Deel vs Horilla-hr
Deel and Horilla-hr are both HR and payroll software. Deel is a commercial product from Deel. Horilla-hr is open source under LGPL-2.1, with 1.5k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Deel when
- You want to hire staff or contractors in countries where you have no legal entity.
- Pick Horilla-hr when
- A small or mid-size company wants a free self-hosted HR suite and has someone to run Django.
Side by side
Hires and pays people in other countries through employer-of-record entities, contractor management and global payroll.
An HR system with employees, recruitment, onboarding, attendance with biometric devices, leave, payroll, performance, assets and helpdesk.
EOR fees per employee are high, and you rely on Deel's local partners for compliance.
Payroll and tax logic need checking for your jurisdiction, and the interface leans on older jQuery.
Production-ready
Usable
Cloud service and mobile app
Self-hosted server and mobile app
Not published
Python, Django, HTMX, PostgreSQL and Redis
Closed source, sold by Deel
Open source, LGPL-2.1 (weak copyleft)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can use it inside a product you sell; changes you make to its own files must be shared.
4.1k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
1.5k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 3 years ago, latest release 2.2.0.
Other comparisons
More HR and payroll software
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.