Best Cloud Payroll Software India (2026): Top 10 Compared

Zoho Payroll is the India-specific payroll product in the Zoho suite, sold from a pricing page that states every meter in the open. The free tier is the unusual part: ₹0 for up to ten employees, with automatic payroll calculation, payslip generation, income tax, EPF, ESI, statewise professional tax and labour welfare fund handling, the automatic TDS worksheet, the employee self-service portal and more than 40 built-in reports.

The compliance claim on the product page is stated by scope rather than by adjective: tax forms 12BB, 24Q, TDS and Form 16 with built-in e-signature, and professional tax across 28 states. Integrations run to Zoho Books, Zoho People and Zoho Expense.

Kredily sells an India payroll and HR platform on a free-first model, and the pricing page is explicit about what the free tier does and does not do. Free Forever is ₹0 a month for unlimited employees and covers payroll, core HR, attendance and leave, PF, ESI, professional tax and TDS statutory calculation, employee self-service, the mobile app and web clock-in attendance. The page attaches an active usage policy to that offer.

Three attendance add-ons are priced separately at ₹50 per user per month each: Klocky zero-touch attendance, Live Tracking for Android, and KredEYE face recognition.

RazorpayX Payroll is the payroll product inside Razorpay's business banking suite, and its position is disbursement-led: salary payments, statutory payments and filings run through the same rails the company already uses for payouts. The pricing page states three tiers and marks feature availability per tier in a grid.

The grid is more informative than most. Basic payroll, payslip generation, direct salary payment, one-time payments, salary adjustment, the salary register and compliance calculation, payments and filings are shown on all three tiers. Advanced payroll, expense management, support and integrations carry Limited markers on PRIME. Time and attendance and employee delight are shown unavailable on both PRIME and ELITE.

greytHR is a long-established Indian payroll and HR platform, and the pricing page is structured around a base price with an employee allowance rather than a flat per-seat rate. Essential is ₹2,495 a month covering payroll, leave and basic core HR for 50 employees, with ₹45 for each employee above that. Growth is ₹4,495 a month for the same 50-employee allowance with ₹85 above, and adds advanced attendance and shift management, overtime, permissions, geo-fencing and confirmation workflow. Premium is quoted and described as all modules included.

The payroll page is unusually specific about statutory output. It names PF calculations with ECR generation, ESI computations and challans, professional tax with state-specific rules built in, comprehensive TDS calculations with eTDS returns, one-click Form 24Q generation with automatic FVU validation, and digitally signed Form 16 and 12BA.

Pocket HRMS sells an India-focused HRMS with payroll at its centre, and publishes two of its three tiers. Standard is ₹2,995 per month billed annually for 50 employees with ₹60 for each additional employee, and covers leave management, geo-tagging, flexible attendance, payroll processing, the self-service portal, automated taxes and compliance, HRIS and a data import wizard. Professional is ₹4,495 per month billed annually on the same 50-employee base with ₹90 for each additional employee.

Add-on modules are listed separately and cover expense and traveldesk, geo-tracking, timesheet, survey, helpdesk, recruitment, learning, WhatsApp approvals and payslip delivery, and performance management with 360-degree appraisals.

Keka sells payroll as part of an HR platform rather than as a standalone product, and its payroll page describes the run as four steps: import employee data, calculate salaries, benefits, deductions and statutory taxes, disburse in one click, and auto-file compliance reports. Statutory coverage is named as PF, ESIC, TDS and professional tax, with ECR, 24Q and 26Q reports generated and challans made ready for filing.

Integration is the argument the product makes most often. Attendance, leave and workforce modules sync into payroll without manual entry, API connectivity is offered for third-party tools, and accounting exports are listed for Tally, QuickBooks, Zoho Books and SAP. Multi-entity, branch and pay-group processing is stated, along with salary revisions, arrears tracking and off-cycle or bulk payouts.

factoHR sells an India payroll and HR platform and states 4,000-plus businesses and 2.7 million employees managed, with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certification and a stated seven-day go-live. The payroll page frames the problem in hours: HR and payroll teams spending eight to twelve hours a month on manual salary processing, compliance filing and error correction.

The functional claims are specific to Indian statutory work. Built-in compliance management covers TDS, PF, professional tax and ESIC with audit-ready reports, challans and Form 16. Arrears and salary revisions are processed back-dated, and leave and attendance reconcile into payroll from the attendance module. Payroll data is centralised across locations, which matters for the multi-state professional tax problem.

Darwinbox is an Indian-headquartered HCM platform used by large enterprises, and its India Payroll page positions the product as an end-to-end online payroll run for India rather than a module bolted onto core HR. The company states more than 900 enterprise customers across 130 countries and 1.2 million payslips processed monthly across geographies.

The payroll argument centres on a documented four-step framework covering review, initiate, verify and e-approve, and release and report. The stated purpose is to remove the manual reconciliation and offline approval chains that sit between HR, finance and payroll teams, replacing them with a single dashboard carrying live payroll and HR inputs, in-flow reconciliation, variance analysis and e-verification. Audit trails, data control and approval tracking are stated as part of the same framework.

For India specifically, the company describes statutory reporting including TDS, ECIS and PF ECR arrears, and filing of monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and annual returns. Deployment is offered in more than one shape, spanning a lighter payroll option, a self-run configuration and managed services, so the operating model is part of the buying decision rather than fixed.

PeopleStrong is an Asian HCM vendor with a payroll product built for enterprise scale in India. The payroll page organises its claims around five areas: processing, unified payroll and HR, employee experience, configurability and compliance, and analytics.

Processing covers automated workflows for common payroll tasks, bulk transactions, an Ask Me helpdesk and automated pro-rata salary calculation. The unified section describes leave, attendance and shift data feeding payroll automatically, with consolidated reporting. Employee-facing functions include round-the-clock payslip and payroll access on mobile, bill scanning for reimbursement, and natural language query handling.

Configurability and compliance is the section that matters most for a large Indian employer: multiple salary structures, pay periods, payslip formats and approval mechanisms, a complete audit trail with an automated maker-checker process, and automatic calculation of TDS, EPF, ESI and other statutory figures. Analytics is stated as a custom report builder covering variance and income tax declaration reports, more than 350 pre-defined reports and configurable dashboards. The company separately offers payroll outsourcing alongside the platform.

Ramco Payce is the payroll platform from Ramco Systems, an Indian enterprise software company, and it is sold on multi-country scope rather than India alone. The published figures are operational: 500-plus customers, 150-plus countries and 36 million payslips a year, with a stated 25 years of payroll work across more than 40 industry verticals.

The technical claims centre on speed and error detection. Ramco states that the in-memory engine processes 100 million payroll records in 30 minutes, and that an anomaly and reasoning engine reduces hundreds of variances to a small number of items needing human review. Country rules are built through a no-code rule builder, and statutory rates are described as updating automatically before each pay run. Integration runs through certified connectors to Workday, Oracle HCM, SAP SuccessFactors, Microsoft Dynamics, Epicor and Sage, plus time systems including Kronos.

For Indian buyers the more useful artefact is the maintained India payroll and tax compliance reference published alongside the product, which tracks notifications on provident fund inspection charges, the Code on Social Security wage ceiling and the transition of TDS provisions between the Income-tax Acts of 1961 and 2025.