Breathe HR vs Mellow: Payroll Capability Compared

Breathe HR is a well-established HR platform built for small UK businesses. It handles leave management, document storage, performance reviews, and employee records capably. What it does not do is payroll. If you use Breathe for HR, you send your payroll data to Xero or another external provider to run the actual PAYE calculation and RTI submission. Breathe and your payroll system are separate tools that require manual data transfer between them.

Mellow calculates PAYE and National Insurance natively. The payroll engine sits inside the same platform as your HR data — so a new hire's details flow into the payroll run automatically, a salary change in the HR system updates the next payroll calculation, and there is no data re-entry between the two. The only manual HMRC step in Mellow is RTI submission, which is done using your Government Gateway credentials directly within the platform.

For businesses that currently use Breathe plus a separate payroll tool, the main question is whether the two-system overhead — data reconciliation, subscription costs, potential for errors at the handoff — outweighs the cost of switching. The answer depends on your current payroll complexity and how often you make changes. If you are growing and finding the handoff is creating errors or delays, Mellow's native payroll removes that friction.