Employee Portal Software: What a Small Team Should Buy or Build

Employee portal software is the login where staff find their pay stubs, tax forms, time off, documents and work requests. For a small team it is rarely one product: payroll services such as Gusto already include the pay and time-off part, a free employee app can cover documents and announcements, and a custom build is worth paying for only on the workflow left over.

Which employee portal software handles which job

Prices and features below were checked on the vendors' pages on September 27, 2026.

• Pay stubs, tax forms and time off: your payroll's employee login. Every Gusto payroll plan, from Simple to Premium, includes its employee app. Employees use it to request paid time off, view tax documents, update tax elections and change personal details (Gusto help), and their pay stubs stay in their account to view and print. Turn on your payroll's employee login before shopping; if it has none, switch to a payroll service that has one rather than building a pay stub page. Copying pay data into another tool gives you a second place to secure.
• Handbook, announcements, directory and checklists: an employee app. Connecteam's Small Business plan is free for up to 10 users and covers chat, updates, a directory, a knowledge base, documents, time off, forms and checklists. The plan's feature list marks exceptions, so check it against your needs. Past that size, each paid hub starts at $29 a month billed yearly, or $35 month to month, for the first 30 users; a free Limited plan keeps the essentials up to 30 users.
• One workflow on records you already keep: a custom build. No-code AI builders such as Softr and Zite generate an app and its database from a description, and Softr can also connect to an existing source such as Airtable or Google Sheets. A build makes sense when those records already run another part of the business, such as invoicing, and a second copy in an employee app would drift out of date.
• A company-wide intranet: dedicated software, later. AgilityPortal's smallest plan starts at $99 a month, "ideally for 25-99 employees" (pricing), and Axero quotes $10 to $15 per user per month (pricing). Both target companies past the small-team stage.

What it costs for an eight-person team

Here is a fictional example. A landscaping business has an owner and seven employees, six crew members and a crew manager, all on payroll and all with email addresses on the company domain. The owner needs four things: pay and tax forms, time-off requests, safety procedures with announcements, and a daily job list. That list holds client addresses, gate codes and photos, and the owner already keeps it in a database that also feeds invoicing.

• Pay, tax forms and time off go through Gusto Simple, which already runs the payroll: $49 a month plus $6 per person, so $97 for eight people. The business pays that for payroll anyway, so the portal part adds nothing.
• Safety procedures and announcements go in Connecteam's free plan, since eight people fit under its 10-user limit. Staying in Gusto for them would mean upgrading: its directory starts on Plus and its employee handbook tool on Premium, at $180 plus $22 per person, or $356 a month for eight people.
• The job list is the only build. On Softr, employees who share a builder's email domain count as team users, and Basic includes five; people on personal addresses such as Gmail count as client users, with five more. Seven employees on the company domain exceed that, and extra app users can only be added from Pro. A page that only the manager can see also needs custom user groups, which Softr's documentation reserves for Pro and above. That puts this build at $119 a month, or $1,188 a year.
• Zite has no user limit on any plan; its Pro plan costs $20 a month billed annually. Its pricing page lists roles, user groups and granular permissions on the Team plan, whose price is not published there.

The check that decides the budget takes two minutes: count your employees by email domain before you pick a Softr plan, and ask Zite for the Team price before you count on the cheaper one.

“

A generated screen that shows each employee the right records does not prove that the data behind it is restricted.

”

The prompt for the part you build

Both builders take a plain description. This one fits the fictional business above; replace the team, tables, fields and each role's rights with yours.

Build an internal portal for a landscaping business with 6 crew
members and 1 manager.

Tables:
- Jobs: client name, address, gate code, date, assigned employee,
  status (scheduled, done, problem), photos, notes.
- Employees: name, work email, role (crew or manager).

Crew members sign in with their work email. They see only the jobs
where they are the assigned employee. They can set the status to done
or problem, add notes and upload photos. They cannot edit the address,
the gate code or the assignment.

Managers see every job, can reassign a job and can edit every field.

Do not store pay, tax, bank or ID information in this app.

How the builders decide who sees what

A generated screen that shows each employee the right jobs does not prove that the data behind it is restricted.

Softr applies "View" data restrictions on all plans, including Free. A rule that matches each job's assigned email to the signed-in user hides other people's jobs in lists, dropdowns and filters. Softr states that its visibility checks and record filters run on the server. The matching "Create", "Edit" and "Delete" restrictions start on the Business plan, at $329 a month billed yearly or $395 month to month. Below that plan, limit editing through the pages and buttons you expose, and test it.

Zite links a record to a person with a user field, so each person can be shown their own data. Its database roles, which set view, edit, create and delete access by table, are marked as coming soon for the Team and Enterprise plans.

If the portal may grow into a product your clients also use, Base44 vs Lovable compares a managed backend with code and a database you own.

Test the portal with fake employees first

Run this before any real record or real employee enters the app.

1. Create three test accounts on addresses you control: two crew members and one manager. On Softr, use your company domain so they count like real employees.
2. Add six fake jobs, three assigned to each crew account, with invented addresses and gate codes.
3. Sign in as the first crew member. You should see exactly three jobs. Open one and copy its URL.
4. Sign in as the second crew member and paste that URL. The job must not appear. Try the search box and every filter too.
5. As a crew member, try to change a gate code. The change must be refused or impossible to reach.
6. Open the copied URL in a private window without signing in. You should land on the sign-in page, not on the job.
7. Deactivate one crew account and try to sign in with it. The sign-in must fail. On Softr, deactivated users stop counting toward your plan's limit.

If any step fails, fix the rule and rerun all seven. Billing, recovery and export need their own checks before you pay; Is Base44 legit? The 7 checks before you pay lists them for one builder.

Once the test passes, import the real jobs and invite the crew. For your own team, start with two columns: every request employees bring you, and the tool that already handles it. Build only for the rows left empty.