OneBookPlus vs Employment Hero:
two different shapes for two different jobs

Not exactly, and we'll be honest about that. Employment Hero is an HR and employment platform (an 'Employment Operating System'): hiring and applicant tracking, employee records and onboarding, payroll, benefits, engagement surveys, learning, and performance reviews (see employmenthero.com/products). OneBookPlus solves a different primary problem: it runs the whole business, quotes, invoicing, online bookings, jobs, CRM, POS and accounting, with rostering and payroll available as a $29/month add-on. If your need is deep people-management for a growing team, Employment Hero is purpose-built for that. If your need is to run the operations and money side of a small business in one app, OneBookPlus is the better fit. Some businesses run both.

Employment Hero prices per employee per month with a monthly minimum. On their pricing page, HR Essentials is $10/employee/month (minimum $100/month), HR Engage is $14/employee/month (minimum $140/month), and HR Elite and Employment Unlimited are custom (contact sales). Payroll is sold as its own plan at $10/employee/month and is also bundled on the Employment Unlimited tier. There is no free plan for HR or payroll, and additional usage fees (such as per-SMS and per-employee superannuation processing) can apply, check employmenthero.com/pricing for current figures. OneBookPlus is billed per account, not per employee: a free plan plus paid plans at $29 (Starter), $49 (Plus) and $69 (Growth) per month. Rostering and payroll is a separate $29/month add-on with a 14 day trial, not part of any plan. What the plan does band is logins, not employees: Each plan includes a set number of logins, one login on Free, three on Starter, five on Plus and ten on Growth, and below the cap there is no per-seat charge at all. On Growth an extra login is $9/mo, added to the same invoice, so an eleventh person costs $9 and not a new plan. Staff you roster and book but who never sign in (instructors, carers, cleaners, stylists) are free and unlimited on every plan.

No. Employment Hero's product range is focused on the employment lifecycle, hiring, HR, payroll, time and attendance, benefits, learning and engagement (employmenthero.com/products). It does not include GST invoicing, customer quoting, an online booking page, a customer CRM, POS, or business accounting and BAS. Those are exactly the areas OneBookPlus is built around. So for the customer-facing and money side of the business, you'd pair Employment Hero with other tools, or use OneBookPlus, which bundles them.

Most of it, with one clear exception. OneBookPlus has a Rostering & Payroll add-on at $29/month (14 day trial) that runs rosters, timesheets and pay runs, calculates PAYG withholding to the ATO Schedule 1 coefficients, works out superannuation and penalty rates, accrues leave, produces payslips and generates an ABA file so you can pay staff through your bank. What it does not do is lodge Single Touch Payroll. No pay event is sent to the ATO from OneBookPlus, so you still report each pay run through STP-enabled software, and super is calculated and recorded against its quarterly due date rather than remitted for you. Employment Hero's payroll is more deeply tied into a full HRIS (onboarding, performance, benefits) and is a mature, dedicated payroll engine with STP lodgement on the Employment Unlimited tier (employmenthero.com/payroll). If payroll complexity and HR depth are your priority, multi-entity, complex awards, large headcount, or you need STP lodged from the same place you run pay, Employment Hero's dedicated platform is the stronger choice.

It depends on the job to be done. If your bottleneck is people, hiring, onboarding, contracts, payroll, keeping staff engaged and compliant, Employment Hero is purpose-built for that and is a market leader in Australian SMB HR. If your bottleneck is operations and cash flow, winning quotes, taking bookings, getting jobs done, invoicing, chasing payment, and keeping the books and BAS in order, then OneBookPlus puts all of that in one app, with rostering and payroll as a $29/month add-on. Many sole traders and small teams find OneBookPlus covers the operations and money side in one place; larger teams with serious HR needs often want a dedicated platform like Employment Hero.

Yes. OneBookPlus is Australian-built and AU-hosted in AWS Sydney. It calculates 10% GST on invoices and quotes, validates ABNs via the Australian Business Register, tracks GST collected and paid, and generates ATO-ready BAS summaries. Its Rostering & Payroll add-on works out PAYG withholding to the ATO schedules, super and penalty rates, but it does not lodge Single Touch Payroll, so you keep reporting each pay run to the ATO through STP-enabled software. Employment Hero is also an Australian company with ATO-recognised, STP Phase 2 payroll (employmenthero.com/payroll). Both are built for Australian compliance; the difference is scope, HR/employment versus whole-of-business operations and accounting.

Yes, and for some businesses that is the right answer rather than a switch. A common split is Employment Hero for the people side (hiring, onboarding, HR records, benefits) and OneBookPlus for the operations and money side (quotes, bookings, jobs, GST invoicing, CRM, POS and accounting). If you take that path, run payroll in one system only. OneBookPlus does not lodge STP pay events, so your STP reporting stays with the software you lodge from, and splitting pay runs across two platforms creates reconciliation work rather than safety. Businesses that want one bill and a simpler stack usually consolidate later, in whichever direction matches their bigger bottleneck.

Your staff list imports via CSV (names, emails, phone numbers and pay details), so the team is ready to roster on day one. Historical HR records and past pay runs stay in Employment Hero; most businesses keep read access to them as an archive rather than migrating history. Employers have record-keeping obligations for payroll and employment records, so before closing any old account, confirm you have exported or retained what you are required to keep, your accountant or bookkeeper can tell you what applies to you. This is general information, not advice.