Assembly Line

Deel vs HRMS

Deel and HRMS are both HR and payroll software. Deel is a commercial product from Deel. HRMS is open source under GPL-3.0, with 9k GitHub stars.

Which to pick

Pick Deel when
You want to hire staff or contractors in countries where you have no legal entity.
Pick HRMS when
A small or mid-size business wants open-source HR and payroll, especially alongside ERPNext.

Side by side

What it does

Hires and pays people in other countries through employer-of-record entities, contractor management and global payroll.

HR and payroll on the Frappe framework covering employee lifecycle, leave, attendance, expense claims, appraisals, recruitment, payroll and tax, with a mobile app.

Watch out

EOR fees per employee are high, and you rely on Deel's local partners for compliance.

Payroll needs local tax rules configured for your country, and self-hosting means running Frappe.

Ready for

Production-ready (both)

Runs as

Cloud service and mobile app

Self-hosted server, cloud service and mobile app

Built with

Not published

Python, Frappe, Vue and MariaDB

Source code

Closed source, sold by Deel

Open source, GPL-3.0 (strong copyleft)

What the license allows

Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.

Use inside your business is unrestricted, but anything you distribute that includes it must be released under the same license.

How widely known

4.1k Wikipedia readers a month on phones

9k GitHub stars

How established

Not known

Established: started 4 years ago, latest release v16.53.0.

Other comparisons

More HR and payroll software

Every HR and payroll product and project, ranked

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.