Breathe HR API
Breathe HR has a public REST API at developer.breathehr.com with sandbox and production environments. Access is self-serve: an account admin enables the API and generates a key in settings. Webhooks are not natively supported, so integrators poll or go through unified API vendors.
Frequently asked questions
Breathe HR scores A+ on Supergood's API Report Card. Breathe HR has a public REST API at developer.breathehr.com with sandbox and production environments. Access is self-serve: an account admin enables the API and generates a key in settings. Webhooks are not natively supported, so integrators poll or go through unified API vendors.
Breathe HR has a workable official integration path. Most engineering teams can build against it directly. Open API: self-serve, documented, with SDKs
Breathe (commonly 'Breathe HR' or 'BreatheHR') is a UK-headquartered cloud HR platform built explicitly for small and medium-sized businesses. The company was founded in 2012 and is based in Horsham, West Sussex.
Vertical: Enterprise / HR / ERP (Sanity vertical mapping: Enterprise/HR/ERP; Airtable bucket: misc). Centralised employee records and HR data store (HR system of record for UK SMBs). Holiday/leave management: request, approval, balance tracking, calendar visibility. Sickness and absence tracking with reporting.
Low-to-moderate, with strong dominance in the UK sub-50-employee tier. ~8,000 customer organisations / ~250,000 employees in the system at the time of the 2020 ELMO acquisition; meaningful growth since then under ELMO ownership but exact 2026 figures are not publicly disclosed.
HR system of record for UK SMBs: employee PII (name, DOB, address, NI number, bank details), employment history, contract data, right-to-work documentation. Org structure: teams, departments, reporting lines, manager relationships, office locations.
Founded 2012, ~14 years old as of 2026. Cloud-native from inception (not a re-platformed legacy product). The UI is intentionally simple and explicitly positioned as 'easy to use' for non-HR-trained SMB founders and ops staff.
Supergood's grades measure one thing: can a customer's engineering team get their own data out programmatically? Supergood checks six things (whether a real API exists, how access is gated, data coverage, auth quality, docs and developer experience, and stability) and rolls them into a letter grade. Supergood re-verifies grades, and they only move on evidence.
Breathe HR has partial MCP support. No official MCP server from Breathe HR, but an open source community server by Fuzzy Labs covers employees, absences, and company data with documented local and Claude Desktop setup. Adoption is minimal and the project is not vendor supported.
Partially. MCP support for Breathe HR exists but is incomplete, so what MCP clients like Claude, Cursor, and Codex can reach depends on what the available server covers.