As of 20 Oct 2026, the panel rates Factorial 1.5/5 and HiBob 2/5 in HR Management. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 0 of the 6 judges pick Factorial and 5 pick HiBob, 1 calls it a tie. Factorial scores higher on 2 of 7 criteria (Pricing transparency and Employee data protection & co-determination). HiBob scores higher on 5 of 7 criteria (Payroll handoff, Recruiting & onboarding, Absence & working-time, plus 2 more). Provenance — Factorial: EU-Made; HiBob: Rest of world. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
The written short answer is being updated after a re-evaluation. The scores below are current.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Payroll Officer
Closes payroll every month and answers to the tax adviser when it is wrong. Cares about one thing above all: whether the month leaves this system clean, with backdated changes, mid-month leavers and variable pay handled. Treats "CSV export" as a confession, not a feature.
Factorial
HiBob
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Digital personnel file & data model
Factorial
The vendor's own document-management page and a checklist for the digital personnel file appear in the captures, but nothing captured confirms structured document types, an org chart, custom fields or any change history. I found no public information on effective-dated contract or salary history, which is what I would need before trusting the file through a backdated raise.
HiBob
The pages show a core HR system of record with contracts, IDs and tax forms stored on the profile, e-signature and document management, and org charts and headcount reports that update automatically — a real personnel file. But we found no public information on effective-dated change history for contract or salary changes, on custom fields, or on org structures spanning multiple entities and cost centres, which is what I would need before trusting it as the record of truth.
Payroll handoff
Factorial
The captured pages include a DATEV page and an integration page naming DATEV LODAS, so a named payroll path is evidenced in the site's own structure. Nothing captured confirms the export format, variable pay, mid-month joiners and leavers or any pre-payroll check, and I found no public information on certification or vendor maintenance of the integration — so the month would close on trust.
HiBob
This is more than a spreadsheet handoff: the Payroll Hub is described as exchanging data with third-party payroll providers over APIs in real time, native US and UK payroll sit on the same platform, and the UK product is HMRC-recognised with monthly, weekly and bi-weekly cycles, shift and overtime variations and wage-compliance alerts. The captured pages name no third-party payroll provider for the integrations, and we found no public information on a pre-payroll check, an approval and lock step before transmission, or retro-accounting for backdated changes — the things that decide whether my month closes clean.
Absence & working-time
Factorial
Vacation-management pages appear among the captures, but no captured facts confirm automatic entitlement, carry-over, sickness recording or any working-time capture. I found no public information on how the product meets the German recording duty, so I treat working time as unaddressed in the evidence.
HiBob
Working-time capture is real: employees log hours, managers approve, attendance reports feed payroll, with multiple clock-ins per day, retroactive edits and custom policies for global teams. We found no public information on automatic vacation entitlement and carry-over, sickness recording, public-holiday calendars per location, or the German recording duty, so I cannot treat this as inspection-grade.
Recruiting & onboarding
Factorial
Captures exist for applicant management and for onboarding and offboarding, yet nothing confirms structured stages, a careers page, or the handover of a hired candidate into an employee record without re-entry. I found no public information on e-signed contracts or applicant deletion deadlines.
HiBob
The join path from signed offer onwards is well governed: one employee record created at offer signing, pre-boarding from the moment the offer is signed, e-signatures, document collection, IT equipment requests, and bank and tax details passed straight to payroll so day one needs no re-entry. Before the offer it thins out — a hiring module is named and AI can draft job descriptions, but we found no public information on careers pages, structured stages, rejection handling or posting to job boards.
Employee data protection & co-determination
Factorial
A platform data-processing agreement is available, the trust centre offers audit reports on request, and single sign-on, least-privilege access and logging are named as controls. I found no public information on retention periods per data category, deletion that can be executed, subject-rights support, or monitoring settings a works council could negotiate.
HiBob
A data protection officer is appointed, standard contractual clauses and the data privacy framework cover transfers, and access rights can be defined per stakeholder — more than a checkbox. But retention is stated only as data being kept as long as reasonably necessary, with no published periods, and we found no public information on a published signable data processing agreement, field-level access with an audit log of who read what, executable deletion, or how monitoring and analytics features would sit with a works council.
European sovereignty
Factorial
The vendor presents as Factorial HR S.L. of Barcelona, and the captured security page names Amazon Web Services and Azure as infrastructure with no hosting region stated. I found no public information confirming the contracting entity's jurisdiction, the hosting region or any subprocessor list, so the sovereignty answer is assumed rather than documented.
HiBob
The privacy policy states that personal data is maintained, processed and stored in the US, EU, UK, Australia, Canada and Israel, with the US subsidiary certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework — transfers are papered, but no EU residency is committed to for EU customers. The named entities are US and Israeli, and we found no public information naming the subprocessors or the data-centre provider.
Pricing transparency
Factorial
A pricing page appears in the captures, but the captured content gives no figures for tiers, per-employee prices, billing period, minimums or VAT treatment. An HR lead cannot compute an annual invoice from what is public here; I found no public information on any price at all.
HiBob
The pricing page as captured offers a free demo and states that the cost of the software varies based on features, number of users and the subscription model; we found no public information on per-employee prices, billing periods, minimum terms or module prices. The published dollar figures are savings and return-on-investment claims rather than prices, so an HR lead cannot compute an annual invoice from the public pages.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Factorial
HiBob
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Ownership
Not determined
Not determined
Data residency
Not determined
Not determined
Subprocessors
Not determined
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
As of 20 Oct 2026, the panel rates HiBob higher: 2/5 against 1.5/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 0 of the 6 judges pick Factorial and 5 pick HiBob, 1 calls it a tie. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is Factorial or HiBob European?
Factorial is European (EU-Made). HiBob is not European by provenance (Rest of world). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Where do Factorial and HiBob store customer data?
Per the vendors’ own pages as captured — Factorial: its pages as captured do not say. HiBob: Default not stated; pages mention the US, the EU, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and Israel.