The Best Free Payroll Software (2024)

• Payroll Automation: With the app, you can simplify and automate payroll, automatically generate payslips, pay employees, complete tax forms, and process salaries on a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, and bi-monthly basis.
• Time Tracking: You can use HR.my to track daily attendance and overtime. Its app features easy web clock-in and clock-out and can even optionally capture selfies and geolocation.
• Expense Tracking: In addition to payroll, HR.my lets you track all business expenses and payroll data, so you’ll know exactly where all spending goes. You’ll be able to set monthly or annual limits for each claim entitlement, as well as easily sort claims by type.

HR.my is free forever, with no paid plans, add-ons, or fees. To get started, download the mobile app on your device, Windows, Mac, Android, or iPhone, and create a free account.

HR.my is a free-to-use employee management platform with multi-lingual support. It allows HR to process employees’ payroll, business expenses, time tracking, manage incidents, leave, and document workflow at no extra cost. HR.my does not have a paid plan, so you may need to choose another provider’s paid option if you need more features. If you need an automated workflow for managing employees’ payments, consider choosing QuickBooks’ paid payroll offer.

HR.my is best for businesses of all sizes looking for a free, comprehensive payroll and employee management solution with no limitations on payroll runs, number of employees, or data storage.

• Automatic Tax Calculations: You can use Payroll4Free for payroll runs, pay your employees by checks or direct deposits, and calculate all your federal, state, and local payroll taxes.
• Employee Portal: Payroll4Free has an employee portal that gives your team members the option to access and update their pay information online, print pay stubs and W-2s, and review their accrued vacation time.
• Vacation Time Tracking: The platform lets you track your team’s vacation, sick leave, and PTO, so you’ll always be able to see the exact number of hours each employee works. With this information, Payroll4Free automatically calculates employees’ work time and the duration of vacation to determine the actual salary.

The payroll software is free forever, as long as you’re running payroll for up to 10 employees. Also, there is no pricing information for larger teams, so you will need to contact the company to request a quote.

Additionally, Payroll4Free offers several price schedules depending on what users need. Here are some of the Pay4Free payment lists:

• Payroll Tax Service: Payroll4Free handles payroll tax calculations and filing for you. Its recurring monthly/annual fee is $35/$350.
• Direct Deposit Service: This involves using Payroll4Free bank to pay your employees via direct deposits.
• Payroll Processing Per Posting: when 11-25 employees are paid, it costs $10 (1st ten employees are free).
• Payroll Processing Per Increment of 25 employees:  When 25+ employees paid costs $35 (per posting).

Payroll4Free allows you to process payroll for free for the first ten employees, while you need to pay for processing payment starting from the 11th employee. It doesn’t have a price package in tiers, but additional features to pay for include service fees, batch posting, direct deposits, direct wire, employee data setup, and more. Payroll4Free lacks competitive payroll features such as paying next day or same day, employee portal, time tracking, and auto payroll.

For businesses that need more features, integrations, a more appealing interface, and filing 1099 for employees, consider options like QuickBooks, Roll by ADP, and Deel.

• Dedicated Tab for Ease of Use: Although the app runs in Excel, its layout ensures that everything’s visible at a glance. You’ll have a dedicated tab for each functionality, as well as the ability to save your setup, undo, and cancel & exit.
• Access to Relevant Information: You can use Excel Payroll to store relevant information on each employee, calculate their monthly earnings and deductions, prepare W-2 forms, and even create and print checks.
• Flexible Payment Schedules: You can set up flexible payment schedules within the platform, which allows you to pay freelancers, contractors, and FTEs (full-time employees) at different intervals.

The core payroll service of Excel Payroll is completely free, especially for a small business or a nonprofit. If you want to run payroll for more than 50 employees or need to complete more than 3,640 payroll transactions annually, you’ll have to buy a premium license:

• Trial Version: $40; one-year renewal
• Trial Version with Extended Time: $50; renews every year and a half
• Standard Version: $100; two-year renewal
• Premium Version: $500; unlimited access

Additionally, if you want to automate tax calculations, you’ll have to pay $50 for an updated tax table specific to your state.

Excel Payroll is one of the free spreadsheet-based payroll processing software. It’s easy and simple to use but has an outdated interface. Small business owners who are comfortable using Excel and want to save money on payroll software would find it useful.

However, it has several limitations, which may lead to seeking an alternative solution or upgrading to advanced features. Excel Payroll does not have a paid plan or add-ons, so consider choosing payroll software that is flexible, customizable, user-friendly, adaptable to multiple employees, and provides more support, like Zoho Books or FreshBooks.

• Payroll Experts’ Assistance: With Roll by ADP, you can pay both full-time employees and contractors in minutes, either by direct deposit or company check. The company handles all payroll tax deductions, meaning everything is double-checked by tax filing and payroll experts at ADP.
• GenAI Functionality: In addition to the ability to process payroll, Roll by ADP helps you streamline HR and business management with its GenAI chat functionality that offers real-time assistance. The AI also proactively checks for any errors, ensuring complete accuracy of all payroll runs.
• Employee Portal: Like HR.my and Payroll4Free, Roll by ADP also features an employee portal where your team members can interact with the app to view their job, pay, and benefit info, manage tasks, and more.

Roll by ADP has one subscription plan and supports a no-long-contract technique. The price starts at $39/month + $5/month for each active employee, and first-time users get the first three months free. This gives you plenty of time to test the app in practice and see if it meets the unique needs of your business before committing to a monthly subscription.

While not a completely free payroll system, Roll by ADP allows users to use the platform freely for the first three months. This way, new users can test the system’s functionality before becoming a full-time paid user. As a paid user, you can access all the features that Roll by ADP offers, such as payroll and taxes, intelligent assistance, raises and bonuses, employee self-service, QuickBooks integration, and Gen AI chat.

Since Roll by ADP lacks a higher tier, if your business needs have outgrown the software, you’ll need to choose a more advanced alternative like Deel or QuickBooks. Switch to a different provider if you need to integrate with more business tools like marketing, POS, or employee engagement platforms.

• Biometric Facial Recognition Timeclocks: TimeTrex offers a modernized time-tracking approach that goes beyond regular punching. With biomedical facial recognition, administrative overhead is reduced.
• Detailed Job Costing: TimeTrex’s job costing approach is thorough and analytical, offering filter options to break down labor costs by employee, location,  department, or project type. This provides you with the productivity insights needed to make the right business decision.
• Employee Management & Onboarding: As a workforce management software, TimeTrex allows you to document and keep all your employee data in one place. It serves as an all-in-one information management tool to house, manage, track, and review employees’ performance.

Similar to Roll by ADP, TimeTrex offers monthly pricing plans.

Starting from TimeTrex’s basic plan, businesses have access to advanced features that help them manage their business operations effectively. The features include biometric facial recognition, a mobile app, holistic HR management, leave & absence management, and more.

Its no long-term technique is a good way of helping customers save more money so they only pay for services when they need payroll help.

TimeTrex payroll functionalities become insufficient in managing your employees’ payments as your need expands. One limitation is its customization, which may not meet the specific needs of your business if you seek an extremely specific tailored solution to your industry. In this case, QuickBooks may satisfy your need because it offers various industry-tailored solutions, making it highly customizable.

Considering that TimeTrex’s mobile interface needs more workaround for the best experience, you may prefer a payroll option that allows you to seamlessly process payroll on your mobile device, especially in the field.

• Auto Full-Service Payroll: QuickBooks’ automated payroll includes calculation, filing, and paying taxes on your behalf while you attend to other critical business needs. Once QuickBooks has automated your tax and payroll activities, you can visit the platform to download reports or any other needed data.
• Team Health Benefits: As part of your employee payroll management, Quickbooks supports you with affordable healthcare benefits provided by Allstate Health Solutions. This helps your organization engage employees, retain top talents, and attract applicants.
• Automated Taxes and Forms: Aside from monthly taxation, QuickBooks helps with collating yearly tax data, ensuring your business is compliant.

QuickBooks price plans are in three tiers, allowing different businesses to choose a preferred option. See the table below for the QuickBooks payroll price list.

Each of QuickBooks payroll plans is feature-rich; however, its most popular plan, Payroll Premium, allows businesses to access expert reviews and time tracking. Small to mid-sized companies can choose this plan as experts can analyze their payroll whenever they need external assistance.

Users who choose QuickBooks’ 30-day free plan will have to start paying regular fees once the trial ends, while those who prefer the 70% discount offer enjoy a discount for the first three months of joining. This is a fair deal as users select their preferred option.

QuickBooks is a feature-rich payroll software that is only free for 30 days. Although QuickBooks includes many automation and customizations, it does have some restrictions that may lead you to look for an alternative as your business grows. QuickBooks, for example, is not built to manage all of your business’s entities in the same accounting platform if your company has grown to many locations. Given that QuickBooks has no plan that allows this, you should look into alternatives such as Deel.

• Instant Tax and Wage Calculations: Deel payroll software ensures that your payroll is accurately calculated and filed in compliance with tax and labor regulations. It calculates employee rates based on their local rules, saving you time for manual calculations.
• Directory Customization: As you manage your global team, HR work becomes intensive. Therefore, to ease people management, the Deel HR plan allows you to customize employee information and organize data using custom fields, tags, and categories.
• Powerful Dashboards: Deel provides you access to powerful dashboards and intuitive visualizations for global costs, headcount, employee compensation trends, and more. This data provides you with valuable information to proactively manage your international team.

Deel offers multiple plans, three of which focus on payroll processing for global companies.

Deel provides a free plan that is more targeted toward HR tools. However, its payroll plans are affordable, starting with the US payroll plan of $19/employee/month. This plan is suitable for businesses in the US that want to automate W-2, W-4, 1099, new hire filings, and more US payroll offers.

Deel is a popular payroll software with comprehensive features targeting global companies. Its free plan offers HR features that help HR effectively manage their global team. The features include time off and expenses management, people’s directory creation, onboarding and offboarding automation, and employee time tracker. While all these features support HR, they have key payroll gaps. Therefore, bridging these gaps will require you to upgrade to any of Deel’s paid payroll plans.

Deel offers three payroll plans to address various companies’ employee payment concerns. For example, if you are upgrading to pay overseas team members, Deel Payroll has the capabilities you need. And if all you need is the ability to manage payroll in the United States, Deel US Payroll is an excellent upgrade choice.

• Affordable Payment Plan: Patriot’s affordable payment options encourage organizations to add more users without overspending. For its two payment plans, you can add extra employees at $4/employee.
• Multiple Locations: Patriot provides businesses with numerous location identifiers that allow them to assign a particular location to each employee. Even if you have remote team members, Patriot automatically calculates the taxes based on employees’ location.
• Multiple Pay Rates: You can add up to five pay rates for each hourly employee and include unique information to describe each project.

Patriot offers only two affordable price plans to support small businesses.

The Full-Service Payroll is Patriot’s most popular plan. In this plan, Patriot handles tax filing for the users to ensure compliance, and the user handles the payroll. It’s suitable for organizations that need experts to handle their payroll tax filing.

While there is no free forever plan, Patriot offers users a long duration of testing the software—6 months. Unlike most payroll software, this is a good deal.

You need to upgrade to a paid Patriot plan once the 30-day free trial expires and you want to continue using Patriot. Its paid plans allow you to run unlimited payrolls for employees and contractors with free integrations to workers comp and 401(k) plans. However, it only works in the US and doesn’t offer some advanced HR tools.

That being said, if you need to pay employees or contractors outside of the United States, you may need to upgrade from Patriot to another comprehensive payroll software like Deel.

• Automatic Payroll Entry: Because Wave’s payroll is connected to its accounting interface, your organization’s payroll data entry is automated and error-free.
• User-Friendly Interface: Wave’s clean and simple layout allows users with little or no payroll knowledge to simply navigate the interface, making payroll management easier.
• Tax Services: Wave handles payroll taxes for 14 states in the United States, helping them pay for tax and file paperwork with their state tax office and the IRS. The states include New York, Arizona, Wisconsin, Indiana, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.

Wave offers a flexible payroll price plan to support the specific needs of businesses.

The software offers both self-service payroll and tax service payroll, depending on users’ location. For both payroll plans, Wave provides email support, regular tax compliance monitoring, accurate payroll calculation, detailed reporting, and more.

Wave is a robust accounting software that also offers payroll as an add-on. It typically serves startups with fewer team members. So, as your team expands and you need to manage their pay schedule effectively, Wave may not be capable enough to manage your complex payroll needs.

In addition, its connectivity with other business tools requires a workaround via Zapier automation. As a result, consider investing in more advanced payroll software to support your organization without restrictions. All you have to do now is migrate your data to the new platform, like Xero or FreshBooks, and continue growing.

• Forms and Taxes Tracking: Zoho provides you with the tools you need to track federal and state tax forms without losing grip on any relevant data.
• Automated Notifications: Zoho’s built-in notification feature alerts you whenever you have an upcoming payment and tax filing. This helps you stay updated and make the right decisions at the right time.
• Accounting Integration: Similarly to Quickbooks and Wave, Zoho payroll integrates with its accounting software. This way, you have all your data in place and avoid manual data entry or error.

Zoho offers a single-paid plan for its payroll processing.

Zoho’s payroll plan is a good deal and suitable for businesses that need to manage their payrolls. Its yearly plan is cost-effective, and its per-head cost is affordable compared to others on this list. Plus, if you sign up for the yearly plan, you receive your first two months for free.

Zoho payroll allows new users to use the software freely by providing a 14-day free trial. After this period, you need to pay to continue enjoying the service. It offers single-state payroll for all 50 states in the US and handles every payroll function smoothly.

However, when your organizational needs expand, Zoho Payroll may lag in meeting up. One of the common issues is when you need to process payroll for employees outside the US. In this case, you may have to consider a Zoho alternative such as QuickBooks and Deel, as Zoho payroll isn’t scalable enough to support multiple countries or a global payroll.