Exact Officient: what it is, what it costs, and when an alternative fits better (2026)

In one sentence: Officient (now Exact Officient) is a Belgian-built HR platform that centralises and digitises your HR administration; Peepel is an agentic execution engine that performs that HR work for you. Both are made for Belgian SMEs - the difference is whether HR work gets organised or executed.

Why people look for an Officient alternative

Type officient.io today and you land on exact.com. The product's own site no longer exists: Officient is now called Exact Officient and has become a module inside Exact's business-software suite. Exact acquired the company in September 2020, when it served more than 4,000 clients and over 35,000 employees (Exact). For teams that have run the platform for years, that move is usually the moment the question of an alternative starts.

Officient earned a strong position in the Belgian SME market: a clean, user-friendly platform that pulled HR administration out of Excel and into one system.

The most common reason teams start shopping for an alternative is not that Officient is bad - it's that it organises HR work rather than doing it. It gives you a tidy dashboard, digital contracts and a self-service app, but your HR team still clicks through every step. If your goal is to remove the administrative load rather than reorganise it, that's the ceiling you run into. This is exactly the gap Peepel is built for.

How they compare

Besides these two you'll come across four more alternatives: HoorayHR, Personio, AFAS and the HR portal of your own social secretariat. They're covered further down in which other alternatives will you come across.

What does Officient do well?

Officient is a genuinely good system of record, and for many Belgian SMEs it's the right tool.

• Mature and proven. By the time Exact acquired it in 2020, Officient already served more than 4,000 clients covering some 35,000 employees. That's a well-tested product with a large Belgian install base.
• Deep local payroll coupling. Officient couples natively with the major Belgian social secretariats - SD Worx, ADMB, Acerta, Partena and Securex - so approved data flows to the secretariat without duplicate entry. For Belgian payroll, that breadth is a real, verifiable strength.
• User-friendly. Reviewers consistently praise how little training the platform and its self-service app need, and how fast the support team responds.
• Exact backing. As part of Exact, Officient sits alongside accounting and ERP tooling - useful if you already run Exact for finance and want HR in the same family.

If what you need is a clean, well-supported place to store and organise HR data with solid Belgian payroll connections, Officient is a credible choice.

Where does Officient fall short for SMEs that want execution?

It organises the work, it doesn't do it

Officient's model is to centralise HR data and digitise the admin around it: contracts, documents, leave requests, self-service. That's a big step up from Excel. But the work still runs through your team - you configure the module, you action the request, you push the data. On the 4 levels of HR software, that's a system of record with a workflow layer (levels 2-3): organising work efficiently, not removing it. And there's a lot of it to remove - HR teams spend as much as 57% of their time on administrative tasks (Deloitte); organising that admin faster still leaves it on someone's desk.

AI is not the foundation

Officient automates routing and admin, but it was not built around agentic AI. It doesn't take an instruction in natural language and run the whole workflow. It doesn't reason over your data and surface what you didn't think to ask. Adding AI features to a system of record doesn't change its level - only who executes the task does (more here). And the market is moving the other way: Gartner expects 40% of enterprise apps to include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from under 5% in 2025 - toward execution, not just organisation.

HR is one module in a bigger suite

Since the Exact acquisition, Officient is part of a broad business-software portfolio. That's an advantage if you want HR next to accounting, but it also means HR competes for roadmap focus inside a large ERP company. Peepel does one thing - agentic HR - and goes deep on executing it.

What does Peepel do differently?

Agents do the work; you approve

With Peepel you describe the task in plain language and its agents run it end-to-end - onboarding, leave, contracts, performance, payroll prep - across your people data, documents, calendar and payroll feed. A human stays in the loop by design: the agent pauses for approval where policy or judgement is needed, because the software doesn't hold every piece of context. You manage exceptions, not processes.

Built AI-native, not retrofitted

Peepel was designed from day one around execution and proactive intelligence, not a system of record with AI bolted on. It surfaces findings without being asked - an onboarding cohort underperforming, a benefit going unclaimed, a policy breach - before anyone runs a report.

Flat, transparent pricing

Peepel is €9.50 per employee per month, all modules included, no setup fee, cancel monthly. What you see is what you pay - no base licence, no tier gating, no sales call to model your cost.

The honest caveat: young vs established

We'd rather be straight than oversell: Peepel is the younger, fast-growing product here, not the decade-deep incumbent. Officient has the years of track record and the Exact backing; Peepel doesn't yet. What you get in exchange is an architecture built for where HR software is going - agentic execution - rather than a proven system of record retrofitted with automation. If you want the safest, most established option, that's a genuine point for Officient. If you want the model HR software is moving toward, that's Peepel.

Key takeaway: Officient centralises and digitises your HR admin so you can do it faster; Peepel executes the admin so you don't have to. Not better - a different level: level 4 (system of execution) rather than level 2-3.

Switching from Officient is a 15-minute job

The biggest reason teams stay on a tool they've outgrown is the pain of moving. Peepel removes it: migrating from Officient to Peepel takes about 15 minutes. Everything you keep in Officient - people, contracts, documents, structure - is copied straight into Peepel, so there's no separate setup, no data re-entry and no implementation project to schedule. You can have your own data running in Peepel the same day you decide to look.

That matters because switching cost, not features, is what usually keeps a team on software it has already outgrown. Take that cost close to zero and the only question left is which model you actually want: organise the work, or have it done.

Key takeaway: the switching cost that normally keeps you on Officient barely exists here - a roughly 15-minute migration with your data copied across, not a multi-week implementation.

How do the prices compare?

Peepel charges one fixed price: €9.50 per employee per month, with all modules and digital signing included and no setup fees.

Both charge per employee, and Officient is a little cheaper per head - no point hiding it. Compare on your own numbers.

• Officient (Exact Officient): around €7.90 per employee per month (excl. VAT), with a minimum monthly invoice of about €208.50 and a 5-employee minimum. Some capabilities are paid add-ons - e-signing via itsme, for instance, is billed as credits on top.
• Peepel: €9.50 per employee per month, all modules and e-signing included, no setup fee.

For a 30-person team that's roughly €237/month on Officient (at €7.90pp) versus €285/month on Peepel (at €9.50pp), so Peepel is a bit more per head. The honest trade-off is what the price buys: Officient gives you the lower rate with a modular/add-on structure; Peepel gives you a flat, all-in rate with every module and e-signing included, and the agentic execution model on top. Choose Peepel for what it does, not because it's cheaper - because on sticker price alone it isn't.

When to choose Officient

• You want a proven, user-friendly Belgian system of record and don't need the work executed for you.
• You want the safest, most established option - years of track record and a large install base weigh more than being on the newest model.
• Native coupling with a specific social secretariat across the big five is your top priority.
• You already run Exact for accounting/ERP and want HR in the same suite.

When to choose Peepel

• Your goal is to remove HR administration, not reorganise it - you want workflows executed, not just digitised.
• You want agentic AI as the engine (natural-language execution, proactive insights), not a feature on top of a record.
• You want transparent, all-in per-employee pricing and a platform focused solely on agentic HR.

If that's the direction you want HR to take, book a demo and we'll run one of your own workflows end-to-end, so you can see the difference between organising the work and having it done.

Which other alternatives will you come across?

HoorayHR positions itself explicitly as the alternative to Officient and therefore ranks high in search results. It's a Dutch package with a Belgian site: €7.50 per user per month on Core, €9.25 on Plus, with time tracking, multi-entity and expenses as paid add-ons and digital signing capped at 3 to 5 signatures per employee per year (pricing). The leave module follows Dutch leave types and the payroll connectors are Nmbrs, AFAS, Loket.nl and Salar. For a Belgian payroll process the question is therefore which social secretariat they connect to; those names aren't on their site.

Personio is the broad European HR suite with the largest installed base, strong as soon as you also want recruitment in the same system. Personio has stopped publishing rates since 2026 and names no Belgian payroll connector publicly. See Peepel vs Personio.

AFAS has the strongest public record on Belgian payroll connectors of them all, with the system names included: eBlox (SD Worx), ExpertSalary (Partena), Hora (Liantis), Dots (Attentia), plus direct connectors with Acerta and Group S (AFAS Belgium). Expect an implementation project of months and pricing through a partner. Above 200 employees with an existing ERP, that's the safer bet.

Your own social secretariat. Nine out of ten Belgian private-sector employers already work with a secretariat, and they all offer their own HR portal. Securex even resells Officient directly. Ask what your current contract already includes before you buy something new.

Related reading

The 4 levels of HR software · Best HRIS in Belgium 2026 · Peepel vs. Personio