ANKASTRA vs Keka: Which Attendance & Payroll System is Right for Your Manufacturing Enterprise?

Keka is the HR software that Indian technology companies recommend to each other.

ANKASTRA was built specifically for Indian manufacturing — steel plants, foundries, pharmaceutical units, automotive suppliers, and facilities where the attendance challenge is 400 contract workers at a biometric gate at 6:00 AM, not a distributed remote team clocking in on a smartphone app.

Both are good products. They solve different problems. This comparison is honest about both.

Disclosure: ANKASTRA is Ajinkya Technologies’ own product. We have noted Keka’s genuine strengths where they exist. All feature claims are verifiable from public documentation as of June 2026.

Feature Comparison

Where ANKASTRA Wins for Manufacturing

Factory-floor attendance that works in real conditions

Keka’s selfie attendance is excellent for a remote software developer checking in from home. It is not designed for 600 workers filing through a factory gate in the 10 minutes before the 6:00 AM shift start, in a facility where personal smartphone use on the floor may be restricted.

ANKASTRA deploys kiosk-mode hardware at gate points — face recognition terminals or biometric readers — that process attendance automatically as workers pass through. The system handles low-light conditions common in early-morning industrial settings, dust and protective equipment that partially obscures faces, and the queue management challenge of high-volume shift changes. The Flutter kiosk app operates offline, queuing punches locally and syncing when connectivity is restored.

Contract workforce management that is actually complete

At most Indian manufacturing facilities, contract workers represent 40–70% of total headcount. Keka’s HR model is built around the permanent employee — a PAN number, a CTC, a bank account. Contract workers who are legally employed by a contractor company but physically working at your facility do not map cleanly to this model.

ANKASTRA’s data model was designed from the ground up to handle both. Contractor companies have their own portal. Their workers’ attendance is tracked against your facility’s biometric hardware. At month end, contractor billing is automatically calculated and a billing statement is generated — days worked per worker, applicable rate per category, statutory deductions handled by the facility versus the contractor. What is typically a 5-day manual exercise becomes a 4-hour verification.

Statutory compliance for the actual geography of Indian manufacturing

Indian manufacturing is not concentrated in Bengaluru and Hyderabad. Plants are in Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal. Professional Tax rates differ in every state. Labour Welfare Fund rates differ. Some factory-specific statutory registers — Form 12, Form 15, Form 25 — are mandated under the Factories Act and enforced by state factory inspectors.

ANKASTRA’s compliance engine covers all 28 states and 8 Union Territories with rate tables maintained and updated at each state budget. Factories Act compliance registers are auto-generated. When a factory inspector arrives unannounced, the compliance team can print every required register immediately.

The SAP and ERP integration story

Most large manufacturing enterprises run SAP or an equivalent ERP. ANKASTRA’s REST API integration with SAP enables real-time posting of attendance-linked cost centre allocations, contract labour billing postings, and leave liability accruals. Keka’s SAP integration is limited and primarily suitable for basic payroll data exchange rather than the full operational integration that manufacturing clients require.

Where Keka Wins

User interface and mobile experience. Keka’s product design is genuinely excellent — clean, modern, intuitive for the office-based employee. The mobile app is well-built and employees adopt it easily. ANKASTRA’s priority is operational reliability for manufacturing environments; the UI is functional rather than beautiful.

Performance management and employee experience features. Keka has built a comprehensive performance management, OKR, and employee engagement suite. For technology and services companies where career development tools matter as much as payroll accuracy, Keka offers more in this dimension. ANKASTRA is focused on attendance, workforce management, and payroll — it does not offer performance management modules.

Ecosystem integrations for tech companies. Keka integrates with tools common in technology company stacks — JIRA, Slack, various ATS platforms. For a SaaS or IT services company, this ecosystem fit matters. It is irrelevant for a steel plant.

The Bottom Line for Manufacturing HR Managers

If you run HR or operations at an Indian manufacturing enterprise — and your workforce includes factory-floor shift workers, contract labour, biometric attendance hardware, multi-state statutory compliance, and SAP or ERP integration requirements — ANKASTRA was built for you. Keka was not.

If you run HR at a technology company, a services firm, or a modern corporate office with standard attendance and payroll requirements, Keka is an excellent choice. ANKASTRA would be over-engineered for your needs.

The right choice is the one that was built for your context.

Last updated: June 2026. Feature comparisons based on publicly available documentation. Contact us if any information is inaccurate and we will update promptly.

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