These two overlap just enough to appear on the same shortlists and differ enough that choosing wrongly hurts, because they approach the same multinational workforce from opposite ends. Sage People is HR first: a system of record for people, built on the Salesforce platform, with self service, performance, compensation and workforce analytics, treating payroll as something it feeds through connectors everywhere except the UK and US where it runs natively. PaySpace is payroll first: legislative payroll engines for over forty African countries kept current in house, with HR functionality layered on top, and it was acquired by Deel precisely because that payroll depth is so hard to replicate.
The geography of your headcount decides this. A business running operations across African markets, where in country statutory compliance is the hard problem, gets more from PaySpace than any global HR suite can offer, because localised gross to net calculation in Lagos, Nairobi and Johannesburg is the product. A business headquartered in the UK or US with a spread of international offices, where the hard problem is one employee record, consistent processes and board grade people analytics, is squarely Sage People territory, with payroll delegated to local providers through its connector.
Larger groups genuinely straddling both worlds sometimes run the pair together, Sage People as the HR system of record feeding PaySpace as the African payroll engine, and both vendors support that pattern. If you must pick one: count where your employees sit. Majority in Africa with compliance as the pain, PaySpace. Global spread with people data as the pain, Sage People. The overlap in their brochures is much larger than the overlap in what they are actually best at.