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 Skeptic
Has watched three HR suites promise one system and deliver five modules with a shared logo. Reads every claim for what it does not say: which module the feature lives in, what it costs on top, and whether "integration" means a maintained connector or a documented endpoint someone could build against.
Factorial
HiBob
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Digital personnel file & data model
Factorial
Dedicated document-management pages exist, so a digital personnel file is clearly part of the pitch, but nothing captured says what is in it: we found no public information on structured document types, org structure, custom fields, or whether contract and salary changes keep dated history. The closest personnel-file capture is a downloadable checklist template, which markets the problem rather than evidencing the product.
HiBob
A personnel file does exist — contracts, IDs and tax forms stored on the profile, e-signature and document management in the Core HR capability list, and an org chart that updates alongside headcount reports. What the captured pages never show is the audit-grade half: we found no public information on effective-dated change history for contracts or compensation, custom fields on the record, multi-entity or cost-centre structure, or permissions any finer than defining access rights to pre-approved stakeholders.
Payroll handoff
Factorial
The vendor points at DATEV — a DATEV page and an integration page for DATEV LODAS exist — which clears the bar of a named payroll system, but we found no public information on the export format, whether the connector is vendor-maintained, or how joiners, leavers and mid-month changes are handled. A named target without a documented format or a maintained connector is precisely the integration that quietly becomes re-typed data.
HiBob
Here the single-platform claim has substance: native US and UK payroll sit on the same platform as the HR data, the UK engine is HMRC-recognised with tax-code and student-loan sync plus wage-compliance alerts, and the Payroll Hub exchanges data with third-party providers by API in real or near real time. But those hub providers stay unnamed, the German-language pages show no DATEV or Lohn und Gehalt path, and we found no public information on a documented pre-payroll check, mid-month joiners and leavers, or retro-accounting.
Absence & working-time
Factorial
Vacation-management pages confirm that absence handling exists, but we found no public information on automatic entitlement, carry-over, sickness recording, or any working-time capture at all — and no public information on how the German working-time recording duty is addressed. Until working time is evidenced, this reads as a vacation tool, not a compliance answer.
HiBob
Working-time capture is evidenced and reasonably deep — flexible tracking, multiple clock-ins and -outs per day, retroactive edits, manager approval, attendance reports that flow into payroll, and custom policies for global teams. The absence half is one line — "time off, and approvals" — and we found no public information on automatic entitlement calculation, carry-over, sickness recording, holiday calendars, or any statement addressing the German working-time recording duty.
Recruiting & onboarding
Factorial
Pages exist for both applicant management and onboarding/offboarding, so both halves of the join path are on the menu, but we found no public information on careers pages, structured stages, rejection handling, e-signed contracts, or whether a hired candidate carries over into an employee record without re-entry. The handover between those two pages is exactly the seam where one system becomes two.
HiBob
Onboarding is documented end to end: pre-boarding starts the moment the offer is signed, one team-member record is created at offer signing, documents are collected and e-signed, and tasks fan out to IT equipment requests and payroll and benefits enrolment without re-entry. Recruiting itself surfaces only as a module name in the privacy policy plus AI generation of job descriptions — we found no public information on applicant stages, a careers page, rejection handling, interview scheduling, or applicant retention and deletion.
Employee data protection & co-determination
Factorial
A data processing agreement is available through the security page and access controls with logging are described — but for Factorial's own operations, not a customer-configurable role model — and we found no public information on retention periods, executable deletion, subject-rights support, or field-level permissions. The captured privacy and GDPR pages give a works council nothing it could vote on.
HiBob
The compliance paperwork is more than a checkbox: an appointed external Data Protection Officer, standard contractual clauses for the EU, UK and Switzerland, Data Privacy Framework certifications, and a trust center. What a works council will actually ask for is not on the captured pages — retention is stated only as data being kept "as long as it is reasonably necessary", and we found no public information on stated retention periods per data category, executed deletion, field-level access with a read audit log, or analytics that can be switched off beyond an AI settings toggle.
European sovereignty
Factorial
The security page names Amazon Web Services and Azure as infrastructure but states no region for either, and we found no public information on the contracting entity, data residency, or any subprocessor list on the captured pages. The vendor being a Spanish company is the one fact holding this above the bottom: an EU vendor with hyperscaler hosting of unstated region and no published subprocessor chain is a contract question, not a documented answer.
HiBob
The privacy policy puts personal data in the US, EU, UK, Australia, Canada and Israel across entities including Hi Bob Limited, Hi Bob, Inc. and Hi Bob (UK) Limited, with EU-US transfers resting on Data Privacy Framework certification and contractual clauses — a lawful-transfer mechanism, not European hosting. The subprocessor chain appears only as unnamed "authorized Service Providers", and we found no public information on a hosting-region choice, a published subprocessor list, or data-centre certification.
Pricing transparency
Factorial
The vendor's pricing page was captured twice, in September and October, and neither capture produced a single figure; we found no public information on per-employee prices, tiers, billing period, minimums, or VAT treatment. An HR lead cannot compute even the entry-level annual invoice from what is public here.
HiBob
No price appears anywhere in the captured pages: the homepage links to a pricing page whose only captured offer is a free demo, and the onboarding page states "The cost of onboarding software varies based on the features, number of users, and type of subscription model". The only published figures are ROI and savings marketing claims — an HR lead cannot compute any part of the annual invoice from 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.