Attendo (formerly Petpooja Payroll) vs Keka: Pricing, Hardware and Fit Compared

If you’re comparing Attendo and Keka, here’s the short answer. They’re built for different businesses. Attendo is a complete workforce management system for every kind of business, running attendance, shifts, leaves, payroll and statutory compliance in one place, and it is built for businesses that run on shifts and frontline staff. Keka is a full HR suite for mid-sized corporates.

India’s payroll services market stood at USD 1.78 billion in 2025. It’s expected to reach USD 2.74 billion by 2031 (Mordor Intelligence, 2025). On top of that, more than 7.8 crore enterprises are registered on the Udyam portal, employing roughly 26 crore people (PIB, 2026). With that many businesses and workers, picking the right payroll tool matters.

So which one fits your business? Here’s a side-by-side breakdown.

What Does Each Platform Actually Do?

Both tools process salaries and track attendance, but they’re aimed at very different users.

Attendo is a complete workforce management system. It runs attendance, shifts, leaves, approvals, payroll and statutory compliance in one place, and connects attendance hardware (biometric devices, face scanners) directly to salary processing. More than 40,000 businesses run on it, including manufacturing units, retail chains, hospitals, restaurants and quick commerce operations.

Keka is a broad HR platform. It bundles payroll with performance reviews, OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), hiring tools, and a learning system. Which of those a business gets depends on the plan it buys.

Here’s the real difference. If you need a biometric device that syncs attendance straight to payroll without third-party tools breaking, Attendo does that. If you need performance reviews and goal tracking, Keka has them. Most businesses of this size do not need performance management software. They need attendance and salary to work without errors. Every single month.

For a detailed look at everything Attendo offers, see our guide on key features of Attendo.

How Do Attendo and Keka Compare on Features?

India’s payroll software market is growing quickly, and the two products below sit at opposite ends of it. So how do they compare?

Here’s how they stack up:

Across the businesses running on Attendo, in manufacturing, retail and hospitality, the features that matter most aren’t performance reviews or hiring tools. Instead, they care about reliable attendance capture, accurate salary processing, and support that picks up when something goes wrong at 11 PM on salary day.

Which System Handles Attendance and Hardware Better?

This is where the gap is widest. If attendance data is wrong, everything after it breaks. Salaries, compliance filings, reports. All of it.

Attendo includes an attendance device with every package, and the customer picks which one: Biometric for fingerprint, Biometric Pro for fingerprint and NFC card, or the Face Scanner for face recognition. Every device carries a lifetime warranty. They sync with the payroll software on their own. There’s no third-party vendor to deal with. No integration to fix.

Keka, on the other hand, connects to third-party biometric devices. But it doesn’t make or supply any hardware itself. Whoever supplies the device also owns the sync between it and payroll, which means two suppliers rather than one.

For businesses with frontline workers (factory floors, restaurant kitchens, retail counters), hardware that just works isn’t a bonus. It’s the base of the entire payroll process. Our manufacturing page shows how that plays out on a factory floor.

How Does Pricing Compare?

It is worth seeing the market these two are competing in, because it is what makes the pricing question worth asking at all.

India’s payroll services market, USD 1.78 billion in 2025 rising to a forecast USD 2.74 billion by 2031, a compound annual growth rate of 7.41%. Source: Mordor Intelligence.

More businesses are buying payroll tools as that market grows. But the wrong pricing model can quietly drain your budget.

Attendo charges one flat annual fee. There are no per-employee charges that go up as you hire. For businesses that add seasonal staff or deal with high turnover (which is common in retail, hospitality and manufacturing), this makes a big difference. Read our detailed breakdown on how flat-fee payroll pricing works.

Keka publishes tiered plans on its own site, priced as a monthly base fee with per-employee charges once a seat threshold is passed. Rates and thresholds change, so check the current numbers on Keka’s pricing page rather than relying on a figure quoted in an article.

Add-ons like hiring, helpdesk and learning tools are priced separately.

The difference shows up as a business grows. On a model that charges per employee above a seat threshold, the software bill rises as headcount crosses it. On a flat annual fee, it does not move whether the team is 10 or 100.

Who Should Choose Which?

Attendo suits Indian businesses of any size that want a price-effective way to run attendance and payroll. Past that, the choice comes down to what else you need sitting alongside it.

Choose Attendo if you:

• Want a cost you can budget once. A flat annual fee that does not move when you hire, so the payroll bill is the same at 40 staff as at 400
• Want one vendor, not two. The device and the software come from the same company, so there is no device supplier and software supplier pointing at each other when a punch goes missing
• Want room to grow on the hardware. One device covers up to 750 employees, or 3,000 on the Face Scanner, and extra branches simply get their own device. There is no software-side limit on headcount
• Want support that actually answers. 24×7×365, including weekends and salary-processing days, when a stuck punch has to be fixed before salaries go out
• Want an established Indian company behind it. Attendo is built by Petpooja, running since 2011 with a team of 1,800+, and 40,000+ businesses run on Attendo today
• Run shifts and frontline staff, whether that is a fabrication unit, a retail chain, a hospital, a restaurant or a quick commerce operation

Choose Keka if you:

• Need performance management, OKRs and hiring tools alongside payroll
• Have an IT team to manage third-party biometric integrations

For more comparisons, see how Attendo stacks up against SalaryBox and PagarGuru.

Conclusion

Attendo and Keka serve different markets. Attendo is a complete workforce management system that connects attendance hardware directly to salary processing. Keka is an HR platform where payroll is one of many modules.

If your business needs biometric attendance, simple salary processing, and support that’s available around the clock, Attendo is the more practical pick. More than 40,000 businesses already use it, across manufacturing, corporate offices, retail, healthcare, hospitality and education.

Want to see how it works? Visit Attendo. If you run a retail chain, our retail page shows how the same setup works across branches.

Frequently Asked Questions