Lucca

Lucca is the clearest answer in this category to the question the rest of it answers vaguely: whose machines is the personnel file actually on?

Lucca SAS runs on OVHcloud in France and Germany, with encrypted backups at Scaleway in France and the Netherlands — a French company, French and German data centres, and two French infrastructure providers, rather than a European vendor renting capacity from an American hyperscaler. For a personnel file, which holds sickness absence and therefore health data, that removes the layer of transfer analysis that an EU region on a US cloud still leaves in place.

The product is sold module by module rather than as a suite, and the prices are published: for organisations of 100 or more employees Lucca gives indicative figures of €3.21 per employee per month for Core HR, €3.11 for Absences, €3.00 for Timesheets, €3.97 for Performance and €3.16 for Engagement, excluding VAT and with no minimum term.

That is unusually transparent for a platform of this size — Dialog, Kenjo and PayFit all quote on request — but it also means the bill is the sum of what you switch on, and four modules at once puts Lucca well above the per-employee headline of a bundled all-in-one.

Lucca has held ISO 27001 since July 2022, the only independent security audit named by any of the long-established platforms here.

The gaps are commercial rather than technical: there is no free trial, only a demo on request, so the product cannot be evaluated with real employee data the way Factorial or Eurécia allow.

The published prices are indications for 100-plus headcounts, so a company of thirty is negotiating rather than reading. And Swiss customers are the exception to the infrastructure story — they are hosted on Microsoft Azure in Switzerland with backups on Google Cloud in Zurich, which is the American cloud the French setup avoids. Founded in 2002, it is also the oldest company in this category by more than a decade.

What Lucca does well

• Hosted on OVHcloud in France and Germany, with backups at Scaleway — European infrastructure end to end
• ISO 27001 since July 2022, an independent audit rather than a GDPR statement
• Per-module prices published, from €3.00 per employee per month for Timesheets
• No minimum term, and modules can be bought one at a time
• Paris company trading since 2002, the longest track record here

Where Lucca falls short

• No free trial — demo on request only
• Published prices are indications for 100+ employees; smaller companies negotiate
• Running four or five modules costs more per employee than a bundled all-in-one
• Swiss customers sit on Microsoft Azure with Google Cloud backups, not on OVHcloud

Standout feature. French company, French and German hardware: Lucca is the only platform here whose data and backups both sit with European infrastructure providers rather than on a US hyperscaler's EU region.