Brightpay Vs Iris Payroll

Both BrightPay and Iris Payroll have earned loyal bureau and accountant user bases over decades of UK payroll work. In 2026 neither sits still. BrightPay has ended desktop sales and is mid-way through a forced cloud migration.

Iris Payroll Basics was discontinued in April 2026, pushing its free user base toward a paid Staffology subscription. Comparing these two products in 2026 means comparing two moving targets.

The question of which fits your practice depends less on feature lists than on how each handles the transition, what it costs at bureau scale, and where each falls short for your specific compliance obligations.

A bureau manager running 30 SMB clients on monthly cycles cares about cost-per-payslip and P11D handling, not interface polish.

The core tension is structural. BrightPay’s bureau licence is the cheapest multi-client payroll option in the UK market, with a flat annual fee covering unlimited employers and employees.

Iris Staffology Payroll charges per payslip, offers an API that no SMB competitor matches, and handles P11D natively. You are not choosing between a cheap option and an expensive one. You are choosing between two different operating models.

Head to head

Data verified April 2026

BrightPay vs IRIS Payroll

Choose BrightPay for payroll bureau use with a lower annual licence cost; choose IRIS for complex accountant and enterprise payroll environments requiring deep compliance tooling.

BBrightPay

Price

By quote(calculator-based)

Free trial

60 days

Employees

Unlimited

RTI / HMRC

Full RTI + HMRC filing

Best for

Payroll bureaux and accountants

Watch out for

Desktop-first; cloud version newer

See BrightPay pricing →

IIRIS Payroll

Price

Quote-based

Free trial

Demo only

Employees

Unlimited

RTI / HMRC

Full RTI + HMRC filing

Best for

Accountants and payroll bureaux

Watch out for

Enterprise-focused pricing; less SMB-friendly

See IRIS Payroll pricing →

Source: provider pricing pages and HMRC documentation verified April 2026. Affiliate links used where programmes are live.

BrightPay wins on a low licence cost for bureaux and small practices; IRIS wins on depth for large, compliance-heavy accountant and enterprise environments.

Last checked: 2026-04-30 · Whichapp evaluates comparison pages quarterly. No paid placement.

How evaluated: Live UK provider pricing pages plus HMRC RTI and FPS filing checks; affiliate links used where programmes are live.

BrightPay vs Iris Payroll at a Glance

For a senior People Ops or bureau manager scanning this in five minutes, the headline is that both products are HMRC-recognised, both handle RTI and auto-enrolment reliably, and both serve UK SMBs well. The differences sit in the operating model.

BrightPay is a single-product, flat-fee tool that does payroll and nothing else. Iris Staffology sits inside a four-product family that includes payroll, HR, P11D, and bureau management, all priced separately.

If your bureau is running standard PAYE work for SMB clients, the BrightPay bureau licence will be cheaper, often by an order of magnitude. If your client list includes any P11D obligations, CIS contractors, or API-driven internal systems, the calculation flips.

That binary holds across the rest of this comparison: BrightPay wins on cost, Iris wins on depth, and the deciding factor is your client mix.

The BrightPay desktop retirement (final year 2025/26) and the Iris Payroll Basics discontinuation (April 2026) both create migration pressure in 2026. Bureaus on either legacy product cannot stand still. The question is which migration path makes more sense for your specific workflow.

Full Comparison Table: BrightPay vs Iris Payroll

What Are the Key Differences Between BrightPay and Iris Payroll?

The two products diverge on three axes that matter to a buyer in 2026.

Operating model. BrightPay is single-product. You buy the payroll tool, you get payroll.

Iris is a product family.

Staffology Payroll is one of four engines, alongside Iris HR, Iris P11D, and the legacy desktop products.

That breadth helps if your bureau wants HR and benefits in one ecosystem; it adds complexity if you only need payroll.

Pricing structure. BrightPay charges per licence with a flat annual fee and a bureau tier that covers unlimited clients. Iris charges per payslip in Staffology and quote-based for PayrollPro bureau customers.

At 450 monthly payslips a BrightPay bureau licence costs roughly one-tenth of the equivalent Staffology bill. That difference compounds across a tax year.

Compliance depth. Iris natively handles P11D, Gender Pay Gap reporting, full CIS, and IR35 within the payroll product. BrightPay handles the basics (RTI, auto-enrolment pensions, CIS as of April 2026) and expects you to use a separate tool for P11D.

For bureaus with simple SMB clients this is a non-issue; for bureaus with company car schemes or 250+ employee clients, it is decisive.

The transition timelines also differ. BrightPay desktop is gone after April 2026 with a multi-year run-up. Iris Payroll Basics ended in April 2026 with shorter notice and no free replacement.

Both vendors are pushing legacy users to paid cloud products, but the migration paths feel different in practice.

What Is BrightPay and What Does It Offer?

BrightPay is a UK and Irish payroll product owned by Bright (formerly Thesaurus Software, rebranded after the BrightSG group acquisition). It has been in market since 1992 and built its reputation on accountancy practices and small-to-mid bureaus running multi-client payroll.

The product is HMRC-recognised, supports RTI Full Payment Submissions and Employer Payment Summaries, and integrates directly with NEST, The People’s Pension, and Smart Pension for auto-enrolment.

The 2025/26 tax year is the final year for BrightPay desktop. From April 2026 the only available product is BrightPay Cloud, which absorbs the Connect employee self-service portal and employer dashboard at no additional charge.

Cloud billing is based on the highest recorded employer and employee count in the billing period, which removes the flat-fee predictability the desktop product had.

For bureaus, the licensing model is the headline. A bureau licence covers unlimited employers and unlimited employees at a flat annual rate. There is no per-client charge, no per-payslip charge, no per-employee surcharge.

For a practice running 30 SMB clients on monthly payroll, that flat rate is the cheapest UK option by a wide margin.

Capterra reviews of 700+ verified UK users land on an 89% recommendation rate, with most negative feedback concentrated on mid-year setup complexity rather than core RTI accuracy.

What BrightPay does not offer matters too. There is no native P11D module. There is no REST API.

There is no Gender Pay Gap reporting tool. For practices whose clients only need standard payroll, none of those gaps are relevant.

For practices with company car schemes, taxable benefits, or 250-employee clients, the gaps push you to either a parallel toolset or a different vendor. See the BrightPay review for the deeper product walkthrough.

What Is Iris Payroll and What Does It Offer?

Iris is a UK-headquartered software group with a four-product payroll family: Iris Staffology Payroll (cloud, API-first), Iris PayrollPro (bureau-focused, quote-based), and the legacy desktop products Iris Payroll Business and Iris Payroll Professional.

Iris Payroll Basics, the free entry-level product, was discontinued in April 2026 with users directed to Staffology as the recommended replacement.

Staffology is the headline product for new buyers in 2026. Pricing is published: £43 per month for up to 19 payslips, then £2.15 per additional payslip.

Bureau customers move to PayrollPro, which is quote-only and starts around £1,500 per year plus per-employee fees depending on volume and complexity.

Both products are HMRC-recognised, handle RTI in line with HMRC standards, and integrate with eight UK pension providers covering the full SMB and mid-market workplace pension landscape.

The technical depth is where Iris pulls ahead. Staffology exposes a full REST API with webhooks for every payroll event. No other UK SMB payroll product matches that API coverage.

P11D benefits-in-kind reporting is native across the entire product family, not bolted on.

Gender Pay Gap reporting is included in Staffology Plus and PayrollPro. CIS, IR35, and full statutory pay handling are built in.

The trade-off is cost and procurement friction. PayrollPro bureau quotes take a sales conversation; Staffology pricing assumes per-payslip billing that scales linearly with volume.

For high-volume bureau work that does not need P11D, that pricing model is structurally more expensive than BrightPay. The full breakdown sits in the Iris Payroll review.

How Do BrightPay and Iris Payroll Compare on Features: Bureau Multi-Client Tools?

Bureau workflow features are where multi-client practices spend most of their time, and the two products handle this differently.

BrightPay’s bureau workflow centres on a single dashboard listing every client employer. Switching between clients takes one click; running a payroll cycle takes the same number of steps regardless of client count.

Bulk RTI submission is supported, so a bureau can run end-of-month FPS submissions across 30 clients in a single batch. The Connect portal lets each client view their own employees, payslips, and reports without giving them access to other clients’ data.

Iris PayrollPro is built explicitly for bureau scale. Multi-client batch processing, client-level permissions, and a dedicated bureau portal with white-labelling options are standard.

The PayrollPro support model includes a named account manager, which BrightPay does not offer at any tier. For bureaus that need formal SLA commitments to their own clients, PayrollPro’s tier-1 support is a meaningful difference.

The decision splits on volume and complexity. A bureau with 20-50 standard SMB clients will get more from BrightPay’s flat-fee model and find the dashboard sufficient.

A bureau with 50+ clients, or with mid-market clients needing P11D and Gender Pay Gap, will find PayrollPro’s bureau-specific tooling and SLA worth the premium.

Below 20 clients, neither product is overkill; above 100 clients, PayrollPro’s batch processing and dedicated support tend to win.

Section payoff: match the bureau tooling to your client count and complexity, not to your software preference. BrightPay’s flat-fee bureau licence is the rational default below 50 clients on standard PAYE; PayrollPro earns its quote at 100+ clients or where compliance depth is non-negotiable.

How Do BrightPay and Iris Payroll Compare on Pricing: Bureau Cost at Scale?

Cost comparison between these two products requires separating the bureau and single-employer use cases, because the pricing structures are fundamentally different.

BrightPay desktop (final year 2025/26):

• Up to 3 employees: free
• Up to 10 employees: £139/year
• Up to 25 employees: £209/year
• Unlimited employees: £289/year
• Bureau licence: flat annual rate (calculator-based), unlimited employers and employees

All prices exclude VAT. The desktop product will not be relicensed for 2026/27.

BrightPay cloud (from 2026/27): No published tier table. Billing is based on the highest recorded employer and employee count in the billing period. Monthly or annual payment options, with an approximate 10-15% annual discount.

The interactive calculator at brightpay.co.uk/pricing/ is required for specific quotes. The Connect add-on is absorbed into the cloud product with no separate charge.

Iris Staffology Payroll (2026 published pricing):

• Base fee: £43/month (covers up to 19 payslips per month)
• Above 19 payslips: £2.15 per additional payslip (published rate for the 20-50 payslip band; above 51 payslips IRIS requires a bespoke quote)
• Bureau (PayrollPro): quote-only, indicative from ~£1,500/year plus per-employee fees

Worked example at bureau scale. A bureau running 30 clients, each with 15 employees on monthly payroll, processes 450 payslips per month. Note: 450 payslips sits well above IRIS's published 50-payslip band; the figure below extrapolates the £2.15 rate and should be treated as indicative only. For actual bureau-scale pricing, request a bespoke quote from IRIS.

• BrightPay bureau licence: flat rate, historically in the range of £600-900/year for this volume
• Iris Staffology: £43/month base + (431 additional payslips x £2.15) = £43 + £926.65 = £969.65/month, approximately £11,600/year (indicative extrapolation; IRIS quotes bespoke above 51 payslips)

The per-payslip model makes Iris materially more expensive at bureau scale for high-volume, low-complexity work. That gap narrows when P11D obligations, API integration, or dedicated support SLAs enter the calculation. For full per-tier costs see the BrightPay pricing guide.

The billing-model risk for BrightPay cloud. The highest-recorded-headcount approach means a single month of seasonal or temporary staff can lift your tier for that period.

A bureau with retail or hospitality clients, where headcounts spike at Christmas or summer, carries real forecasting risk. The flat desktop model had no equivalent exposure.

A finance lead wants predictable per-quarter costs; the cloud billing model breaks that for any client with seasonal payroll.

Section payoff: BrightPay wins on cost for standard SMB bureau work by a factor of 10x or more at typical volumes. Iris earns its premium only when compliance complexity (P11D, GPG, API) makes the additional cost defensible.

How Do BrightPay and Iris Payroll Compare on Compliance: HMRC RTI and Auto-Enrolment?

Both products are HMRC-recognised and handle Real Time Information submissions reliably. The compliance differences sit in adjacent obligations.

RTI accuracy and reliability. BrightPay’s RTI track record across 700+ Capterra reviews is strong, with FPS and EPS submissions described as reliable.

Iris Staffology and PayrollPro have equivalent RTI reliability ratings, with the additional benefit of bulk submission tooling for bureau use. Neither product has a meaningful RTI quality gap; both meet HMRC’s recognition standards.

Auto-enrolment provider integration. BrightPay integrates directly with NEST, The People’s Pension, and Smart Pension. Iris Staffology integrates with eight providers including those three plus NOW:Pensions, Aviva, Legal and General, Scottish Widows, and Standard Life.

For SMB clients on NEST or TPP (the dominant providers at sub-50 employee scale), BrightPay’s coverage is sufficient. For mid-market clients with occupational schemes through major insurers, Iris’s broader coverage matters.

P11D benefits-in-kind. This is the largest compliance gap. Iris handles P11D natively across the product family.

BrightPay does not.

Bureaus with clients that have company car schemes, private medical insurance, or other taxable benefits either run a parallel HMRC P11D Organiser process or use a third-party service. That is a workflow tax of around an hour per client per year, which adds up at scale.

CIS and IR35. Both products handle CIS contractor deductions and verification. BrightPay added CIS support in April 2026 to close a long-standing gap; Iris has supported CIS across its product family for years.

For IR35 off-payroll worker handling, both products support the deemed payment calculation and reporting requirements.

Gender Pay Gap reporting. Iris Staffology Plus and PayrollPro include native Gender Pay Gap reporting modules. BrightPay does not.

For bureaus with 250+ employee clients (the legal threshold for GPG reporting), this is a real gap that requires a separate process at BrightPay.

Section payoff: Compliance parity holds for standard SMB payroll. Iris pulls clear ahead at any client profile with P11D, GPG, or eight-provider AE integration needs. BrightPay’s CIS catch-up in 2026 closes one historic gap but leaves P11D and GPG open.

How Do BrightPay and Iris Payroll Compare on Scalability: Multi-Client Bureau Onboarding?

Onboarding new clients into a bureau workflow is a recurring task that the underlying tooling either eases or frustrates.

BrightPay’s client onboarding wizard imports YTD figures from CSV or other payroll software, sets up the employer record, and runs an alignment FPS in a single linear flow.

Mid-year onboarding (the most common bureau scenario) is the most-cited friction point in user reviews; the alignment process works but takes more steps than experienced users expect. Once clients are set up, switching between them is one click.

Iris PayrollPro provides a structured client onboarding template with HMRC RTI alignment, employer record setup, and bulk employee import via CSV or API.

The PayrollPro onboarding is built around a bureau model, so the flow assumes you are adding 5-10 employer records at a time, not single in-house setup.

Staffology’s REST API also enables programmatic client provisioning, which a bureau with development resource can use to automate onboarding entirely.

The white-labelling and client portal differ. BrightPay’s Connect portal gives each client a branded view of their employees and payslips at no extra cost.

PayrollPro supports bureau white-labelling on the client portal, which lets a practice present a fully branded payroll experience to its own clients. For bureaus that compete on brand, PayrollPro’s white-labelling is a real differentiator.

Multi-client reporting is parity. Both products generate consolidated reports across all clients in the bureau, with year-end P60 batches, RTI summaries, and pension contribution exports. Bureau-wide P11D batch reporting only exists in Iris.

Section payoff: For raw onboarding speed at low-to-mid volume, BrightPay is faster once you know the system. For programmatic onboarding at scale, white-labelled client portals, or bureau-wide P11D, PayrollPro wins.

How Do BrightPay and Iris Payroll Compare on Support: SLA and Response Time?

Support quality matters for a bureau with its own client commitments to maintain.

BrightPay support is well-reviewed in Capterra and Trustpilot data, with email and chat as the primary channels. Phone support is available for bureau licence customers but not for in-house tier purchasers.

The published response time targets are not formal SLAs; users report next-business-day responses as typical, with same-day responses common for bureau customers.

Iris PayrollPro offers a tiered SLA: four-hour first response on standard packages, one-hour first response on premium tiers, and a dedicated account manager for bureau customers. Staffology in-house customers get standard ticket support without a named contact.

For a bureau that has promised its own clients same-day response on payroll queries, PayrollPro’s formal SLA is the more defensible choice.

Documentation quality is parity. BrightPay’s help centre is well-organised and includes searchable RTI, AE, and CIS guides. Iris’s documentation across Staffology and PayrollPro is broad, with API reference materials that BrightPay does not need to provide because there is no API.

Community support differs. BrightPay’s accountant user community is active on LinkedIn and in third-party forums, with bureau-to-bureau peer support common.

Iris’s user community is more fragmented across the four-product family, but the API community is stronger because Staffology has the only meaningful UK SMB payroll API.

Section payoff: For formal SLAs and bureau-grade support contracts, PayrollPro is the structurally stronger choice. For day-to-day support quality on standard payroll queries, both products are reliable; BrightPay’s bureau-tier phone support closes most of the gap.

Which Should You Choose: BrightPay or Iris Payroll?

The decision splits cleanly along client profile, not along software quality.

In our assessment, BrightPay is the stronger default for cost-led SMB bureaus on standard PAYE work, while Iris Staffology earns its premium only where P11D, GPG, or API integration are genuine obligations rather than nice-to-haves.

Choose BrightPay if…

• You run a payroll bureau for SMB clients with standard payroll obligations (PAYE, auto-enrolment, RTI) and no P11D requirements
• Cost is the primary driver and you need a bureau licence that scales across unlimited clients without per-payslip charges
• You are already using BrightPay desktop and migrating to cloud on the enforced 2026/27 timeline
• Your clients use NEST, The People’s Pension, or Smart Pension for auto-enrolment and you need reliable direct file submission
• You want a payroll-only tool without the overhead of a four-product family

BrightPay does not fit if your clients have P11D obligations, if you need an API for internal workflow integration, or if your practice has UK-only data residency requirements that preclude Azure-hosted, Irish-owned infrastructure.

Choose Iris Payroll if…

• Your bureau serves clients with P11D benefits-in-kind obligations (company cars, private medical insurance, other taxable benefits)
• You have built or plan to build internal workflow tools that require a payroll API
• Your client base includes CIS subcontractors and you need reliable CIS deduction and verification
• You are migrating from Iris Payroll Basics and want to stay within the Iris ecosystem
• Your bureau serves larger employers (250+ employees) who need Gender Pay Gap reporting natively
• A formal support SLA matters for your own client commitments

Iris Staffology does not fit if you are a small bureau where the £43/month base plus per-payslip charges will materially exceed BrightPay’s bureau licence, or if you need same-day onboarding: PayrollPro bureau migrations typically take four to eight weeks.

What Are the Best Alternatives to BrightPay and Iris Payroll?

If neither product fits, the UK SMB payroll market has three credible alternatives worth considering.

Sage Payroll. The default incumbent for many UK practices, with strong Sage 50 Accounts integration and HMRC-recognised RTI handling. Pricing sits between BrightPay and Iris, with per-employer and per-employee tiering.

Sage is the right choice if your practice already runs Sage 50 Accounts and wants tight integration; it is rarely cheaper than BrightPay at bureau scale, and its API is thinner than Iris Staffology. Switch to Sage if your accountancy stack is Sage-centric.

Xero Payroll. Cloud-native, HMRC-recognised, and bundled with Xero accounting at no extra cost up to 5 employees. Xero Payroll is the right choice for in-house teams that already run Xero accounting and want a single-vendor stack.

It does not offer a bureau licence equivalent to BrightPay, and its API is functional but narrower than Staffology’s. Switch to Xero Payroll if you are running Xero accounting and your client list is sub-50 employee SMBs.

Moorepay. Outsourced UK payroll bureau service rather than software. Right for in-house teams that want to outsource the entire payroll function to a UK-based bureau with formal SLA. Not directly comparable to BrightPay or Iris on a software-only basis.

Switch to Moorepay if your decision is build-vs-buy and you have decided to buy.

For the full UK payroll software comparison, the alternatives shortlist scales further depending on bureau size and integration requirements.

Frequently Asked Questions

How We Compared BrightPay and Iris Payroll