Full Keka HR Review—Hiring Features, Pricing, and Alternatives

Keka is an HR platform that helps companies streamline the workflow of their entire HR department, including hiring and recruitment tasks. Its features touch on every aspect of an HR rep’s work, from overtime and billables management for existing employees to an applicant tracking system (ATS) for potential hires. 

Does Keka substantially improve your hiring processes in practice? Is there any better hiring software that could be your ideal Keka alternative? We’ll cover all of those questions in our objective review. 

Keka—Main Features

The platform’s boasts numerous features valuable for HR teams, such as:

• Performance & Careers—for continuous feedback and career goals management
• Time & Attendance—for attendance and leave management
• Timesheet Software—for customizable time-tracking workflows
• Hiring & Onboarding—for a streamlined candidate experience in the hiring process

In this review, you’ll learn about Keka’s most important hiring features, such as:

1. Hiring Pipelines
2. Candidate Assessment 
3. Offer Management

Hiring Pipelines

An easily manageable workflow is crucial for any successful hiring process. That’s why Keka provides recruiters and HR reps with customizable hiring workflows for each job opening. These workflows are divided into stages, which your HR staff can use to track and manage candidates across the hiring process. 

For instance, when a candidate completes and passes their test task, you can quickly move them from the “Assigned” stage to the “Interview” stage without having to notify other team members manually. Everyone sees the same hiring workflow, all changes are instant, and all tasks and assignees are visible to everyone. 

This project-based approach to every vacancy helps your HR reps assess whether your hiring process is efficient enough and quickly notice any bottlenecks. 

Keka’s hiring features were primarily designed for large corporate HR departments, which is evident from the presence of requisition workflows. These separate workflows streamline creating new vacancies in larger departments with a transparent approval chain with instant notifications. Managers and decision-makers from different departments can approve or deny all vacancy suggestions quickly and easily from a single screen.  

The platform also provides an internal job board, which makes it easier to find qualified candidates in-house. 

Candidate Assessment

Keka’s ATS helps companies track hundreds of candidates more efficiently and quickly eliminate unqualified applicants through practical testing.

The platform doesn’t have its own skill tests, but it supports third-party testing platforms like:

1. Codility
2. HackerRank
3. HackerEarth

These assessments are perfect for testing candidates for tech-based roles. They also eliminate any uncertainty and overreliance on unverifiable resumes. All test results are instantly visible on the part of candidate profiles called “scorecards,” resulting in better and more efficient hiring decisions. 

Keka also helps HR reps keep track of all job ads for the same vacancy posted on various online job boards. You can quickly see where most of your candidates come from and which hiring channels have brought you the biggest number of successful hires. 

Offer Management

Once you’ve decided which candidates to hire, Keka helps your company streamline the job offer through automation. 

If you also use Keka for payroll management, the platform can provide potential new hires with an automatically generated salary breakdown. There’s no need to involve anyone from the finance department or wait for their approval, which significantly shortens the job offer process. 

You can also configure a list of pre-hire documents required for every job role in advance—like educational documents and previous payslips. Then, the candidates can simply upload them to the designated fields, resulting in smoother onboarding and file management. 

Finally, Keka also provides offer letter templates, which you can customize for every vacancy or create your own from scratch. These will be instantly sent to applicants once they reach the “Job Offer” stage, saving you valuable time and effort you’d otherwise spend writing emails manually. 

Downsides of Keka

The main Keka downside is its complex pricing, which is more convoluted than most competing ATS. It doesn’t help that all recruiting features are locked behind a separate subscription, as will be explained in detail in the following section.

While Keka claims its pricing is SME-friendly, it’s just too expensive in practice, and many of the features you’re paying for—like requisition workflows—aren’t even necessary for most startups. 

Finally, while it relies on reputable third-party testing platforms, they’re mainly intended for software engineers—leaving the platform ill-suited for hiring professionals from other fields.  

Keka Pricing

Keka’s pricing is flexible—but also overly complex and untransparent. 

Let’s start with the three base subscription tiers:

1. Foundation—$500 per month for up to 100 employees, with a $5 per month cost for each additional employee
2. Strength—$800 per month for up to 100 employees, with an $8 per month cost for each additional employee
3. Growth—$1,100 per month for up to 100 employees, with an $11 per month cost for each additional employee

Here are the features you get with each tier: 

Smaller companies with fewer than 100 employees pay less—which would make Keka’s pricing extremely fair and praise-worthy if that were all. Unfortunately, that’s only the beginning. 

Keka provides automation features tailored to services businesses—but at an additional cost on top of basic HR features. Here are the three “Professional Services Automation” tiers: 

All three require a subscription to one of the base tiers, significantly raising the price even the smallest service business with only a few employees would have to pay for Keka. The same is true for hiring and recruitment features, which are all locked behind two optional subscriptions that also require one of the three base plans:

If you’re a services company that wants to use Keka for recruiting, you have to pay for three separate subscriptions: Foundation, PSA Basic, and Keka Hire Pro. 

There’s also an undisclosed, custom price for companies with fewer than 50 employees—the “Startup pricing” tier. The pricing complexity doesn’t end there either because Keka bills every new customer for an undisclosed setup fee, which you have to dig through FAQs to even learn about; it isn’t mentioned anywhere else. And this goes for every Keka customer. 

Keka Integrations

The platform supports several integrations with various third-party tools, such as:

• Tally
• QuickBooks
• Upside LMS
• Xoxoday
• EarlySalary
• ZestMoney
• Kaarva
• Stashfin
• Ekincare
• Good Health
• Plum
• Onsurity
• ClearTax
• Quicko
• Paxes
• Trackex

Keka Customers

Keka is an India-based company with an HQ in Hyderabad and offices in:

1. Bengaluru
2. Dallas
3. Chennai
4. Delhi
5. Kolkata
6. Mumbai
7. Pune

The Keka HR platform has been used by hundreds of companies across India and the world, including:

• Mitsubishi Motors
• Hitachi
• Dream11
• Razorpay
• Vedanta
• OnePlus
• Casepoint
• Taaza
• HackerEarth
• Ajmera Tyres
• Pixelloid Studios
• Grabon
• Urjanet
• Mouritech
• ICM Capital
• Easypolicy
• Hartex
• Oliva
• Metrochem
• Industrial Air Solutions

Keka Alternatives

If you think Keka’s pricing is too complex and not cost-effective, don’t worry—you can choose an alternative ATS from many competing HR platforms. We’ve reviewed all the main ones to ensure you’ve got everything you need to make an informed decision:

Workello vs. Keka

Keka provides a comprehensive offer to companies looking to streamline and digitize their HR processes. However, it comes with a few key issues:

• It’s not affordable enough for smaller businesses
• Its pricing isn’t transparent and simple
• It only provides assessments for software engineers

If you want a high-volume recruiting platform that has none of those problems, Workello is the perfect Keka alternative. 

Workello is much more cost-effective, even if you pay for the highest subscription tier. This makes it the ideal choice for startups and other small businesses that want to grow efficiently and quickly. 

Unlike Keka, Workello has simple pricing. The platform has a free trial and two subscription tiers, both of which provide all of Workello’s features—the highest tier just gives you more candidate assessments per year. 

There are no hidden setup fees or additional subscriptions—it’s all transparent and easy to understand. 

Workello also provides built-in candidate assessments created by industry experts—it doesn’t rely on third-party testing platforms. These are also practical skill assessments but for a broader range of professionals beyond programmers, like writers and virtual assistants. 

The platform also automates all email communication with applicants. You get customizable email templates for every message candidates receive as they move from one hiring stage to the next. Once you customize them according to your needs, all emails are sent to candidates automatically at appropriate times. 

Keka vs. Workello—Overview

Here’s a breakdown of how Keka and Workello compare in terms of features and prices:

Bottom Line

Keka provides plenty of useful automation features for a large company with complex HR processes. However, it’s far less cost-effective for smaller and medium-sized businesses, its pricing is untransparent, and you have to pay an additional subscription for hiring features.

On the other hand, Workello’s yearly subscription costs less than what you’d pay for a single month with Keka—and you get more candidate assessment features, a more streamlined experience, and simple, transparent pricing. Sign up for a free trial, check out Workello in action, and cut your recruitment costs in half!