An Objective Keka Review—Features, Pricing, and Alternatives

Keka is an HR platform designed to streamline a company’s HR processes. It has features that can facilitate a range of tasks within an HR department, from overtime and billables management for existing employees to tracking applicants for open positions.

Source: Keka

In this Keka HR review, we’ll explore the platform’s features and pricing to help you determine if it’s a good fit for your team. We’ll also present an ATS for SMBs that could be your ideal Keka alternative.

What Is Keka Software—Key Keka Features

The platform boasts numerous features that can simplify and automate HR work, such as:

• Performance & Careers—for continuous feedback and career goals management
• Time & Attendance—for attendance and leave management
• PSA Software—for optimizing time, resource, and project profitability
• ModernHR—HRMS for managing employees and documents
• Hiring & Onboarding—for a streamlined candidate experience in the hiring process

In this review, we’ll focus on Keka’s most important hiring features, including:

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

Hiring Pipelines

A streamlined workflow is crucial for any successful hiring process. 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 leverage to track and manage candidates efficiently across the hiring process.

This project management-based approach to every vacancy helps your HR reps efficiently monitor and manage each candidate in the pipeline. Candidate Kanban boards allow you to move candidates through the funnel with simple drag-and-drop actions. Everyone on your team can see the same hiring workflow, all changes are instant, and all tasks and assignees are visible to everyone.

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

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

Thanks to Keka’s report and analysis options, you can monitor ads on various online job boards and understand where your candidates are coming from and how your job posts are performing to build a bulletproof hiring strategy.

Candidate Assessment

Keka 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 reliance 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.

While being able to integrate Keka with third-party testing platforms is a valuable advantage, it’s worth noting that the focus is on testing software engineers and developers, which limits the functionality of these integrations.

Offer Management

Once you’ve decided which candidate(s) to hire, you need to act fast—and Keka helps your company streamline the job offer process 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, like educational documents and previous payslips, that are required for every role in advance. The candidates can simply upload them to the designated fields, resulting in smoother onboarding and file management.

Finally, Keka 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.

If you keep your candidates in the dark about the latest updates in the hiring process, they may lose interest and give up. With Keka’s candidate portal, your candidates can track their journey. The portal features an inbox, so you can communicate directly with select candidates. The Know More About Us section lets you post interesting facts about your company to impress candidates.

Keka Reviews

How does Keka perform in real life? Let’s check out some Keka reviews to get a better idea of its functionalities and potential drawbacks.

Many Keka reviews mention exceptional support management—quick and precise responses from the support team helped the users streamline their operations and workflows.

Users also appreciate Keka’s clean, easy-to-use interface with well-designed modules that simplify tasks and its customizability—you can adjust the platform to ensure it aligns with your workflows.

Like other platforms, Keka isn’t perfect, and some users raised potential drawbacks you should consider when determining whether the platform is a good fit.

Several users pointed out high pricing as a drawback, which can be especially problematic for smaller businesses.

Another potential limitation is that changes made within Keka for some users didn’t go into effect immediately, which caused issues.

Keka Pricing

Keka’s pricing is flexible—but also quite complex.

Let’s start with the three base subscription (HR & Payroll Platform) 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:

Source: Keka

The platform supports startups and small businesses by giving them special pricing, which is commendable.

The story of Keka subscription models doesn’t end there. We’ve mentioned that the platform provides automation features tailored to services businesses (PSA software), but these come at an additional cost.

Here are the three “Professional Services Automation” tiers:

1. PSA Basic
2. PSA Advance
3. PSA Scale

Unfortunately, Keka doesn’t reveal pricing for these tiers. Still, the company does state that you need to opt for a plan in HR & Payroll Platform (Foundation, Strength, or Growth) to be able to purchase a PSA plan.

The same goes for hiring and recruitment features, which are all locked behind two optional subscriptions that also require one of the three base plans. The two options are:

1. Keka Hire Pro—$50/month per recruiter
2. Keka Hire Advanced—$75/month per recruiter

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

On top of everything so far, Keka bills every new customer a nominal setup fee, which you have to dig through FAQs to even learn about; it isn’t mentioned anywhere else.

Keka Integrations

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

• Tally
• 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
8. Singapore

The Keka HR platform has been used by 8,500+ companies in India and across the world, including:

• OnePlus
• Casepoint
• Taaza
• HackerEarth
• Ajmera Tyres
• Pixelloid Studios
• Grabon
• Urjanet
• Mouritech
• ICM Capital
• Easypolicy
• Hartex
• Oliva
• Metrochem
• Industrial Air Solutions
• BIM Modeling Services
• Apple Tree
• Noise
• R for Rabbit
• boodmo
• Unbox Robotics
• Lumel
• Amromed
• Wingify

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 as an Ideal Keka Alternative

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

• Its pricing isn’t transparent and simple
• It only provides assessments for software engineers
• It has occasional problems with slower loading times
• If you want a high-volume recruiting platform with none of those problems, Workello is the perfect Keka alternative.

Source: Workello

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

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

There are no hidden setup fees or additional subscriptions—everything’s easy to understand.

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

Workello teamed up with top industry experts to design tests that hit the sweet spot between comprehensiveness and high test take rates. Let’s say you’re hiring a new writer—here’s how an ideal Workello test looks:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DwkNG25BCHU

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 pricing:

Choose the Platform That Offers the Most Value for Your Team

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 offers more candidate assessment features and a more streamlined experience for a fraction of the cost a smaller team would have to pay for a more comprehensive tool. Sign up for a free trial, check out Workello in action, and cut your recruitment costs IN HALF!