platform carries you from ten people to past ten thousand — multi-entity, multi-country and multi-currency throughout — so there's no migration project waiting for you at the point where a smaller system runs out of room.

That matters more than it sounds. Changing HR systems is one of the more painful things a growing company does. Doing it because you outgrew the floor of your last one is an avoidable kind of pain.

Namely is built for United States payroll.

Humavera runs ten countries on its own statutory engines, in one tenant, in one plan: the United Kingdom, the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Côte d'Ivoire.

UK PAYE with National Insurance. US federal, state and local withholding. Progressive bands and reliefs, social insurance ceilings, contribution splits, end-of-service gratuity. 155 currencies at the right precision.

And you run it. Draft a run and see the whole calculation element by element before anything is approved. Fix something and rerun it, as many times as you need, at no extra cost. Answer an employee's question about their net pay on the call rather than raising a ticket.

Around the calculation: flexible earnings, deductions and employer contributions. Regular, off-cycle and supplemental runs. Final settlement. Loans and advances with a repayment engine. Bank files in whatever format your bank wants. And consolidated reporting across several legal entities at once — one group, one report, nothing exported.

Whoever prepares a run can't approve it. Enforced by the system, not written in a policy nobody reads.

Payroll, attendance and shift scheduling, performance, learning, skills, succession, internal mobility, recruitment, benefits administration, expenses, workflow automation, the report designer and AI — all part of the platform.

Performance. Review cycles with configurable rating scales, goals and OKRs with two-level weighting, operational KPIs, 360 feedback, continuous feedback, 1:1 check-ins, calibration sessions and performance improvement plans.

Learning. A course library, learning paths, instructor-led sessions, assessments, certifications, mandatory training rules, training budgets, and AI-generated course content.

Skills and careers. A skills and competency library with proficiency scales and gap analysis, career paths, development plans, succession planning, and an internal opportunity marketplace where your people apply for gigs, projects, secondments and full roles inside the company.

Deskless teams. App clock-in, ZKTeco and eSSL devices natively with other brands through a gateway, geofences, grace and rounding rules, overnight shifts, regularisation requests, and overtime that flows into payroll without re-entry. Plus shift scheduling with templates, patterns, coverage rules, shortage alerts, swaps and open shifts.

Think about the ordinary things an HR team needs to do: add a field, change who approves a leave request, build a report finance asked for, add a country, change an accrual rule because the law changed, adjust a pay element.

In Humavera, your team does every one of those themselves, the same day, in the interface. Approval paths in a visual designer. Reports in a report designer. Leave policies, pay elements, eligibility rules and org structure configured directly.

No service request, no waiting for someone else's queue.

The workflow designer is visual, with eight step types including approval, condition, branch and parallel. 183 events across the platform can start a workflow automatically — a hire, a leave request, a probation date, a contract expiry, a payroll run, a document acknowledgement.

Workflows are versioned, checked for closed loops, and can be simulated before you switch them on, so you see exactly what will happen before it happens to a real employee. SLAs and escalation are built in. You can also describe what you want in plain language and let AI build the workflow for you.

Because payroll sits in the same system, automation reaches it — a confirmed probation can update a pay element, assign a training path, notify a manager and file a document, in one flow.

A report designer across twelve data areas with filters, grouping and aggregate functions. A presentation designer for tables, charts, KPI tiles, images and page breaks at A4 or Letter. Export to CSV, Excel or PDF, scheduled daily, weekly or monthly, shared with everyone, with a department, or with named people, and scoped per legal entity.

The part worth pausing on: a report runs with the permissions of whoever reads it. Share a report with a department head and it cannot show them a salary they aren't entitled to see. Permission is enforced on the data itself, not on the screen displaying it.

Most systems guard the page and leave reports as a side door. We closed it.

Humavera's assistant answers HR questions from your own live data, using twelve data tools that respect each user's permissions — so it can never surface something the person asking isn't allowed to see. Alongside it: flight-risk indicators, predictions, suggested action plans, and bias monitoring on AI-assisted decisions.

There's a transparent credit system, so you can see what each feature costs and allocate credits across your team.

Every plan. Every user.

English, Arabic and French, with genuine right-to-left layout — built for it, not translated into it. Multi-currency and multi-timezone throughout, with statutory profiles per legal entity.

The iOS and Android app is white-label: your company's name, your company's brand. Your people open your app, not ours.

Hosting in the EU (Germany) or Singapore.