Humavera vs Gusto

Gusto charges a monthly base fee plus a fee per employee, and which plan you're on determines both.

Here's the part that catches people: multi-state payroll isn't available on the entry plan. Hire one person in a second state and you move up a tier. The per-employee fee roughly doubles and the base fee rises with it — for everyone on your payroll, not just the new hire.

A fifteen-person company hiring employee number sixteen in another state can see its monthly bill roughly double. Nothing about the first fifteen people changed. One address did.

Humavera charges per employee. That's the entire model. Free, Starter at $6, Growth at $12, Enterprise at $16 per employee per month, billed annually. No base fee, no minimum, and no tier gate on where your people live.

Hire in a second city, a second country or a second legal entity, and your price per person is the same number it was yesterday.

For employees beyond the United States, the answer is employer of record — a partner company legally employs your staff on your behalf. It's a real solution when you have no legal entity in a country, and it's priced accordingly: typically several hundred dollars per employee per month, on top of the software, before salary, statutory contributions and benefits.

Humavera runs payroll in ten countries on its own statutory engines, in the platform, included in the 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.

If you hold your own company in a country, you shouldn't be paying an employment-service premium to pay people in it.

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 platforms pay people well. What they rarely do is run the rest of HR.

Performance. Review cycles with configurable rating scales, goals and OKRs with weighting enforced at two levels, operational KPIs with periodic readings, 360 feedback, continuous feedback, 1:1 check-ins, calibration sessions between managers, 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, each with its own acceptance path.

All on the same employee record as payroll. All in every plan — there the day you need it, rather than a second system bolted on later.

Clock in from the app, or connect the hardware you already own — ZKTeco and eSSL natively, other brands through the CAMS gateway. Geofences, grace and rounding policies, break rules, overnight shifts, missing punches, regularisation requests, and overtime at a configurable multiplier that flows straight into payroll with no re-entry.

Then shift scheduling in the same system: templates, patterns, coverage rules, shortage alerts, shift swaps and open shifts, with an AI shift manager that proposes a schedule.

Retail floors, clinics, factories, restaurants, field teams — this is usually what decides whether you run one system or two.

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.