Deel vs Kolay

Deel is a global HR and payroll platform founded in San Francisco in 2019 by Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wang. It lets companies hire contractors and full-time employees in more than 150 countries, either through Deel's own employer of record (EOR) entities, where Deel legally employs the worker on your behalf, or through payroll for entities you already own.

The product is modular. Contractor management handles localized contracts, invoices and payouts in many currencies; EOR covers employment contracts, benefits, taxes and statutory filings; Global Payroll consolidates payroll for your own entities; and Deel HR is an HRIS with org charts, time off and documents. Add-ons cover immigration and visa support, equipment provisioning, IT management and engagement tools. Contractor, EOR, payroll and HR modules are each priced per worker per month.

Deel suits remote-first startups and scale-ups hiring across many countries, including Turkey, where it can employ staff without a local company. EOR is expensive per employee, so companies often open their own entity once headcount in one country grows. Support quality varies by country, and the breadth of modules adds complexity. Remote.com and Oyster are direct EOR rivals, Rippling is stronger when US payroll and IT are central, and Gusto is simpler for US-only teams.

Kolay, known in Turkey as Kolay İK, is a cloud HR platform built in Turkey for Turkish employers and one of the most widely used HR tools in the local market. It replaces spreadsheets and paper forms with a single system for employee records, leave, overtime, shifts and attendance, expenses, onboarding and offboarding, performance reviews and the inputs payroll needs, all designed around Turkish labor law and SGK requirements.

Employees use the web and mobile apps to request leave, submit expenses with receipts, and see documents and company announcements, while managers approve requests in a few taps. HR teams manage org charts, personnel files, statutory leave balances, shift plans and attendance data, and run performance cycles. Reports cover headcount, turnover and leave liabilities. Kolay also offers its own cloud payroll product, Kolay Bordro, relaunched in October 2024, so leave, overtime and attendance data can flow into salary calculations; companies whose payroll is run by an external accountant can use Kolay for HR alone. Pricing is per employee and quoted in Turkish lira.

Kolay fits Turkish companies from roughly 10 to several thousand employees that want compliant, localized HR operations with Turkish-language support. Multinationals that need one global HRIS across many countries will find it narrower than international systems. BambooHR and Personio lack Turkish legal templates and local integrations, while the HR modules of local ERP suites such as Logo are an option for companies that want HR from the same vendor as their accounting.