Solutions
Capstan is one complete HR system of record for the whole company: employees and global contractors together, equity your team can see, and payroll inputs compiled for your partner. The core is free for teams up to twenty, with no trial clock and nothing held back, and above twenty the paid plan includes every one of the fourteen modules at no extra charge. Two kinds of team feel that most, a startup that will not outgrow its first HR tool and a team spread across time zones, and the rest of this page is written for both.
Jump to For startups or For global teams.
The parts below are the same whichever team you are. They are why the segment sections that follow are short: the Capstan story is stated once here, not repeated for each audience.
A contractor is a distinct entity with its own engagement, deliberately kept outside employee headcount, so engaging one never inflates your seat count or your free-plan cap. Onboarding, tax-form resolution, invoice approval and payment recording run in the same workspace as your employees, on one audit trail.
Contractor ManagementTrack your option pool, grants and vesting as effective-dated records, and let every employee read their own vested and unvested units and next vest date in self-service. It ends the quarterly vesting email, and it shows units rather than a valuation, because a valuation is a number we would be making up.
Compensation & EquityCapstan compiles the payroll inputs it already holds, attendance, leave, overtime, compensation and expenses, into a documented export for your payroll partner, then files the returned payslips and letters back into the record. It computes no gross-to-net and holds no statutory rate, so the compliance maths stays with the partner.
PayrollPer-tenant encryption, tenant isolation enforced in the database rather than the app, passwordless sign-in, and a one-click export that keeps working even on non-payment. The security page states the ISO 27001 scope in full and, just as plainly, what we do not have.
Read the security pageFor startups
Most HR tools charge from the first person and put the org chart, the audit log and an export behind a higher tier. Capstan does the opposite: the whole core is free to twenty, and the software you start on is the software you scale on.
The complete core HRIS, people and org, time off, attendance, onboarding and exits, documents and letters, workflows, self-service and reports, is free for up to twenty active employees. It is not a trial and it does not expire, and someone serving notice or already gone does not use up one of the twenty.
Every plan runs the identical core. A plan changes how many people you can carry and whether the module suite is on, never what the software does, and nothing in the core is moved behind a wall to make a quarter. The audit trail, the export and self-service are on the free plan.
Checklist templates tied to a start date, document collection and the workflows around a joiner, so nothing falls through when you are hiring two people a month with no HR team. The same machinery runs an exit.
For global teams
When employees sit in one tool and contractors in another, there is no single roster and no one audit trail, and leave is impossible to read across time zones. Capstan is one record for a distributed, multi-country team, held in one self-contained EU region.
Work locations carry their own time zones and holiday calendars, so leave, who is out this week and approvals all read correctly whether a person sits in Berlin or Bengaluru. The core handles this on every plan, because a distributed team needs it from the first hire.
Compensation records and bands carry their own currency and effective dates, so a team paid in three currencies is one structured record rather than three spreadsheets, and it becomes clean input for whichever partner runs each country’s payroll.
A distributed company runs employees and contractors from one directory rather than two tools, with contractor tax handled by country packs each workspace configures per jurisdiction and the whole roster in one self-contained EU region a reviewer can check. Capstan is not an employer of record and it moves no money, so it holds the record alongside an EOR rather than replacing it.
The paid plan turns on the whole platform, all fourteen modules at no extra charge and nothing switched on a line at a time. See what each one does, in context, on the product page.
It is the complete core HRIS, free for up to twenty active employees, with no clock and no expiry. There is no subscription behind it, so it cannot lapse. The one thing the free plan cannot do is switch on the module suite, which needs a paid plan.
The twenty-first active employee moves you to the paid plan. The twenty free seats are carried into that plan, so you are charged for one seat and not twenty-one, and there is no cliff at the boundary. Every plan runs the identical core, so nothing about the software changes and the whole module suite switches on at no extra charge.
Yes, and that is the point. A contractor is a distinct entity with its own engagement, kept outside employee headcount, so you run both in one workspace with one audit trail, and engaging a contractor never inflates your employee seat count or your free-plan cap.
In one self-contained region, the EU today: data and object storage in Frankfurt (eu-central-1) and compute in Amsterdam (eu-west-1). Each region is an isolated deployment with no cross-region service key, and there is no region chooser; the same stack is built to open in more regions as they come online. A full export in open formats is always available, including on non-payment and on the way out.
No. Capstan is not an employer of record and it moves no money. It is the system of record and the workflow around your people. If you need someone employed under another entity in a country where you have none, you need an EOR, and Capstan holds the record alongside that arrangement rather than replacing it.
No. Nothing in Capstan uses AI to evaluate people: no attrition scoring, no sentiment analysis and no algorithmic candidate screening. There is one optional assistant a workspace can turn on, and it answers only from aggregate figures a caller could already see, sent to OpenAI which does not train on the data. Nothing scores, ranks or screens a person.
No. The core is built to run itself for a small team: onboarding checklists that finish, leave and approvals from the notification, and self-service so people answer their own questions. The buyer is usually a founder or an operations lead, not an HR department.
The complete core is free for your whole team, up to twenty. See it in one sitting.
