Smart Salary vs PayrollPanda (2026): What ‘Free’ Really Costs

Payroll close, one admin, and a free tier that ends there

Payroll closes on Friday. One person runs it, one person checks it, and when that person is on leave in the same week, the run still has to happen. A vendor that prices the software at zero has not removed that problem. It has moved the cost somewhere else.

This is a head-to-head between Smart Salary and PayrollPanda for Malaysian employers. PayrollPanda is a strong payroll engine with published statutory coverage, and its free tier is the reason most buyers look at it. The question is what the free tier covers when your payroll is run by real people, and what you pay when it is not enough.

Disclosure: Smart Salary publishes this comparison and is one of the two products. Every claim about PayrollPanda below is taken from their own website, checked on 26 October 2026 and linked so you can read the source. Confirm current features and pricing with each provider before you decide.

Compare the two by what your payroll week needs

	Smart Salary	PayrollPanda
How it is sold	One clear subscription across the modules you run	Free tier for core payroll, Pro for everything else
Admins	Unlimited admins on the subscription	Free plan shows 1 owner; Pro adds unlimited admins
Time attendance	Built in: time clock, shifts, overtime, leave	Not native. Timesheets and overtime arrive through Jibble
Mobile	Mobile clock-in with GPS and geofencing	No mobile app. Their help desk says small screens are not supported
Pricing	Written quote against your headcount and module list	RM38 per company plus RM8 per employee monthly, excluding SST. Pro pricing is not published
Growth above 100 staff	Quote scales with your scope	Custom quotation
Free offer	A 30-day free trial with no strings attached, then one clear subscription	“Free forever” on the marketing page; their help desk says billing starts at the second payroll run

What the free tier actually covers

PayrollPanda publishes its free plan in detail. It includes payroll runs, payment files, payslips, EA and Form E generation, automated statutory calculations and basic leave management. The plan comparison shows what waits behind the upgrade: a second admin, unlimited report exports and bulk uploads, advanced leave policies, integrations and API access.

Read that list as a workflow rather than as features. The free tier computes your payroll. It does not let a second person check it, export the reports freely, or connect the numbers to anything else. Those are exactly the steps that stop a payroll run from being one person’s manual job.

Then there is the pricing question their own pages answer differently. The marketing page says the software is free forever for unlimited users, with unlimited payroll months. The help desk says leave management is free, the first payroll run is free, and you are invoiced monthly from your second run. Both statements sit on payrollpanda.my. Read both before you plan around either.

The one-admin problem

Payroll is not a one-person job. Someone prepares the run, someone else checks it before salaries go out, and the accountant needs the numbers afterwards. On the free plan that is one owner account. The moment an HR specialist, a finance colleague or an external accountant needs their own access, you are on the paid tier.

Now add headcount. Below 100 employees you can read the prices. Above 100, their help desk sends you for a custom quotation. So the free tier is priced in public, and the version you will actually run at scale is priced in a sales conversation. If a vendor will not publish the number, you are not saving money by choosing the free option. You are deferring the negotiation.

What Smart Salary sells instead

Smart Salary is sold as one clear subscription across payroll and the modules you run. The admins who run them are unlimited, and employee self-service is part of the same system rather than an add-on. There is no free tier to outgrow and no feature held back for the upgrade call. You ask for a written quote against your headcount and module list, and you get a number you can put in a budget.

That is the honest answer to freemium arithmetic. A free tier is a marketing position, not a price. The price is what you pay for the people, the workflow and the growth the free plan leaves out, and a vendor that publishes none of those numbers has not made them free.

Attendance is the difference a free tier cannot absorb

PayrollPanda covers payroll and leave. Time and attendance is a separate product: their own pages recommend Jibble for timesheets and overtime, synced into payroll afterwards. Their help desk also states that the platform does not work on small screen devices such as mobile phones.

Smart Salary Time and Attendance runs inside the same record as payroll. The Time Clock captures hours on a phone with GPS and geofencing, WiFi, biometric or facial recognition devices. Shifts, overtime, leave and attendance reports all feed the hours that payroll uses. Working patterns are configurable per group, with custom holidays and regional holiday calendars supported.

For a workforce that clocks in on a site, in an outlet or on the road, the choice is between hours that arrive in payroll from one system and hours that arrive through a second product, a sync and a reconciliation. If clock capture is the wider problem, our comparison of time attendance software in Malaysia covers the rest of the market. Smart Salary also supports Mandarin, for workplaces where Chinese is the working language and HR would otherwise translate every notice by hand.

What the free tier costs in ringgit

Take their published rates. RM38 per company plus RM8 per employee each month, excluding SST. A 60-person company is RM518 a month at those rates, close to RM6,216 a year, for the plan with one owner, basic leave and daily and monthly report exports. The tier that adds a second admin, unlimited exports and integrations is Pro, and Pro has no published price anywhere on their site.

Then add the time. One admin preparing a run, checking exceptions and re-entering figures elsewhere is a recurring monthly cost. At a RM3,000 monthly salary and the common 26-day, 8-hour convention, an hour of that person’s time is worth about RM14.42. Five hours a month of payroll housekeeping is close to RM720, and it buys no capability at all. Hold that number next to any subscription quote you collect.

One caution about figures you will find in reviews. Some comparison sites claim free users must key bank transfers into their portal by hand. PayrollPanda’s own plan page lists payment files on the free tier. Ask to see the file your bank accepts and count the steps. Verify it in a demo, not in a review. That is also the standard we would ask you to apply to every claim in this article.

Ask both vendors the same six questions

Vendor qualifying questions are written to find out what you will pay. Turn them around and they become a buyer’s checklist:

• How many people need their own login to run and check payroll, and what does the second one cost?
• What happens to the price when headcount passes 100?
• Show me the published price of the tier I would actually run, not the entry tier
• Is attendance part of your system or a partner product, and what does the handover cost me in hours?
• Does it work on the phones my staff carry, in the language they read?
• Run my last payroll month on your system and show me the manual edits that remain

Frequently asked questions

Is PayrollPanda really free?

Their marketing page says free forever with unlimited payroll months. Their help desk says leave management is free and payroll is invoiced from the second run at RM38 per company plus RM8 per employee, excluding SST. Both are on their own site. Ask which applies to your account before you budget around either.

What does the free plan leave out?

According to their own plan comparison: additional admins beyond one owner, unlimited report exports and bulk uploads, advanced leave policies, integrations and API access. Those are the features that remove manual work, which is the pattern worth noticing.

Does Smart Salary have a free tier?

No free tier, and no free-tier arithmetic. Smart Salary gives you a 30-day free trial with no strings attached: the full product, your own data, no commitment. After that it is one clear subscription with the modules you run included and unlimited admins, and the quote reaches you in writing rather than through an upgrade call.

Which is better for shift, factory and field teams?

PayrollPanda handles payroll and relies on an integration for timesheets. Smart Salary records clock-ins on mobile with GPS and geofencing, runs shifts, overtime and leave, and passes those hours to payroll in the same system. For teams that are not at a desk, that difference decides how much of the month is spent correcting hours.

PayrollPanda offers free forever. We offer 30 days free with no strings attached

A free tier is permanent, and so are its limits. A trial is the whole product, on your own data, for 30 days, with no strings attached. Run a real payroll month with your real shifts and clock-in corrections, and see what changes when the hours reach payroll by themselves. We are confident about how that ends, and the trial exists so you do not have to take our word for it.

The quotation? Do not worry. Tell us what you pay for the setup you run today and our quote comes back lower, with our best price in writing before you commit.

Still running this manually? You are in the right place to start. Our world-class support team helps you set up, stays with you through your first runs, and helps your business grow from there.

Choose the subscription you can explain in one line

PayrollPanda earns its reputation on payroll maths and a genuine free entry point. If one person runs a small payroll and a free plan covers them, it is a reasonable place to start. The cost appears when payroll needs a second pair of eyes, a phone, attendance, or a headcount above 100, and those are the moments a free tier is designed to sell against.

Smart Salary is the alternative when you want the whole workflow in one record and one subscription, from clock-in to payroll, with a written price instead of a qualifying conversation. Talk to the Smart Salary team and start the 30-day free trial, or read the signs your company has outgrown spreadsheets, the employer’s guide to EPF, SOCSO, EIS and PCB and how Smart Salary compares with Info-Tech.