Joinly vs Hire2Retire

Where they overlap

Both read the HR system as the source of truth and turn a hire, a change and a termination into the corresponding directory actions: create the account, put it in the right groups, update it when the role changes, disable it when the person leaves. Both map HR attributes to directory attributes, both handle Active Directory and Entra ID, and both are sold as no-code configuration rather than a scripting project. If your only question is "can it do joiner-mover-leaver from my HR system", the answer is yes for both.

Where they differ

• Market and hosting. RoboMQ is a US company and its source list leans toward North American HR and payroll systems. Joinly is Dutch, hosts in the EU, is ISO 27001-certified and its source list covers the European HR landscape — AFAS, Nmbrs, Visma, SD Worx, Personio, PayFit, Zucchetti, Factorial and the Nordic systems — alongside the global ones. For an organisation subject to GDPR and NIS2, where the processor sits is a question, not a detail.
• Breadth versus depth. Hire2Retire lists Google Workspace and Okta as targets; Joinly does not, and says so. Joinly's depth is Microsoft: Entra ID through Graph including licences, Temporary Access Pass, sessions and soft delete; Exchange (shared mailbox, delegation, rules); SharePoint permissions; Teams; and the Microsoft 365 licence lifecycle. If your identity platform is Microsoft, that depth is the product; if it is Google or Okta, Joinly is the wrong tool.
• Beyond the directory. Joinly's workflows continue into the service desk — an incident in TOPdesk, a request in Freshservice — and into any application with a webhook, with each step waiting for the previous one. How far Hire2Retire's workflows extend past the directory and its listed applications we cannot say from its public pages.
• The brake. Joinly's dry run with Excel export, per-run thresholds, read-only mode and the 20% stop are documented product features. We have not found an equivalent described on Hire2Retire's pages; that does not mean it lacks one.
• Evidence. Joinly writes an audit log per mutation with its source and the workflow that caused it. Hire2Retire describes audit and compliance reporting as well; the shape of it is best judged in a demo of each.

How to choose

If you are a North American organisation with a Google or Okta estate, Hire2Retire covers ground Joinly does not. If you are a European organisation on Microsoft — especially a hybrid one with an on-premise Active Directory next to Entra ID — and you need EU processing, an explainable rules layer and offboarding that reaches the mailbox and the service desk, Joinly is built for exactly that. Either way, run a dry run on your own HR data before you sign anything; that is the one test that tells you what the tool will actually do.