Breathe

Breathe, still widely known as BreatheHR, is the HR software a UK small business reaches for when the holiday spreadsheet and a shared folder of contracts have stopped coping. It is built in Horsham for the UK small business market, and its defining choice is flat per company pricing by headcount band rather than a per employee fee, which changes the maths for a lot of buyers.

What it does well

The pricing model is genuinely small business friendly. Micro is twenty four pounds a month for up to ten employees, Starter forty four for up to twenty, Regular ninety nine for up to fifty. You pay one predictable fee for the band rather than a fee that creeps up with every hire, which makes budgeting simple and honest.

Core HR is done well and without fuss. Leave management, employee records, documents, and simple performance tracking cover what a small business actually needs, and the interface is approachable enough that a non specialist can administer it. It replaces the spreadsheet on day one.

It is UK built, so statutory leave and UK employment norms are handled natively, and the support understands the UK context.

Where it falls short

It is deliberately simple, which becomes a ceiling. Larger organisations, complex approval chains, sophisticated performance frameworks or deep people analytics will outgrow it, and the upper bands lose the price advantage that makes the lower ones so attractive.

There is no built in payroll, so you run payroll elsewhere and connect or export. For a small business that is usually fine, but it is worth knowing going in.

Some capabilities that rivals include as standard, such as health and safety, are paid add ons here.

The UK detail that matters

Breathe is a UK product built for UK small employers. Statutory holiday entitlement, UK employment record keeping and the everyday HR needs of a small British business are handled natively. All prices exclude VAT, annual billing saves around fifteen percent on the lower tiers, and there is a fourteen day free trial with no card required.

Who should buy it

UK small businesses up to around fifty employees that want to retire the holiday spreadsheet with a simple, predictably priced HR system. Companies approaching a couple of hundred staff, or needing deep performance and analytics, should compare against CharlieHR, Access PeopleHR and the mid market suites.