Horilla-hr vs HRMS
Horilla-hr and HRMS are both HR and payroll software. Horilla-hr is open source under LGPL-2.1, with 1.5k GitHub stars. HRMS is open source under GPL-3.0, with 9k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Horilla-hr when
- A small or mid-size company wants a free self-hosted HR suite and has someone to run Django.
- Pick HRMS when
- A small or mid-size business wants open-source HR and payroll, especially alongside ERPNext.
Side by side
An HR system with employees, recruitment, onboarding, attendance with biometric devices, leave, payroll, performance, assets and helpdesk.
HR and payroll on the Frappe framework covering employee lifecycle, leave, attendance, expense claims, appraisals, recruitment, payroll and tax, with a mobile app.
Payroll and tax logic need checking for your jurisdiction, and the interface leans on older jQuery.
Payroll needs local tax rules configured for your country, and self-hosting means running Frappe.
Usable
Production-ready
Self-hosted server and mobile app
Self-hosted server, cloud service and mobile app
Python, Django, HTMX, PostgreSQL and Redis
Python, Frappe, Vue and MariaDB
Open source, LGPL-2.1 (weak copyleft)
Open source, GPL-3.0 (strong copyleft)
You can use it inside a product you sell; changes you make to its own files must be shared.
Use inside your business is unrestricted, but anything you distribute that includes it must be released under the same license.
1.5k GitHub stars
9k GitHub stars
Established: started 3 years ago, latest release 2.2.0.
Established: started 4 years ago, latest release v16.53.0.
Other comparisons
More HR and payroll software
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.