Braudit or HRIS platforms: What to use?

Most companies start using technology to manage their human resources with an HRIS and it makes sense. It's essential for organisations to have a system of record for employees that handles payroll, benefits, leave, compliance, and sometimes even performance reviews. It’s the digital backbone of people operations.

But as teams grow, a familiar challenge emerges: organisations start mistaking HR systems for performance systems. Many HR tools include features like goals, reviews, and ratings but they rarely provide the continuous visibility or context needed to understand how performance is evolving in real time.

That's where a platform like Braudit comes in. But we've had organisations assume that Braudit is just a duplicate of their HRIS. Is it true?

The short answer: No.
The longer answer: HRIS platforms and Braudit live in the same orbit but serve fundamentally different purposes.

HRIS platforms weren’t built to drive performance. They were built to manage records. And when it comes to the real, day-to-day work of improving productivity and outcomes, the difference between an HRIS and a platform like Braudit couldn’t be clearer.

A record, not the reality

Think of an HRIS as the infrastructure that keeps the company’s people operations stable. It’s the database of truth for employee information — contracts, compensation, time off, job titles, tax forms. HRIS tools are invaluable because without them, you’d drown in paperwork and compliance chaos. What they don’t do, however, is improve your team's performance and how work gets done.

Most HRIS platforms include performance management modules because it checks a box. A company looking for a one-stop shop will see “performance reviews” in the feature list and assume it’s solved. But under the hood, these modules are designed for administration, not optimisation.

Here’s what that typically looks like:

• Annual or semi-annual review cycles.
• Goal-setting frameworks (OKRs, KPIs, or custom fields).
• Manager feedback forms.
• A rating system (stars, percentages, or scales).

Useful? Yes.
Complete? Far from it.

HRIS platforms capture performance data the same way they capture payroll data — as static records. A review is logged, a rating is stored, and the data is archived. performance management in HRIS tools is retrospective and administrative. It's more about documenting performance than understanding or improving it. That’s the critical gap.

An HRIS is excellent at answering questions like:

• When is John due for his review?
• Has Sarah’s compensation adjustment been approved?
• Did the manager complete feedback for all direct reports?

Those are essential HR functions but they’re not the same as understanding performance.

Braudit is where work speaks

Braudit was built for something entirely different. It’s designed to live in the flow of how your team works, tracking what’s being done, how your team gets things done, and how those patterns evolve over time. Braudit doesn’t replace your HRIS; it sits alongside it, addressing the blind spot.

Instead of months for a review to capture a blurred snapshot of performance, Braudit tracks the daily reality of work: tasks completed, goals progress, KPIs met and enables your team to generate data-based reviews at anytime in a matter of seconds. It connects the dots between productivity (output) and performance (quality) to reveal trends as they happen.

Braudit doesn’t just store performance data. It interprets it — generating performance insights grounded in real work, enriched with context, and benchmarked against past trends.

Where an HRIS helps you tick the box of a review cycle, Braudit helps you understand the story behind the how your team works:

• Who is consistently delivering outcomes?
• Where are productivity bottlenecks forming?
• Which goals are being hit, missed, or quietly abandoned?

This isn’t about replacing your HRIS but complementing it with a system built to make performance visible and actionable.

In Braudit, performance isn’t a static score managers assign once or twice a year. It’s a living thing that's clear, continuous, and connected to real work.

“We already use an HRIS...”

This is the most common objection we hear. And it usually comes from a place of assumption:

• “Our HRIS lets us set OKRs, so we’re covered.”
• “We already run reviews inside our HR platform, so why use another tool?”
• “Adding Braudit feels like an overlap.”

The reality is that HRIS performance modules don’t capture the day-to-day execution that defines true performance. They don’t show which teams are over-delivering, who’s struggling with deadlines, or how productivity fluctuates across projects or teams.

Instead, they treat performance as an event. A periodic assessment rather than a continuous narrative. But with Braudit, things are different.

Optimisation vs administration

HRIS platforms are brilliant at administration. They are great at ensuring information is structured, accessible, and compliant. But they aren’t built to enable the optimisation of your team's performance like Braudit.

Optimisation requires a different toolkit:

• Real-time tracking of productivity and performance.
• Multi-level ratings and insights.
• Auto-generated performance reviews created from work data.
• Benchmarks comparing individuals, teams, and historical performance.
• Trends that spotlight improvement and decline — not just static scores.

In other words, Braudit isn’t a record system. It’s an intelligent, continuous performance engine.

Together, not instead

Your HRIS tells you who someone is inside your organisation.
Braudit shows you how they perform, contribute, and grow over time.

Your HRIS might tell you that an employee has been in their role for two years, taken 10 days of leave, and scored 4 out of 5 stars in their last review. Braudit, meanwhile, reveals that over the past quarter, they completed 95% of their tasks on time, had a productivity-to-performance ratio of 0.8, averaged 4.8 stars in performance check-ins, and have a consistency score of 82%.

Without Braudit, performance management risks becoming a structured but disconnected HR process. Without an HRIS, performance insights lack the backbone of compliance, compensation, and people data.

When the two work in tandem, you get the best of both worlds: the administrative stability HR needs, and the performance intelligence leadership demands.

One is a profile. The other is a story. And in the future of work, it’s the story that matters.

All about outcomes

When companies run HRIS alone, performance often remains a compliance exercise: something HR teams push through once or twice a year to meet policy requirements. But when HRIS and Braudit run together, performance becomes a living discipline.

Managers don’t just “complete” reviews; they learn how their teams are growing, where bottlenecks form, and what interventions make the biggest difference. Employees don’t just receive ratings; they see their own trends, strengths, and opportunities laid bare in ways that feel actionable, not judgmental.

The result isn’t just better documentation of performance. It’s better performance itself.

Measurement to optimisation

Once performance becomes visible, measurement stops being the end goal, but becomes the starting point. A Performance Intelligence platform like Braudit helps organisations move from simply tracking what happened to understanding why it happened and how to improve it.

Performance visibility gives leaders clarity on who’s excelling, where teams are getting stuck, and how work patterns influence outcomes. But optimisation is where real transformation begins. When organisations can see performance in context, they can act with precision: balancing workloads, aligning goals, and supporting growth where it matters most.

This creates a powerful feedback loop as visibility drives action, and action fuels growth. Over time, organisations don't just perform better; they learn faster, adapt faster, and sustains higher performance across every level.

In conclusion...

The belief that Braudit duplicates HRIS functionality is understandable, but only if you look at feature lists instead of outcomes. Both systems talk about “performance.” But they mean different things.

HRIS means performance as a recorded event.
Braudit means performance as a continuous reality.

Together, they give you the full picture: the system of record and the system of optimisation. The who and the how. The profile and the story.

That’s not duplication. That’s synergy.