For small businesses
HR software for small business
Capstan is HR software for a small business that does not have an HR department. It puts your whole team in one system, replacing the spreadsheets and the shared drive, and it is free for up to twenty people with every feature included and no annual contract.
Every figure sits on the pricing page and nowhere else, because pricing is adjusted to your country and belongs in one place.
Is Capstan HR software for a small business? Yes.
Capstan is built for small teams that run people admin themselves, without an HR hire or an HR budget. It is one system of record for who works for you, on what terms, from when, with which documents on file, so the answers stop living in one person's spreadsheet.
- One place for people, documents, time off and the org chart, instead of a folder, a sheet and a chat thread.
- Self-service for your team, so joiners, leave requests and document updates are not all routed through you.
- Set up in an afternoon, not a project. There is nothing to install and no consultant to book.
How much does HR software cost for a small business?
For up to twenty active people it is free, the whole product, with no time limit and no card required. Past twenty you pay one per-seat price a month for the seats above the first twenty, which stay free, billed monthly with no annual contract and no lock-in.
- Free is the complete product, not a trial or a stripped core. A small team can run on it indefinitely.
- When you do pay, the bill follows your headcount month by month, one seat at a time, with nothing to commit to up front.
- The price you start at is the price you keep. The price book only ever adds, so a later rise never reaches the seats you already carry.
The per-seat figure is on the pricing page, and the reasoning behind giving the whole product away up to twenty is in the manifesto.
Do you need an HR person to run it?
No. Capstan is made to be run by a founder, an office manager or an operations lead who has people admin as one part of a wider job, not a full-time HR role. The workflows and reminders do the chasing, so the routine work happens without someone driving each step.
- Onboarding, document collection and acknowledgements run as workflows with reminders, rather than a to-do list you hold in your head.
- Every action is on an audit trail, so a small team still has a defensible record of what happened and when.
- Reporting is built in, so headcount, leave and cost questions have an answer without a spreadsheet exercise.
What do you get on every plan?
Every plan, the free one included, carries the whole platform. There is no small-business tier that holds features back for a bigger plan, so the fourteen modules are all there from the first day, whether you pay or not.
- The core HRIS: one directory for every employee and contractor, with records, documents, self-service and reporting in one place.
- Onboarding, time off, attendance, expenses, workflows, an org chart, reviews, a helpdesk and more, all fourteen modules, none sold separately.
- The same complete product on the free plan and on a paid plan. Paying lifts one thing, the twenty-active-employee cap, and changes nothing else.
- A one-click export in open formats, yours whether or not you owe us anything, that keeps working even if a workspace is suspended.
How this compares to the tools a small business usually weighs, built rather than priced, is on the comparison pages, and the case for moving off spreadsheets at all is on why switch.
Can it handle employees and contractors together?
Yes, and small businesses usually run both. Employees and contractors live in one workspace with one audit trail, and a contractor is kept outside your employee headcount, so engaging one never inflates your seat count or eats into the free twenty.
- Contractors get their own portal, invoices and a payout register, without being counted as employees.
- Payroll stays with your provider. Capstan compiles the inputs it already holds into a documented export for a payroll partner, and never runs, calculates or files payroll itself.
- One directory answers who works for you in any form, which is the question a small business actually needs answered.
What happens as the business grows or shrinks?
It scales with you and never traps you. Cross twenty active people and you move onto a paid plan for the seats above twenty, drop back below and you return to the free plan with the whole platform intact, or leave entirely and take everything with you.
- Downgrading to Free keeps all fourteen modules. Nothing is switched off and nothing is taken back.
- A one-click export in open formats is yours on the day you leave, whether or not you owe us money, and it keeps working during a suspension.
- Your data is region-served: today that is the EU, with data in Frankfurt and compute in Amsterdam, wherever your business is based.
Run your whole small business team in one place, free for up to twenty people.