Is Indian HRM cheaper than Keka?

Yes. Indian HRM starts at ₹49 per employee per month with no minimum commitment. For a 30-person team, Indian HRM costs ₹1,470 per month against Keka's ₹6,999 minimum, roughly 4 to 5 times cheaper.

Does Indian HRM have the same features as Keka?

Feature parity on core HRMS, and adds modules Keka does not include in its base plan: WhatsApp, asset management, helpdesk, policy handbook.

Can I migrate from Keka to Indian HRM?

Yes. Migration is free, typically 3 to 5 business days. Parallel payroll runs for the first month to ensure accuracy.

Is Indian HRM easier to set up than Keka?

Yes. 3 to 5 days versus Keka's 2 to 4 weeks. Indian-default configurations, free setup support included.

How does Indian HRM payroll compliance compare to Keka?

Both handle PF, ESI, TDS, PT, Gratuity. Indian HRM adds Labour Welfare Fund and state-wise Minimum Wages. Same EPFO and ESIC-accepted report formats.

Is customer support better at Indian HRM or Keka?

Indian HRM offers email, chat, phone, and WhatsApp on every plan including Foundation. Response times under 2 hours during business days.

Indian HRM vs Keka 2026: Honest Side-by-Side Comparison

If you're shortlisting Keka, you've done your homework. It's a popular HRMS in India and hundreds of mid-market companies run on it for good reason. So this page isn't a hit piece. It's the comparison we wish more vendor sites would write: where Keka is strong, where Indian HRM makes a different bet, and which buyer should pick which. Both cover Indian payroll, attendance, and hiring. The real question is what you want to pay, how fast you want to be live, and how much of your team works from a phone.

Pricing: per-employee economics

Keka

Keka's entry plan typically starts around ₹6,499 per month for up to 100 employees, which is roughly ₹65 per employee at the cap. As of 2026, the per-seat cost climbs on smaller teams and on higher tiers, and modules like advanced performance are usually add-ons. For a 40-person company, the effective rate is closer to ₹160 per employee per month.

Indian HRM

Foundation is ₹49 per employee per month, Growth is ₹99. Same price whether you have 8 employees or 800. Payroll, attendance, hiring, and compliance sit inside the plan, not behind add-on SKUs. There's also a 3-month free trial without a credit card, which Keka doesn't publicly offer on entry tiers.

India compliance: PF, ESI, TDS, PT

Both platforms cover Indian payroll compliance well. Keka has been doing this since 2015 and the engine is mature. Indian HRM ships the same set: PF challans, ESI deductions, TDS slabs, Professional Tax by state, gratuity, bonus, and Form 16. If your CA workflow already exports cleanly from Keka, you won't lose anything switching. The difference is bundling. On Keka, statutory reporting depth can depend on your tier. On Indian HRM the statutory pieces sit in every plan, including Foundation.

Mobile experience and the field workforce

Keka has a mobile app and it works. The product is web-first though, and most of the heavy admin happens on a laptop. Fine for an IT services head office. Painful for retail, manufacturing, schools, or any team where 60% of people don't sit at a desk. Indian HRM was built phone-first for the employee side: GPS punch, selfie verification at clock-in, offline queueing for poor signal areas, leave requests, payslip download, and field-visit logging all live in the app. Admins still get the full web console.

AI features: where the trade-off shows

This is the cleanest split between the two. Keka's strength is structured workflows: well-built performance review cycles, clean ATS pipelines, solid org charts. Indian HRM leans into AI on the boring parts. Resume screening ranks candidates against a JD in seconds. Leave requests can auto-approve based on team coverage and policy. If you want a deep performance management module out of the box, Keka is ahead. If you want to spend less time clicking through approval queues, the AI auto-routing in Indian HRM saves real hours every week.

Time-to-value: how soon you're actually running payroll

Keka implementations typically take one to two weeks with their team, and the data hygiene at the end is worth it for a 500-person rollout. Indian HRM's free migration runs three to five business days for most SMEs, including salary structure import and last-payroll reconciliation. Teams under 50 often go live in two days. Neither approach is wrong. Bigger company, slower careful rollout. Smaller team, faster pragmatic one.

So which one should you pick?

Pick Keka if you're past 300 employees, performance reviews are central to how you operate, and your HR team has the capacity to drive a longer implementation. The performance module and the implementation muscle are real advantages at that size.

Pick Indian HRM if you're an SME under 300 people, your workforce is partly on the field or on factory floors, and you want to be live this week at ₹49 to ₹99 per employee per month with no add-on negotiation. The 3-month trial means you can verify all of this before paying anything.