Faster to adopt
Attendance and leave go live in an afternoon; payroll is a module you switch on when you are ready rather than a project with a go-live date.
Comparison
Employee Desk as a Keka alternative
Keka is a full Indian HRMS: payroll, statutory compliance, performance management and hiring, alongside attendance and leave. Employee Desk covers a deliberately narrower slice and adds something Keka does not: a desktop time tracker.
- 7-day trial
- No keystroke logging
- INR pricing published
What each product is
Employee Desk
Employee management with time tracking attached
Attendance, leave, holidays, employee records, projects, tasks and daily work reports, with an optional desktop time tracker on top. Available as a cloud subscription. Built in India, priced in rupees.
- Attendance and leave are core, not an add-on
- Per-user pricing: pay only for active employees; admins are free
- No keystroke content is ever recorded
- Employees see everything recorded about them
Keka
A full Indian HRMS with payroll
Keka is a well-regarded Indian HR platform covering payroll processing with statutory compliance, attendance and leave, performance management, and hiring. For a company that wants one vendor for the whole HR function, that breadth is the reason to buy it.
- Payroll processing with Indian statutory compliance
- Performance management and appraisal cycles
- Recruitment and applicant tracking
- Cloud only
Feature comparison
Compared on facts that can be checked from public documentation. Where something is genuinely unclear it is marked rather than guessed at.
| Employee Desk | Keka | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Attendance, leave, work tracking | Full HRMS including payroll |
| Payroll processing | PF/ESI/PT computed; TDS entered manually | Yes, with statutory compliance |
| Statutory filing (PF, ESI, TDS) | No | Yes |
| Performance management | No | Yes |
| Recruitment / ATS | No | Yes |
| Attendance with shifts and grace | Yes | Yes |
| Leave with accrual and balances | Yes | Yes |
| Desktop time tracker | Yes | No |
| Active and idle time measurement | Yes | No |
| Screenshots | Optional | No |
| Hours per project for billing | Yes | Limited |
| Implementation effort | An afternoon | Weeks, because payroll |
Check Keka’s own site before you decide. Last checked against Keka’s public pages on 8 October 2026. Software changes. Everything on this page is written from Keka’s public documentation and pricing pages at the time of writing, we do not restate their prices here because they move, and we correct this page when we are told it is wrong. If you find something inaccurate, email contact@digitalgeniussolution.com and we will fix it.
Where Employee Desk is stronger
01
02
03
Desktop time tracking
Measured active hours, activity percentages and hours per project. Keka is an HR platform, not a work tracker.
Time tracking →Project-level hours
For agencies and services companies, hours per client and per project is the number the business runs on, and it is not what an HRMS is built to produce.
Workforce → 04Cheaper for a narrower need
Cloud is priced per active user per month (plans from ₹59 per user/month + GST) if attendance and leave are all you need.
Pricing →Where Keka may be stronger
Written plainly, because a comparison page that finds no fault with itself is not worth reading.
Payroll
This is the big one. Keka goes deeper on Indian statutory compliance, including tax handling and filing. Employee Desk runs monthly payroll with PF, ESI and PT, but TDS is entered manually and returns are not filed from the product.
Statutory compliance
PF, ESI, TDS and the filings around them. Employee Desk computes PF, ESI and PT but does not file returns.
Performance and hiring
Appraisal cycles, goals and an applicant tracking system. Entire modules we do not have.
HR breadth
Onboarding workflows, document management and employee lifecycle depth built over years of focus on exactly that.
Which should you choose?
Choose Employee Desk if
- Payroll already runs somewhere you are happy with.
- You need measured work hours, not just attendance.
- You bill clients by the hour and need hours per project.
- You want to be running this week.
Choose Keka if
- You want statutory filing and income-tax projection in the same product.
- You need performance management or recruitment.
- You are consolidating several HR tools into one platform.
- Nobody needs measured work hours or screenshots.
These two are not mutually exclusive. A team can run a full HRMS for payroll and Employee Desk for work tracking and project hours, exporting attendance from one into the other. If that is your situation, say so on the call and we will tell you honestly whether the second system is worth it.
Frequently asked questions
Does Employee Desk do payroll?
Yes, on plans that include payroll: salary components and templates, loss of pay from absences with the days listed on the payslip, payslip PDFs, loans with EMI, PF/ESI/PT and a bank transfer sheet. If you prefer to keep your HRMS for payroll, export the attendance register as CSV or XLSX instead.
Can we use Employee Desk alongside an HRMS?
Yes. The HRMS handles payroll and the employee lifecycle; Employee Desk handles work tracking and project hours, with attendance exported between them.
Does Keka have a desktop time tracker?
Keka is an HR platform rather than a work-tracking product, and does not offer desktop activity tracking of the kind described here. Check their current feature list if this is your deciding factor.
Can Keka be self-hosted?
No, it is a cloud product. Need an on-premise deployment? Contact sales.
Best Hubstaff alternatives 2026Hubstaff alternativeHubstaff alternative in IndiaHubstaff alternative without screenshotsCheaper Hubstaff alternativeEmployee Desk vs HubstaffTime Doctor alternativeInsightful alternativeActivTrak alternativeEmployee Desk vs Zoho PeopleEmployee Desk vs greytHREmployee Desk vs BambooHREmployee Desk vs ConnecteamEmployee Desk vs JibbleOpen-source Hubstaff alternative?All comparisons
Run both for a week
A 7-day trial with your real team is a better comparison than any table. Install the tracker on two machines and look at what the reports actually say.
- 7-day trial
- No credit card
- Cancel anytime