Compare / Personio SE & Co. KG
Rutba vs Personio
The European mid-market HR platform, strongest in German-speaking markets. Mature where we are new, and narrower where we are wide.
Checked 1 September 2026Personio pricing ↗
What Personio is
An HR operating system for European small and mid-sized companies: employee records, recruiting, onboarding, absence and time tracking, performance, and payroll preliminaries handed to a local payroll provider.
Who it genuinely suits
- European mid-market companies, particularly in DACH markets
- HR teams who need local compliance and works-council-aware processes
- Businesses whose payroll is run by an external provider and always will be
Where they win
What Personio does better than us.
Every comparison page on this site has this section and none of them is empty. If it were, you would be right to discount the rest of the page.
European compliance and local practice
Absence law, works councils, local contract templates and the conventions of European HR administration. Built in rather than configured.
Recruiting and onboarding are shipped products
Applicant tracking with a careers surface, live and mature. Our Recruit app is scaffolded with no features and our own site says so.
An established local partner and consultant ecosystem
People you can hire who know it, in the markets where it is strongest.
Where we win
What Rutba does that this does not.
Argued from how the products are built rather than from a feature list, because feature lists are the part of a comparison that goes stale first.
Payroll is ours rather than handed onward
Personio prepares payroll and passes it to a provider. Rutba runs it, and posts the result into the ledger — which removes both the handoff and the reconciliation after it.
The hours come from a clock we ship
Time tracking that begins at a shared device rather than at a form.
It is not only HR
The same platform holds the customers, the stock, the orders and the books. Personio is deliberately the HR layer of a stack.
Deployment flexibility
Our cloud, your cloud, or your own hardware where a product supports it — which matters in exactly the markets Personio is strongest in.
And the one that is not a feature
Personio SE & Co. KG will not build what you ask for. We will.
That is not a criticism of them — a vendor at their scale has to weigh your request against every other customer it touches, and schedule it behind a roadmap set a year out. Your request is a rounding error in their planning, honestly so. We are small, and the people building the product are the people you talk to: what helps everyone goes into the product at no extra charge, what is specific to you is quoted as the work it is, and when the answer is no you get the reason.
Side by side
The same six questions the hub asks of everyone.
| Question | Rutba | Personio |
|---|---|---|
| Runs the businessCRM, stock, orders, production and the ledger, from one vendor | Included | Not covered |
| Runs the dayMail, files, documents, chat and meetings, included rather than licensed separately | Included | Not covered |
| One set of recordsDo the modules share the records, or integrate copies of them | Included | Partly |
| Buy it yourselfCan you subscribe and start without a partner or a sales cycle | Included | Included |
| Parts sold separatelyCan you take one piece without committing to the platform | Included | Included |
| Run it yourselfIs there a path to your own hardware | Partly | Not covered |
On price: We do not reproduce Personio SE & Co. KG’s prices here. A list price is published and fair to quote, and it is stale within a quarter — which would make this page quietly wrong in a way you could not see. Read today’s number from them, and ours is on our pricing page in full, tier by tier.
Moving
What leaving Personio actually involves.
The question that decides this is not whether you should move but whether you can. This is the honest version, including the parts that do not come across.
- 1
Employee records, absence balances and org structure export and import cleanly.
- 2
Recruiting pipelines should not move yet — our Recruit app has no features. Keep an applicant tracking system until it does.
- 3
If your payroll provider relationship is working, moving payroll is a separate decision from moving HR. Do them one at a time.
- 4
Move at a period boundary and parallel-run one absence cycle.
No customer has done this yet. The steps above describe the mechanism — what exports, what imports, what has to be rebuilt — rather than a migration we have run. When one has been run, this section will say whose it was.
Our actual recommendation
If you need European HR administration and your payroll provider is settled, Personio is a strong product and more finished than ours in recruiting. Look at us when the HR system, the clock, the pay run and the ledger have become four vendors.
If you did move
The products this comparison is about.
With their real availability labels, which apply inside a comparison exactly as they do everywhere else on this site.
Rutba People
Available nowHR, payroll & employee management software
Employee records, the org structure, attendance and leave, a shared time clock, and payroll that runs on all of it — plus a self-service portal so staff answer their own questions instead of asking HR.
- Employee records, employment history, contracts, teams and matrix reporting lines
- Attendance and leave with approval chains
- A shared time clock that gives attendance an actual source
Includes: HR · Employee Self-Service · Payroll · Time Clock · Workforce · Recruit · Talent
From $8 per employee / month
Rutba Books
Available nowAccounting & bookkeeping software
Invoicing, bills, banking and reconciliation on one side; the ledger, tax, budgets and the financial reports on the other — fed automatically by every sale, pay run and stock movement happening elsewhere in the business.
- Two apps on one ledger - the daily bookkeeping surface and the accountant’s workbench, neither hiding anything from the other
- Sales invoices, bills, receipts, supplier payments and credit notes, with per-line tax
- Bank statements read in whatever your bank emits - CAMT.053, MT940, OFX/QFX or CSV - and matched, with reconciliation that must reach zero
Includes: Books · Accounts
From $14 per user / month
Rutba CRM
Available nowCRM & sales pipeline software
Track leads from first contact to signed quote, keep every conversation attached to the customer it belongs to, and run your support desk off the same contact record your sales team uses.
- Lead capture, scoring, and pipeline stages you define
- Quotes and proposals that convert straight into orders
- Shared customer timeline — calls, emails, and tickets in one thread
Includes: CRM · Helpdesk · Customer Portal · Marketplace
From $18 per user / month
Head to head
Personio against the others.
You are comparing Personio to something, and it may well not be us. These are written to the same standard as this page — sourced, dated, and naming where each product wins.
Weighing this against Personio?
Tell us what you run and how you use it. We will be specific about what would improve, what would get worse, and whether the move is worth it at all.