Best payroll software with time tracking for small business

Rippling prices its base Unity platform at $8/employee/month (employee directory, onboarding, basic analytics) plus a mandatory flat platform fee reported around $35-40/month, and that base price doesn't include payroll at all, payroll is a separate module typically adding $6-10/employee/month on top. Once payroll, time tracking, and any other modules are added, the effective per-employee cost commonly lands in the $23-38 range, and Rippling doesn't publish a single all-in price, every quote is custom based on company size and modules selected, per multiple 2026 pricing breakdowns. It's a genuinely powerful, deep HR/IT/payroll platform, built for a company that needs that breadth, not a small team wanting one predictable price.

Buddy Punch is a strong dedicated time clock, GPS, geofencing, kiosk punch-in, but payroll isn't native at any tier. It's either a third-party payroll integration on Starter and up, or Buddy Punch's own payroll add-on at $8/user/month plus a $49 base fee, a separate product bolted onto the time clock rather than one system the two were ever built as. Worth the honest caveat: for a field team that specifically needs geofenced clock-ins, Buddy Punch's time-clock feature set is more purpose-built than Wrkbase's, that part of the trade-off is real.

QuickBooks comes closer to real integration than most: because Intuit owns both products, hours approved in QuickBooks Time flow into QuickBooks Payroll without a manual export. The catch is QuickBooks Time isn't sold standalone, it requires an active QuickBooks Online subscription on top, and both Time tiers rose in July 2026 (Premium to $20/month plus $10/user, Elite to $40/month plus $12/user). Genuinely synced, but two products and two bills, not one system that was never two things to begin with.

OnTheClock time tracking runs $4/employee/month plus a $5 monthly base fee (includes scheduling, PTO, GPS/geofencing), with payroll available as a $6/paid-employee/month add-on plus a separate $40 monthly base fee, per OnTheClock's own pricing page as of September 2026. Structurally the same pattern as the others on this list: a genuinely capable time-clock tool with payroll bolted on as a second product and a second bill, not one system from the start.

Wrkbase was never two products stitched together: attendance, task time tracking, and payroll are the same system, so a pay run reads directly off the hours and attendance records already on file, no export, no CSV, no separate time-tracking subscription to keep synced. Payroll unlocks on the $8/member/month Team tier (the same tier that includes time tracking and attendance, not an extra module), computed from salary records rather than an hourly rate, so it's built for salaried small-business payroll specifically, not hourly wage calculation. Worth knowing before you switch: it doesn't file taxes or move money itself, actual payment still goes through your existing method and gets recorded here, that part is genuinely different from Rippling or QuickBooks Payroll.

If deep HR, IT, and payroll breadth across a larger company is the actual need, Rippling has the most range here, at custom, generally higher, pricing. If field-team geofencing is the real requirement, Buddy Punch is more purpose-built for that specific job than Wrkbase is. If your accounting already runs on QuickBooks, QuickBooks Time + Payroll is a genuinely synced, familiar option. If what's actually wanted is one system where attendance, time, and payroll were never separate to sync in the first place, that's specifically what Wrkbase is built to be, free for teams up to 5, no card required. Prices above are as each vendor listed them publicly in 2026, confirm current numbers on their own pages before deciding.

Not automatically, tools like MyHours are honest, capable time trackers with no payroll feature at all, which is fine if payroll is already handled elsewhere and only the time-tracking half is being shopped for. It matters for this specific comparison because the question being asked here is about the two working together, and a tool that only does one half of that can't be evaluated on the integration angle at all, only on time tracking alone.

Sometimes, but the honest answer is it depends on what "best-of-breed" is being compared against, and the real savings are usually in time and error-reduction more than sticker price. Stitching together a dedicated time clock and a dedicated payroll tool can genuinely cost less per feature than an all-in-one, the trade-off is the export/import step between them, and the reconciliation work and error risk that step creates, every pay period, indefinitely.