Your whole people operation, on software you own
Most growing companies run HR on a tangle of subscriptions — one tool for the org chart, another for time tracking, a payroll service that bills per head, a spreadsheet for leave and a shared drive full of PDFs. Arbor replaces that tangle with a single, self-hosted HR and payroll platform that covers the entire employee lifecycle: from the first job application, through onboarding, the working day, leave, pay, benefits, reviews and expenses — all in one place you fully own.
It is built for teams that want serious, enterprise-grade HR tooling without enterprise complexity or a SaaS bill that grows every time you hire.
Why Arbor
- You own it. Self-hosted on your own server and your own MySQL database, so sensitive HR and payroll data — salaries, bank details, ID numbers — stays in-house, not locked inside someone else's cloud.
- One purchase, no per-seat fees. A single license with unlimited employees, instead of a recurring per-head subscription that punishes you for growing.
- Designed to survive a security review. PII such as bank details, ID numbers and OAuth tokens is encrypted at rest, with two-factor authentication, an audit log and field-level visibility rules built in.
Who it's for
Arbor is designed for the people who actually run HR, not a call centre:
- Founders replacing BambooHR or Gusto at a fraction of the SaaS cost
- In-house IT teams retiring a $500-a-month subscription for a one-time purchase
- Agencies offering a white-label HR platform to their SMB clients
- Distributed and deskless teams that need clock-in, leave and pay in one place
- Multi-company groups managing several entities from one login
A complete tour of what's inside
Employees & org structure
An employee directory with search, filters and bulk CSV import sits at the centre, backed by a department hierarchy with assigned heads, an interactive org chart you can zoom and pan, a skills catalogue with gap finder, role-specific onboarding templates and custom fields on any entity. Multi-company support scopes employees cleanly across entities.
Recruiting & ATS
Post job openings to a public careers page, move candidates through a drag-and-drop Kanban board, screen résumés with AI fit scores, schedule interviews via Calendly or Cal.com, and send offer letters with e-signature — the whole hiring funnel in one workflow.
Time & attendance
Staff clock in and out from the web with IP tracking, or by Twilio SMS for deskless workers, with automatic late and half-day detection and a nightly auto-close for open shifts. Per-project timesheets with a billable toggle, shift patterns, a weekly scheduler grid and a team calendar with iCal feed round it out.
Leave management
Configurable leave types with paid toggles and colour coding, weekend-aware day counting, a manager approval workflow, a monthly accrual engine with tenure gates and caps, carryover rules and a country-aware holiday calendar — so balances always reflect reality.
Payroll
Run monthly payroll with draft, processed and paid states, powered by a progressive tax-bracket engine with automatic provident-fund and insurance calculation, multi-currency support with per-run FX rates, and anomaly detection that flags any pay swinging more than 20%. Payslips are generated as PDFs with DomPDF — no external service required.
Benefits administration
Manage health, dental, vision, life and 401(k) plans with coverage levels for self, spouse and family, a dependent registry with encrypted SSNs, open-enrolment windows and pre-tax deduction tracking.
Performance & growth
Run review cycles — self, manager, peer and upward — with AI summaries of strengths and improvements, track OKRs with auto-progressing key results, hold weekly check-ins and 1:1 meetings with shared agendas, and let an AI summariser write up the notes.
Surveys & eNPS
Launch pulse surveys and eNPS scoring with custom questions, an anonymous response option and AI sentiment analysis that extracts themes from free-text answers.
Expenses
Employees file expense reports with receipt uploads against admin-defined categories, routed through an approval and reimbursement workflow with a currency-aware audit trail.
Communication & self-service
A home-feed timeline carries pinned announcements, a kudos wall, and a celebration widget for birthdays and anniversaries, while a full inbox aggregates approvals, surveys and offers. Employees handle their own payslips, leave and details through self-service — and an "Ask HR" chatbot answers policy questions.
AI, your way
Optional AI features — résumé screening, review and 1:1 summaries, job-description drafting, survey sentiment, payroll-anomaly flags and the Ask-HR chatbot — run on a bring-your-own-key model, so you choose OpenAI, Anthropic or Google Gemini and keep your data on your terms.
A day with Arbor
A candidate applies through the careers page and lands on the hiring board; once hired, an onboarding template spins up their tasks automatically. They clock in from the web, file a leave request that routes to their manager for approval, and submit an expense with a photographed receipt. At month end, payroll runs against the tax engine, anomalies are flagged for review, and payslips appear in each employee's self-service portal as PDFs. Meanwhile a review cycle closes with AI-drafted summaries, a pulse survey reports its eNPS, and the whole company sees the new hire welcomed on the kudos wall — no spreadsheets, no juggling five subscriptions.
Built on a modern, maintainable stack
Arbor is built on Laravel with Livewire, Tailwind CSS, Blade and Alpine.js — a modern, well-supported stack that any Laravel developer can customise and extend. It runs on plain MySQL or MariaDB with no Redis, PostgreSQL or Node required at runtime, so it installs on basic LAMP and shared hosting as happily as on a standalone VPS. There is a dark mode, a command palette (⌘K), a Progressive Web App with offline clock-in, six interface languages, and enterprise touches like SCIM 2.0 provisioning, CIDR allowlists, SIEM export and GDPR self-service data export.
What you actually get
- Self-hosted on infrastructure you choose, with your data in your own MySQL
- Non-obfuscated source code you can read and adapt
- Commercial use rights under the Standard License
- A 5-step web installer — live in about ten minutes, no SSH required
- Pre-built vendor and assets so no Composer or npm is needed on the server
- Lifetime access to the version you buy, plus free updates and a self-heal upgrade mechanism
- Documentation — install, AI setup, social auth and features guides included
Try it before you buy
A live demo is available with one-click logins for Admin, HR, Manager and Employee, so you can see exactly what each role sees before committing.
Pricing, support & guarantee
Arbor is available under the Standard License for $59, with 6 months of author support included. Need longer? Extend to 12 months for +$8.85 or 18 months for +$14.75 at checkout. Every purchase includes lifetime access to free updates and is backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy with confidence.
Frequently asked questions
Is Arbor really self-hosted?
Yes — you install it on your own server (VPS, cPanel or shared LAMP hosting) with your own MySQL database, and keep full control of your data and source code.
Are there per-seat or monthly fees?
No. It is a one-time purchase under the Standard License with unlimited employees, plus optional paid support extensions and free updates.
Do I need an AI subscription to use it?
No. The AI features are optional and use a bring-your-own-key model for OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini — everything else works without them.
What if it is not right for me?
Every purchase is covered by a 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can try the live demo first.