Lattice HRIS Is Shutting Down: How to Migrate Without the Enterprise Price Tag

If your team relied on Lattice for leave requests, employee records, or time tracking, you already know the deadline: July 31, 2026. That's when Lattice shuts down its HRIS for good. Payroll access already ended on March 31.

Several competitors — HiBob, Factorial, BambooHR among them — are already publishing migration guides and comparison pages, all running variations of the same pitch: replace Lattice with our all-in-one platform. They're quoting $8-25 per employee per month and 6-8 week implementations, with HiBob's own migration timeline estimating 17 weeks from vendor selection to go-live. For a mid-size team that never used half of Lattice's HRIS features in the first place, that feels like solving the wrong problem at the wrong price.

This article takes a different approach. We'll walk through what actually happened to Lattice, what your team most likely used every day, how competitors are positioning themselves, and why a specialist tool focused on leave management, time tracking, and core HR might be a faster, cheaper, and more honest Lattice HRIS alternative than another platform promising to do everything.

The situation and our take

• Lattice HRIS shuts down July 31, 2026. Payroll already ended March 31. You've got roughly four months.
• The alternatives already in market pitch "full HRIS replacement" at $8-25 per employee per month with 6-8 week implementations. If you mainly used Lattice for leave management, time tracking, and employee records, you're overpaying for modules you'll never open.
• Calamari covers the daily-use HRIS functions — leave management with flexible policies you can adapt to most countries worldwide, time and attendance with nine clock-in methods, core HR with document management — starting at $2 per employee per month.
• Implementation takes 5-10 days, not 6-8 weeks.
• You can keep Lattice Talent Suite for performance management and run Calamari alongside it for the operational functions being sunset. Calamari's three core modules (Time Off, Time & Attendance, Core HR) cost $6.50 per employee per month on annual billing. Combined with Lattice Talent Suite at $11, that's $17.50 total — less than most standalone all-in-one alternatives charge on their own.

What happened to Lattice HRIS

Lattice announced its HRIS product at the Lattiverse conference in October 2024, positioning it as the natural extension of a platform already known for performance management and engagement. The pitch made sense on paper: one vendor for the entire employee lifecycle, from hiring to reviews to time off. Within months, Lattice reported 250% growth in HRIS customers.

Thirteen months later, Lattice told those same customers the HRIS was shutting down.

The timeline moved fast:

The industry reaction was blunt. Brett Ungashick from OutSail, an HRIS advisory firm, noted that "the service and support burden around payroll is heavier than it looks on a whiteboard" and that "APIs are great, but they don't come with the domain expertise earned from 20 years of tax edge cases that the incumbents have already tripped over." HR Launcher Lab put it more directly: "Design doesn't matter when payroll breaks or compliance fails. In core HR, operational maturity beats elegant UX every single time."

What stays

Lattice isn't disappearing entirely. The Talent Suite — performance reviews, goals and OKRs, 1:1s, engagement surveys, career pathing, and compensation planning — continues at $11 per seat per month, with add-ons for Engagement (+$4), Grow (+$4), and Compensation (+$6). There's a $4,000 minimum annual contract. If your team valued Lattice primarily for performance management, that part of the product isn't going anywhere.

What disappears

Everything on the HRIS and operational side: employee records, the custom workflow builder, PTO management, onboarding and offboarding workflows, people analytics, and the Report Builder. Payroll — which was US-only and built on Gusto's embedded infrastructure rather than Lattice's own engine — is already gone. Time tracking ($2/seat add-on) goes with it.

No formal migration path

Lattice hasn't announced a migration partner or provided an official export-and-switch guide. Customers are receiving credits for their remaining subscription and discounts on the Talent Suite, but the actual work of moving HRIS data to a new system is on you. Worth factoring in when you compare alternatives: the clock is running, and nobody's going to hand you a migration playbook.

What Lattice HRIS customers actually used every day

Before you start comparing alternatives, ask a more basic question: what did your team actually do in Lattice HRIS on a typical day?

Most mid-size HR teams using Lattice fell into a predictable pattern. The features they touched daily were a short list: checking who's off today, approving or submitting leave requests, looking someone up in the employee directory, and logging hours if the team used time tracking. Weekly, maybe running a timesheet report or updating an employee record after a new hire started. Monthly, pulling a payroll export or reviewing PTO balances.

The features Lattice marketed most heavily — the custom workflow builder, people analytics dashboards, the Report Builder — were tools that a small HR team of one to five people rarely had time to configure, let alone use regularly. Onboarding and offboarding workflows were set up once and revisited when something broke. Advanced permissions and field-level access controls mattered to compliance teams at larger organizations, not to a Series B startup with 80 employees and one HR generalist.

Here's a rough breakdown of how those features mapped to actual usage:

The point isn't that those quarterly and rarely-used features don't matter. For some teams they do. But if your daily work in Lattice was leave management, employee records, and time tracking, you don't need to replace every feature Lattice offered. You need to replace the ones you actually used — and ideally do them better.

That distinction matters when you're evaluating alternatives, because every competitor in the next section is going to pitch you on replacing everything at once.

How competitors are targeting Lattice customers

Within weeks of the Lattice announcement, competitors started publishing migration guides, comparison pages, and targeted landing pages. If you've been researching alternatives, you've probably already seen some of these. Here's what each major player is offering and what angle they're running.

HiBob published the most comprehensive response: a detailed blog post walking through the shutdown timeline, a five-vendor comparison table, a week-by-week migration timeline, and a list of questions to ask during vendor demos. Their pitch is straightforward — "look for a vendor whose core business is HRIS, not a company treating HR as a side project." A pointed shot at Lattice, but it also describes their own positioning: mid-market all-in-one HR platform for distributed teams. Pricing isn't published; implementation takes 6-8 weeks. Their own migration timeline, when you add up vendor selection (weeks 1-10) and implementation (weeks 11-17+), comes to at least 17 weeks from start to go-live.

Factorial went with a step-by-step migration guide and a fear-driven angle: "don't get left behind." They include a Factorial-vs-Lattice feature comparison table and five migration steps, but no pricing figures ("flexible pricing"), no implementation timeline, and no mention of other competitors. If you want a how-to-switch article that only considers one destination, this is it.

BambooHR hasn't published dedicated Lattice migration content, but it's showing up in most competitor comparisons and is likely the first name many HR teams reach for when they start searching. The pitch is familiar: established brand, clean interface, strong on the basics — employee records, PTO tracking, onboarding and offboarding workflows, applicant tracking. It targets US-focused SMBs up to around 500 employees, and that's largely where it performs well. Pricing runs roughly $12-22 per employee per month depending on tier, with implementation typically handled by BambooHR's onboarding team over several weeks. Time tracking is available but limited compared to what Lattice offered, and there's no equivalent to multi-method clock-in or attendance fraud prevention. If your team is US-based, already knows BambooHR, and needs a full HRIS replacement with hiring workflows and org charts, it's a reasonable fit. If you mainly used Lattice for leave, time tracking, and records — and don't need the broader HR suite — you'll be paying for a lot of features you won't use.

Rippling takes a different angle entirely — HR, IT, and finance on one platform. It's the choice if you want to manage devices, app access, and payroll alongside HR. That integration depth comes at a cost: pricing starts higher, implementation is more involved, and it's built for teams that need the full stack. For a Lattice customer who mainly wants an HRIS replacement, it's likely more platform than the job requires.

What the pricing actually looks like

Most of these platforms quote per-employee-per-month rates that look reasonable at first glance, typically somewhere between $8 and $25 depending on the vendor, plan tier, and team size. But those headline numbers can be misleading. Per-seat costs often scale inversely with headcount — a platform advertising $8 per employee at 100 seats might charge $15-20 for a team of 30. Nearly all of them require annual contracts, and most charge implementation fees on top — onboarding packages, dedicated migration specialists, configuration support — that can add thousands to the first-year cost.

Calamari charges no implementation fee. Setup is self-service, and the 14-day trial includes full configuration — not a sandbox with limited features.

The pattern

Every vendor is pitching a full HRIS replacement with 6-8 week implementations. They're all competing for the same position — the next all-in-one platform for your HR team. None of them are asking the question that matters most: did you actually need an all-in-one HRIS in the first place?

If the answer is yes — if your team genuinely used Lattice for payroll, benefits, org charts, advanced analytics, and custom workflows — then one of the vendors above might be the right fit. But if the answer looks more like the previous section — leave management, employee records, time tracking, and not much else — you're about to pay for a second platform full of features you won't use. Which is exactly how you ended up here.

Calamari — the specialist alternative for what you actually used

If you're looking for a Lattice HRIS alternative that covers what you actually used without the modules you didn't, this is it. Calamari isn't an all-in-one HRIS. It doesn't do payroll, benefits administration, recruiting, or compensation planning. What it does is cover the three functions that most Lattice HRIS customers used every day — leave management, time and attendance, and core HR — and do them with more depth than Lattice ever offered.

The product is modular. You pick the modules you need and pay only for those. Time Off starts at $2 per employee per month on annual billing. Time & Attendance is $2.50. Core HR is $2. You can run one, two, or all three.

Leave management that goes deeper than Lattice

Lattice's PTO management handled the basics: request time off, approve it, check balances. Calamari's leave engine is built around eight types of policy constraints — backdating restrictions, notice periods, minimum and maximum duration rules, substitute availability checks, employment tenure barriers, leave type dependencies, weekly limits, and conflict prevention. You configure the rules once, and the system enforces them automatically. When an employee's request gets blocked, they see exactly why and when they'll become eligible.

Leave policies can be adapted per country, per office, or per contract type. Different holiday calendars per location, accrual rules that match local labor law, balances tracked in days or hours, automatic carryover with configurable limits and expiration dates. The interface is available in 13 languages, including English, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Serbian, Croatian, and Brazilian Portuguese.

When an employee's leave is approved, it syncs automatically — to Google Calendar, Outlook calendar, Slack status, and Teams availability. Both Outlook and Google Calendar go a step further: Calamari creates Out of Office events that automatically decline conflicting meeting invitations, and in Outlook it also sets the autoresponder. Nobody needs to remember to toggle anything on their last day before vacation.

Time and attendance with nine clock-in methods

Lattice offered time tracking as a $2 add-on with web and mobile clock-in. Calamari offers nine methods, each designed for a different work scenario:

1. Web browser — for desk-based employees
2. Mobile app with GPS — for field teams and remote workers
3. Dynamic QR codes — auto-refresh on screen, screenshot-proof, ideal for shared workspaces
4. Static printed QR codes — simple, no power needed, works at any entrance
5. NFC cards and tags — programmable via phone, admin can assign and revoke remotely
6. iBeacon (Bluetooth) — automatic clock in and out when entering or leaving the office, zero manual action
7. Kiosk mode — any tablet or smartphone as a shared terminal, supports QR, NFC, and photo capture
8. Slack — a visual dashboard inside Slack showing a clock, work schedule, start/stop/break buttons, project logging, and request approvals
9. MS Teams — a visual dashboard showing clock, availability status, planned absences, clock in/out, and leave approvals

The kiosk with photo capture and dynamic QR codes address a real problem Lattice never solved: buddy punching and time fraud. Employees clock in with a photo on the shared kiosk, and dynamic QR codes can't be screenshotted and forwarded. Geofencing restricts clock-in to approved areas — if someone isn't physically at the location, the system blocks the attempt. For teams returning to office or running hybrid setups, iBeacon removes friction entirely — walk in, clock in, no tapping required.

Anomaly detection runs on top of all clock-in methods. Late arrivals, early departures, short shifts, and unclosed sessions trigger real-time alerts to managers. The system catches patterns that manual review would miss.

Core HR and document management

Lattice HRIS included employee records with custom fields, an employee directory, and basic document handling. Calamari's Core HR module covers the same ground and adds structured document management — a configurable folder hierarchy with granular access control, multi-stage approval workflows (manager, then legal, then HR), full version history, and mobile upload so employees can photograph and submit documents from their phone.

Employee profiles include "Work With Me" sections where team members describe their communication style and collaboration preferences — a small feature, but one that helps distributed teams build context around people they've never met in person.

Smart Tables in the People view let HR edit employee data in bulk — select cells across rows, update multiple records at once. For a team of one to five HR people managing hundreds of employees, that saves hours of clicking through individual profiles.

Reporting covers eleven categories: People, Timesheet Details, Entitlement, Requests, Payroll, Attendance, Timesheet, Activities, Abnormalities, Presence List, and Projects. Each report can be filtered by employee, team, contract type, and date range, and exported to Excel. Large reports generate asynchronously in the background and are available for download for seven days.

Archived employees and their documents are retained at no additional cost — relevant for companies operating under labor laws that require multi-year record keeping.

Keep Lattice for performance, use Calamari for operations

Here's the scenario most Lattice customers aren't hearing from competitors: you don't have to pick one platform for everything.

Lattice Talent Suite continues at $11 per seat per month. It still covers performance reviews, goals and OKRs, 1:1s, engagement surveys, and compensation planning. If those features work for your team, keep them.

Add Calamari for the operational functions Lattice is dropping — leave management, time and attendance, core HR with document management. The three modules together cost $6.50 per employee per month on annual billing. Combined with Lattice Talent Suite, that's $17.50 per employee — less than most standalone all-in-one alternatives charge for their platform alone, and you keep the performance management tooling your team already knows.

If you decide later that you want to consolidate performance management too, Calamari offers a Performance module at $2.50 per employee per month. It's lighter than Lattice's offering — no career pathing, no compensation planning — but it covers review cycles, goals, and feedback for teams that don't need the full Talent Suite.

Feature-by-feature comparison

The table below compares Calamari with what Lattice HRIS offered before the shutdown announcement. We're being honest about where Calamari wins, where the two are roughly equal, and where Calamari doesn't compete.

Where Calamari wins: leave policy depth, clock-in flexibility, document management, Slack and Teams integration, calendar automation, fraud prevention, multi-language support, implementation speed, and pricing.

Where Calamari doesn't compete: onboarding and offboarding workflows, custom workflow builder, org charts, people analytics, and payroll. If these were critical to your Lattice usage, you'll need either an all-in-one platform or additional tools alongside Calamari.

What it actually costs

Calamari publishes its pricing on the website. There are no tiers, no "contact sales" gates, and no implementation fees. You pick the modules you need, and the per-employee cost scales linearly — the same rate whether you have 10 employees or 500.

Minimum: 10 seats. No minimum annual contract. 14-day free trial, no credit card required.

Typical configurations for Lattice migrators

If you mainly used Lattice for leave management and employee records:

Time Off + Core HR = $4.00 per employee per month (annual billing).

If you also used time tracking:

Time Off + Time & Attendance + Core HR = $6.50 per employee per month (annual billing).

If you want to replace Lattice entirely, including performance:

All four modules = $9.00 per employee per month (annual billing).

The dual-vendor math

If you chose Lattice primarily for performance management, you might want to keep the Talent Suite and only replace the operational HRIS functions that are being shut down. Here's what the combined cost looks like:

How that compares

Most all-in-one HRIS competitors quote $8-25 per employee per month, but those are list prices. Smaller teams often pay significantly more per seat, and nearly all vendors charge implementation fees on top. One more thing to keep in mind: according to Vendr procurement data, Lattice customers with negotiated contracts were paying 32-39% less than the published price, with even steeper discounts on multi-year commitments. So if you're comparing a new vendor's list price against what you actually paid at Lattice, the savings may be smaller than they appear.

Calamari's pricing is the same whether you pay monthly or commit annually (annual just gives you a lower rate). There's no implementation fee, no onboarding package to purchase, and no minimum annual contract. For a 100-person team on the three-module annual plan, that's $650 per month — $7,800 per year — with full functionality from day one.

How to migrate from Lattice to Calamari

The competitors in this space quote 6-8 week implementations. HiBob's own migration timeline adds up to 17 weeks when you include vendor selection. Lattice HRIS access ends July 31, 2026, and Lattice hasn't provided a formal migration path. Here's a realistic migration plan that takes 5-10 business days.

If you're still evaluating vendors and want a structured framework for comparing options, this guide on choosing the right HR system covers the full checklist — from security and data access levels to integration requirements and migration planning.

Step 1: Export your data from Lattice now

Don't wait. Even if you haven't picked a replacement yet, export everything while you still have access. The key datasets:

• Employee records — names, roles, departments, managers, contact details, custom fields
• Time Off Balances — current entitlements, used days, carryover
• Compensation History — if relevant for your records
• Documents — download anything stored in Lattice (contracts, signed policies, onboarding docs)

Lattice hasn't provided a formal export guide, so use whatever admin export tools are available in your account. CSV is the safest format. The earlier you do this, the more time you have to catch gaps.

Before exporting, decide on the scope. Do you need leave history from previous years, or just current-year balances? Migrating everything takes more effort, but it also means you don't need a separate archive. Consider who owns each data source — HR, IT, or a combination — and assign clear responsibility early. If you have multiple data sources beyond Lattice (spreadsheets, shared drives, other tools), map them all before you start.

Step 2: Set up Calamari (1-2 days)

Start a free 14-day trial at calamari.io. No credit card, no sales call. If you want to see the product in action before configuring it yourself, book a demo and our team will walk you through a setup tailored to your company.

During the trial, configure the basics:

• Create your company structure — departments, teams, locations
• Set up leave types and policies per country or office
• Configure holiday calendars for each location
• Set working time schedules
• Connect SSO (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or SAML)
• Enable Slack or Teams integration

The setup is self-service, but you're not on your own. Calamari's customer success team helps with migrations every day — from structuring your import files to configuring policies that match your current setup. There's no onboarding fee for this support.

Step 3: Import data (1 day)

Calamari accepts CSV imports for employee records and leave balances. Map the columns from your Lattice export to Calamari's fields, upload, and verify. Leave balances — current entitlements, used days, carryover — can be imported so employees don't lose their accrued time off.

The biggest challenge in any HRIS migration isn't the software — it's preparing clean input data. Field mappings, date formats, policy rules that don't translate one-to-one between systems. This is where Calamari's customer success team adds the most value. They work with new customers on migrations continuously and can spot data preparation issues before they become go-live problems.

Pay attention to how accruals work in Calamari versus Lattice. Verify that policy settings — notice periods, carryover limits, entitlement rules — match what your team expects. This is the step where subtle differences between systems surface, and it's easier to catch them before go-live than after.

If you have documents to migrate, the Core HR module's document management supports bulk upload and mobile upload (photo scan from phone).

Step 4: Activate integrations (1 day)

Connect the tools your team already uses:

• Slack or MS Teams — visual dashboards for clock-in, leave requests, balance checks, and approvals
• Google Calendar or Outlook — automatic leave sync with Out of Office events and autoresponder
• Payroll export — configure export format for your payroll provider
• Jira, Asana, or Basecamp — if your team tracks project time

Most integrations are toggle-and-configure. Review which integrations your team relied on in Lattice — calendar blocking, Slack notifications, Google Workspace sync — and make sure the equivalent is set up in Calamari before you go live. The Slack and Teams apps mean employees interact with Calamari inside the tools they already have open, which effectively eliminates the "where do I go to request time off?" training problem.

Step 5: Go live

Communicate the transition timeline clearly to your team. If there's a data freeze period between exporting from Lattice and going live in Calamari, make sure everyone — HR, managers, payroll — knows the schedule and can plan around it.

Send invitations to employees. If you've connected Slack or Teams, most of the daily interactions happen there — employees don't need to learn a new interface for the basics. Leave requests, balance checks, clock-in, and approvals all work from the chat tool they already use.

For time and attendance, choose your clock-in methods per location: web for remote workers, iBeacon for office auto-detection, kiosk for shared spaces, QR or NFC for warehouse or field teams.

Total timeline

Compare that to 6-8 weeks for most all-in-one platforms, or 17+ weeks if you follow HiBob's recommended process from vendor selection to go-live.

Addressing the top concerns

Payroll. Calamari doesn't process payroll, and that's a deliberate choice. Payroll is jurisdiction-specific, tightly regulated, and the main reason Lattice's HRIS failed — as Brett Ungashick from OutSail put it, "the service and support burden around payroll is heavier than it looks on a whiteboard." Instead, Calamari generates payroll-ready data exports formatted for your payroll provider. You keep your current payroll system and feed it clean, approved attendance and leave data. No vendor lock-in, no switching payroll providers just because you switched your leave management tool.

Employee adoption. This is the concern that kills most HR software rollouts. The answer depends on where employees interact with the tool. If they have to log in to a separate app every time they want to request a day off, adoption will be slow. Calamari's Slack and Teams integrations are designed to make the separate app unnecessary for daily tasks. Leave requests, balance checks, clock-in, approvals, and team availability all work from visual dashboards inside the chat tool employees already have open. When someone goes on leave, their Slack status and Outlook or Google Calendar update automatically. For most employees, Calamari runs inside Slack or Teams — not another browser tab to remember.

Company size and stability. Fair concern, given the context. Calamari serves over 130,000 employees across 106 countries. Leave management, time tracking, and core HR are the company's core business — not a side project bolted onto a performance management platform. Lattice's HRIS failed because it was an expansion into unfamiliar territory. Calamari has been building leave and attendance tools from day one. The product isn't trying to become an all-in-one platform. It does three things well, charges transparently for them, and has been doing so for years.

Keeping Lattice for performance. Yes, that works. Lattice Talent Suite — performance reviews, goals, OKRs, 1:1s, engagement surveys, compensation planning — continues at $11 per seat per month. Lattice itself encourages customers to keep the Talent Suite and find a separate solution for the HRIS functions being discontinued. Calamari and Lattice Talent Suite run independently with no conflicts.

Global teams. Lattice HRIS was US-centric — payroll was US-only, and multi-country compliance was minimal. Calamari supports leave policies adapted to local labor laws across 106 countries, with different holiday calendars per location, accrual rules per contract type, and an interface available in 13 languages. EU data handling and GDPR compliance are built in, not bolted on.

‍

Looking for a Lattice HRIS alternative that doesn't overcharge for features you'll never use? Start a free 14-day trial — no credit card, no sales call, full functionality from day one. Not sure if Calamari is the right fit for your team's specific setup? Book a demo and we'll walk you through your use case.