Every growing team ends up choosing, usually without meaning to, between two ways of buying software. Best-of-breed means the strongest tool for each job — the market leader for projects, another for HR, another for passwords — joined together with integrations. All-in-one means one suite that covers most jobs adequately, on one account. Both are reasonable. The mistake is choosing by default, one subscription at a time, and discovering the cost of the result two years later.
This piece is a framework for choosing deliberately. It is written by a company that sells an all-in-one suite, so it is worth saying up front: there are teams for whom best-of-breed is the right answer, and the section on when it wins is meant seriously.
What each approach is good at
| Best-of-breed | All-in-one | |
|---|---|---|
| Depth in one job | Deepest — the tool is the whole product | Enough for most teams, rarely the deepest |
| Integrations and add-ons | Large marketplaces | Fewer; the parts already share data |
| One record per person | No — a copy in every tool | Yes — one account, one set of roles |
| Onboarding and offboarding | Once per tool | Once |
| Price as you hire | Rises in every tool at once | Depends on the pricing model |
| Switching cost later | Low per tool, high in total | High for the suite, none between its parts |
What the separate tools cost
The visible cost is the subscriptions. Taking the list prices of six widely used tools — published on each vendor’s own pricing page and last checked on 24 September 2026 — a 20-person team pays the following a year:
| Job | Tool and plan | A year for 20 people |
|---|---|---|
| Project tracking | Jira Standard (Cloud) | $2,250 |
| Time tracking | Toggl Track Starter | $2,160 |
| Password manager | 1Password Teams Starter Pack / Business | $898 |
| Screen recording | Loom Business | $3,600 |
| File storage | Google Workspace Business Standard | $3,360 |
| HR | BambooHR Core | $3,000 |
| HR | Slack Pro | $1,740 |
| Total | $17,008 |
That is $17,008 a year before payroll, notes, or project profitability — and it rises with every hire, in every tool, because almost all of them charge per seat. The features page shows the same table at 5 and 50 people, with the pricing basis for each line so you can check the arithmetic.
The less visible costs — eight sets of invitations for every new starter, offboarding that misses one tool, permissions that drift apart, and the same person spelled three ways in three systems — are set out in the hidden cost of eight SaaS subscriptions. They are usually larger than the subscriptions, and they fall on the people least able to absorb them: whoever does HR and IT alongside their actual job.
When best-of-breed is the right choice
- One job is the business. If projects are your product — a large engineering organisation living in its issue tracker — the deepest tool for that job is worth its price and its integrations.
- You depend on a marketplace. If your workflows run on add-ons, automations and integrations with dozens of other systems, a suite with fewer of them will feel narrow.
- You have someone to run it. Best-of-breed works when an operations or IT person owns the joins between tools, the access reviews and the offboarding checklist.
- Your teams genuinely need different tools. A sales team and an engineering team may each be best served by their own specialist software.
When all-in-one is the right choice
- Nobody owns the stack. In a 10- to 200-person company the joins between tools are usually nobody’s job, which is how a leaver keeps access to the password manager.
- The data needs to line up. If hours should flow into project cost and payroll, or a hire should become an employee record without retyping, shared records matter more than depth in any one tool.
- You hire often. Per-seat pricing across many tools turns every hire into several price rises; a flat or bundled price does not.
- The jobs are standard. Most teams need good attendance, leave, projects, files and passwords — not the most configurable version of each.
A way to decide in an afternoon
- List every tool you pay for, its owner, and what it costs at today’s headcount and at next year’s.
- Mark the two or three tools your work genuinely depends on for depth. Keep those whatever you decide.
- For the rest, ask whether a suite would do the job adequately and whether the data would be more useful in one place.
- Count the offboarding steps a leaver needs today. If it is more than you can trust someone to remember, that is the real cost.
- Trial the suite on your own data before deciding — a demo with sample data proves very little.
Where Orbiz fits
Orbiz is an all-in-one suite of ten tools on one login — among them HRMS for hiring and people, AMS for attendance and leave, Cadence for projects, Vault for shared passwords, Grabr for screen recording and Filespace for files — priced as one flat figure per organisation with unlimited members. For the six tools in the table above, Orbiz costs $2,388 a year for 20 people on annual billing, against $17,008 for the separate subscriptions. It is deliberately not a CRM, an accounting system or a platform with an add-on marketplace, and the comparison pages say where each competitor is the better choice.
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