A Zoho One alternative that doesn’t make you license everyone

Zoho One’s headline price, £37 per employee, only applies if every employee on payroll has a licence. OpSemble charges per module for the people who use each one, and covers the UK ground Zoho One doesn’t: PAYE payroll, health and safety, and ISO 9001 quality.

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£29/month platform fee, then £6–£9 per user per module. Comms is free. Full pricing.

What OpSemble gives you

Seats per module

Five CRM seats for the sales team, three HR seats for the managers who approve leave. Nobody pays for apps they never open.

UK payroll

PAYE payroll with payslips, HMRC submissions and pension auto-enrolment, inside the HR module.

Health and safety

Incidents with RIDDOR deadlines, RAMS, COSHH, permits, contractors and an ISO 45001 register.

Quality management

Document control with approval gates, NCRs, CAPAs, audits and a clause-by-clause ISO 9001 register.

CRM and projects

Pipelines, quotes, sequences and support cases; projects with an editable Gantt, time tracking and billable time to invoice.

One tenant, one bill

Every module shares the same people, customers and audit log, on a monthly bill with a published price.

Switching from Zoho One

List the apps you actually use

Check which Zoho One apps have active users. That list, not the fifty on the box, is what you’re replacing.

Bring your contacts across

Export contacts and accounts from Zoho CRM as CSV and import them into OpSemble CRM, which de-duplicates on the way in. Employees import from a spreadsheet.

Run both for a fortnight

The trial is 14 days with no card. Keep Zoho One running until you’re sure.

Time it to your renewal

Zoho One’s listed prices are for annual billing. Plan the switch around your renewal date rather than paying for a year you won’t use.

Side by side

Structural differences, not a feature scorecard. Zoho One prices are its UK list prices, ex VAT and billed annually, as shown on zoho.com in September 2026.

	Zoho One	OpSemble
Pricing	£37 per employee/month, billed annually, if every employee on payroll is licensed. Otherwise £80 per user/month, billed annually.	£29/month platform fee plus £6–£9 per user per module. Comms is free.
Who you pay for	Every employee on payroll, or each named user at the higher rate.	The people who use each module. A five-person sales team doesn’t mean licensing the warehouse.
Apps	50+ apps, including email (Zoho Mail), accounting (Zoho Books), help desk and analytics.	Nine modules: CRM, projects, HR, health & safety, quality, training, invoicing, inventory and comms.
UK payroll	No.	Yes: PAYE, payslips, HMRC submissions and pension auto-enrolment.
Health & safety	No dedicated module.	Incidents with RIDDOR deadlines, RAMS, COSHH, PPE, permits, contractors, visitors, toolbox talks and an ISO 45001 register.
Quality (ISO 9001)	No dedicated module.	Document control, NCRs, CAPAs, audits, calibration, suppliers and a clause-by-clause ISO 9001 register.
Trial	30 days.	14 days, no card, keep your data if you subscribe.
Data hosting	Zoho announced a UK data centre for 2026; check which region your account uses.	UK (Azure UK South).

Competitor details are from the vendor’s own website and, where marked, third-party reviews, checked in September 2026. They may have changed since. If you spot something wrong, tell us at sales@opsemble.co.uk and we’ll fix it.

Should you leave Zoho One?

Zoho One is remarkable value if you’d genuinely use a lot of it. At £37 an employee you get email, accounting, a help desk, analytics and dozens of other apps, and nobody else sells that much software for the money. If your team would live in Mail, Books and Desk, stay where you are. The case for OpSemble is the business that needs four or five things done properly, some of which Zoho One doesn’t do in the UK at all.

The all-employee rule is the part people find out later. The £37 price is conditional: every employee on payroll needs a licence, including the ones who will never log in. License only the people who need it and you move to flexible user pricing at £80 a user. Either way you’re paying for the whole suite, per head.

OpSemble prices the other way round. A £29 platform fee, then each module for the people who use it: CRM for sales, Projects for delivery, HR for the managers who approve leave. The growing services firm on our pricing page, twelve people using Projects, CRM, HR and Invoicing, comes to £197 a month. Twelve Zoho One all-employee licences are £444 a month, billed annually.

The other difference is what’s in the box for a UK business. Zoho One doesn’t run UK payroll and has no health and safety or quality management system. OpSemble’s HR module runs PAYE payroll with HMRC submissions; Health & Safety covers incidents with RIDDOR deadlines, RAMS, COSHH and permits; Quality runs document control, NCRs, CAPAs and an ISO 9001 register.

See the full comparison for Zoho One alongside monday.com and the dedicated tools, or build your plan for your own numbers.

Frequently asked questions

Is OpSemble cheaper than Zoho One?

It depends how much of Zoho One you’d use. For a business that needs a few modules for some of its people, usually yes: a twelve-person firm using Projects, CRM, HR and Invoicing is £197 a month on OpSemble against £444 for twelve Zoho One all-employee licences. If you’d also use Zoho Mail, Books and Desk, Zoho One’s bundle is hard to beat.

Does OpSemble include email hosting?

No. OpSemble doesn’t host email. Keep your existing email provider alongside it.

Can I import my contacts from Zoho CRM?

Yes. Export contacts and accounts from Zoho CRM as CSV and import them into OpSemble CRM, which de-duplicates on the way in.

Does OpSemble run UK payroll?

Yes. UK PAYE payroll with payslips, HMRC submissions and pension auto-enrolment is part of the HR module.

Is there a minimum contract?

No. Subscriptions run monthly and can be cancelled at any time, taking effect at the end of the current billing period. Early customers lock in their rate.

Pay for the modules you use, not the whole payroll

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