Functionality
While both services offer essentially the same (a directory of employees, employee time tracking, project monitoring, creating reports, etc.), OrangeHRM Live functionally is slightly better. It goes deeper in the implementation of individual features and offers some extra features as well, such as monitoring of productivity using KPI metrics. Truth to be told, the variety and depth of OrangeHRM Live’s functionality will be, in our opinion, best used in bigger organizations, while for smaller organizations, HR Locker would work just fine.
Category Winner: OrangeHRM Live
Customization
HR Locker is not the best customizable system we have seen in our testing - and it has been said very gently. In fact, customizability in HR Locker is very weak even when we compare it with other systems of this category. On the other hand, this comparison is very difficult for HR Locker in principle, because OrangeHRM Live can be used as a definition of “customizability” (at least among the cloud HRM systems). In the OrangeHRM Live you can adjust pretty much everything according to your needs starting with nearly all the fields in the employee directory and all descriptive fields through the application functions up to the structure of reports. HR Locker, in contrast, won’t let you even add custom fields to employee directory, thus this category is easily won by OrangeHRM Live.
Category Winner: OrangeHRM Live
Look and Feel
First, let’s review the look. HR Locker’s environment is a combination of green and neutral grey, which makes a pleasant, fresh, and modern look. OrangeHRM Live is all tuned to -- you guessed it right -- orange. To keep it short and sweet, HR Locker is easily a winner here. Well, we don’t say that OrangeHRM Live is an unattractive and user unfriendly system -- only somewhat rough around the edges and sometimes unnecessarily complicated. OrangeHRM Live consists of multiple modules which are interconnected among themselves. However, this modularity is not hidden to the end user. For instance, if you are about to add a new employee in a directory module and wish to assign him a position, then you must go to another module, define the position and then go back and assign that position to the employee. It’s functional, but not convenient. In contrast, HR Locker offers well thought-out and nicely looking environment.
Category Winner: HR Locker
Browser, Language and General Support
According to our testing, you can work with both applications in all commonly used web browsers. Implicitly, both applications are in English, but OrangeHRM Live offers to localize the service (for a fee) into any desired language. You can reach HR Locker primarily on a customer support website where the help is provided by dedicated HR Locker employees as well as by the community. General Support is provided for all paying customers of OrangeHRM Live as well, but they also get variety of trainings and other extras.
Category Winner: OrangeHRM Live
Price
Both applications offer a free trial: HR Locker for 30 days for all plans and OrangeHRM Live for 14 days with unlimited usage. In addition, HR Locker has a free plan for very small companies of up to 3 employees. HR Locker has a number of plans which differ in number of employees, and space for your documents. HR Locker’s cheapest plan is for €199 per year (circa $23 per month) and for up to 15 employees. The most expensive plan offered is for 100 employees and costs €999 a year ($118 a month). If you’re interested in using it for an even bigger organization, you need to contact the producer.
OrangeHRM Live doesn’t have any plans at all (don’t bother to look for them - it will be waste of your time) and all the fees are directly calculated from the size of the organization. However, to find out how much you will pay you have to contact the support. We were told that the price starts from $6.25 per employee/month and can go down till $0.25/employee/month including technical support, training, etc. With such a broad range we cannot decide the winner of this category, and because it is OrangeHRM fault, we feel it will be right to name its oponent the winner of this category.
Better price openness would suit OrangeHRM better. It is an exception among all cloud providers that this firm doesn’t provide its price list on its pages.
Category Winner: HR Locker
Summary
Both services are good representatives of the HRM services category. In our opinion, HR Locker will work best in smaller organizations that do not have great demands on customization and do not need the rich and diverse functionality OrangeHRM offers. OrangeHRM Live will (also thanks to its pricing policy) find its users primarily in larger companies that want very well functional and configurable software. Having said that, the overall winner of our test is OrangeHRM Live.
Overall winner: OrangeHRM Live