Personio Review—What the Software Offers

Personio is a Germany-based all-in-one HR software that offers tools for payroll, automating HR processes, recruiting, and onboarding. It’s aimed at small- and medium-sized businesses with between 10 and 2,000 employees. 

The software saves up to 60 hours of manual work per month and has dozens of features—provided you choose the most expensive plan.

Source: Personio

In this article, we’ll go through Personio’s features and the pricing model, as well as introduce some alternatives that may fit your business better. If you’re looking for an ATS for SMBs, we’ll explain why there’s no need to pay for the full Personio package and what tool can meet your hiring needs at a more affordable price.

Personio—Key Features

Personio is an HR-first software whose Core functionalities are dedicated to effectively managing your workforce. It can help you automate workflows, manage your payroll more efficiently, and create custom reports on individuals, teams, and the entire company. 

Personio also has an ATS, but the Recruiting features are not a part of the Core functions—they are optional, as are its Performance and Development functionalities. You’ll need to pay additionally to manage your hiring process. If you choose to do so, know that Personio is a comprehensive HR solution that lacks the simplicity of ATS software that handles only application management.

The tool also includes the ability to create contracts with electronic signatures, which speeds up the whole hiring and many other internal processes. E-signatures are unavailable in the lowest-tier plan, though.

Regarding candidate management, Personio automates job posting on over 600 job boards (mainly with a European audience) and helps you create a dedicated career page. It has a separate dashboard where you can easily manage your candidates and review their applications at each selection process step.

Other features worth mentioning include:

• Attendance tracking
• Employee calendar
• Applicant evaluation forms
• HR helpdesk

List of All Features for Recruiters

Overall, Personio has over 50 features, but the essential plan unlocks only 10 of them, and you’ll need to pay up for everything else—including the basic ATS. You’ll also have to pay additionally for automated job post publishing, regardless of your chosen plan. 

We’ll focus on Recruiting functionalities and show you what Personio offers in the table below:

Downsides of Using Personio

Despite its broad offer of helpful features, Personio is a complex solution and can be challenging to use, especially if you’re not familiar with HR software.

The main issue with Personio is the learning curve it comes with. The integration process is so complex that the company has an implementation manager dedicated to each customer. Some employers have expressed that they contact customer support whenever they want to change something for fear of messing up other settings. The complexity of the product is evident in its Recruiting component, as Personio lacks the simplicity and ease of use dedicated ATSs have.

Other users have complained about the fact that holidays can’t be customized, and it can be confusing to manage individual employees.

Another aspect of Personio you should look out for is the pricing. The total fee depends on company size, and the least expensive plan costs €99 a month, which unlocks only 10 features for a business with up to 25 employees.

The Core functionalities don’t include any recruiting tools.

Unlocking the full potential of Personio for a company of the same size can cost you up to €530 per month, which is on the high end for HR software, especially for a small business or a startup.

Another issue is the discrepancy between the prices listed and the calculator Personio provides on the pricing page, which we will elaborate on further below.

Personio—Integrations

Personio supports 100 integrations. The most popular ones include:

• Slack
• Microsoft Teams
• Zapier
• WorkMotion
• DATEV
• Google Calendar
• Microsoft Azure
• Circula
• Greenhouse
• Indeed
• LinkedIn
• Culture Amp

Personio Pricing

When you open the pricing page on Personio’s website, you’ll be greeted with a promising price of only €2.88 a month—per employee.

When you choose the number of employees, the lowest option ranges from 0–25, resulting in a base pay of €72 per month for the Essential plan.

This is a competitive price when compared to other HR software solutions, but the issue is that the base cost covers only a handful of features (not including recruiting) and may not actually be accurate. 

The pricing page contains a calculator that doesn’t match the price you get when you do your own math. When you choose the Essential plan without any add-ons and for 0–25 employees, Personio claims the price is actually €99—the difference is €27.

Source: Personio

Personio offers 40+ optional features, and the overall price can quickly stack up. For example, if you take the most affordable plan for the smallest company size and add Recruiting options, the price hikes up to €148 a month. This unlocks only four additional functions and allows you up to 5 open positions.

Using the price calculator, Personio offers three plans with the following monthly prices (for a business with up to 25 employees):

1. Essential—€99 (€148 with basic recruiting options)
2. Professional—€149 (€198 with basic recruiting options)
3. Enterprise—Price available upon contact

If you only want to use the company’s ATS, you’ll still need to pay for the core HR functions. The Essential plan, with all possible additional options selected, comes with a monthly fee of €422. This puts Personio among the more expensive solutions, especially for small businesses with up to 25 employees.

Source: Personio

Personio—Customers

Since Personio is a company based in Munich, Germany, and with offices in six other European cities, most customers come from Europe, and they price their services in EUR. The software is available in English, German, French, Dutch, and Spanish.

Personio boasts over 6,000 companies that use its software, including:

• LUSH
• Core
• Clockwise
• Vromo
• Premier Inn
• Tractable
• Spendesk
• Stonewall
• Mindful Chef
• Wefarm
• Papercup
• Prima
• VertiGIS
• WeDo
• Anorak
• Bluewave
• Umotif

Alternatives to Personio

Personio doesn’t offer precisely what you’re looking for, or it’s just too expensive and complex? The good news is that there are plenty of ATSs and HR software solutions you can choose from. Check out our unbiased reviews to see what they offer:

Workello vs. Personio

If you want to focus on hiring top candidates, consider opting for a dedicated ATS instead of a one-stop-shop HR product like Personio. 

Workello helps you save time, money, and energy by automating the entire hiring process. It allows you to establish your own hiring funnel and use it to track candidates and move them through the funnel from a one-page dashboard. Workello assists in all phases of recruiting, providing job description templates, automated emails, pre-screen assessments, interview-scheduling tools, and hiring analytics.

The main difference between Workello and Personio is that Workello’s features focus on high-volume recruiting by automating the hiring process and cutting down your costs. Personio has a larger scope of tools, such as payroll management.

Another difference is that Workello doesn’t lock any of its features away from the introductory plan. 

Workello has two plans with the same number of features, with the only difference being how you pay:

1. Growth—$299, billed quarterly (up to 30 assessments)
2. Scale—$579, billed annually (up to 300 assessments)

Workello comes pre-optimized and is easy to use. If you have no experience with an ATS and you’re going through your first major hiring cycle, you’ll take no time to master Workello.

Personio vs. Workello—Features Comparison

Check out how the two compare when it comes to recruiting new employees:

Summary

Personio is an all-encompassing HR tool that can help you with all aspects of managing your workforce, from hiring new people to logging days off of your employees. It’s a well-known solution with over 6,000 customers across Europe.

While it has tools for recruiting, you need to pay extra for them, and they don’t cover the entirety of your hiring process. Workello is a dedicated ATS that’s easier to set up and will provide automation every step of the way—for more than 400x lower price than Personio.