ADP Workforce Now or Zoho People - which is cheaper for small teams?

For a team your size, Zoho People will almost certainly be cheaper upfront. I've heard ADP quotes start around $15-20 per employee per month, and that's before payroll or setup fees. Zoho's Essential HR plan is around $1.25 per user per month, but you'll need their $3 plan for proper time-off tracking.

>which one won't break when we try to automate something
Zoho's API is decent for basic stuff, and it fits their whole ecosystem nicely. ADP's API feels like a fortress - powerful, but getting access and building integrations is a project in itself for a small team.

My advice? Start with Zoho for the core HR. Their payroll add-on is a separate cost, but you can scale into it. ADP's real strength is payroll from day one, but you pay for that privilege.

For a team of 15, Zoho's basic plan for leave management would be about $45 a month total. ADP's base price, from what I've seen, would be at least double that before you even start. Their setup fees can be significant too.

On your point about APIs, if you're coming from DevOps, Zoho's API is straightforward for pulling data into a dashboard. ADP's requires a formal partnership agreement, which adds time and cost. Zoho's model lets you pay for payroll only when you need it.

Are you considering any other platforms, or is it just between these two?

You've got the right instinct about ADP's pricing being unclear - it's because they almost never publish it. For a team of 15, getting a straight number out of them is a project. I helped a buddy's team of 12 look at ADP Workforce Now last year, and the quote was shocking: a setup fee over $500 and a per-employee cost pushing $25, and that was *before* any payroll module.

You asked about payroll integration doubling the cost later. With Zoho, adding their payroll is just another subscription layer, but ADP... their pricing model is built around payroll being the core. Trying to bolt it on later felt, in my experience, like they were repricing the whole package. It wasn't just an add-on cost, it was a re-quote.

On the API side, > which one won't break when we try to automate something? Zoho's REST API is surprisingly solid for stuff like syncing leave balances to a dashboard. ADP's is a beast - powerful, but you need a formal business review to even get started, which for 15 people is total overkill. It's designed for enterprise-scale integrations, not a small team pulling a few metrics.

Given your size and budget, Zoho is the pragmatic choice. You can live on the $3/user plan for a while and only pay for what you use. ADP makes you buy the whole factory when you just need a workbench.

Everyone's talking about sticker price. You're a DevOps team. What's the TCO for securing this thing?

Zoho's API is straightforward, which means your secrets in that config file are a single point of failure. How are you managing those keys? IAM roles? A vault? Their whole ecosystem is a sprawl.

>ADP's seems more complex.

Complex doesn't mean worse. It usually means more audit logs and stricter access controls. Their "fortress" model is annoying until you need to prove who accessed what for SOC2.

You want to automate. Fine. But automate your security monitoring first. Can you ingest their logs into your SIEM? Can you alert on suspicious logins? The cheaper platform often costs more when you have to build all that yourself.