Zoho People Review, Pricing & Features

What is Zoho People?

Zoho People is a human resource software solution used by a wide range of businesses to assist with their HR needs. It is used by businesses primarily for recruiting, time tracking employees, and managing expenses. Its standout features are its recruiting capabilities and expense management.

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Table of Contents

• What is Zoho People?
• Zoho People Review Summary
• Zoho People Pricing & Cost
• Zoho People Features
  • Recruiting
  • Employee Onboarding
  • Time Tracking
  • Expense Management
  • Performance Management
  • Analytics and Reporting
• Zoho People Integrations
• Zoho People Customer Service
• Zoho People Alternatives & Competitors
• Is Zoho People Right For You?

Zoho People Review Summary

Zoho was founded in 1996 by Sridhar Vembu, Tony Thomas, and Sreenivas Kanumuru. The Zoho People product was created to assist businesses with their human resource management needs. Since then, Zoho People has served a wide range of businesses from its headquarters in Chennai, India.

Zoho People’s strong points are its recruiting and expense management capabilities. It also supports time tracking and employee onboarding automation. A critical downside of Zoho People is that you can only run payroll or employee benefits if your business is located in India.

Zoho People’s pricing starts at $1.50 per month per employee. It is far more affordable than its two closest competitors: Sage HR and BambooHR. They also provide a free version for up to five employees.

Overall, Zoho People is effective for companies in need of affordable HR software with recruiting features, time-tracking tools, and expense management. In fact, Zoho People’s features are as robust as some far more expensive alternatives. Note however, that payroll and benefits are only available in India.

Zoho People Pricing & Cost

Zoho People’s pricing starts at $1.50 per month per employee. It is one of the more affordable human resource software systems on the market today. They also provide a free version for up to five employees.

Note that recruiting, payroll, and expense management features are only available with the most expensive plan: Zoho People Plus.

Zoho People Features

Below, we'll discuss Zoho People’s key features. We include product screenshots to give you a sense of this solution’s interface and usability.

Recruiting

Recruiting is done through Zoho Recruit, which comes with Zoho People’s most expensive plan. Zoho People’s ATS capabilities enable you to easily manage job postings, candidate pipelines, and candidate information from one central location.

Creating and editing a job post in Zoho People is easy to do. You can publish your job post on a number of different job boards. Some of the most popular free job boards Zoho People offers native integration with include:

Editing your job applications is also easy. A number of common application requirements are all automatically added. However, you can choose to leave these fields out or even add your own unique questions with the following question types:

Similar to Sage HR, you can edit your hiring pipeline in Zoho People. Editing your pipeline is as simple as creating a new field and dragging your various pipeline stages to your preferred order.

Candidates all have their own profile inside Zoho People. Their profile includes information such as resumes, cover letters, and feedback from interviewers.

Unfortunately, Zoho People does not feature the flexible rating system that Sage HR has. You are limited to the basic five star rating system that the software comes with.

Employee Onboarding

Zoho People only offers features that automate employee onboarding. Contrast this with Sage HR or BambooHR, which both assist with onboarding and offboarding.

Ultimately, this means that customers of Zoho People have a far easier time sending necessary documents and tasks to employees when they’re joining the company, rather than leaving. It cannot automate tasks such as exit interviews or exit forms.

Zoho People’s primary onboarding feature is an interactive page that new employees go through. This page can include an introductory video, messages from coworkers, company information, and a checklist of tasks to accomplish.

Creating and editing a task is straightforward. You can select a task name, description, priority, and task owner. This means that your HR team, IT department, and managers will know exactly what tasks they need to do when employees are being onboarded.

Finally, you can set up actions to trigger once employees have finished their tasks. Two common tasks that are automated are email alerts, and the update of employee information.

Time Tracking

Zoho People’s time tracking tools are helpful for small businesses interested in scheduling and managing hourly employees. Your employees can clock in and out and request time off. Managers can set paid-time-off (PTO) policies, monitor hours, approve timesheets, and approve time-off requests.

You can create as many PTO policies as you require for your employees. Common policies include sick days, vacation days, or bereavement. You can customize entitlement, accrual methods, applicability, and restrictions.

Monitoring and scheduling employee hours in Zoho People is easy to do. As you can see below, you have a top-level overview of your employees’ schedules with Zoho People’s calendar view.

You can also use this view to schedule employee shifts. Shifts can be set to recur daily, weekly, or monthly. This is particularly convenient for companies that have employees with fixed schedules.

Performance Management

Zoho People features performance management tools that help create and track employee goals, performance reviews, and feedback. However, we found that the process of setting these tools up was harder to accomplish than in Sage HR. Ultimately, performance management in Zoho People is not user friendly.

As a manager, you can customize your company’s performance management by activating modules. Each module contains performance-related data points that are tracked for every employee. These include:

on_current="true" Goals Feedback Key result areas Competency Skill set

Although performance management is robust in Zoho People, we found that it was far more difficult to set up than in alternatives like Sage HR. The process of setting up and tracking employee performance did not have the same level of user-friendliness that other features in Zoho People had.

There was also no dashboard that aggregated performance reviews like the ones in Sage HR. These dashboards make it far simpler to monitor overall team performance. If having a centralized dashboard to visualize and organize your performance reviews is important to you, consider Sage HR.

Expense Management

Recruiting is done through Zoho Expense, which comes with Zoho People’s most expensive plan. Zoho People’s expense management features make tracking, approving, and reimbursing employee expenses a user-friendly experience.

Employees can add expenses through the desktop and mobile app. Managers will be able to approve or deny expenses once they’re submitted.

Zoho Expense can scan your receipts and populate their respective fields accordingly. This means that as soon as you have a physical receipt of a purchase, you can use your phone to take a picture and scan it.

As a manager, you can select any number of administrators, payment types, or expense categories. This level of flexibility means that you can easily track your company’s expenses, regardless of how specific they might be.

Zoho Expense comes with a number of premade expense categories including:

Analytics and Reporting

Zoho People comes with a comprehensive amount of important reports. Creating reports is also very intuitive and user-friendly. This provides you with multiple ways to see top-level analysis of your company.

Here is an overview of some of the most common Zoho People reports your company might need:

Creating a custom report is easy to accomplish in Zoho People. You can create the following chart types:

As you can see above, creating a graph is as easy as dragging and dropping variables into the X and Y axis slots. Once you select your variables and chart type, a live view of your chart is generated to preview. This is comparable to creating reports in Gusto.

Integrations

Zoho People integrates with a number of other Zoho products, including Zoho CRM, Zoho Books, and Zoho Writer. Here are some of Zoho People’s most popular third party integrations:

Customer Support

Zoho People’s customer support team is attentive and easy to reach. However, you can only call with a paid version of Zoho People. They also do not offer live chat. Hours of operation for phone calls are Monday through Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM. Support centers are available in the United States, Europe, and India.

Zoho People’s secondary resources include a blog as well as a knowledge hub. The knowledge hub includes articles that help users effectively leverage Zoho People. These are all effective resources to learn more about Zoho People and HR software as a whole.

Zoho People Alternatives & Competitors

Zoho People competes with a variety of human resources management solutions that offer similar functionality. The best choice for you will depend on your budget and feature preferences. Its most comparable alternatives are Sage HR and BambooHR.

Zoho People's top competitors are:

Is Zoho People Right For You?

Overall, Zoho People is effective for companies in need of affordable HR software with excellent recruiting features, time-tracking tools, and expense management. In fact, Zoho People’s features are as robust as some far more expensive alternatives. Note however, that Zoho People only offers payroll and benefits in India.

If you're interested, you can try Zoho People here.