HollyHR vs Sage HR

For the published focused-core prices, yes. HollyHR's controlled early-access Free plan is £0 for up to 10 active people and Standard is £2 per active person per month before tax. Sage HR lists Core HR and Leave Management at £5 per employee per month before optional modules.

Only when a team needs HollyHR's focused shipped core and accepts a manual, reconciled migration. HollyHR does offer opt-in inclusive calendar-day starter/leaver proration from employment dates, composed with current FTE. It is not like for like for Sage HR's native mobile and payslip experience, electronic signatures and signing evidence, automated onboarding assignment and employee-change workflows, richer leave accrual with effective-dated working-week history and irregular-hours rules, retrospective sickness handling, Azure-directory SSO, performance, timesheets, shifts, expenses, recruitment, announcements, custom reports, payroll connections, or complete migration of histories, files, balances, signatures and configuration. Future starters default to invited/non-default and are hidden from ordinary-member shared projections, while selected-manager involvement and audited pre-start login are deliberate choices. Aggregate sickness reports are restricted to HR Admins and System Admins because small-team totals can still enable inference.

It can be. Supplier familiarity, support and a tested Sage payroll or payslip relationship are legitimate reasons to stay. Connected payroll requires a separate subscription, and a shared vendor name does not prove that every field or workflow synchronises, so trace the exact connection you use.

Both store employee files, but the workflows differ. Sage HR publishes templates, multi-stakeholder signing order and signature-status tracking. HollyHR stores private profile files and linked compliance evidence but does not ship native e-signature, signing-order or reminder workflows.

Authorised Sage users can download documents, while the documents report exports an Excel inventory. Sage states that the report excludes signable documents and time-off requests and that the Excel export does not contain document files. Completed signable PDFs are individually downloadable only after every recipient signs, so preserve awaiting, partial and expired signature status and evidence separately.

Yes. Sage maintains an official Sage HR developer portal. HollyHR has approved organisation-scoped beta API reads and hosted MCP reads. Its safe reads exclude document bytes, download links and compliance records; write-capable API/MCP access requires Standard+, approval and controls, and MCP writes are environment-disabled by default.

No. HollyHR has no Sage-specific adapter. Its generic importer accepts CSV or .xlsx with 1–500 mapped rows per apply and maps 12 people fields. Managers, working patterns, leave balances and history, documents, signatures, pay, performance, time, expenses, applicants, reports and integrations require separate handling.

HollyHR records basic current or future Time Off but does not automate retrospective sickness entry, fit-note, return-to-work or SSP casework. Aggregate sickness reports are restricted to HR Admins and System Admins because category, month and department totals can still identify sickness in a small team.

There is no honest universal time. It depends on the people data and how much leave, document, signature, payroll, performance, time, shift, expense, applicant, workflow, report and integration state must be rebuilt and reconciled. Keep Sage available until a parallel run and retained source evidence pass review.