Summary
The honest answer first: these are not the same kind of product, and for a lot of businesses Employment Hero is the right choice. If a comparison page tells you the vendor who wrote it wins on every dimension, it is marketing wearing a table.
Employment Hero is a broad employment platform — HR, payroll, onboarding, and benefits, with time and attendance as one component of a suite. NestedClock is a focused time and attendance and rostering product that feeds whatever payroll system you already use. The decision is mostly about which of those shapes fits your business, not which has more features.
A note on pricing: we do not quote Employment Hero's prices here. They change, they differ by module and headcount, and a stale figure in an article like this is worse than no figure. Check their current pricing directly. Ours is published in full below and on our pricing page.
The clearest difference: what happens at payroll time
This is the distinction that decides most evaluations, so it is worth being blunt about.
NestedClock does not file Single Touch Payroll and does not lodge anything with the ATO. It records hours, applies rates, calculates pay including PAYG, produces payslips, and exports to your payroll or accounting system — Xero and MYOB included. Your payroll software remains the system of record for lodgement.
Employment Hero's payroll product does process payroll end to end, including STP reporting.
So the question is: do you want one vendor doing everything, or a specialist doing hours well and handing off? Both are legitimate. If you are currently happy with your accountant and your Xero file, replacing your payroll to fix a timesheet problem is a large change to solve a small one. If your payroll is a mess and you want to consolidate, a suite makes sense.
Where Employment Hero is the better choice
Genuinely, and without hedging:
- You want a single vendor for HR and payroll. One contract, one support line, one dataset from hire to termination.
- You need HR functions beyond time and attendance — structured onboarding, policy acknowledgement, performance reviews, an employee file with documents.
- You want to replace your payroll software. If lodgement, payslips and STP are all moving, buying them together is sensible.
- Employee benefits matter to you as a retention tool.
- You are scaling past what a focused tool covers. Our largest plan tops out at 60 staff and 10 locations; above that, we are not the answer.
Where NestedClock is the better choice
- Your problem is hours, not HR. You know what your people are meant to work; you do not reliably know what they did work. That is the specific problem this product is built for.
- Your payroll already works. Feeding accurate hours into an existing Xero or MYOB process is cheaper and lower-risk than migrating payroll.
- You run shifts across locations. Staff clocking in at more than one site, hours attributed per location, managers scoped to their own sites.
- You need a shared device at the door. A tablet kiosk with PIN entry, optional photo verification at clock-in, and GPS on the clock event.
- You want a smaller bill. Our top plan is $119 a month for 60 staff across 10 locations. A suite priced per employee per month is a different order of cost at that headcount.
Our pricing, in full
Per month, billed monthly. Yearly billing is ten months for twelve.
- Free — $0. 3 staff, 1 location. Clock in and out, breaks, PIN, kiosk.
- Starter — $29. 10 staff, 2 locations. Adds rostering, the staff portal, photo verification, monitoring, messaging and time adjustments.
- Professional — $69. 30 staff, 5 locations. Adds GPS, late-start alerts, cross-location clocking, pay rates and payroll, leave and availability, and payslips.
- Business — $119. 60 staff, 10 locations. Adds the AI assistant and agent.
New accounts start on a 14-day Professional trial, no card required. Pricing is flat per plan rather than per employee, which is the main structural difference from suite pricing: adding your eleventh casual does not change your bill until you cross a plan boundary.
What we do not do
Stated plainly, because finding out later is the expensive way:
- No STP lodgement or ATO reporting.
- No HR module — no performance reviews, no policy library, no employee document management.
- No employee benefits or discount programs.
- No learning management.
- No recruitment or applicant tracking.
- Above 60 staff or 10 locations, you have outgrown our plans.
A note on interpretation
One thing neither product does, and no product can: decide your award classifications for you. Software applies the rates you configure. If someone is on the wrong classification, every system in this category will confidently pay the wrong rate, on time, forever.
Be sceptical of any vendor implying their software makes you award-compliant. What software genuinely does is give you an accurate record of hours worked and an audit trail of changes — which is what you need when a question arises, and what shifts the burden of proof back where it belongs. The classification decision stays yours.
How to actually decide
- Write down the problem you are solving. "I do not know actual hours" and "my HR admin is chaos" have different answers.
- Decide whether payroll is moving. If it is not, you are in the market for a time and attendance tool.
- Cost it at your real headcount, including casuals, and at the headcount you expect in two years.
- Trial both with one real location for one full pay cycle. A demo will not surface the awkward parts; a fortnight of real shifts will.
- Check the exit. Can you export your data in a usable form? Ask before you buy, not when you leave — see switching systems.
Correct as at November 2026. Employment Hero is a trademark of its owner and we are not affiliated with them. Their product changes; verify anything above that matters to your decision directly with them.