Attendo (formerly Petpooja Payroll) vs PagarGuru: Pricing

As a business grows, payroll becomes more than just salary disbursement. Attendance tracking, overtime calculation, statutory deductions, and compliance reporting all start influencing how accurately salaries are processed. What works for a small team can quickly become complicated as headcount increases, making structured payroll management software essential.

This is why businesses evaluating payroll software companies in India must look beyond basic automation. Factors like attendance dependency, salary structuring, and how payroll software pricing in India scales with team growth matter just as much as features. Understanding how the per-employee pricing model works will help you assess long-term costs. Attendo and PagarGuru both operate as attendance and payroll software, but their approaches to pricing, compliance management, and operational structure differ.

What Do Businesses Need from Payroll Software?

Before diving into a comparison, it is worth setting out what a business actually requires from its payroll management system. Whether it’s attendance tracking, salary structure configuration, or compliance handling, businesses should prioritise these features:

• Accuracy and Compliance: Payroll software should ensure accurate salary calculations, manage overtime, and automate tax deductions such as PF and ESI.
• Ease of Use: Many businesses have no dedicated HR team, so simple, easy-to-use systems are key.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Affordable payroll software matters. The pricing model should scale with your business. As more businesses buy into payroll software, and India’s payroll services market is forecast to grow from USD 1.78 billion in 2025 to USD 2.74 billion by 2031, and the cost of getting the model wrong grows with it.

What are the Key Differences Between Attendo and PagarGuru?

Both platforms offer payroll software for Indian businesses, but their approaches to attendance tracking, pricing models, and system functionality differ. By exploring these differences, you’ll gain clarity on which solution best suits your business’s unique needs.

Attendo

Where attendance integrity meets payroll precision.

Attendo is a complete workforce management system for every kind of business, running attendance, shifts, leaves, approvals, payroll and statutory compliance in one place. It is built by Petpooja, which has been serving Indian businesses since 2011, and more than 40,000 businesses run on it today across manufacturing, corporate offices, retail, healthcare, hospitality and education.

It runs in the cloud, so attendance and payroll are managed online with no local installation to maintain. Attendance can be reviewed and corrected in bulk before payroll is finalised, and finalising locks the period so the numbers behind a payslip cannot drift afterwards.

Key strengths:

• Strong shift scheduling and rule enforcement
• Biometric and app-based attendance integration
• Automatic PF, ESIC, PT, TDS and LWF calculations
• Advance and loan deduction handling
• The same product whether the team is 20 or 900, with no tier-gating and no per-employee charge

Best for: Indian businesses of any size that want a price-effective way to run attendance and payroll.

The same setup runs across very different floors, from a fabrication unit in Rajkot on two shifts, a diagnostic lab chain in Pune, a garment showroom in Surat. Our guide to what Attendo includes covers the modules in detail.

PagarGuru

Flexible attendance capture with structured payroll rules.

PagarGuru supports multiple attendance capture methods and connects them to rule-based payroll logic.

Its flexibility makes it adaptable across different team structures.

Key strengths:

• Biometric, face recognition, and geo-based attendance
• Leave management with customisable policies
• Multi-location attendance centralised, with combined and separate reports
• Structured attendance-to-payroll linking

Best for: businesses with hybrid or multi-location attendance environments.

Decoding Payroll Pricing Models: Fixed vs Variable Costs

Choosing the right pricing model is a key factor in selecting payroll software. Some platforms offer fixed annual fees, while others base costs on employee count, which can increase as your business grows. This section compares the two models and helps you assess their long-term cost implications.

For Attendo, the package and the device are settled on a call. Talk to the Attendo team about which one suits the site. PagarGuru publishes its tiers on its own site, and rates change, so check their own site for the current numbers rather than relying on a figure quoted in an article.

Conclusion: Choosing the Right Payroll Solution

The real distinction between Attendo and PagarGuru is less about what they do than how they are packaged. Attendo runs attendance, shifts, leaves, payroll and all five statutory deductions on one flat annual fee, with every feature in the box and the attendance device included. PagarGuru spreads its features across three per-employee tiers and sells its device separately.

Which one fits comes down to how you want to be billed as the team grows. If you would rather budget once a year, and have whoever supplies the device also answer for it, Attendo is the more predictable choice. see how it works end to end. If you would rather pay only for the tier you use and already have devices in place, PagarGuru fits that.

Frequently Asked Questions