BambooHR is $6/employee/mo. Roster is a self-hosted alternative at $0.99/mo. Here's when each makes sense.
| Roster | BambooHR | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Self-hosted, your infra | Managed SaaS (cloud only) |
| Data location | Your server, your disk | BambooHR's cloud |
| Free tier | 20 members | Paid only |
| Pro pricing | $0.99/mo | $6/employee/mo |
| Dependencies | None (single binary + SQLite) | N/A (managed) |
| Setup time | ~30 seconds | Account signup |
| Dashboard | Built-in at /ui | Cloud dashboard |
| License | BSL 1.1 | Proprietary SaaS |
Roster is a single Go binary with embedded SQLite. Install it with one command, and you are running in under a minute. Your data stays on your server.
curl -fsSL https://stockyard.dev/roster/install.sh | sh
BambooHR is a strong product. There is no point pretending otherwise. Where Roster earns its place is in situations where BambooHR cannot be used — airgapped environments, regulated industries, teams with strict data sovereignty requirements, or simply developers who prefer tools they can inspect end to end. If none of those constraints apply, BambooHR may genuinely be the better choice.
Architecturally, Roster and BambooHR could not be more different. BambooHR runs on distributed cloud infrastructure with load balancers, managed databases, CDNs, and redundancy across availability zones. Roster is a single process writing to a single file on a single disk. That sounds fragile until you realize that SQLite handles more concurrent readers than most web applications will ever need, and WAL mode means reads never block writes.
If you are currently using BambooHR and considering Roster, start by running both in parallel. Install Roster on a test server, point your workflow at it for a week, and compare the experience. Roster's data directory is isolated — running a trial costs nothing beyond the compute. If Roster does not fit, delete the binary and the data directory. There is nothing else to clean up.
Single binary. Free to start. $0.99/mo for Pro.