# Finch vs Salsa (slim)

> Finch scores 71.6 (BB) on agent readiness against Salsa's 46.1 (D), and leads in every scored category. Both do payroll employees. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/finch-vs-salsa.md (~2,200 tokens) · this version ~730 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/finch-vs-salsa.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/finch-vs-salsa
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-08

Finch scores 71.6 (BB) on agent readiness against Salsa's 46.1 (D), and leads in every scored category. Both do payroll employees.

- Finch: BB 71.6, rank #104 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/finch.min.md
- Salsa: D 46.1, rank #651 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/salsa.min.md
- Finch, good for An application that needs to read employees, pay runs and pay statements from whatever payroll or HR system an employer already uses, or to write benefit deductions back. Ahead on Reliability, 84 against 36; Schema & documentation, 87 against 73; Agent ergonomics, 71 against 48; Security & auth, 66 against 56; Payments & pricing, 30 against 5; Maintenance & community, 84 against 50; Transparency & trust, 74 against 51. Also Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better; Runs on your own machine.
- Salsa, good for A software platform that wants to sell payroll to its own business customers and can sign a partner agreement, with Salsa handling tax filing and money movement.

| Category | Finch | Salsa |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 84 | 36 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 87 | 73 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 71 | 48 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 66 | 56 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 30 | 5 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 84 | 50 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 74 | 51 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Finch | Salsa |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Profound Platform Inc. (dba Finch) | Salsa Software Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.tryfinch.com` | `https://api.salsa.dev/api/rest/v1` |
| Transports | HTTP, stdio | HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth | API key |
| Licence | Proprietary service under Finch's Master Service Agreement. The SDKs and the MCP server on GitHub are Apache-2.0 | Proprietary service. The website Terms of Use are public and the partner agreement isn't. The browser library @salsa-payroll/salsa-js on npm is MIT |
| Tools exposed | 2 | none |
| Last release | 2026-10-05 | 2026-10-07 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-08-07 | 2022-04-07 |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | 2025-09-24 |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | yes |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | yes |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | yes |
| Popularity | 16k npm/wk, 26k PyPI/wk | 435 npm/wk |