Breathe wrote a comparison page about us first. It was polite, it was well written, but it left a few things out.

So we did the obvious thing: we read their help centre, their pricing, their marketplace and 161 of their customer reviews on TrustPilot, and pulled out the good, the bad, and the ugly. We did the same to ourselves, too, and then compared the two.

You’ll see for yourself that some of what we found makes us look good, and some of it doesn’t. The important thing is that we put it all in, warts and all.

The Headline Difference Between Sense HR and Breathe

Before we get into the deep detail of SenseHR vs BreatheHR, we do want to highlight one big difference between the two HR systems. And that’s that they were built with very different purposes in mind.

Breathe was built as a basic HR admin database. Sense was built to automate your HR function and connect you to your busiest workers. Sure, they both share some capabilities – both work as a functioning HRIS (HR Information System). But they are not the same.

A fun little exercise to highlight this, is to ask these three questions to both HR systems:

  1. Can it split a 200-page payslip PDF and file each page to the right person, on its own?
  2. Can it tell you where a lone worker is right now, and alert you if they fall?
  3. Can a cleaner with no work email, no laptop and no company phone request a holiday?

Sense answers yes to all three. Breathe answers no to all three, on every plan, at any price.

Now, if none of those three questions matter to you, then you should stop reading right now and go buy Breathe. We’re being serious! Breathe is a good system for anyone who wants to do basic HR for a small, office-based team.

But if even one of those questions matters to you – or if you’re looking for something slightly more than just essential HR admin for a small office team – then this honest comparison is worth 5 minutes of your time.

Who Wins at What: Sense HR vs Breathe HR

Both HR systems are great for core HR – holidays, employee records, etc. So we won’t focus on that part too much.

Sense HR is great at automation, customisation, AI-powered assistance, and specialist tools for frontline workers. Breathe, on the other hand, is great for rota building, e-learning courses, and ease of use right out of the box.

This graphic shows you what we mean:

What Breathe does well

Breathe does beat Sense in a few areas. For example, the number of customers.

BreatheHR has 17,000 customers, whereas Sense HR has just over 1,000. This is partly because Breathe has been around for longer (launched in 2012, vs Sense HR that was launched in 2022). But it is also because their main customers are smaller companies with fewer employees; if we were to compare actual employees served by both systems, the numbers would be far closer.

Another positive for Breathe, is that their reviews praise how quickly you can pick it up with no training, with several customers even saying they were up and running the same day they bought it! Sense takes a little more time to implement, for customers who want to customise their screens and build their processes before they get started.

Breathe also beats Sense in two unique areas of functionalityt:

Now, based on the above, if you’re a team of five people who need holiday booking and nothing else, Breathe is a perfectly sensible choice, and we’d rather tell you that than sell you something you don’t need.

But if you want your HR system to do even just a little bit more than the basics, then we want to show you a few things worth considering before you choose between BreatheHR and SenseHR.

1. The AI thing

Breathe’s comparison page doesn’t mention AI. Here’s why.

Breathe has no substantial AI tool of its own. The one AI tool listed on their site, Harriet, is another company’s product. You pay for it separately and connect it in. Their own marketplace calls it the “Harriet Integration”, and it is an extra tool you need to buy.

It’s kinda the same as the way Sense connects to Xero for payroll. We don’t say “we have payroll”… we say that you can connect our HR system to Xero, via an easy integration. Therefore, we don’t “have” payroll. And by the same rule, Breathe doesn’t have AI.

Here’s how that looks in a terrible graphic that we cobbled together in Microsoft paint:

What Sense AI Actually Does

The other thing, is that Sense HR’s AI functionality does way more than just chat to you. A lot of systems claim to offer AI, when actually they mean that they’ve embedded something like ChatGPT into their interface, letting you have a chat with a bot while you work.

But the AI built into Sense is very, very different. And at the time of writing this comparison, we actually have 10 different AI agents, who each perform a unique job or function within your system – with more agents being built and added on a regular basis.

Here are a few examples of Sense HR’s AI agents:

Agent Type

The job it does

General Assistant

Knows UK employment law. Writes your policies, answers HR questions, drafts letters

Payroll agent

Takes one 200-page payslip PDF, splits it, files each page to the right person. Also handles other files, like P60’s P11d’s.

Document agent

Drafts contracts and letters, personalises them, sends them for signature

Screening agent

Reads every application and scores it against the role

Interview agent

Runs the first-round interview and scores the answers

Calendar agent

Reads attendance and absence data, flags the patterns you’d have missed

Expense agent

Checks receipts against your own expense policy, flags what breaks the rules

These agents serve as very helpful assistance tools, letting you get more work done in a shorter space of time. But unlike many assistance tools, you don’t simply learn commands, keyboard shortcuts or workarounds. You just type what you want, e.g. “process this payslip” (then attach the file.)

Oh, and the “General Assistant” you see up there is the one that saves you actual money, by the way. Outsourced HR advice lines charge around £16 per employee per month for a similar service. Sense HR’s is included with your package.

A 25-person business is paying roughly £4,800 a year for someone to answer questions like “do I have to give her a fit note at day seven?” That question is now free, instant, and doesn’t involve waiting for a callback.

(For a tribunal claim or a serious dispute, still call a real employment lawyer. This is for the everyday ninety per cent.)

2. The only HR software that comes with hardware you can hold

This isn’t even a comparison between Sense and Breathe – this is a comparison between Sense and every other HR software supplier on the market. You see, Sense HR is the only HR system that builds its own proprietary hardware, such as clocking in machines for your entrance area, wearable badges for your busy hands-on workers, and more.

Breathe is just software, and software that you access with a company laptop or a mobile phone. That’s not a bad thing, by the way – plenty of teams use software that is “just software”. But if your staff are cleaners, carers, site workers or warehouse teams, then software alone has a problem: it only knows what someone typed into it.

Sense builds specialist hardware that sits in your frontline workers’ pockets, clips to their badges or bags, and feeds data into your HR system from across your entire workforce – often without requiring any manual input at all!

For example, the Sense Badge. It clips to a belt or a collar. It:

That last point matters more than it sounds – because staff like cleaners often have no other way to access your company’s HR system:

How do you give HR software to a cleaner with no work email and no company phone? Every other vendor’s answer is “you don’t – you just get their supervisor to type it in later.” Ours is a badge that costs less than a phone, and can be re-used by new staff members when old ones leave.

Sense has eleven more hardware devices, too.

The Sense Badge is our flagship hardware product with the most functionality, but we build loads of other stuff, too. Such as lanyard tags, wristband beacons with SOS, nano asset tags at 1.2 grams for tracking equipment, smart buttons that trigger any process you like, door and window sensors, temperature and humidity monitors, light and motion sensors, plus clocks that run on the mobile network so your IT team never needs to get involved.

But why would anyone want this technology? 

Well, not everybody does, and that’s fine! But the people who do want it, use it for building their own cool processes and systems. Such as one-tap fire or evactuation roll call that shows who is still in the buidling, and where. Or lone-worker alerts, that send help to a person’s precise location during a disaster. Operations teams use our hardware to provide proof of exactly where a job was done and by whom, with analysis of how your buildings actually get used.

And of course, many HR teams simply buy the Sense Clock, to give their shift-based or casual workers a quick and easy way to track their time and attendance, that automatically syncs with their HR and payroll data.

Breathe offers none of this. Not even on a higher plan. It simply doesn’t exist as part of their offering.

3. HR automation: how basic do you want it?

Breathe’s own comparison page says it “doesn’t offer advanced automation logic.” But what does that even mean? Well, here’s what it looks like in practice – the grey bars show the actions users have to take, while the green bars shows the tiny parts the system will take care of for you:

That first bar isn’t hypothetical, we used data from real reviews and customer reports to build this chart. One Breathe customer wrote that approving ten holiday requests took clicking “a million buttons”, which is of course an exaggeration. But we have had other Breathe customers take us through the actual process, and it really does require a lot of manual work to approve holiday requests.

Other customers have complained about the complexities of logging a week’s worth of timesheets. And there are actions that customers don’t even realise could be automated by an HR system, such as chasing fit notes at day 7, or informing payroll of sudden changes.

Sense HR offers over 100 ready-made processes that you can install with one click. These then execute automations that run themselves inside of your system, and can even be configured or customised to suit your unique ways of working. Here are a few examples of pre-build processes you can install:

And for customers with more complex requirements, the top plan of Sense HR includes an automation builder tool that requires no coding knowledge, and lets you design your own workflows from scratch.

What does Breathe have, in comparison? Unfortunately, they just have a checklist builder for onboarding and offboarding. And that’s about as far as our comparison goes.

4. Design screens to bend the system to your business

Most HR software gives you fixed fields to work with, and Breathe is no exception. Which is fine for very traditional teams working from a very traditional office with very linear processes.

But what if you need to track uniform allocation, PPE sizes, vehicle checks, security clearance or DBS renewal dates? It gets a bit more complicated, and Breathe doesn’t help you out here.

Sense lets you build your own screens. Name them, add fields, choose a layout, and you’re done.

And unlike some systems that offer similar capabilities (not Breathe, though), Sense goes beyond a simple extra screen that’s fixed to a record:

  1. Profile templates. Contractors, office staff and field staff each get a different profile layout. Or you can build your own, based on worker types you employ.
  2. Dynamic screen variants. The same screen shows different fields depending on who’s looking and which step of a process they’re in. For example, the employee sees and fills in three boxes, while HR sees all twelve.
  3. It’s instantly reportable. Build a field this morning, report on it this afternoon. Nothing gets stranded outside the reporting engine. All data you keep, including your custom fields and screens, can be included in your reports.

And as this is a comparison… Breathe gives you the fields Breathe decided you need.

5. Fixed reports vs ask anything

Breathe’s own page describes their reporting functionality as “pre-built dashboards.” Which means that someone else picked the questions they thought you’d need to answer.

Ours (from the Elite plan up) is designed more as a custom report builder:

But perhaps the most beautiful part of all this, is you don’t actually have to build the reports yourself. You can, if you like. But you can also ask AI to build the reports for you. For example, “built me a report that shows the gender breakdown of the sales team in Romania”. Or for complex reports that somebody else has built, you can ask the AI to break it down for you.

Fair warning: our cheapest plan has fixed reports, too. We offer a cheaper plan that is more similar to Breathe’s entire system, which in some areas is simpler and more restrictive, with reporting being one of those areas. But unlike Breathe, as you move up the tiers, the functionality becomes exponentially greater.

If you want the custom report builder, you’ll need the Elite package. You can learn more about this on our pricing page.

6. Customer support is where reviews start to get ugly

We read all 161 Breathe reviews. We already showed you some of the areas Breathe wins – such as being able to get started on day one, in some cases. But the support complaints repeat so consistently, we can’t exclude them, they form a pattern.

The complaint

What customers actually said

Can’t reach a human

It gets worse every year “trying to speak with a human”

No phone number

One reviewer noted Breathe publishes none at all

The bot is the only option

Payroll link broke, staff had no payslips, only the bot to talk to

Waiting all day

Breathe promises 24-hour chat replies. That customer got nothing all day

Complaints ignored

One said if you complain “they will simply ignore you”

Locked out, no reply

Another waited with no response while locked out of their account

One review put it plainly: fine product, but support had become “pathetic” after a year.

The payroll one was the review that worried us the most. The payroll broke, and staff didn’t get their payslips. And the only thing available to talk to was a bot? Fair enough, a lot of companies use some form of AI now as a first line of support. But with a topic so urgent, that’s surely turned into a Friday afternoon spent explaining to your team why they can’t see what they’ve been paid.

The difference in reviews paints a clear picture:

What we publish about our response times:

If something breaks

Our written promise

Serious, stops you working

Reply in 1 hour, fixed in 8

Smaller problem

Reply in 1 hour, fixed in 16

Question or minor issue

Reply in 4 hours

Uptime

99.9%

Total disaster

Service back in 8 hours, backup at a second UK site

We know that uptime and support times are important to a function as critical as HR. After all, our founding team have been building HR software since 2005. So, at Sense, we publish our response times and our uptime and disaster controls for everyone to see. But we couldn’t find any equivalent published commitment from Breathe. Not on their site, not in their help centre.

7. The difference in price

If you’re a 10-person team, here’s what you could be paying per month:

This gets even worse when you look at what Breathe’s price doesn’t include:

Rota, time tracking, e-learning, recruitment, expenses — separate paid add-ons, each one another line on the invoice. E-signature needs a higher plan. Sense includes e-signature from the cheapest plan.

The way we structure our pricing, by the way, is an entry plan for basic HR, then one step up to Elite (£6 per person, paid yearly) that unlocks everything at once. That means AI agents, custom reports, hiring, expenses, the workflow library, integrations, and more. You don’t need to conduct five different purchases, you just need to decide between two tiers.

Here’s our Elite pricing vs Breathe’s basic pricing:

That chart is deliberately generous to Breathe: it shows their core plan with no add-ons at all. And as you can see, they work out cheaper than buying Sense Elite. But as soon as you add rota, time tracking, e-learning, recruitment or expenses, the grey line climbs above the green one. By how much? We’re not sure, and we wouldn’t want to say, because unfortunately, Breathe doesn’t publish their add-on prices per seat.

Who should you choose?

There are some obvious benefits to choosing BreatheHR. But in many, many cases, SenseHR is very clearly the better choice. Here’s how we like to summarise that choice:

  1. Choose Breathe: you’re small, you want holiday booking that works this afternoon, you need a rota tool built in, and you want e-learning courses included.
  2. Choose Sense: you want to automate repetitive HR admin, you have staff who don’t sit at desks, you want AI that processes payroll and screens candidates rather than just chatting, or you need to know where people are for safety reasons.

Everything above came from public sources: both companies’ help centres, both pricing pages, Breathe’s own marketplace, and Trustpilot. Where we couldn’t confirm something about Breathe, we said so rather than assuming the worst. Where they beat us, we said that too.

Obviously we think you should pick us. But we’d rather tell you exactly where Breathe wins and let you decide, than write the kind of comparison page where the competitor mysteriously has no strengths at all. You’ve read those before, and you didn’t believe them either!