Quick answer
Breathe HR is a simple, well-established system that works well if your HR needs are straightforward: one or two office sites, standard holiday/absence/performance admin, and a bundled e-learning library. Sense HR is built to do all of that too, but with more headroom either side of it: enterprise-level customisation at SME pricing, AI agents that actually perform admin tasks rather than just answer questions, and the option to add location-verified time tracking, its own hardware, and recruitment tooling as you grow — all on one platform that’s designed to work as well for a 10-person office as it does for a 10,000-employee, multi-site enterprise.
Sense HR vs Breathe HR at a glance
| Sense HR | Breathe HR | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | SMEs and growing enterprises of any working style — office, hybrid, remote, multi-site or frontline | Single-site, office-based SMEs |
| Company size range | ~10 to 10,000+ employees on one platform | 1–250+ employees |
| Entry price | From £2 per employee/month | From £24/month (1–10 employees) |
| Pricing model | Per-employee, scales down with headcount | Six flat monthly bands by headcount |
| Customisation | Enterprise-grade: screen designer, custom fields, custom workflows — no consultant required | Fixed modules; limited configuration |
| AI features | AMI: 6+ agents built into every plan that perform tasks (drafting documents, processing payroll, screening candidates) | AI-powered employee helpdesk (chatbot) |
| Hardware | Designs its own clock terminals, wearable badges and location gateways | None — software-only rota/clock add-on |
| Time & attendance | Built in from Elite plan: 4 clock types incl. facial recognition & location verification | Add-on: £11/month, standard rota/clock only |
| Recruitment/ATS | Built in on Elite plan: 100+ job boards, AI candidate screening, UKVI right-to-work checks | Add-on: £16/month |
| E-learning | Not offered | 35+ courses, add-on: £15/month |
| Workflow automation | 100+ pre-built UK-specific workflows, plus a custom workflow designer on Enterprise | Not a core feature |
| Free trial | 14 days, no card required | 14 days, no card required |
| Implementation | Free, UK-based, with dedicated account manager on Elite+ | Standard onboarding |
| UK customers (self-reported) | 1,000+ | 17,000+ |
| TrustPilot Rating | 4.6 (95 Reviews) | 3.9 (156 Reviews) |
Sources: sense.hr/pricing.html, breathehr.com/en-gb/hr-software/hr-software-prices, SenseHR Trustpilot Breathehr Trustpilot Figures checked August 2026.
Where each platform fits
Breathe HR markets itself broadly — “one platform for all your HR needs” for SMEs from 1 to 250+ employees across any industry. It’s a genuinely easy system to pick up, and that simplicity is a real strength if your HR needs are mostly holiday, absence, documents and basic performance reviews.
Sense HR covers exactly the same core HR ground — records, onboarding, absence, performance, documents, reporting — so an office-based SME isn’t getting a lesser or more complicated product by choosing it. What Sense adds on top is headroom: a screen designer and custom workflow engine that let you configure the system to your process rather than the other way round, an AI agent roster that takes real admin work off your team’s plate, and, if and when you need it, location-verified attendance hardware and a recruitment ATS. The practical effect is that Sense doesn’t box you into a single company profile — the same platform that suits a 10-person professional services office also supports Sense’s largest customer, a multi-country group with 1,100+ employees, without switching systems as you grow.
Pricing: what you’ll actually pay
Headline prices only tell part of the story, so it’s worth doing the per-employee maths on both.
Sense HR prices per employee, per month, across four tiers:
- Team — from £2/employee/month, sliding down to £1.35/employee/month at 200 employees. Covers core HR, UK statutory leave, and the AMI HR assistant.
- Professional — £4/employee/month flat. Adds payroll integrations (Sage, Xero, BrightPay, PayCaptain), e-signatures, and expenses.
- Elite — £6/employee/month flat. Adds the full AMI agent stack, ATS with AI interviewing, 100+ Automate workflows, full time & attendance, and free UK implementation with a dedicated account manager.
- Enterprise — £8/employee/month. Adds Sense Presence location intelligence, custom workflow design, lone worker protection, fire roll-call and asset tracking — built for larger, more complex organisations.
Breathe HR prices in six flat monthly bands by headcount, with most core features (holiday/absence, dashboards, document management, performance management) included, and extras sold separately: a Business Essentials bundle (Health & Safety, Learn, Expenses, Recruitment) at £81/month, or individually — Rota/Time & Attendance £11/month, Learn £15/month, Recruitment £16/month, Expenses £14/month, Health & Safety £12/month.
Because Breathe’s plans are flat bands rather than a per-employee rate, the effective cost per employee actually swings quite a bit depending on where you sit in a band — from around £1.75/employee/month near the top of a band to as much as £4.71/employee/month right after you cross into the next one. It’s also worth noting Breathe’s published bands only run to 250 employees, so larger or fast-growing businesses will need to move to a bespoke enterprise quote at some point. Sense’s per-employee pricing runs continuously from its Team tier through Enterprise, which is part of how it supports everything from a 10-person team up to organisations of 10,000+ without a plan or pricing-model change.
Feature-by-feature comparison
Core HR & employee records
Both platforms cover the essentials — employee records, holiday and absence management, document storage, and org charts. Breathe includes acknowledgment tracking on stored documents; Sense includes unlimited custom HR data fields per employee from its entry-level Team plan, searchable via its AI assistant. Neither platform requires you to have a frontline or multi-site operation to get full value from this layer — it’s standard HR admin, done well, on both sides.
Customisation: enterprise-grade flexibility at SME pricing
This is one of the clearest differentiators. Breathe’s modules are largely fixed — you switch features on or off and add bundles, but you’re working within a set structure. Sense includes a screen designer that lets you adapt forms, fields and approval workflows without involving a consultant or developer, available from its core plans, plus a custom workflow designer on Enterprise for building bespoke automations from scratch. That’s the kind of configurability normally reserved for expensive enterprise HRIS platforms, made available at SME per-employee pricing — useful whether you’re a small office with one unusual approval process or a large organisation with genuinely complex, multi-department workflows.
AI features
This is the widest gap between the two. Breathe’s AI is an employee-facing helpdesk chatbot that answers HR policy questions. Sense’s AI suite, AMI, is built into every plan and goes considerably further: it drafts and routes contracts for e-signature from natural-language instructions, matches uploaded payslip PDFs to the correct employee records automatically, screens and scores job applicants, and flags attendance and expense anomalies — all without leaving the customer’s own tenant or training on shared data (Sense states its AI is ISO 27001-accredited and UK GDPR compliant). These are agents performing tasks on the user’s behalf, not just answering questions — a meaningfully different category of “AI feature” from Breathe’s chatbot, and one that benefits office-based teams’ admin load just as much as frontline operations.
Hardware: the only platform in this comparison that builds its own
Breathe’s time and attendance is a software-only rota and clock-in add-on. Sense is the only provider in this comparison that designs and manufactures its own physical hardware: clock terminals (tap card, AutoClock, fingerprint and facial recognition options), wearable badges staff can carry for location tracking and lone-worker safety, and the indoor gateways that power its location intelligence. None of this is required to use Sense as a standard HR system — it’s there as an available layer for businesses that want verified attendance or site-level visibility, without needing to integrate a separate third-party hardware vendor.
Time & attendance
Available from the Elite plan, Sense’s time and attendance goes beyond a standard rota tool: indoor location verification cross-checks where a clock-in actually happened, which Breathe’s software-only add-on (£11/month) doesn’t offer. Sense’s own product page states this delivers up to +10% accuracy and a 4% reduction in payroll bill, with up to £3,000 saved per month and “0 phones needed” for clocking in. This is most valuable for businesses with shift workers or multiple sites, but the underlying clock-in/payroll integration works just as well for a single-office team that simply wants accurate hours without manual reconciliation.
Sense’s AI also extends into absence monitoring: an absence heatmap by day of week, plus AI-flagged patterns (for example, repeated Monday or Friday absences with a calculated Bradford score) that surface which employees may need a conversation — again, equally useful whether that employee works on a shop floor or in an office.
Recruitment & right-to-work checks
Breathe offers recruitment tracking as an add-on (£16/month). Sense’s ATS, included from Elite, posts to 100+ job boards in one click, uses AI to auto-rank applicants within 60 seconds of application, and includes UKVI-compatible right-to-work identity verification via TrustID with sponsorship licence reporting built in — relevant for any employer managing visa sponsorship obligations, regardless of company size.
Sense’s AI screening agent chats directly with applicants post-application — confirming availability, key requirements (like manual handling limits) and right-to-work status — before a recruiter ever opens the file.
Workflow automation
Sense includes Sense Automate: 100+ pre-built, UK-specific HR workflows (statutory Fit Note reminders, return-to-work sign-offs, holiday buy/sell, TOIL carryover limits, flexi-time reconciliation), available from Elite and expandable to fully custom workflows on Enterprise. Breathe doesn’t offer an equivalent workflow automation library — its automation is limited to standard approval routing within its core modules.
E-learning
This is a genuine point in Breathe’s favour: it includes 35+ e-learning courses as an add-on (£15/month). Sense doesn’t currently offer a learning management module, so if in-platform training content matters to you, Breathe has the edge here.
Mobile access
Both offer iOS and Android apps. Sense specifically designs for employees without a company email address — useful for frontline and warehouse staff, but the same app works identically well for office-based employees who’d rather book holiday from their phone than log into a desktop portal.
Implementation, support and trials
Both offer a 14-day free trial with no card required upfront. Sense additionally includes free UK-based implementation and a dedicated account manager on Elite and above; Breathe’s onboarding is self-serve or supported depending on plan. Both providers offer UK-based support teams.
Reviews and reputation
Breathe has been in the UK HR software market longer, and it shows in review volume: on Trustpilot it sits at 3.9 out of 5 from just over 156 reviews, with reviewers praising ease of use and affordability but flagging gaps in objectives/performance features and support responsiveness in some cases.
Sense HR has fewer Trustpilot reviews so far, 95 at the time of writing, reflecting its shorter track record on review platforms. Its average score is notably higher, though: 4.6 out of 5 against Breathe’s 3.9. Sense also points to named case studies as further evidence (Coopers Fire reports 90% faster onboarding and contract prep cut from an hour to five minutes; a national cleaning provider reports fewer customer complaints after deploying Sense’s location-verified attendance across 11 sites). If review volume alone matters most to your due diligence, Breathe currently has the bigger sample; if you weight it by actual customer satisfaction, Sense currently scores higher.
Where Breathe HR genuinely has the edge
In fairness, there are a few scenarios where Breathe is the better fit: if in-platform e-learning is a must-have and you don’t want to source it separately, if you want the largest possible pool of existing UK customer reviews to check before buying, or if you’d rather self-serve the entire trial and onboarding without any configuration decisions at all. Breathe’s fixed, out-of-the-box simplicity is a genuine strength if you want zero setup decisions to make.
Where Sense HR is the stronger choice
Sense’s advantages aren’t limited to any one type of business. For a small office-based team, the draw is enterprise-grade customisation and AI agents that remove admin work, at SME pricing. For a growing company, it’s a single platform that doesn’t need replacing as headcount climbs from 10 to 1,000 to 10,000, with per-employee pricing that gets more efficient as you scale rather than jumping between flat bands. For multi-site, shift-based or frontline operations, it’s the added layer of location-verified attendance and purpose-built hardware. Very few HR platforms are credibly built to do all three at once — most either specialise in simple SME admin or in complex enterprise deployments, not both.
Frequently asked questions
For most headcounts, yes. Sense HR starts at £2 per employee/month on a sliding scale, while Breathe’s flat-band pricing means the effective cost per employee can run as high as £4.71/employee/month depending on where your headcount sits within a band. Once you factor in Breathe’s paid add-ons for time & attendance, recruitment and e-signatures — all included in Sense’s Professional and Elite plans — Sense is typically the lower total cost, especially for teams over 20 employees.
Breathe HR is a fixed-module HR system built for straightforward, office-based SME admin. Sense HR covers the same core HR ground but adds enterprise-grade customisation, AI agents that perform admin tasks (not just answer questions), and optional hardware and location-based attendance tools — all on pricing designed for SMEs.
No. Sense HR’s core HR features (records, onboarding, absence, performance, documents, reporting) work the same way for any business, and most of its customers use it for standard office-based HR admin. Frontline features like location-verified attendance and its own hardware are additional capabilities available when a business needs them — not a requirement to use the platform.
Sense HR is designed to scale on one platform from around 10 employees up to organisations of 10,000+, using the same core system with more advanced tiers (Professional, Elite, Enterprise) unlocking additional customisation, automation and hardware as a business grows.
Yes. Sense designs and supplies its own clock terminals (including fingerprint and facial recognition options), wearable location badges, and the gateway hardware that powers its indoor location tracking — it’s the only platform in this comparison that builds hardware rather than relying solely on software.
Breathe offers an AI-powered employee helpdesk chatbot for answering HR questions. Sense HR’s AMI suite goes further, handling payroll document matching, contract drafting, AI candidate screening and attendance anomaly detection across every pricing plan.
Yes — both Sense HR and Breathe HR offer a 14-day free trial with no card required. Sense also offers free UK-based implementation support on its Elite plan and above.
Yes. Sense’s Elite plan includes free UK-based implementation and a dedicated account manager, which typically covers migrating employee records, documents and historical absence data during onboarding. Contact Sense HR to scope a migration timeline for your specific setup.
The bottom line
Both are capable, UK-built HR platforms. Breathe’s strength is genuine out-of-the-box simplicity for a straightforward, single-site office team. Sense HR is built to cover that same ground just as comfortably, then scale with you — enterprise-level customisation and a working roster of AI agents at SME pricing, purpose-built hardware and location intelligence when you need it, and one platform that stays fit for purpose whether you’re 10 people in one office or a 10,000-employee multi-site operation.
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