Keka Pricing, Explained — and How Workclave Compares

Keka is a full HR suite, and its pricing reflects that breadth. The part that surprises smaller teams is the base platform fee — reported to start around ₹9,999 per month — that you pay before a single employee is counted. On top of that sits a per-employee charge that rises with your headcount and the tier you choose.

That two-layer model makes sense for a company buying an all-in-one HRMS with payroll, recruiting and performance built in. It works far less well if all you really need is reliable attendance and utilisation, because you carry the weight of the whole suite in the base fee whether or not you use it.

The base fee is what changes the maths at low headcount. With a fixed monthly platform charge sitting underneath the per-user rate, your effective cost per employee is very high for a team of ten and only starts to feel reasonable once you have scaled to dozens of staff.

Treat every figure here as an approximate, illustrative guide rather than a quote. Vendor pricing changes often and varies by plan, contract length and negotiation, so always confirm current numbers directly on the vendor's own website before you budget.

• Base platform fee: reported from roughly ₹9,999 per month, charged before any users.
• Per-employee fee: added on top, tier-dependent, rising with headcount.
• Effective cost per head is highest for the smallest teams because of the base fee.
• Annual commitments and add-on modules can move the total further.

Workclave removes the base fee entirely. It is free for up to five users, then ₹199 per user per month with no platform minimum, so your cost scales cleanly and linearly with your team. A five-person startup pays nothing; a fifteen-person agency pays for fifteen seats and not a rupee more.

The result is that Workclave typically lands around 60% cheaper than a comparable Keka setup for lean, attendance-focused teams — mostly because you are not funding a base fee for modules you would never switch on. If your core need is session-based attendance, timesheets and utilisation, the difference is stark at the sizes where it matters most.

This is not a case for pretending Keka is a bad product. If you want one vendor to run payroll, recruiting, performance reviews, expenses and attendance together, and you have the headcount to absorb the base fee, a broad HRMS can be worth it. Consolidation has real value at scale.

The honest question is whether you need all of that today. Many Indian IT and agency teams over-buy early, paying suite pricing for a fraction of the features. If attendance, approvals and billable utilisation are the jobs you actually need done, a focused tool without a base fee is the cheaper and simpler answer.