Frappe HR

HR

Vacation requests, payslips and employee records — without the per-employee bill

Replaces

  • Factorialfrom ~$5/employee/mo

Your price: $0 — runs on your machine. And your data never leaves your hands.

Official websiteSource code

What is it?

Frappe HR is the free, open-source version of the HR software small companies use every day. It keeps employee records and org charts, handles vacation and sick-leave requests with approval flows, tracks attendance, manages expense claims, runs performance reviews and recruitment — and even does payroll with proper payslips. There’s a mobile app so employees can request time off or check their payslip from their phone.

It’s built by the same team behind ERPNext, so it’s polished, actively maintained, and trusted by companies worldwide.

What does it replace?

HR platforms like Factorial (from ~$5/employee/month). That pricing sounds small until you do the math: a 50-person company pays $250+ every month — and the bill grows automatically with every hire, right when money is tightest.

What does it cost you?

Nothing, whether you have 10 employees or 500. Bonus: salary data, reviews, and personal records are some of the most sensitive information a company holds — with Frappe HR, they live on your own infrastructure, not in someone else’s cloud.

Get it running

Copy the text below, paste it into Claude (or Claude Code), and answer its questions. It handles the entire installation. You don’t need to understand the technical parts — that’s Claude’s job. Plan for about fifteen minutes.

Set up a self-hosted Frappe HR (hrms) instance on this machine using Docker.

1. Use the official frappe_docker project: clone https://github.com/frappe/frappe_docker and read its docs on custom apps — hrms (https://github.com/frappe/hrms) is a Frappe app that must be baked into the image.
2. Build a custom image following the "Custom Apps" guide (docker build with APPS_JSON_BASE64 including frappe/hrms), then start the stack with docker compose, setting strong DB and admin passwords in the environment.
3. Create a new site, install the hrms app on it, and verify the Frappe HR login page loads in the browser.
4. Sign in as Administrator, complete the HR setup wizard, and create a sample employee, leave type, and leave application to prove the flow works.
5. Explain how to back up the site data and how to upgrade the hrms app to a newer release.