Best attendance apps for small businesses in India, 2026

The short answer

If your people work across more than one site, Shiftelio is the cheapest way to get location-verified attendance in India, at Rs 5,999 a year for up to 25 employees with GPS and payroll included. The same 25 people cost Rs 80,250 on Truein, about Rs 83,988 on Keka, Rs 88,500 on SalaryBox and Rs 95,940 on greytHR once each vendor's location add-on is switched on. We make Shiftelio, so every one of those figures is sourced and dated below.

If you only need a record book, do not buy anything. Kredily publishes a free forever plan with no employee limit covering an employee database, web clock-in and leave, and at Rs 0 it beats every price on this page including ours. Know what it is before you plan around it: salary payouts, PF and ESI challans, Form 16, overtime and daily wages are all outside it, and so is GPS. The cheapest Kredily tier that can actually pay somebody is Rs 14,988 a year, which is more than our Rs 5,999, and it still has no location verification.

What 25 employees actually cost, per year, once the software does the job

Who charges extra for the feature you came for

• IncludedShiftelioIncluded in every plan, including the Rs 999 one
• IncludedPagarBookIncluded in the App and Web plan
• Costs extraKredilyNot on the free tier. Selfie and GPS on Professional at Rs 1,749 a month, then Rs 50 per user per month more for continuous Live Tracking, Android only
• Costs extraSalaryBoxAdd-on at Rs 100 per user per month
• Costs extragreytHRAdd-on at Rs 140 per user per month, Growth and Premium only
• Costs extraTrueinAdd-on at Rs 200 per user per year, on top of the Rs 69,000 base fee
• Costs extraKekaPart of the suite, but sold in a 100-seat minimum block

How this list was ranked

• Location verification counts, and it counts at its real price. Every cost here has the vendor's own GPS add-on switched on, because a field team was never going to buy the plan without it.
• Figures are dated and sourced per row. Where a vendor publishes India pricing we quote it and say when we read it. Where no price is published we say the figure is second hand and name the kind of source. An undated price is worthless within months.
• No unverified negatives. Every limitation named below comes from a vendor's own published plan structure, not from a review-site summary.
• We are first, and we have shown our working. We make Shiftelio. Rather than ask you to trust the ranking, the criterion is stated above, the arithmetic is in the table, and our own entry carries the same "wrong choice when" paragraph as everything else. A free competitor sits second and beats us outright for single-site teams.

Best in each category

The one question that decides it

Does your attendance problem happen at a desk, or away from one?

If everybody comes to the same address, you have a register problem, and a register is cheap to build. Kredily will keep those records for nothing at any headcount, and if a record is genuinely all you need then take that rather than pay anyone on this page, us included. Check their comparison table first, because payouts, statutory challans, overtime and daily wages are not in it. Once you need those, the free line stops being the comparison and Rs 14,988 is. If your people are on sites, on routes or in other people's buildings, you have a verification problem instead, and the table above is what verification actually costs from each vendor.

Answer that question first and seven of the nine options below disappear.

The whole list at a glance

1 of 9 · our product

Shiftelio

Best overall for a small team working across more than one site

GPS-verified attendance and payroll for 5 to 100 people spread across sites.

Choose it when

You have between five and a hundred people, they are not all at one address, and location verification is the whole reason you are shopping. This is the only product on the list where that feature is inside the base price rather than beside it, which is why the cost table below reads the way it does. The flat price is the second half of the argument: it does not move when you hire, so the quote you get today is the bill you get in eighteen months.

Look elsewhere when

Two honest cases, and they are not small ones. If everybody works at one address and you only need a record of who was here, you are paying for GPS you will never use, and Kredily keeps that record for nothing at any headcount. Go and take that instead. Be clear about the line though: their free tier cannot run a payout, a PF or ESI challan or an overtime calculation, and the tier that can is Rs 14,988 a year against our Rs 5,999. And if you need real HRMS machinery, performance cycles, applicant tracking, org-wide people analytics, we do not build it and are not going to pretend we do. Above roughly a hundred people that stops being a nice-to-have and Keka or greytHR is the right purchase.

Disclosure: this is our product and this page is on our website, which is exactly why the criterion is written out above, why every rival figure is dated and sourced, and why the paragraph above this one exists. Our prices are on the pricing page and there is nothing behind a "contact us". How we rank is set out on the methodology page. A free competitor sits directly below us and beats us outright for single-site teams.

2 of 9

Kredily

Best free tier, for keeping employee records at Rs 0 rather than running a payroll

A free HR and payroll system for a team that all turns up to the same place.

Choose it when

Your budget is genuinely zero, everybody works at one address, and what you want is a proper employee record rather than a spreadsheet. The free tier is real, it has no headcount limit, and nothing else on this page offers that. As somewhere to put your employee data at Rs 0 it is very hard to argue with, and we would rather point you at it than sell you something you do not need. Read the next paragraph before you plan around it, because free here means keeping records, not running a payroll.

Look elsewhere when

You expected the free plan to run your payroll. Read their comparison table rather than the headline: Free Forever covers an employee database, self-onboarding, web clock-in, one leave and attendance rule, statutory PF, ESI, PT and TDS calculation and 250 MB of storage. It does not include salary payouts, PF and ESI challans, Form 12BB or Form 16, overtime, daily wages or mid-month payouts, analytics, or exit settlements. Every one of those starts at Payroll OS, Rs 1,249 a month. For a shop or site paying daily wages, the missing overtime and daily wage row is the whole job. And if your people work away from an office, selfie and GPS attendance is Professional at Rs 1,749 a month, Rs 20,988 a year for the same 25 people, with continuous Live Tracking a further Rs 50 per user per month on top, Rs 35,988 in total, and marked Android only on their own table. One last thing to ask about before you build a plan on a Rs 0 line: the free offer carries an asterisk on their own page reading subject to active usage policy, and that policy is not published anywhere we could find, so what keeps you inside it is at their discretion. None of this makes it a bad offer. At Rs 0 with no headcount limit it is still the right answer for a single-site team keeping records. It does mean free means something narrower here than the headline suggests, and it is worth knowing which side of the line your requirements fall on before you migrate anything.

3 of 9

PagarBook

Best for a team under about nine people

Attendance and wage tracking for shop, site and daily-wage staff.

Choose it when

You have a handful of staff. Per-head pricing is genuinely the cheaper model when the head count is small: at Rs 699 each, the crossover against our Rs 5,999 lands at about nine employees, so anything under that and you should buy theirs rather than ours. We would rather write that down than have you work it out after signing.

Look elsewhere when

You expect to grow. Per-head billing rises every time you hire, and by 25 people it is roughly three times the flat price, by 40 it is more than four. Work the number for the team you expect next year rather than the one you have this month.

4 of 9

Zoho People

Best if your business already runs on Zoho

HR for a business already living inside the Zoho suite.

Choose it when

You already run Zoho for mail, CRM or books. The integration is the reason to choose it and it is a good reason. Running a second vendor has a real cost that never appears in a comparison table: another login, another support queue, another invoice, another export when something breaks.

Look elsewhere when

You are not a Zoho business, or you have fewer than five people, because the five-seat minimum means a three-person company pays for five. Bought on its own merits against attendance-first tools, it is a broad suite competing with specialists.

5 of 9

SalaryBox

Best for a shop or kitchen where supervisors mark attendance on a phone

Daily-wage and shop-floor teams, with an attendance-first interface.

Choose it when

You run a shop, a kitchen or a small factory floor, you pay daily wages, and you want something your supervisors will actually open every morning. It is built for exactly that reader and it shows in the interface.

Look elsewhere when

You need location verification and you are counting the cost. A base fee plus a per-user rate plus a per-user GPS add-on is three separate multiplications against your headcount, and for a field team the third one was never optional. Our full breakdown is on the SalaryBox comparison page.

6 of 9

Truein

Best against buddy punching by contract labour at a fixed site

Face-recognition attendance for contract and high-churn workforces at gates and sites.

Choose it when

You have contract labour, a proxy-attendance problem and a site somebody physically arrives at. Face capture is a fundamentally different answer to buddy punching than a GPS ping is, and if your losses come from people marking each other present, this is the category that addresses it head on. At several hundred staff the base fee stops mattering and this becomes a serious purchase.

Look elsewhere when

Your team is small. The Rs 69,000 base fee is charged whether you have 20 people or 400, so at 25 staff it works out near Rs 3,010 per employee per year against Rs 240 here. It is priced for the enterprise it was built for, and below fifty people the arithmetic never gets there.

7 of 9

greytHR

Best Indian payroll compliance depth

Indian statutory payroll depth, with attendance attached to it.

Choose it when

The hard part of your month is payroll compliance rather than knowing who turned up. greytHR has been doing Indian statutory payroll longer than most of this list has existed and the depth shows in the parts nobody demos: form outputs, state-wise professional tax, the arrears and revision handling that turns a payroll correction into a five-minute job instead of a weekend. If a chartered accountant is already involved in your payroll, they have probably heard of it.

Look elsewhere when

You are under fifty people, because both plans bundle fifty and you pay for the bundle either way. And if you need live location, the Rs 140 per user per month add-on is the single most expensive way to buy GPS on this page: Rs 42,000 a year for 25 people, on top of a plan that already costs Rs 53,940.

8 of 9

Keka

Best full HRMS once you are past a hundred people

A full HRMS for a mid-sized company that has an actual HR function.

Choose it when

You are past a hundred people, somebody at your company has HR in their job title, and you are buying performance management, onboarding workflows and analytics as much as attendance. It is a good product for that company, and past the seat block the per-head price becomes ordinary.

Look elsewhere when

You are the fifteen or twenty-five person company. A hundred-seat minimum block means your effective per-head price is four times the headline, for machinery you will not open. If your entire attendance problem is currently a WhatsApp group, this is not the answer to it.

9 of 9

factoHR, HROne and the quote-only tier

Best when you have a procurement process rather than a price question

Enterprise HR platforms sold through a sales process.

Choose it when

You have a procurement process, a shortlist and somebody to run a pilot. At that size a sales call is not friction, it is how the thing gets configured for your actual leave policy and your actual shift rules.

Look elsewhere when

You wanted a price. If a vendor will not publish one and you have twenty staff, the demo costs you two hours to learn a number you could have read in ten seconds elsewhere.

Questions people ask before choosing

Work the numbers yourself

• All free tools
• Overtime calculator
• Attendance register generator
• Shift roster template
• PF and ESI calculator
• Shiftelio compared with Truein
• Shiftelio compared with Keka
• Shiftelio compared with SalaryBox
• Shiftelio compared with PagarBook
• How we rank, and where these numbers come from

Other comparisons on this site

Each of these ranks against a different question, so they reach different answers. The one you want is the one whose question is yours.

• Best free attendance apps in India: How far a free tier gets you before payroll, location or a headcount cap forces an upgrade
• Best GPS attendance apps in India: Which tier gates which kind of location proof: stamp, geofence, live trail, anti-spoofing
• Best attendance apps for field staff in India: Site caps, offline capture and the cost of a continuous trail, for staff never at one address
• Best attendance apps for construction sites in India: Workers who own no smartphone, whether a daily wage can be paid at all, and whether the pricing shape survives a headcount that moves with the project
• Best attendance apps for restaurants in India: Whether a two-part day can be rostered at all, whether each outlet gets its own boundary, and how fast a new hire can punch
• Best payroll software for small businesses in India: Whether the statutory output is actually produced, not merely calculated