Truein vs Shiftelio · verified August 2026
Truein alternative: Rs 5,999 a year flat, with no Rs 69,000 base fee
Truein charges a Rs 69,000 annual base price before your first employee is counted, then Rs 250 to Rs 350 per user per year on top, with live tracking and leave management priced as separate add-ons. For a team of 25 that is Rs 75,250 a year. Shiftelio is Rs 5,999 a year flat, with GPS, leave and full Indian payroll in the base price.
Price comparison for a team of 25
Truein figures are from truein.com/pricing with the India rupee option selected, read in August 2026: a Rs 69,000 per year base price on every plan, plus Rs 250 per user per year on Time Capture or Rs 350 on Advanced, with live tracking at Rs 200 per user per year and leave management at Rs 60 per user per year. Shiftelio figures are from our own pricing page. Both sides exclude GST. Truein Enterprise is quote-based and is not shown, because we cannot source a figure for it.
| Plan | Works out to | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Shiftelio, everything included | Rs 500 a month equivalent | Rs 5,999 |
| Truein Time Capture | Rs 69,000 base + Rs 6,250 users | Rs 75,250 |
| Truein Advanced | Rs 69,000 base + Rs 8,750 users | Rs 77,750 |
| Truein Advanced with live tracking and leave | Rs 77,750 + Rs 6,500 in add-ons | Rs 84,250 |
The Rs 69,000 is charged before your first employee is counted, and it is the same Rs 69,000 whether you have twelve people or two hundred. That is what makes Truein cheap at scale and expensive at your size: at 25 staff their entry plan works out to about Rs 3,010 per employee per year against Rs 240 here.
Feature comparison
Truein rows are taken from their own published plan contents and India pricing page as read in August 2026, and from what Capterra and Techjockey reviewers report. A tick in the Truein column is a genuine tick, and the two rows where we carry the cross are there because they are true.
Flat annual price with no base fee and no per-user charge
Rs 69,000 a year base price on every plan, plus Rs 250 to Rs 350 per user per year on top of it.
Indian payroll runs, payslips, PF and ESI in the same product
Truein is time and attendance that feeds a payroll system. A Capterra reviewer names the gap directly: payroll management is missing.
GPS live location included in the base price
Live tracking is a Rs 200 per user per year add-on on Truein's published India pricing.
Leave management included in the base price
A Rs 60 per user per year add-on on the entry plan.
Shift and job scheduling on the entry plan
Listed under Advanced. The Time Capture tier does not include shift and job scheduling.
Overtime rules and policies on the entry plan
Overtime multipliers and advanced policies are Advanced-tier features.
Loans, salary advances and their recovery schedule
Outside the scope of an attendance product. It would come from whichever payroll system you feed.
Offer letters, experience letters and salary certificates
Face-verified attendance
Both, but not the same control. Truein runs supervised face recognition at a shared device, which is the stronger answer for a crowd arriving at a gate. Ours is a selfie paired with a GPS fix from the employee's own phone.
Subscription prices published without a sales call
Truein publishes both subscription tiers and their add-on rates. Enterprise is quote only.
Android and iOS apps
Contractor and agency workforce management
Theirs, clearly. If you run contract labour supplied by an agency through a gate, this row is probably the whole decision and you should buy Truein.
Applicant tracking and performance reviews
Neither product does this. If it is on your list, you are shopping for an HRMS and both of us are the wrong shortlist.
How the two bills are shaped
A single total is only true at one headcount. The shape of the charge is what decides the bill as your team changes size, and it is the part that does not go stale.
| Truein | Shiftelio | |
|---|---|---|
| Charging model | A Rs 69,000 annual base price per customer, plus Rs 250 to Rs 350 per user per year depending on tier. | Flat annual price per plan. Rs 999, Rs 5,999 or Rs 14,999 a year depending on headcount band. |
| What happens when you hire | The per-user line goes up with the headcount, every time. | Nothing, until you cross the plan's employee limit. |
| What you pay before employee number one | Rs 69,000. | Nothing. The plan price is the whole price. |
| Location verification | Live tracking is a paid add-on at Rs 200 per user per year. | GPS check-in with selfie verification from the employee's own phone, included in every plan. |
| Leave management | A paid add-on at Rs 60 per user per year on the entry tier. | Included, with the leave balances feeding the payroll run directly. |
| Indian payroll cycle | Positioned as time and attendance feeding a payroll system, rather than running payroll itself. | Included. Payroll runs, payslips, PF and ESI, loans and advances, letters. |
| Getting a price | Both subscription tiers and the add-ons are published. Enterprise is a sales conversation. | Every plan and limit is on the pricing page. No quote, no implementation fee. |
Truein Enterprise is quote-based and nothing on this page makes a claim about what it costs. Every other figure here is from their own published India price list, read in August 2026. If a quote you have been given differs from their published page, trust the quote, and write to us so we can correct this.
What Truein users say
Quoted unmodified from public reviews. Truein rates 4.8 out of 5 on Capterra across 42 reviews and 4.8 on Techjockey, so these are complaints inside a well-reviewed product rather than a verdict on it. They are here because they name the specific gaps a small buyer should check for before signing.
“Payroll management is missing according the attendance and leaves.”
“Offline mode has limited capabilities compared to online mode.”
“GPS track also not accurate.”
“Expensive than few other local options.”
“Still a bit complicated to set up.”
Why teams switch to Shiftelio
There is no base fee at all
Truein's Rs 69,000 lands on the invoice before a single employee is enrolled. Shiftelio has one flat annual plan price and nothing underneath it, so a twelve-person business pays a twelve-person business price.
GPS and leave are not add-ons
Location tracking at Rs 200 a head and leave management at Rs 60 a head are separate lines on Truein's price list. Both are in the base plan here, on every tier, including the Rs 999 one.
Payroll is the same product, not the next purchase
Attendance, leave, payroll runs, payslips, PF and ESI, loans and letters all sit in one system. There is no integration to build and no seam for a small business with nobody to maintain it.
Nothing to mount at the site
Check-in happens on the phone the employee already carries, with a GPS fix and a selfie. No shared terminal to buy, power, clean or replace when it stops reading faces.
What Truein is actually for
Truein is a face-recognition time and attendance product aimed at contract and high-churn workforces at fixed locations: factories, construction sites, warehouses, retail chains, anywhere a shared device sits at an entrance and the problem is people marking each other present. Face capture at a known device is a genuinely different answer to buddy punching than a phone GPS ping is, and if that is your loss, it is the category that addresses it directly. They position around time and attendance, integrating with payroll systems rather than running an Indian payroll cycle themselves.
Stay with Truein when
If any of these describe you, this page has done its job and you should stop reading. We would rather lose the signup than the trust.
- Your losses come from proxy attendance. Somebody is marking somebody else present, and you need identity verified at the moment of the punch rather than a location verified. Face capture at a controlled device is built for exactly this, and no amount of GPS accuracy substitutes for it.
- You run contract labour through a gate. High churn, a contractor supplying the people, a site everybody physically arrives at. That is the workforce Truein designs for, and the enrolment and rotation handling reflects it.
- You have several hundred workers. The Rs 69,000 base price is the entire reason Truein looks expensive on this page, and it is also the reason it stops mattering: spread across 500 staff it is Rs 138 a head, and at that size their per-user rate is competitive with anything.
- You already have a payroll system you are happy with. Truein is attendance that feeds something else. If your payroll is settled and only attendance is broken, buying an attendance specialist is a reasonable decision.
Switch to Shiftelio when
- Your people move. Field staff, delivery, multi-site supervisors, home visits. A device at a gate cannot verify somebody who never passes a gate; GPS-verified check-in from the phone they already carry can.
- You are between roughly ten and a hundred people. This is the size where a fixed base price does the most damage, because there are not enough heads to spread it across and no volume tier reaches you.
- You want the price to stop moving when you hire. Rs 5,999 a year covers up to 25 employees across 3 locations and Rs 14,999 covers up to 100. Hiring your eleventh person changes nothing on the invoice.
- You want attendance and payroll in one place. Attendance, leave, payroll runs, payslips, PF and ESI, letters and exports are the same product here rather than an integration you maintain.
- You do not want the features you came for sold back to you as add-ons. Location tracking and leave management are line items on Truein's price list. Here they are in the base plan on every tier.
The differences that change a decision
A gate is not a territory
This is the whole decision, and it is worth being blunt about. Face capture at a shared device answers "is this really that person", which is the right question when everybody comes to one entrance. GPS check-in answers "was this person where they were supposed to be", which is the right question when nobody does. Buying the wrong one gives you a system that is technically working and practically useless: a perfect face match proves nothing about a technician who should have been at a customer site in Andheri, and a perfect GPS trail proves nothing about who was holding the phone at a factory gate. Decide which question you are asking before you compare anything else.
A fixed base price is a headcount bet, and small teams lose it
Truein's Rs 69,000 does not change with your size, which means the only thing that decides whether it is cheap or ruinous is how many people you divide it by. At 500 staff it is Rs 138 a head and nobody notices. At 25 it is Rs 2,760 a head before the per-user rate is even added, which is why a small Indian business that asked for a quote goes looking for an alternative the same afternoon. That is not a criticism of the model. It is a statement about who the model was built for, and it was not built for you.
The add-ons are the features you came for
Live tracking and leave management are priced separately on Truein's India list at Rs 200 and Rs 60 per user per year. For a field team those are not optional extras, they are the reason you were shopping, so the honest comparison is against the total with both switched on. That is the Rs 84,250 row in the table above, and it is the number a 25-person field business would actually be quoted.
One product or two
Attendance that feeds payroll and attendance that runs payroll are different purchases. The specialist route is the right one when your payroll is already handled and you want the best attendance you can buy. It is the wrong one when you are a small business currently doing payroll in a spreadsheet, because you are solving half a problem and adding an integration to maintain. Shiftelio is deliberately the second kind: attendance, leave and payroll are one system because a twenty-person business does not have anybody to maintain the seam between two.
What we are not
We are not a contract-workforce platform, we do not sell site hardware, and we do not claim our selfie verification is equivalent to a supervised face-recognition terminal for a workforce of hundreds rotating through a gate. If that is your problem, Truein is a better purchase than we are and this page exists partly to say so.
Questions people ask
How much does Truein cost in India?
Truein publishes India pricing as a Rs 69,000 per year base price charged per customer, plus Rs 250 per user per year on the Time Capture tier or Rs 350 on Advanced. Live tracking is a further Rs 200 per user per year and leave management Rs 60. For a team of 25 on Time Capture that is Rs 75,250 a year, or Rs 84,250 on Advanced with both add-ons switched on. The Enterprise tier is quote-based. Figures read from truein.com/pricing in August 2026 and exclude GST.
What is a good Truein alternative for a small business in India?
It depends on whether your people work at a fixed site or move between them. Truein is built around face capture at a device at the site, which is the correct answer to proxy attendance in a contract workforce. For a small team spread across a few locations or working in the field, a flat-priced app with GPS check-in on the employee's own phone usually costs a fraction as much and needs no hardware. Shiftelio is Rs 5,999 a year for up to 25 employees across 3 locations, with GPS, leave and payroll in the base price and no base fee.
Is Truein expensive for a team of twenty-five?
For that size, yes, and the reason is structural rather than greedy. The Rs 69,000 annual base price is the same whether you have twenty-five people or five hundred, so at twenty-five it alone works out to about Rs 2,760 per employee per year before the per-user rate is added. The full Time Capture bill lands near Rs 3,010 per employee per year. Shiftelio at Rs 5,999 for the same twenty-five people is about Rs 240 per employee per year, with GPS and payroll included.
Does Truein do payroll?
No. Truein positions itself as a time and attendance product that feeds payroll systems, rather than as an Indian payroll platform, and Capterra reviewers name the gap in exactly those terms. If your payroll is already handled that is an advantage and not a gap. If you are currently running payroll on a spreadsheet, you would be buying half a solution plus an integration to look after, which is a poor trade for a business with nobody to look after it.
Is GPS tracking included in Truein?
Not in the subscription price. Truein's published India pricing lists live tracking as an add-on at Rs 200 per user per year, on top of the base price and the per-user rate. For twenty-five field staff that is a further Rs 5,000 a year. Shiftelio includes GPS-verified check-in with a selfie in every plan, including the Rs 999 one, and there is no version of the product where location verification costs extra.
Can GPS attendance replace face-recognition attendance?
Not for the problem face recognition exists to solve. GPS proves a location, face recognition proves an identity, and they fail in different directions: a location check cannot tell you whose hand held the phone, and an identity check at a gate cannot tell you whether a field technician reached the customer. Shiftelio pairs a location with a selfie at check-in, which raises the cost of cheating considerably for a small mobile team, but for hundreds of contract workers rotating through a single entrance a supervised face-recognition terminal is the stronger control and we would say so.
Do I need to buy hardware for Shiftelio?
No. Check-in happens in the app on the employee's own Android phone or iPhone, with a GPS location and a selfie, so there is nothing to mount at a site, nothing to power and nothing to replace when it breaks. For staff without a smartphone there is a separate approach documented on our attendance without a smartphone page.
How do I move my attendance history off Truein?
Ask them for a full export before you cancel anything, in a format you can open, and check it covers the whole period you need to keep for compliance rather than the last few months. That advice applies to leaving any vendor including us. Shiftelio lets you download your complete attendance and payroll history at any time regardless of plan or payment status, and we will import a clean CSV of past attendance when you start.
See the price before you see a salesperson
Every Shiftelio plan and limit is on the pricing page. There is no quote to request, no implementation fee, no minimum billed headcount and no paid add-on for location verification.
This is a comparison written by Shiftelio, which is one of the two products described. Everything stated about Truein is drawn from their own published pages and positioning, together with their published India price list, and public reviews on Capterra and Techjockey which are quoted rather than summarised, and was checked in August 2026. Where their pricing is quote-based or reported inconsistently across sources we describe the charging model rather than assert a figure, and you should ask them directly. Plans and prices change on both sides. Truein names and marks belong to their owners and are used here for identification only; no affiliation or endorsement is implied. If you believe anything here is inaccurate, write to support@shiftelio.com and we will correct it.