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HR Management

Ciphr

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Panel rating · 6 judges · How to read the stars

Category median

Sovereignty: not determined

0–5 in half steps. 5 means the rubric's top anchor is met on the evidence.

by Ciphr Group · www.ciphr.com

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Ciphr: AI-assisted analysis on whats-best.ai Ciphr: AI-assisted analysis on whats-best.ai (dark)

Add ?theme=dark to the image address for dark backgrounds. The badge shows the category and the month of the latest evaluation, and EU-Made where that is the product’s provenance. It never shows a score.

Ciphr at a glance

Vendor
Ciphr Group
Headquarters
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 20 Oct 2026
Data hosting
Default not stated; pages mention United Kingdom and the EU source, captured 20 Oct 2026
Free plan
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 20 Oct 2026
Panel verdict
The AI panel rates Ciphr 2.5/5, the mean of 6 judges. Ciphr is a UK-built HR management suite from Ciphr Limited of Reading, aimed at UK mid-sized organisations of 200 to 2,000 employees. how scores are made
As of
Vendor pages captured 20 Oct 2026; evaluated by the panel 21 Oct 2026. all sources

Ciphr alternatives, European ones first →

Read this page as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.

The Payroll Officer

Weighted verdict

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.

Same scores as the panel view — this lens weights them the way this judge cares.

Scored by The Payroll Officer

Panel median The Payroll Officer This judge’s scores over the panel median. Each label opens its reasoning below.
Scores per criterion, in stars out of 5
Criterion Panel median The Payroll Officer
Digital personnel file & data model 2 of 5 2 of 5
Payroll handoff 3.5 of 5 3.5 of 5
Absence & working-time 2 of 5 2 of 5
Recruiting & onboarding 2.5 of 5 3 of 5
Employee data protection & co-determination 3 of 5 3.5 of 5
European sovereignty 1.5 of 5 1.5 of 5
Pricing transparency 1.5 of 5 1.5 of 5

Digital personnel file & data model

How this is scored

The system of record: employee master data, the digital personnel file, org structure, custom fields, and whether history is kept rather than overwritten.

0 — A contact list with job titles; no document storage, no org structure, no history — changes overwrite what was there.

3 — Employee records with document upload, but a flat structure: no org chart, few or no custom fields, and no dated history of contract or salary changes.

5 — Digital personnel file with structured document types, an org chart, custom fields, and change history on the core employment fields.

8 — Complete record: versioned contract and compensation history with effective dates, document templates with e-signature, org structure supporting multiple entities and cost centres, and granular field-level permissions.

10 — The file is the single source of truth an auditor could work from: full effective-dated history on every field, retention rules per document type, delegated administration per entity, and export that reproduces the record intact.

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The Payroll Officer

Employee records carry document attachment and change tracking, and leaver records are flagged and anonymised automatically — that is a personnel file, not a contact list. But the captured pages give me no org chart, no custom fields and no effective-dated contract or salary history, which is exactly the history I would want in place before trusting a backdated change to land correctly. 1 4 5 8

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Payroll handoff

How this is scored

Whether the month closes cleanly into payroll — DATEV, Lohn und Gehalt, an in-house system or an external tax adviser — and how much of that is automated rather than re-typed.

0 — No payroll path stated at all; whatever leaves the system leaves as a spreadsheet somebody retypes.

3 — Generic CSV export said to be usable for payroll, with no named payroll system, no defined format and no handling of mid-month changes.

5 — A named payroll integration or a documented export format for at least one major system (e.g. DATEV LODAS/Lohn und Gehalt), covering the recurring monthly fields.

8 — Certified or vendor-maintained integration with a named payroll provider, covering variable pay, absences and mid-month joiners and leavers, with a documented pre-payroll check.

10 — Payroll is a first-class part of the product: maintained bidirectional integrations with several named systems, an auditable approval and lock step before transmission, retro-accounting for backdated changes, and the tax adviser given their own access.

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The Payroll Officer

The month looks closable: HR changes sync to Ciphr Payroll in real time with no re-keying, approved absences flow straight through, individual adjustments hit payslips immediately, and payroll can pause and resume the sync with a full audit trail — backed by RTI/HMRC recognition and a CIPP award. The third-party path is thinner in public evidence: Ciphr Paylink is described, but no third-party payroll system is actually named, and we found no public information on a documented pre-payroll check, on retro-accounting for backdated changes, or on separate access for a payroll adviser. 1 3 4 5 6

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Absence & working-time

How this is scored

Vacation, sickness and working-time recording — including whether the product meets the German recording duty (BAG 2022, ArbZG) rather than merely offering a timer.

0 — No absence or time handling; both live in a spreadsheet elsewhere.

3 — Vacation requests with an approval step, but entitlement is manual, carry-over is not handled and there is no working-time recording.

5 — Automatic entitlement and carry-over, sickness recording, an absence calendar, and basic working-time capture with a report per employee.

8 — Configurable per country and contract: pro-rata entitlement, public-holiday calendars per location, break and rest-period rules, overtime accounts, and an export the employer can hand to a labour inspection.

10 — Working-time recording built as a legal obligation rather than a feature: tamper-evident records, documented compliance with the ArbZG recording duty, works-council-configurable monitoring limits, and shift or on-call models handled without add-ons.

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The Payroll Officer

Absence is real and included as standard: leave, sickness and other absence logged from any device with configurable approvals, automatic UK statutory sick pay and holiday entitlement handling, automatic Bradford Factor scoring with alerts, and paid and unpaid reporting by team, department or organisation. We found no public information on working-time recording, on carry-over, or on per-location holiday calendars, so nothing published evidences statutory working-time capture. 5

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Recruiting & onboarding

How this is scored

The join path — vacancy to signed contract to a person who has an account, equipment and a plan on day one.

0 — Neither applicant tracking nor onboarding exists; hiring happens in a shared inbox.

3 — A basic applicant list with statuses, or an onboarding checklist — one of the two, without the handover between them.

5 — Applicant tracking with a careers page, structured stages and rejection handling, plus a checklist-driven onboarding that carries the hired candidate over into an employee record without re-entry.

8 — Multi-posting to named job boards, interview scheduling and scorecards, GDPR-conscious applicant retention and deletion, e-signed contracts, and onboarding that triggers tasks in IT and payroll.

10 — The whole join is one governed flow: approval-gated requisitions with budget, structured and bias-conscious evaluation, automated applicant deletion at the stated deadline, and provisioning driven from the record so day one needs no HR intervention.

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The Payroll Officer

The handover is the strong part: on offer acceptance recruitment data flows directly into the HR record with no re-keying, and onboarding generates contracts, verifies right to work, sets up payroll and assigns learning — payroll set-up driven from the record is exactly what I want before day one. Beyond blind recruitment and automatic retention flags on applicant records we found no public information on a careers page, structured stages, rejection handling, interview scheduling or scorecards, nor on contract e-signature. 6 7 8

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Employee data protection & co-determination

How this is scored

How the product handles the most sensitive personal data a company holds — retention, deletion, role separation, subject rights — and whether it can pass a works council (BetrVG §87) rather than merely a procurement checklist.

0 — No stated retention or deletion handling, no role model beyond admin-or-not, and no DPA offered on the site.

3 — A DPA exists on request and roles are coarse; retention and deletion are described as something the customer arranges themselves.

5 — A signable DPA is published, roles are configurable per module, applicant and employee retention periods are stated, and deletion can be executed rather than only promised.

8 — Field-level access control with an audit log of who read what, configurable retention per data category with automatic deletion, documented subject-rights support, and monitoring or analytics features that can be switched off for co-determination.

10 — Built for the works council to say yes: published processing documentation and subprocessor list, per-entity data separation, tamper-evident audit trail, evaluation and behavioural-analysis features off by default with their scope documented, and a data-protection impact assessment the customer can build on.

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The Payroll Officer

Retention is configurable and executable — set 30, 60 or 90 days or longer and leavers are flagged for anonymisation or deletion automatically, from a dashboard that also downloads data and extends retention — subject access requests are fulfilled without a manual trawl, roles restrict sensitive records, and a dedicated DPO, ISO 27001 and a public Trust Centre are documented. We found no public information on field-level permissions, on a log of who read which record, or on published processing documentation with a subprocessor list, so I cannot confirm it would satisfy a works council review. 2 4 8

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European sovereignty

How this is scored

Where the data lives, who the contracting entity is, who the subprocessors are, and whether the answer is documented rather than assumed. Independently sourced by the sovereignty pipeline; scored here as the buyer would weigh it.

0 — US-headquartered vendor, US contracting entity, hosting region unstated or US, subprocessors not named.

3 — EU hosting is offered as an option but the contracting entity is non-EU, or the subprocessor list is incomplete or absent.

5 — EU hosting stated as standard and an EU contracting entity, but the subprocessor chain includes non-EU providers without an explained safeguard.

8 — EU or DACH hosting with a named data-centre provider, an EU contracting entity, the full subprocessor list published, and any non-EU processing named with its legal basis.

10 — Sovereign end to end and evidenced: vendor, contracting entity, hosting and every subprocessor in the EU, certification of the data centres published, and an on-premises or private-cloud option for buyers who need it.

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The Payroll Officer

The contracting entity is Ciphr Limited, registered office in Reading, UK, and the vendor states that data including absence records is held in UK and EEA data centres — but for a European buyer that UK entity is a non-EU contracting party, and we found no public information on the data-centre provider or any subprocessor list. Hosting is at least stated outright rather than left silent, though nothing published lets a buyer trace the full chain. 5 7

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Pricing transparency

How this is scored

Whether an HR lead can compute the real annual invoice for their headcount — including the modules they actually need — from public pages alone.

0 — No public prices at all; every tier is a sales conversation.

3 — An entry price per employee exists, but the modules most buyers need are unpriced, or a minimum headcount, setup fee or mandatory onboarding package is not stated publicly.

5 — Per-employee prices are public for the main tiers with the billing period stated, but at least one commonly needed module (payroll, time, recruiting) hides in an unpriced bundle.

8 — Every tier and module priced publicly with per-employee maths, billing period, minimum term and VAT treatment stated; only genuinely custom enterprise work lacks a number.

10 — Complete price computability: a calculator or table that produces the annual invoice for a given headcount and module selection, including setup, minimums and renewal terms.

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The Payroll Officer

An entry price is public: "HR software from £5 per user per month (minimum user numbers apply – see example pricing)" and "Pricing for Ciphr HR starts from £5 per employee per month; minimum contract terms apply". Payroll, recruitment, learning and benefits carry no public price in the captured pages, and the minimum contract terms, the minimum user numbers and any setup fee are not quantified — I could not compute an annual invoice for a given headcount from what is published. 1 5 6

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European sovereignty — proven facts

0 of 4 dimensions proven

Built only from facts shown on the vendor's own pages. A dimension we could not prove is left open, not scored as zero.

Ownership Not determined — uncited Report an error
Data residency Not determined — uncited Report an error
Subprocessors Not determined — uncited Report an error

Questions about Ciphr

Is Ciphr European?

Not determined: the vendor’s pages as captured do not say where Ciphr is based.

Where does Ciphr store data?

The default storage location for customer data is not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 20 Oct 2026. The vendor’s pages mention United Kingdom and the EU as hosting locations, per the vendor’s page captured 20 Oct 2026.

Does Ciphr have a free plan?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 20 Oct 2026.

What are the best alternatives to Ciphr?

As of 21 Oct 2026, the panel rates rexx systems (3.5/5), HRworks (3/5) and Kenjo (3/5) highest among the other 30 HR Management products evaluated. Ratings that look equal are rounded to half stars; the order uses the unrounded rating, then the name. The highest-rated European alternative is rexx systems (EU-Made). Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made. The full list, with European products first: Ciphr alternatives.

Where this could be wrong

What we left out

A claim that does not survive our checks costs us the claim, not the page. This is what was taken off this one.

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Sources (8)

The pages every claim on this page was read from — each one checked, dated, and kept verifiable.

  1. 1 Vendor page www.ciphr.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  2. 2 Security / trust page — found from the homepage www.ciphr.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  3. 3 Payroll handoff — found from sitemap www.ciphr.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  4. 4 Payroll handoff — found from sitemap www.ciphr.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  5. 5 Absence & working-time — found from sitemap www.ciphr.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  6. 6 Recruiting & onboarding — found from sitemap www.ciphr.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  7. 7 Recruiting & onboarding — found from sitemap www.ciphr.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  8. 8 Employee data protection & co-determination — found from sitemap www.ciphr.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →