HRMS Software for Manufacturing Units

factoHR publishes four plans: a Free tier for up to 20 employees covering employee data, letter generation and payslips; Core at ₹4,999 a month for 50 employees plus ₹69 per additional employee; Premium at ₹5,999 plus ₹89; and Ultimate at ₹6,999 plus ₹119. All paid plans are billed quarterly, which is worth knowing before you budget monthly.

What puts it first for a factory is where the shop-floor features sit. Biometric machine integration, shift planning, roster planning and change-shift requests are all in Core — the cheapest paid tier — rather than reserved for a higher plan. Multiple entity management is there too, so a group running two or three plants under separate registrations doesn't pay extra for the privilege.

The deeper differentiator is statutory. factoHR maintains named modules for provident fund trusts, unexempted provident fund, General Provident Fund, superannuation, pension management, gratuity and the Labour Welfare Fund. No other platform on this page documents that machinery. If you are an established manufacturer running your own exempted PF trust, this is close to a deciding factor, because the alternative is handling it outside the system.

HROne prices in three tiers: Basic at ₹4,950 a month for 50 users plus ₹99 per additional user, Professional at ₹6,500 plus ₹130, and a custom-quoted Enterprise tier. Basic already includes core HR with multi-legal entity, the time office with geo-tagging and geo-fencing, selfie attendance, offline attendance, payroll, the mobile app and reporting.

Three of the seven publish a dedicated manufacturing page, and HROne's is the most direct about the actual problem: managing white-collar and blue-collar employees in one system. The named capabilities are multiple shift policies with reminders before shift swaps, automatic calculation for overtime and additional shifts, compliance with wage codes and local factory regulations, and a multilingual mobile app for marking attendance and acknowledging policies.

That last item is easy to skim past and hard to replace. A plant drawing workers from several states has a real language problem, and an English-only self-service app quietly becomes a supervisor's data-entry job instead. Offline attendance matters for the same practical reason — connectivity at a gate or a remote unit is not a given.

greytHR publishes three tiers. Essential is ₹2,495 a month for 50 employees plus ₹45 per additional employee, covering payroll, leave management and core HR. Growth is ₹4,495 plus ₹85, adding advanced attendance and shift management, overtime, permissions and geo-fencing. Premium is custom-quoted with everything included, which greytHR positions as roughly 30% cheaper than Growth plus the equivalent add-ons.

The important thing for a factory is that Essential — the price most comparison articles quote — has no attendance or shift management in it. A plant cannot run on Essential. Your real entry price is Growth at ₹4,495 with a per-head rate nearly double Essential's, which puts greytHR at roughly ₹8,745 a month for 100 staff rather than the ₹4,745 that Essential's numbers would suggest.

What you get for it is the platform with the longest track record in Indian statutory payroll and, by its own figures, more than 30,000 companies using it. Face-recognition attendance is available through the Visage add-on and GPS live tracking at ₹140 per user per month, so the shop-floor pieces exist — they are just priced separately.

Keka sells three HRMS and payroll tiers — Foundation, Strength and Growth — but publishes no prices against them. Its pricing page lists features only, and its own FAQ confirms that a setup fee applies to cover onboarding, payroll configuration, data import and validation of past salary records.

The Foundation tier is better equipped than most entry plans: payroll automation, statutory compliance with pre-built PF, ESI, LWF and TDS reports, overtime automation, basic shift management, gratuity management, loans and salary advances, and employee tax management through Form 16 and Form 24Q. Strength adds selfie clock-in, geo-fencing and continuous location punching, which is the tier where field and floor attendance becomes practical.

The catch for a factory sits in the add-on list. Shift Management — Advanced, which automatically assigns shifts by rule and enforces rotation, is an add-on rather than part of any tier. So is multiple legal entities. For a three-shift plant that rotates crews, the feature that matters most is the one you have to negotiate separately, without a published price to anchor the negotiation.

Kredily's Free Forever plan covers payroll, HR, attendance and leave for unlimited employees at ₹0, with PF, ESI, PT and TDS calculated on it, plus employee self-service, the mobile app and web clock-in attendance. It is limited to one leave and attendance rule, one salary structure and 250 MB of storage, but it is a genuine free tier rather than a trial.

Paid tiers are flat to 25 employees then per head. Payroll OS at ₹1,249 a month plus ₹50 per employee adds bank salary payouts, PF and ESI challans, Form 12BB and Form 16, analytics, and — the line that matters for a plant — overtime, daily wages and mid-month payouts. Professional at ₹1,749 plus ₹70 adds unlimited leave, attendance and salary rules, selfie and GPS attendance with penalty rules, and expense workflows.

At 100 employees Professional works out to ₹6,999 a month, the cheapest verified figure on this page and around ₹1,450 less than factoHR Core. At 250 it is ₹17,499, still the lowest.

Its manufacturing page is also the most specific of the seven about factory work, and it changes the picture. Seven ways to capture attendance at the gate are named, including KredSync biometric-device sync and the Klocky zero-touch tablet alongside KredEYE face recognition. PF, ESI and professional tax are computed per location and per state, with role-based access so a plant manager sees only their unit while head office sees the group. Rotational rosters can be planned in advance with late-mark penalty rules that enforce themselves. And, alone among the seven, Kredily documents contract labour explicitly: permanent, contract and daily-wage staff each on their own salary structures, processed together in one run.

Zoho People prices per user with no base fee, which makes it unusually easy to model. Essential HR is ₹48 per user per month billed annually, covering onboarding, employee database, documents, leave and HR reports. Professional is ₹96 and adds attendance management, timesheets and roster management. Premium is ₹144 and Enterprise ₹192, adding performance, compensation, analytics, a help desk and an LMS. There's a free edition for up to five users and a 30-day trial. Local taxes are charged on top.

Professional is the tier a plant would need, and at ₹96 a user it works out to ₹9,600 a month for 100 staff — more than Kredily or factoHR, less than HROne. Because there's no base fee, it is materially cheaper than everything else at very small headcount: twenty workers costs ₹1,920 a month, where factoHR and HROne both charge a floor of roughly ₹5,000 regardless.

The problem is what isn't in it. Zoho People is an HR system, not an Indian payroll system. Its own pricing page lists no PF, ESI, professional tax or TDS handling at any tier — that lives in Zoho Payroll, a separate product with its own subscription. For a factory, where statutory calculation on a variable wage is most of the difficulty, that means budgeting for two products and accepting an integration between them rather than one system computing pay from attendance.

Darwinbox is an enterprise platform, and its manufacturing page is written for that buyer: unified data, automated operations, upskilled talent, benchmarked against SAP and Oracle rather than against the Indian SMB field. The case studies are specific and worth reading — a 3,500-employee manufacturer running performance management in a regional language on mobile, and a 5,000-employee plant where the Darwinbox mobile app replaced an outdated assembly-line computer so workers could manage their own attendance.

Those two examples describe exactly the right problem. Regional-language access and phone-based attendance for people who don't sit at a terminal are the things that decide whether a shop-floor rollout survives. On that evidence, Darwinbox has genuinely done this work at scale.

What we cannot do is verify the rest. Darwinbox publishes no pricing, and its manufacturing page carries no feature detail on shift rotation, overtime rules, biometric integration or Indian statutory handling. The shift-scheduling, shift-swap and rostering capabilities widely attributed to it appear in the company's own blog posts rather than in product documentation, which is weaker evidence than a plan comparison table — so we've graded those cells as unverified rather than crediting them. Its enquiry form starts at 0–200 employees but runs to 10,000-plus, which tells you where the product is aimed.