Comparison
Paylocity is a serious product, and this page is not a scorecard. It sets out how each of the two is built, taking each side from how it is publicly positioned, and then gives you the questions worth putting to any vendor in this market, us included. Where Paylocity is the better buy, it says so, and it says where Capstan is the wrong choice outright.
Start here rather than with a feature list. Most of the difference between two HR products is decided before either one ships a feature, by what business the company is in.
Paylocity, as publicly positioned, October 2026
Paylocity presents itself as a cloud HR and payroll platform for United States businesses, strongest in the mid-market, pairing a payroll engine with talent, benefits, workforce management and a well-known employee-experience and engagement layer. The published shape is one modern platform a United States company runs its people operations on, bought per employee with products enabled across it.
Capstan, published on this site
Capstan is an HR system of record for companies that employ their own people. It holds the roster, the employment, leave, attendance, documents and the workflows around them, with the module suite included on every plan for the rest. It is not an employer of record, it computes no payroll, and it runs as a self-contained stack in one EU region live today, data in Frankfurt and compute in Amsterdam.
Set out in full on the product page, with the residency model on security and every figure on pricing.
One axis at a time, two published models, each stated as what it is. Nothing here says what Paylocity does not do: their model is theirs to describe, and if it moves, the line about ours still holds.
Paylocity, as publicly positioned, October 2026
Payroll is computed inside the platform for United States customers, with the employment-tax filing that follows a pay run produced from it and the statutory content maintained as the rules change.
Capstan, published on this site
Capstan compiles payroll inputs into a documented export for your payroll partner and files the computed results back onto the employee record. It holds no statutory rate, slab or formula anywhere, moves no money, and files nothing with any authority.
Paylocity, as publicly positioned, October 2026
An established United States HR and payroll platform with talent, benefits, workforce management and a strong engagement and communication layer, built for the United States market, with an ecosystem around it.
Capstan, published on this site
Capstan is newer and narrower on purpose, and written global-first rather than for one country: people, employment, leave, attendance, documents, workflows, onboarding, self-service and reporting are the core on every plan including the free one, with the rest of the fourteen modules included at no extra charge. It integrates through signed outbound webhooks, with no connector marketplace.
Paylocity, as publicly positioned, October 2026
A platform bought per employee with products enabled across it, so what you pay follows the configuration you settle on and is quoted to you.
Capstan, published on this site
A single paid plan that includes the whole platform, all fourteen modules, at one per-seat price, billed month to month with no annual contract and no lock-in, so nothing is switched on a piece at a time. Every figure is on one public page, so you can total that yourself.
Our answers are here in public with nothing rounded off. The slot beside each one is left open on purpose: Paylocity’s answers are theirs to give, and a comparison page that fills them in has stopped being a comparison. Ask them the same six, and set what you are told beside ours.
It decides who is on the contract of employment, who answers a labour authority, and what you are actually buying: a service that takes the employment on, or a system that records it.
Capstan’s answer, in public
You do. Capstan is not an employer of record, never becomes the legal employer of anyone on your roster, and moves no payroll money. If you need a legal employer in a country where you have no entity, that is a different kind of vendor.
Paylocity’s answer
Ask them, and get it in writing.
Computation and filing are where liability sits. A vendor that calculates and files is taking that on. A vendor that prepares inputs is not, and you need the second half of the arrangement in place before you rely on either.
Capstan’s answer, in public
Not Capstan, by design. It compiles joiners and leavers, pay structures, leave, attendance and adjustments into a documented export for your payroll partner, and files the computed results back onto the employee record. It holds no statutory rate, slab or formula, and files nothing with any authority.
Paylocity’s answer
Ask them, and get it in writing.
Residency is a property of where the database is, not of a promise in a policy. Support access is the same question from the other end: not whether staff would look, but whether the system lets them without you switching it on.
Capstan’s answer, in public
One isolated region, the EU today: data in Frankfurt, compute in Amsterdam. It is a self-contained stack with no global control plane and no cross-region keys, so there is no runtime path out of the region. Staff hold no tenant of their own, and access exists only while you have granted a time-boxed consent, masked by default and audited on both sides.
Paylocity’s answer
Ask them, and get it in writing.
This is what growing costs you. If capability moves between tiers, the upgrade you eventually buy is largely software you were already being shown.
Capstan’s answer, in public
The complete core is on every plan, including the free one, which is capped at twenty active employees. Paying lifts the cap and includes all fourteen modules at no extra charge, billed month to month with no annual contract and no lock-in. Every figure is on one public page, so you can total your own number without a call.
Paylocity’s answer
Ask them, and get it in writing.
Export is the price of leaving. Either it is written down before you join, or it gets decided at the moment you have the least leverage you will ever have.
Capstan’s answer, in public
An owner can take a full export at any time: one archive of JSON and CSV, in open formats, with a documented manifest. Export deliberately sits outside the suspension check, so a workspace held for non-payment can still be exported. The export is not a dead archive either: it imports straight back into a fresh Capstan workspace, the people master proven to round-trip, which is the plainest proof there is no lock-in. Deletion is cryptographic erasure followed by hard deletion, with a residue scan.
Paylocity’s answer
Ask them, and get it in writing.
Whether software scores, ranks or screens people decides who is accountable for the judgement, and whether the person it was made about can be shown the reason.
Capstan’s answer, in public
No AI scores, ranks or screens your people, and that is architectural rather than a promise: the agent capability registry is pinned in the database so it cannot hold a capability that evaluates a person, nothing of the kind is built, and the analytics engine can only ever narrow who sees what, with small groups suppressed. The useful AI is off until a workspace turns it on and is bounded by construction: an assistant answers from what the caller may already see, and an agent needs a named accountable human and an explicit human confirmation before it changes any record, can move no money, and can evaluate nobody. The one aggregate assistant that reaches out sends only non-personal figures, such as headcount by department, to our single AI sub-processor, OpenAI, which does not train on the data. No per-person or sensitive record is ever sent to an outside model or used to train one.
Paylocity’s answer
Ask them, and get it in writing.
If an answer of ours turns out to be wrong, it is a bug and we will fix the page. The same standard applies to anything here about Paylocity: tell us and we correct it or take it down.
This is the part of the page that makes the rest of it worth reading. If one of these describes you, the honest answer is that Paylocity is the better buy, and we would rather you knew it here than three months into an implementation.
The part that costs us the sale
Not a softened version of the section above. These are requirements Capstan does not meet and is not going to meet, written down so you can rule us out in a minute rather than in a quarter. If one of them is true of you, nothing else on this page matters.
You want your HR software to run and file United States payroll. Capstan prepares inputs for a payroll partner and computes no payroll, in any country.
A deep employee-experience, engagement and communication layer is central to what you are buying. Capstan includes self-service and reporting on every plan, but engagement tooling at that depth is not what it optimises for.
Your buying process requires a SOC 2 report specifically. Capstan holds an ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certificate and no SOC 2 report, so if SOC 2 is the hard gate for you it is a hard gate.
That is the list as we understand it today. If you hit a limit that is not on it, tell us: a disqualifier we did not know about belongs here more than anything else on the page.
If nothing on this page ruled us out, run it yourself.
