How a provider gets into this index, and how it gets ranked
Published in full, before you read a single review. Every other "best global payroll" list is a vendor ranking itself or an affiliate page with no stated criteria.
Inclusion criteria
A provider must clear all of these to appear anywhere on this site. Failing any one is disqualifying regardless of commercial relationship.
Multi-country payroll, documented
Payroll for employees across multiple countries, publicly documented as a payroll product. Not employer of record dressed up as payroll.
A verifiable public footprint
A real company with a public website, documented service scope, and coverage we can check country by country.
Third-party review presence
Ratings on G2, Capterra, or Trustpilot where they exist. We average them and link out. We never collect ratings ourselves.
Disclosed pricing, or an honest "quote only"
A public price, a starting price, or an explicit quote-only policy, recorded with a source URL and a verification date.
Where the data comes from
Every figure on this site has a source and a date attached in our database, and both are shown wherever a figure appears. Sources, in order of preference:
- 1The provider's own public pricing and documentation pages
- 2Written confirmation from the provider, on the record
- 3Third-party review platforms, for ratings only
We do not take a provider's word for a figure it will not publish. Where a provider declines to disclose, the field reads "quote only" rather than being left blank or filled with an estimate.
The index is re-verified on a rolling basis. Pricing and ratings are re-checked most often, because they change most often.
How we handle ratings
We publish an average of third-party ratings and we link out to every source. We never collect ratings ourselves, and we never present a third-party rating as our own. A provider with too few reviews to be meaningful is marked "not yet rated" rather than given a provisional score.
A high rating cannot move a provider past an inclusion gate, and a low rating does not remove one that clears them.
How we make money
We earn referral fees from a subset of the providers listed on this site. Those relationships are disclosed on every page where a link earns us a fee.
Referral fees have no effect on inclusion, rank order, or which fields we publish. Providers cannot pay for placement, cannot pay to be excluded from a comparison, and cannot review content before publication. Several providers ranked in our shortlists have no commercial relationship with us at all.
If you believe a page reads as though a fee influenced it, tell us and we will publish the correction.
Corrections
If a figure is wrong, we want to know. Providers and buyers can both submit corrections. We verify against the source, update the record with a new date, and note the change where the figure is material.
Built by a small team of researchers led by Robbin Schuchmann. We read the provider contracts and pricing pages ourselves, and re-check every price quarterly. How we research →
Independent · No paid placements · Funded by referral fees that don't influence ranking