The All-In-One Sage HR Alternative For Remote Teams

Cloud-based HCM solutions are essential for any business owner or HR specialist looking to centralize their human capital management efforts, regardless of their company size or location.

Before you choose your human resource management software, you'll want to spend some time researching available cloud-based solutions.

To help you with your quest to streamline your entire employee lifecycle, we've put together a thorough comparison between two leading business applications in the human resource management software industry: flair and Sage HR.

Let's unpack what makes these two HR cloud platforms so great and which is best suited for your diverse and unique needs.

Sage HR, formerly Cake HR, is an HR platform geared around streamlining the human resources needs of its customers with a modular platform. Sage HR’s customers use the platform to manage leave, shift scheduling, recruitment, timesheets, company expenses, and employee onboarding.

You can enjoy complete workforce visibility with Sage HR's interactive reporting and employee database features. Sage HR integrates with a limited number of platforms and offers mobile apps.

Who Is Sage HR Best Suited For?

Sage HR is best for small to medium businesses whose HR specialists would like to reduce their administrative duties and labor, but are not ready for additional features such as a fully integrated payroll system.

The ideal customer for Sage HR is looking for a simple tool to manage time-off requests and performance reviews for their entire team.

Pricing Summary

Sage HR's Standard Core HR + Leave Management plan costs $5.50 (~€5.20) per month per user. You can continue to stack modules like Performance, Shift Scheduling, and Timesheets at a mounting expense.

If you'd like to include job posting and recruitment in your package, Sage HR can be quite an expensive human resources solution.

It's important to note that Sage HR does not offer any payroll features.

Sage HR’s Key Features

• Recruitment management with a custom careers page and applicant tracking pipeline
• Automated employee onboarding workflows and task lists
• Create and link basic competencies to teams and individuals
• Set up performance reviews to get feedback on competencies
• Personal, team, and company goals or OKRs
• 1-to-1 meeting schedules and checklists
• Acces to additional Sage Cloud services and products, such as Sage Payroll

flair is a human resource management system (HRMS) and payroll software that caters to a comprehensive level of HR needs with a straightforward and intuitive interface.

Who Is flair Best Suited For?

flair's cloud-based HR software is not constrained to any company size and has been designed to handle small- to midsize businesses as well as large enterprises.

flair seamlessly integrates with Salesforce. If your business model largely revolves around using Salesforce, or you'd like to migrate much of your sales and marketing processes to Salesforce's cloud-based software, then flair is ideally suited for you.

Pricing Summary

flair's pricing plans begin with the competitive Core module, which starts at €6 per employee per month. The Core module is geared toward solving essential HR needs like payroll, talent management, time tracking, absence management, and automation, among many other workforce management features.

In terms of pricing, flair is modeled to be affordable and accessible. You can book a free demo to see what flair can do, or start immediately and take advantage of our 14-day free trial.

For more details and to get a customized quote for your company, you can visit our pricing page.

flair’s Key Features

flair was designed to slot into your business strategy to improve manager and employee engagement daily, while helping to better manage and automate a wide range of HR-related processes, such as:

• Sophisticated recruitment features such as multiple job posting, and CV parsing
• Customized employee onboarding workflows and welcome pages
• Integrated international payroll and benefits management
• Employee documents storage, plus email templates and document generation
• Employee experience feedback surveys and features for giving praise
• Time tracking and time management, including absence management and leave logging
• Performance reviews and manager sign-off on notes
• Employee skills tracking to identify learning paths
• Employee and company goal setting tied to milestones and key results
• Expense management to keep track of company payouts
• Compensation management with salary planning features
• Dynamic shift planning and collaborative shift calendar management

The Importance Of Payroll, Compensation Management, And Overtime Calculation

Sage HR's otherwise impressive human resources suite misses out on one vital service, namely how to process payroll. flair's compensation management and overtime calculation features expand upon the payroll process, ensuring that your employees receive everything owed to them for their hard work.

While flair provides comprehensive payroll software, Sage HR will not aid you in this often challenging and admin-heavy aspect of human resources without relying on additional Sage Cloud products.

Mastering these financial processes ensures that everyone in your employee database is being paid fairly, which will facilitate better employee retention and satisfaction.

Recruiting Features

Talent management is just as important as employee engagement when it comes to human capital management and an HR professional's full scope of duties. That's why it's essential that your chosen HR software should include advanced recruiting features.

While Sage HR's range of features includes a recruiting platform as part of its extended functionality, it comes with a $200 (~€190) per month additional subscription.

flair's Recruit module offers advanced recruitment management features at a price tailored to your company’s size and needs.

flair's recruiting services software is perfectly adaptable to small- to midsize businesses and enterprises alike, allowing HR professionals to organize and present talent management data effectively.

Both flair and Sage HR are committed to offering great customer support, regardless of your company size and needs.

While flair's intuitive interface should rarely require additional customer support to navigate, you might benefit from delving into our diverse customer resources.

Our guides include client success stories, videos, checklists, and templates, as well as the flair blog and our detailed help and configuration section.

Training

Both human resource management software providers offer training resources that will ensure that you have a firm grip on how to operate their respective employee self-service, performance management, and other features expertly.

You can visit the flair Changelog any time to find explainer videos on how to use our latest features, as well as updates on existing features.

flair's Help Center

flair has a simple, accessible range of help articles across three categories, namely configuration, guides, and installation. You can work your way through systematically or choose to learn as you go.

The courses should take a couple of hours to complete and there are no questions or credits – we understand that learning new software is not linear and should not feel like extra work!

To get started with your flair training, visit our Help Center.

Sage HR Training

You can learn more about Sage HR via Sage University, the global learning platform offered to all Sage customers wanting to master any of their software.

This includes introductory courses as well as advanced, module-based courses on Sage HR features.

There's a notable difference between flair's and Sage HR's pricing setups, and your specific company aims must be taken into account when reviewing each HR software provider's pricing plans.

While flair caters to most of your human resources needs in our Essential plan, the Growth and Performance packages also include advanced performance management, Goal Management, and CV Parsing features.

Sage HR's pricing plan is modular, meaning you need to build upon the Core HR + Leave Management plan with their premium features.

Sage HR Pricing

Sage HR certainly provides its users with a comprehensive plan, even if full access to all their features is a pricy experience. Given that Sage HR employs an add-on pricing system, you could end up paying much more for the full HR suite.

The starter Core HR + Leave Management package for Sage HR is limited to employee profiles, onboarding and offboarding, HR analytics, scheduling reports, Slack bot and workflow automation, while the addition of the Leave Management module allows HR specialists to manage customized employee leave processes.

If you'd like to access the more advanced Sage HR features with the Performance Management, Shift Scheduling, Timesheets, and Expenses Management modules, then you'll need to pay at least $16 (~€15) per month per user.

flair Pricing

flair's Core module, on the other hand, only costs €6 per month per employee and includes our Core HR package, as well as employee onboarding, payroll, Employee Hub, time tracking, absence management, powerful reporting, custom workflow automations, org chart, and document management.

For a breakdown of each of flair’s pricing modules, check out our pricing page.

G2 Reviews Comparison

G2 is one of the most trusted and authoritative review platforms for Software as a Service (SaaS), and we wanted to know how its members enjoyed their time with both Sage HR and flair.

You can quickly find out how a leading Human Capital Management software like flair stands against other similar HR cloud platforms.

Starting with flair, our human resources management software currently enjoys a rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars, with 67% of reviewers handing flair a full five stars.

Sage HR has a 4.3 out of 5-star rating on G2, with 52% of its users giving a 5-star rating.

Both flair and Sage HR enjoy excellent user ratings for Ease of Use, Quality of Support, and Ease of Setup, being almost equally matched. Our Quality of Support rating is higher than Sage HR's.

Top-Ranking Sage HR G2 User Reviews

One reviewer called "Christin C" gave Sage HR 4 out of 5 stars and said that it keeps their team organized. They enjoyed how easy it is to set up employee profiles and leave days on Sage HR's software.

Christin C disliked that Sage HR doesn't offer a time clocking feature and that the calendar start dates are not customizable.

"User in Computer & Network Security" gave Sage HR 3.5 stars and stated that it is "effective in automating and organizing time in a proper way."

The unnamed reviewer appreciated being able to manage and configure their HR processes like the benefits management of their midsize business. With this streamlining at hand, this reviewer was able to better present the essential information for each task that they were working on to their whole team.

While this reviewer enjoyed the benefits of Sage HR, they encountered numerous limitations within several of its functions. The calendar would occasionally fail to load correctly, and important dates would sometimes disappear.

Top-Ranking flair G2 User Reviews

It's always a great idea to see how other business leaders have experienced the software you're considering for your own company.

"Alexander M" is the Head of Global Services at their company and gave flair a full 5-star rating, describing flair as an "awesome HR tool for the entire company."

Alexander M enjoyed being able to better coordinate their reviews, staff planning, and recruiting. Beyond improved human capital management, Alexander M appreciated using flair within Salesforce as a "convenient hub for all purposes."

Alexander M did not have anything negative to say about flair, and stated that the Human Resource Management Software always resolves any issues that they might have. They are also looking forward to flair's development in the future.

Another reviewer called "Enea G" also awarded flair a 5-star rating, saying that "flair is the perfect tool for HR and to integrate it with Salesforce." Their favorite aspect of flair was its slick UI and UX and how all their important information is displayed on the first page.

While Enea G regards flair as the best cloud-based HR software they have used, they suggest that the cancellation process of approved leave days could be improved.

Capterra Reviews Comparison

Capterra is another trusted authority regarding SaaS reviews and comparisons.

Let's deep dive into Sage HR's strengths and weaknesses and look into flair's pros and cons as well.

Sage HR Pros

• A good fit for many businesses' HR needs
• Plenty of modules with a sadly limited functionality
• Easily shared data across departments
• Centralized employee management data

Sage HR Cons

• No warning notifications provided when employees have exceeded their entitled time off
• Occasional login issues with session errors
• The Sage HR mobile app is too basic with a lack of functionality and no online punch card
• Issues with third-party integrations

flair Pros

• Easy to use and very practical
• Comprehensive feature suite and quick development
• Straightforward time control and approval processing for team member requests
• A great source for employee performance evaluation

flair Cons

• The Home page could include more helpful information
• Changing settings could be more intuitive

If you're looking for a platform that offers a single source of truth for employee data, then flair's integrated payroll, time management, and HR automation will prove to be your best option.

Both flair and Sage HR make it easier for employees to keep track of their work hours and log leave in their employee portals, even on mobile apps.

Sage HR is a simple software for smaller teams that need a few key features. In contrast, flair's robust offering is equally suitable for small companies and large enterprises to help with even the most complex HR tasks, such as international tax filing.

flair offers a wide range of powerful integrations with third-party apps that you might already be using at your company. Sage HR has limited integrations on offer and needs to rely on an integrations platform like Zapier to connect to other apps.

Considering that Sage HR is missing many of the features that flair offers, it makes complete sense to try flair as a Sage HR alternative.