Name: Charlie vs Breathe
Brand: CharlieHR
Rating: 4.8 (79 reviews)

Written by:

Jenny Tattum - Senior Product Manager

We discovered that there wasn’t a useful, in-depth guide that compared BrightHR vs CharlieHR in detail — and decided to fix that.

This guide takes you through a detailed look at CharlieHR and BrightHR, covering the pros and cons of both HR systems. We’ve done the research on the strengths and limitations, spoken to real customers, and compared features to help you make an informed decision on which is right for you.

This isn’t just an opportunity for us to talk about how great Charlie is for small businesses. We’ve also considered some of the reasons why you might prefer BrightHR, and been honest about not just the good but the limitations too.

If you’re looking for a transparent, in-depth comparison guide for BrightHR vs CharlieHR, you’re in the right place.

How we’ve researched BrightHR vs CharlieHR

Many people switch from another HR tool, including BrightHR, over to Charlie. When they do, we like to ask them some questions to find out more about why they made the move and how we can serve them better.

Some of the questions we ask them include:

What made you switch to Charlie from BrightHR?
What are the main pros of Charlie?
What do you wish BrightHR had that it doesn’t?
How do BrightHR and Charlie compare on user experience?
Which Charlie features are you most excited about using?

All the people we’ve spoken to have been working at UK-based small businesses with between 2 and 100 employees, including:

Office managers — Who wear many hats and often handle people management tasks alongside their busy to-do list, looking for an easier and quicker way to get everything done.
CEOs and founders — In charge of guiding the culture and direction of the company, including the way performance reviews happen.
COOs — Responsible for daily business operations and ensuring everything is running smoothly, including HR.
Ops managers — Who are responsible for reviewing processes and adjusting workflows to improve productivity and effectiveness, something that Charlie’s use of automation can help with.

Thanks to their responses, we’ve been able to uncover key insights about BrightHR and Charlie that allow us to consider the strengths and limitations of both HRIS platforms.

CharlieHR vs BrightHR — the key takeaways

Looking for a super quick guide on the best benefits of each HR platform? Here’s an introduction to the highlights of both before we dive in a little deeper.

CharlieHR

Best Feature

Charlie is designed for small businesses — Every feature is designed with even the smallest of business in mind, giving you everything you need in one place without it being too complex or overwhelming.
Charlie saves you time — Say goodbye to manually updating spreadsheets and files, and hello to automating all your essential HR tasks and processes.
Charlie is easy to set up and use — Sign up and start using Charlie in seconds, and enjoy a fuss-free onboarding experience.
Charlie offers affordable and transparent pricing — Pay based on the size of your company, starting from as little as £5 per month for one plan that includes everything.

BrightHR

Best Feature

BrightHR is good for larger businesses — Get access to a wide range of HR, recruitment, and payroll functions to suit your growing team.
BrightHR works well for teams with shifts and rotas — Manage shifts and rotas, time-tracking, and leave management with the cloud-based platform or dedicated app.
BrightHR is useful for people with multiple responsibilities — If you’re a team of one, BrightHR can help you manage HR, health and safety, and recruitment from one place.

Why is CharlieHR a better choice than BrightHR for your small business or startup?

CharlieHR and BrightHR are both well-known HR platforms that small businesses like you can use to streamline HR operations. While they both do this well, we think Charlie stands out as the right choice for a number of reasons.

Through user reviews, onboarding interviews, and customer feedback we’ve collected plenty of data about what small businesses want and need — then made this a reality within Charlie. This research has also helped us understand where other software tools are lacking, and allowed us to create features and experiences that make both simple and complex HR tasks easier.

Let’s explore some of the main reasons why Charlie is a strong choice for small businesses and startups.

Pros of using CharlieHR

We have plenty of reasons to think Charlie is the best choice, but we’ve narrowed it down to just three of the most relevant here. Discover what makes Charlie ideal for small businesses that want to streamline, simplify, and improve the way they do HR.

Say goodbye to manual HR

It can feel like there’s an endless stack of tasks to take care of when your role involves HR. There are new hires to onboard, time off and annual leave to manage, and a whole lot of data to enter, filter through, and analyse. These traditionally manual processes are time-consuming and open to error — especially if you have more than one person handling HR.

‍Charlie allows you to take all these tasks and automate them. With Charlie, you can get everything set up and then let the system take care of it all. You also benefit from having one place to store everything, so there’s no need to balance different spreadsheets, systems, and processes.

Use Charlie to:

Streamline onboarding — With one-click onboarding, you can welcome new employees with an onboarding flow that’s automated yet customised.
Simplify time-off management — Ditch the spreadsheets and introduce a time-off management system that runs itself.
Keep all your records in one place — Move all your employee data and share useful policies and documents from the built-in HR database.

Team member requests go to the right person

Automating these HR management tasks doesn’t just speed up the process, it also gives you some valuable time back. Use the hours you’ve saved on repetitive admin tasks for a bigger purpose — like overseeing your HR strategy, working with employees on their career goals, or supporting team members with HR advice.

Become a leader that cares about people’s careers

Working in HR shouldn’t just be about adding new employee data and managing holiday requests. It’s also about enabling managers and individuals to work at their best and achieve their career goals.

Empowering team members to set, work towards, and celebrate achieving their goals is even easier with Charlie. Our performance management feature helps you run high-impact performance reviews that feel effortless to plan and launch.

Get the most out of your performance review process with:

Built-in review templates — Use or customise one of our pre-built 1:1 or performance review templates, or create your own from scratch.
Automated launch — Create recurring reviews in moments, for regular meetings like monthly 1:1s or quarterly reviews.
Interactive self-assessments — Invite employees to answer questions first, so they feel engaged in the process.
360° feedback — Invite other team members to share perspectives and create a richer, fuller picture for your managers and individuals.
Easy review setup — Schedule reviews between individuals and managers through your preferred calendar software.
Reviews dashboard — Get an overview of where everyone is in the review cycle process, track progress, and send automatic reminders.

Charlie makes performance management not only easier, but more engaging and effective. Empower individuals to feel involved in the process, invite team members to share their experiences, and use this as an opportunity to set and make progress towards goals that positively impact your employees’ career journeys.

Get set up in just a few clicks

With some software platforms you need an instruction manual just to get started. At Charlie, it’s different. We recognise how valuable your time is and we know you don’t want to sit through a generic onboarding process call with a salesperson.

Getting started with Charlie is simple, swift, and fuss-free. Our onboarding process is self-service, so you can join and set everything when you’re ready — on your schedule, not ours.

Use our 7-day free trial period to get familiar with how the platform looks, feels, and works. Explore features, fill out your account details, and start setting up your HR processes and workflows. Customise as much as you want, when you want.

Access a library filled with useful guides, walkthrough videos, and self-service help articles when you need it. And if you have a specific question or want some customised help, our support team is quick to respond.

Cons of using CharlieHR

Every software has its pros and cons, and that’s also true for Charlie. Our goal for Charlie is to simplify the way you do HR, which means we’re not always the right choice if you want to go deep into culture, gamification, or timesheets.

In some cases, Charlie won’t be the best HR software for you. Here’s why:

No built-in payroll function

HR and payroll often go together, but payroll can be complex and many small businesses already have a finance tool with an effective payroll management feature. This means that it’s often a feature that goes unused, offering you poor value for money.

That’s why we don’t offer a built-in payroll tool within Charlie, but instead we integrate with a range of popular payroll tools like PayCaptain and Xero. Update your information within Charlie and the data will automatically sync to your chosen payroll too — saving you time and effort and reducing the chance of error.

Fun but limited gamification

Gamification can be a great way to motivate employees to use your HR platform, but it’s not a priority for us at Charlie. Our focus is on streamlining HR operations and making the experience feel effortless.

While we don’t have digital confetti or the chance to collect points to exchange for branded merch or perks, we do have more meaningful ways for you to engage with employees — like engagement surveys, polls, and shoutouts. You can even use our Slack integration to automatically send these shoutouts straight to your chosen channel for increased transparency and engagement.

No traditional timesheets

Some small businesses need employees to clock in and out and complete daily or weekly timesheets. If that’s a must-have for you, then it’s important to know that we don’t currently offer a clocking in/out or timesheet feature.

This doesn’t mean you can’t use Charlie, though. Our integrations with other tools like Papershift mean you can clock in and out, manage schedules, and track time. Choose Charlie as your HR platform and use integrations like this to add in features you need, or enhance the way you run your HR operations.

Reasons to consider BrightHR

Charlie isn’t the only HR tool out there, and we want to be completely transparent about our competitors and what their strengths are — so you can make the right choice for your small business. Next up, let’s take a look at some of the highlights of BrightHR.

Pros of using BrightHR

BrightHR offers a wide range of features and understands the needs of UK-based small businesses well — something that we at Charlie also excel at. Here’s some of the reasons why BrightHR could be the right tool for you.

Built-in candidate management

If your role includes recruitment and talent management, having a built-in candidate management feature (like the one in BrightHR) can save you time and help you cut down on software subscriptions.

With BrightHR’s candidate management tool, you can:

Create job roles — Prepare a job description and advert, and share it with management for approval.
Maintain a library of job roles — Build your own library of job roles, ready to customise and share when you need to hire.
Screen and shortlist candidates — Use the built-in shortlisting tool to identify the best possible candidates.
Get access to templates — Streamline your process with templates for job description and offer letters.
Manage onboarding — Oversee your new employee’s journey from start to finish.

Easy shift and rota planning

For teams that work with shift patterns, having a way to not only manage this but do this effectively (and without fuss) is a must-have. BrightHR has a shift and rota planning feature built in, meaning you don’t need to invest in another tool to handle this.

BrightHR allows you to:

Create customised work schedules — Set up your schedules and launch them in moments.
Assign shifts flexibly — Assign employees to specific shifts on your rota, or invite them to shifts that they can accept or decline.
Fill vacant shifts quickly — Allow team members to claim open shifts, reducing your workload.
Get instant alerts — See changes as they happen and respond to issues quickly with instant notifications and alerts.

Clock in and out with a dedicated app

Managing shifts and rotas from your desktop or laptop is always useful, but an area where BrightHR particularly excels is the ability to track time on the move with its dedicated mobile app, Blip.

With the Blip app, you can:

Track time — Clock in and out and record working hours with digital time tracking.
Get real-time updates — Quickly see who is in, out, or on a break to make employee and absence management easier.
Sync data with payroll — Update your payroll records and keep them accurate with automatic timesheet reporting.
Simplify clocking in — With geolocation tracking and QR code scanning, employees can quickly clock in or out of a location.
Support Working Time Regulation (WTR) compliance — Log working hours, record overtime, and ensure team members are taking their required breaks.

Cons of using BrightHR

Like any software tool, BrightHR also has its downsides. Some people may find BrightHR’s extensive range of features overwhelming, or discover that it’s missing HR functionality in a key area like performance management. Others may find the approach to pricing and contracts offputting.

Here are some of the main areas to consider:

Overwhelming amount of features

BrightHR has a huge range of features and while this is a positive for some teams, for many small businesses this can quickly become overwhelming. If you want to simplify the way you handle HR, this may not be the right tool for you.

For teams that don’t need it, all the functionality around rotas, recruitment, payroll, and employee recognition could become a distraction from your main goals. And as it’s all built into the price, you could end up feeling like you’re not getting much out of the platform compared to your subscription cost.

No performance management feature

Despite the range of features we’ve talked about above, BrightHR doesn’t currently offer performance management or review management. This means teams that want to focus on career goals and performance reviews need to look elsewhere.

If this is a key feature for you, it might be possible to add this to your BrightHR experience through an integration, although this is somewhat limited to Microsoft and Zapier. At Charlie, this feature is already part of the platform, as we recognise how valuable it is to encourage, motivate, and support your employees through their journey.

Hidden pricing and long contracts

Although many software companies (Charlie included!) are transparent about pricing and offer easy-out contracts, the same isn’t the case for BrightHR.

There’s no straightforward explanation of what each plan includes or what it costs. To get a quote, users need to engage with an automated chatbot and share their contact details for a follow-up. This means it’s difficult to fully compare BrightHR with other software tools you might be considering at this stage.
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If you’re interested in signing up for BrightHR, it’s important to know that you’ll be locked into a contract with a minimum term of 12 months. For small businesses that are getting to know how they work best and how they want to operate, being tied to using a specific tool for that long can feel restrictive — especially if it ends up not being the right one for you.

So… is CharlieHR really better than BrightHR?

Naturally we think Charlie is the best, but the answer to this question will always depend on what your goals are and what’s important to your small business.

What we can do is share some of the main reasons why we think Charlie is a better alternative to other competitors, like BrightHR or BreatheHR:

We’re constantly researching — Our dedicated product team spends hours every month in conversation with small businesses and startups. Our goal is to understand your needs better, so we can build HR management software that makes your job even easier.
We’re dedicated to making HR effortless — Remove distractions with a user-friendly interface and stay focused with features and workflows that save you time, especially if human resources is only part of your role.
We’re loved by more than 11,000+ small businesses and startups — We’re already supporting thousands of UK-based businesses to improve the way they handle HR.
We’re always transparent — Our approach to transparent pricing and all-access free trials means you can see and explore everything with no hidden fees, locked features, or unexpected upgrades.
We’re ready and waiting to help you — Explore our in-depth help guides if you prefer the DIY approach, or speak to one of our friendly customer service team members for quick, effective, and personalised support.

We believe that you can’t fully know if a software tool is right for you unless you’ve experienced it yourself. Sign up for a 7-day free trial today to explore everything Charlie has to offer. No commitment and no credit card required.