Canada
United States
Bahamas
Jamaica
Trinidad & Tobago
Antigua & Barbuda
Barbados
AnguillaCanadian HR software, sorted by who owns it.
Workzoom built this table because ownership decides which company can be compelled to hand over data under laws like the US CLOUD Act, regardless of where the servers sit. The test has three parts. Who holds voting control. Which country that owner is based in. Whether a private equity or venture investor holds a controlling stake. Applied below to 18 Canadian HR software vendors, sourced from each vendor's own site.
Workzoom built this table because ownership decides which company can be compelled to hand over data under laws like the US CLOUD Act, regardless of where the servers sit.
Read the full answer
The test has three parts: who holds voting control, which country that owner is based in, and whether a private equity or venture investor holds a controlling stake. Applied below to 18 Canadian HR software vendors, sourced from each vendor's own site.
The table
Who owns the Canadian HR software you are evaluating.
| Vendor | HQ | Ownership | Canadian data hosting | Verified on | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canadian headquarters, no foreign parent or controlling investor found (7) | |||||
| Workzoom | Toronto, ON, Canada | Privately held, founder-owned and Canadian-owned (Nortek Solutions Inc., Toronto, founded 2000) | Yes, AWS ca-central-1 (Montreal); Canadian clients elect this region at onboarding | 2026-09-02 | workzoom.com |
| Folks RH | Quebec City, QC, Canada | Independent, founder-owned (Sylvain Roy); Desjardins Capital and BDC Capital hold minority financing since 2024, not control | Yes, "All Folks data is stored on Canadian servers. No US data transfer." | 2026-09-02 | folksrh.com |
| Rise People | Burnaby, BC, Canada | Independent, founder-led (Faiz Abdulla); Sun Life Financial holds a minority investment (2018, USD 15M), not control | Yes, AWS ca-central-1 | 2026-09-02 | risepeople.com |
| PaymentEvolution | Mississauga, ON, Canada | Independent; states ownership and control rest only with Canadian residents, with no single non-Canadian person or entity holding voting shares | Yes, "All data stored and processed exclusively within Canada" (Azure Canada Central and East) | 2026-09-02 | paymentevolution.com |
| Avanti Software | Calgary, AB, Canada | Independent; Round13 Capital (Toronto, Canada) holds a minority growth stake since 2022; no controlling parent established | Yes, Azure Canada Central and Canada East regions | 2026-09-02 | round13.com |
| Nethris | Montreal, QC, Canada | Subsidiary of CGI Inc. (Montreal, Canada), publicly listed, TSX: GIB.A and NYSE: GIB. Not Desjardins-owned: Desjardins is a CGI client under contract, not a shareholder | Not established by the vendor | 2026-09-02 | nethris.com |
| Knit People | Toronto, ON, Canada | Not established by the vendor; no parent or investor is disclosed on the vendor's own site | Yes, "we transfer the data...to Canada and process it there" | 2026-09-02 | knitpeople.com |
| Canadian HQ, foreign parent or foreign private equity (3) | |||||
| Payworks | Winnipeg, MB, Canada | Founder-established (Barb Gamey and co-founders, 2000); Hg, a UK private equity firm, took an undisclosed-size strategic stake in September 2025 | Yes, "your data stays in Canada" | 2026-09-02 | payworks.ca |
| Wagepoint | Calgary, AB, Canada | Majority stake held by Providence Strategic Growth, an affiliate of Providence Equity Partners (Providence, Rhode Island, USA), since 2020; founders retain shares | Not established by the vendor | 2026-09-02 | provequity.com |
| Collage HR | Toronto, ON, Canada | Subsidiary of People Corporation (Winnipeg, Canada), itself private-equity-owned by Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking (Goldman Sachs Group Inc., USA) since 2021 | Not established by the vendor (privacy policy names "US and Canada" processors, not Canada-exclusive) | 2026-09-02 | collage.co |
| Foreign headquarters (8) | |||||
| Sage | Newcastle upon Tyne, England, UK | Publicly listed, London Stock Exchange, ticker SGE, FTSE 100 | Yes for Sage Intacct (AWS Montreal region); not established by the vendor for other Sage Canada products | 2026-09-02 | sage.com |
| BrightHR | Manchester, England, UK (Canadian office: Toronto, ON) | Subsidiary of Peninsula Group (UK); ultimate control sits with the Done family per UK Companies House, not private equity, not publicly listed | Yes, "we store data in the country of subscription" for Canadian customers | 2026-09-02 | gov.uk registry |
| Employment Hero Canada (formerly Humi) | Sydney, Australia (Canadian office: Toronto, ON) | Subsidiary of Employment Hero Pty Ltd (Sydney, Australia); venture and growth-equity backed (TCV-led Series F; KKR bought a stake from SEEK in 2025); no controlling shareholder disclosed | Yes for the Humi product, "data is securely stored on AWS servers located in Canada" | 2026-09-02 | employmenthero.com |
| ADP Canada | Roseland, NJ, USA (Canadian office: Etobicoke, ON) | Subsidiary of ADP, Inc. (USA), publicly listed, NASDAQ: ADP | Not established by the vendor | 2026-09-02 | adp.ca |
| Dayforce | Minneapolis, MN, USA (SEC-filed principal office; also marketed as dual HQ with Toronto) | Private-equity-owned by Thoma Bravo (USA), acquisition completed February 2026; was publicly listed on NYSE and TSX (ticker DAY) until then | Not established by the vendor | 2026-09-02 | thomabravo.com |
| BambooHR | Draper, UT, USA | Not established by the vendor which party holds controlling ownership; Sorenson Capital (since 2012) and ICONIQ Capital hold minority stakes per their own portfolio pages | Yes, conditionally: "data centers located in the United States, Canada, or Ireland, depending on the location and needs of the individual customer" | 2026-09-02 | sorensoncapital.com |
| Rippling | San Francisco, CA, USA | Independent, venture-backed, no single controlling investor (Series G, May 2025, USD 16.8B valuation) | No, "All data is housed in physically secure, US-based AWS data centers" | 2026-09-02 | rippling.com |
| UKG | Lowell, MA and Weston, FL, USA (dual HQ) | Private-equity-owned, led by Hellman and Friedman (San Francisco, USA); Blackstone holds a reported minority stake, secondary source only | Yes for major product lines, per UKG's own subprocessor disclosure | 2026-09-02 | ukg.com |
Methodology
How this table was built and checked.
This page is written and published by Workzoom, which sells one of the 18 products compared here. Every fact is still sourced to a primary record, not to Workzoom's judgment. Every vendor fact on this page comes from that vendor's own site, its parent or acquirer's own site, or a government registry filing (a corporate-control filing such as UK Companies House, or a securities filing such as a US SEC report). Press coverage was used only as secondary confirmation, never as the primary source for an ownership claim.
Where no primary source disclosed a fact, the cell reads "not established by the vendor." That is a statement about what is publicly disclosed, not a claim about what is true. It is worth asking the vendor directly.
Workzoom's own row is sourced the same way: from Workzoom's published legal and pricing pages, not from internal claims. Workzoom is operated by Nortek Solutions Inc., founded in 2000 and headquartered in Toronto, Ontario. Canadian clients elect the AWS Canada (Central) region at onboarding.
Compiled and verified on 2026-09-02. Rows are re-verified when this page is updated, and an acquisition or investment changes a row as soon as it is confirmed against a primary source. If a vendor's ownership has changed since this date, or you have a primary source that contradicts a row, tell us and we will correct it.
The two questions
What ownership changes, and what it does not.
Ownership: who can be legally compelled
The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel a provider subject to US jurisdiction to produce data in its possession, custody or control, regardless of where the servers are located. Ownership decides which company can be served with that order. A vendor headquartered and controlled outside the US is not subject to it in the same way.
Hosting: a second, separate question
Where a vendor rents its cloud infrastructure is a different question from who owns the company, and it applies to every vendor on this page, Workzoom included. Canadian Workzoom clients elect the AWS Canada (Central) region at onboarding. Hosting location is one input into a jurisdiction decision, not the whole answer.
Hyperscaler exposure applies to everyone
Most vendors on this table, Canadian-owned and foreign-owned alike, run on AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, all US hyperscalers. A Canadian data region reduces some exposure. It does not remove the underlying question of which country's courts govern the company that owns the account.
Do it yourself
How to check a vendor's ownership yourself.
-
Look up the registry filing.
Search a corporate registry, such as Corporations Canada or a provincial registry, or, for a foreign parent, a filing such as UK Companies House or a US SEC report. The filing names who holds control, not who the marketing page implies.
-
Read the privacy policy's subprocessor list.
A vendor's privacy policy or subprocessor list states where data is processed and stored. A hosting claim in a sales deck is not the same document, and the two do not always agree.
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Search for an acquisition press release.
Check the vendor's own newsroom and the acquirer's newsroom for any investment or acquisition announcement. A vendor's older marketing claim can be superseded by its own later disclosure, as this table found more than once.
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Ask for the contract's governing law clause.
The governing law clause in the actual contract names the jurisdiction that will hear a dispute. That single clause is a more reliable signal than any homepage claim.
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Get the data region election in writing.
Confirm, in writing, which cloud region your data will be hosted in, and whether that region is guaranteed for the life of the contract or merely offered as an option today.
FAQ
Canadian HR software ownership questions.
Related
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