01
Open source
The whole platform is on GitHub under the Functional Source License. Read the code, run it yourself, fork it if we ever let you down. Your HR data and the software handling it never need to be a black box.
Open source · FSL-1.1-MIT · public beta
Open, modular HR & payroll for services-first teams
HR you can
read, fork,
and run.
Rippling, Deel and BambooHR are closed suites that make you buy all or nothing. Pulse is three independent modules — Money, People and Work — sharing one workspace, one keyboard, one API. Source-available on GitHub. Free for the first 5 employees, forever.
- Money · People · Work — adopt any
- SOC 2 Type II · GDPR · EU data
- Self-host on Docker / K8s
New this quarter Command bar ⌘J Commessa Forecast Saturation Team Pulse Kudos Focus Mode Open source
ACMENOVA RETAILBLANCO STUDIOZENITH ENERGYLONGO GROUPFABRIQPOLLUXORBITALACMENOVA RETAILBLANCO STUDIOZENITH ENERGYLONGO GROUPFABRIQPOLLUXORBITALACMENOVA RETAILBLANCO STUDIOZENITH ENERGYLONGO GROUPFABRIQPOLLUXORBITAL
- Processed in payroll
- $1.2B Processed in payroll
- Countries supported
- 47 Countries supported
- Teams on Pulse HR
- 4,800+ Teams on Pulse HR
- Commands executed
- 312k Commands executed
Why Pulse
No other HR vendor
matches all four.
Rippling is closed. Deel is contractors-only. BambooHR has no API to speak of. Pulse is the only platform where every one of these four principles is non-negotiable — see the honest comparison.
Open source
The full source is on GitHub under FSL-1.1-MIT. Read every line, run it on your own hardware, fork it if we ever let you down.
LICENSE · self-host · contribute
Modular
Money, People and Work are three independent products. Roll out one, skip the others, swap any of them later. No all-or-nothing migration.
Three modules, one workspace
Ecosystem-first
Webhooks on every resource event, a public REST API, SDKs for TypeScript / Python / Go. Anything we don't ship, the community can add.
Webhooks · REST · integrations
Keyboard-first
⌘K finds anything, ⌘J runs anything. Local intent parser, voice dictation, 40+ shortcuts, offline PWA. No mouse required, no LLM call.
⌘K · ⌘J · voice · offline
What we believe
Four principles. No HR
vendor will match all four.
02
Modular
Money, People and Work are three independent products that happen to share a workspace. Roll out one, skip the others, swap any of them out later. No all-or-nothing migration, no buy-the-suite trap.
03
Ecosystem-first
Webhooks on every resource event, a public REST API, and first-class integrations with Slack, Google, QuickBooks, Okta and Stripe. Anything we don't ship, you (or the community) can add in an afternoon.
04
Keyboard-first
Two keys — ⌘K for fuzzy search, ⌘J for the command bar — reach every action in the product without leaving the keyboard. Voice dictation, 40+ shortcuts, works offline as a PWA.
Everything in one place
Nine products that feel like one.
Each module is deep enough to replace a standalone tool, but they share one profile, one search, one audit log. You'll stop switching tabs — we promise.
Time & attendance
Clock in from anywhere. Track hours against commesse (project codes, the way finance sees it), not just the wall clock. Manual entry, imports, approvals, overtime anomalies — all one surface.
Payroll that doesn't panic
Run multi-country payroll in minutes. F24, Form 941, HMRC PAYE. Payslips, tax filings and journal entries pushed straight to your accounting stack.
People operations
One profile per teammate. Org chart, documents, e-signatures, offboarding — no spreadsheets, no lost NDAs.
Recruiting & onboarding
Kanban pipeline for candidates, automated onboarding workflows the moment someone says yes.
Reports everyone reads
Headcount, turnover, cost per hire, absenteeism — export to PDF/CSV or pipe to BI in a click.
Integrations & API
Slack, Google, QuickBooks, Okta, Stripe. And when we don't have it, our API and webhooks do.
Saturation & margins
Org utilization, weekly bench, blended margin, at-risk projects. A live read on whether the company is over- or under-sold.
Command bar (⌘J)
Type what you want — 'log 4h on NOV-07', 'approve Aisha's expense', 'book leave next Friday'. A local intent parser turns natural phrases into runnable actions. No LLM call, no data leaving your tenant.
Growth & recognition
XP, kudos coins, leaderboards, weekly podiums. Engagement data that HR and managers actually read, not a feel-good gimmick.
Labs · shipping now
Five bets that landed.
Labs is where we ship the experimental stuff. Every team on Pulse gets it by default — no waiting lists, no upsells, no "enterprise tier" paywall.
NEW · Signal
Team Pulse
Anonymous vibe checks + weekly heatmap. See sentiment before it shows up in a 1:1.
NEW · Scenarios
Commessa Forecast
Scenario sliders on top of project burn. 'What if I add a designer?' answered in milliseconds.
NEW · Recognition
Kudos
Peer coins with reasons attached, confetti included. Leaderboards reset weekly, monthly and yearly.
NEW · Depth
Focus Mode
Deep-work timer that auto-declines meetings, posts a status, and logs the session to your timesheet.
NEW · Load
Saturation
Utilization heatmap, cost-vs-value scatter, margin tab. Who's leaning in, what's returning in €/h.
Keyboard-first
Two keys.
Everything.
⌘K opens a fuzzy palette — jump to any employee, project, document or setting.
⌘J opens the command bar — type what you want in plain language, a local parser turns it into a runnable action. No LLM call, no cross-tenant training, works offline.
- Dictate anywhere
- 40+ shortcuts
- Works offline
Command bar ⌘J
> log 4h on NOV-2025-07 yesterday, feature work
Parsed · intent=log-hours · confidence 0.94
Log 4h to NOV-2025-07 on Apr 19, tagged feature.
Confirm Edit details Open timesheet
local parser · no network call works offline
See it moving.
Open the full appDashboard
Approvals, alerts, presence and trends. The one pane your HR team opens at 9am.
Time & commesse
Log hours against any commessa. Budget burn, per-client profitability, exports to CSV.
Payroll
Preview payslips before running, split employees/contractors, file F24 with one click.
- Approvals in one click
- Keyboard-first navigation (⌘K)
- Full audit trail
- Exports to CSV / PDF / API
app.pulsehr.it/
Pending
4
Headcount
12
Overtime
42h
Marcus R.
Vacation · 5d
Tom B.
Sick · 3d
Noah W.
Personal · 1d
Every persona, one surface
The same app,
five points of view.
Role themes aren't cosmetic. Each persona ships with its own palette, default view, and shortcut set. Engineers don't see payroll drafts. CFOs don't see sprint standups.
E
Employee
Lime accent. Clock, leave, kudos, focus.
M
Manager
Amber warmth. Approvals, team load, kudos authority.
H
HR
Coral. People ops, onboarding, anomalies.
A
Admin
Electric cyan. Integrations, API, audit.
F
Finance
Violet. Payroll, margins, forecast.
Built for the way your team actually works.
→ 01
Agencies & consultancies
Bill by project code (commessa), track utilization, close books without spreadsheets.
→ 02
Product startups
Onboard from a candidate-accepted email in one click. Equity, offers, laptops — on rails.
→ 03
Scale-ups (50-500)
Multi-entity payroll, approval chains that match your org, reports your CFO will actually open.
"We replaced four tools with Pulse. Payroll that used to take a full week now closes in an afternoon — and the team actually enjoys onboarding."
Aisha Patel
Head of People, Nova Retail
"The commessa view is the killer feature. I finally know which client is profitable before the quarter ends, not after."
Marcus Rivera
COO, Blanco Studio
"Auditors loved it. Every change is logged, every approval timestamped, every filing a click away."
Yuki Tanaka
CFO, Zenith Energy
Shipped recently
A changelog
worth reading.
- Polish Gantt rows taller + rich hover
- Design App-wide color decluttering pass
- People Avatar hover cards + Employee Score
- Labs Saturation tabs + Insights view
- Labs Commessa Forecast with AI scenarios
- Keyboard Command bar ⌘J with runnable actions
The people behind Pulse.
A team of 18 across six countries, half building, half in the field. We hire from the industries we serve — payroll, HR ops, design.
Sarah Chen
CEO & Co-founder
Ex-Stripe Atlas. Built payroll rails in 47 countries.
Marcus Rivera
Design lead
Formerly Figma, Linear. Believes software should feel like a pencil.
Aisha Patel
Head of People
12 years in HR ops. Turned onboarding into a weekend project.
Yuki Tanaka
VP Product
Shipped finance tools at Brex before joining.
Lina Rossi
Head of Payroll
Certified payroll specialist across 8 jurisdictions.
Noah Williams
Staff Engineer
Distributed systems for payroll concurrency.
Questions we get a lot
Questions, answered.
Can I import data from my current HR tool?
Yes. We ship one-click importers for BambooHR, Personio, Rippling, Deel and Factorial, plus a generic CSV importer with column mapping for anything else. The importer runs a dry-run first so you can fix bad rows before committing, and it preserves employee IDs so integrations keep working. Most teams migrate a full dataset — employees, payroll history, leave balances, documents — in under an hour.
How is Pulse HR priced?
Per active employee, per month. One transparent tier with every feature included — no 'talk to sales for payroll', no upsell for Labs features, no per-seat add-ons for API access or SSO. Free for the first 5 active employees, forever. Contractors are priced differently and capped at $4 per active contractor per month. Annual billing is 15% off.
Which countries does payroll support?
We natively run payroll in the US, UK, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands — all tax filings (F24, Form 941, HMRC PAYE, Modelo 111, URSSAF, Lohnsteuer) and statutory reporting included. For every other country, we integrate with Deel and Remote as contractor rails, and with local Employers of Record for full employment where needed.
Is it SOC 2 / GDPR compliant?
SOC 2 Type II audited annually — report available under NDA. GDPR-compliant by design with EU data residency options (Frankfurt, Dublin, Milan). Every customer gets a signed Data Processing Agreement at sign-up, sub-processors published at pulsehr.it/security. ISO 27001 certification in progress for late 2026; HIPAA BAAs available for US healthcare customers.
Do you have an API?
Yes — a full REST API, webhooks on every resource event (employee.created, leave.approved, payslip.finalised, etc.), and maintained SDKs for TypeScript, Python and Go. API keys are scoped per environment with granular permissions. Full OpenAPI spec published at pulsehr.it/docs/api. Rate limits are 1,000 requests/minute on the standard tier.
Is Pulse really open source?
Yes. The full source is on GitHub at github.com/davide97g/pulse-hr under the Functional Source License (FSL-1.1-MIT). You can read every line, run it yourself, fork it, and contribute back. Two years after each release the license converts automatically to plain MIT — fully permissive. The FSL window blocks competing closed-source SaaS resales during those two years, but any non-competing use (internal deployment, consulting, forks, contributions) is unrestricted from day one. See LICENSE and NOTICE in the repo for the exact terms.
Can we self-host?
Yes. The whole platform ships as a Bun monorepo you can clone and run. Self-hosted deployments on Docker or Kubernetes are supported with a reference Helm chart and Terraform modules. Payroll filing connectors remain managed by Pulse (you'd need tax authority integrations otherwise), but the rest runs entirely on your infrastructure. Start at github.com/davide97g/pulse-hr.
How does the command bar (⌘J) work?
The command bar runs a local intent parser over your tenant's data — no LLM call, no network round-trip, no cross-tenant training. You type natural phrases like 'log 4h on NOV-07 yesterday' or 'approve Aisha's expense', and a deterministic heuristic maps them to runnable actions scoped to your permissions. Because it runs in the browser, it works offline as part of the PWA. We'll expose an MCP server for true agent workflows in a later release; until then, this is the honest label — a keyboard-first command bar, not an AI copilot.
Does Pulse work offline?
The whole surface installs as a PWA on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android. Recent views, timesheets and kudos drafts keep working offline and sync as soon as you're back — no 'loading…' screens at the airport or in a basement meeting room. Payroll runs and other destructive actions require a live connection and will queue if offline, so you never double-pay someone by mistake.
Your team deserves
better software.
Free for the first 5 employees — forever. No credit card. Import your data in under an hour.