Best HR Software for 2022

Gusto is a modern, all-in-one HR software platform that stands out with a clean dashboard and extensive payroll features. For many companies, running payroll is a tedious and time-consuming process ripe for costly mistakes and penalties. With Gusto, business owners and HR administrators can free themselves from the laborious process of calculating hours, rates, deductions, taxes, garnishments, and other aspects of supporting their staff financially. For employees with direct deposit who reside in the United States, you can initiate a regular payroll run in just a quick few clicks from the easy-to-use dashboard. If your team is on salary with regular pay periods, you can automate the entire process and trust that Gusto will handle everything with accuracy.

Unlike other payroll providers, Gusto does not charge any additional fees for running irregular payroll, adding special bonuses, or making adjustments to a recent payroll run. Better yet, the software will automatically file all of your local, state, and federal tax forms on your company's behalf. You and your employees can electronically file, sign, fax, and store all of your documents within your dashboard. Gusto also makes it easy for your employees to make the most of their earnings with paperless pay through Gusto Wallet and debit cards, as well as free financial tools to help your team members reach their goals.

Gusto recently expanded its payroll offering by allowing external platforms to access pieces of its service via an API. With this service, known as Gusto Embedded Payroll, external companies can offer payroll support to their own customers. Gusto's expansion adds to its overall usability and dedication to payroll convenience.

Rippling is standout HR software with tons of automation features that make it a great choice for small and midsize businesses that want to manage their employee operations successfully with a lot less time and effort. All it takes is 90 seconds for you to send an offer letter and new-hire paperwork, run background checks, e-verify documents, add employees to payroll, enroll them in health insurance, order and ship computer equipment, and set up Google Workspace, Slack, and Office 365 accounts — an entire afternoon of tasks if you're still doing them all the old-fashioned way.

Rippling accomplishes this lightspeed productivity through highly automated workflows that are easy to set up and run successfully from the dashboard, which is loaded with homegrown and third-party apps. While the average company will need to spend a little over two weeks to implement the system, once it's up and running, the time savings for onboarding alone will pay dividends the rest of the year. In addition to Rippling's open API to function alongside your existing business software and partners, it integrates with over 500 third-party cloud-based applications to provide any HR tool or service your team may want to incorporate.

Small and midsize businesses that place a strong emphasis on their people will truly benefit from BambooHR's features. This HR software focuses on five areas: people data and analytics, hiring, onboarding, compensation, and culture. While the software executes on each of these areas well, it shines the brightest in helping companies understand and improve the performance of each employee.

BambooHR takes a three-pronged approach to evaluating an employee's performance – through manager assessments and self-assessments, peer feedback, and goals – to provide a complete picture of how the employee is doing. The software asks brief, largely objective questions designed to improve productivity, not just to determine if someone is ready for a promotion or raise.

The platform encourages managers and HR admins to conduct regular internal surveys with anonymous submissions to improve company culture. However, BambooHR also ensures that digesting the data is not an intensive, time-consuming task. It accomplishes this seemingly difficult job by assigning your company an Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS). The software automatically scans employees' survey responses for keywords and groups the results into positive, neutral, and negative feedback categories for efficient analysis. Managers can check the results over time to identify trends in employee satisfaction that your company can use to increase productivity, reduce turnover, and improve your reputation as an employer among job seekers.

Another way BambooHR helps you manage employee performance is through its Employee Wellbeing tools. This application uses consistent employee surveys to gain feedback on how employees feel about their happiness, relationships, personal motivators, and company motivators. Through the academically created and tested survey questions, employers can gain insights and trends that can lead to growth for their employees, teams and company.

For smaller companies with limited HR resources or larger enterprises experiencing strong growth, the ability to automate recurring tasks with efficient workflows can feel like true freedom. GoCo's highly customizable tools can streamline everything on your HR administrator's or your daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly to-do lists. The simple dashboard offers quick access to easy-to-use workflow templates for your onboarding, performance reviews, involuntary termination checklist, new-hire orientation, talent acquisition and much more. GoCo also supports custom fields, with more than 100 useful reporting variables to build actionable reports based on any data being tracked in your system.

With its MagicDocs feature, GoCo users can digitize documents. GoCo recently enhanced this tool to include a drag-and-drop template builder and the ability to add multiple document signatories and signature completion orders. These custom workflows help to ensure your approval processes are streamlined for documents like performance reviews and offer letters.

Additionally, GoCo recently released a new workflow that lets employers automatically track their employees' COVID-19 status. The new tracker is meant to help businesses stay compliant with new federal and state laws. When you set up the COVID-19 status tracking workflow, employees can upload their proof of vaccination or negative COVID-19 tests. It also sends out weekly reminders to unvaccinated employees to ensure they are continuing to maintain compliance.

GoCo's flexible mindset in reporting spills over into other areas as well. The company encourages you to define all of your processes, policies, and partnerships to help it design and implement an HR solution that fits perfectly with how you want to operate your business. For example, if you have a great retirement plan for your employees, GoCo will add it and make it easy for your employees to access through the software. If you're looking for an all-in-one solution, you can get help identifying everything your company needs from your dedicated customer success manager, whose sole responsibility is to make sure your team is set up for success.

As the largest HR company for small and midsize businesses, Paychex knows how to support remote teams with integrated solutions for payroll, health benefits, financial benefits, and all other human resources requirements. Its cloud-based HR software platform is used by more than 680,000 customers, giving Paychex one of the most impressive footprints in the industry – and the proven experience to handle anything your business may need.

Unlike many of its competitors in this space, Paychex gives you the option to run payroll from any computer or mobile device. Its mobile-friendly approach to HR administration also means it does a great job supporting freelance teams, which we can't say for every service we've reviewed. With COVID-19 leaving a lasting impression on the way business is run, having forced many companies to rely on fully or partially remote teams, the ability to access information and accomplish tasks from anywhere makes Paychex an attractive service for 2022 and beyond.

You and your HR admins can say goodbye to the tall stacks of new-hire paperwork and instead give your new employees an easy online user experience to make a fantastic impression for their first day on the job. Paychex's software includes guided digital forms, new-hire checklists, automated document collection, and more with a totally paperless experience with the confidence of E-Verify solutions – all of the tools you need to support your staff from anywhere they want to work. With its centralized document management capabilities, you can seamlessly upload, secure and access important employee documents from any location. Users can upload multiple files at once, sign documents from their Paychex app, and pull real-time reports on uploaded documentation.

After you hire and onboard remote staff, Paychex can help you retain top talent through its new talent management tools. You can view comprehensive talent dashboards, analyze pay benchmarking to compare employee compensation with national standards, and access retention insights to see which employees are likely to leave.

Additionally, Paychex recently aligned with Globalization Partners, so remote teams around the globe have access to international payroll and HR services.

BerniePortal is an all-in-one human resources information system (HRIS) designed to support the entire employee lifecycle. The company tailors its offerings to small and midsize businesses, with a focus on helping organizations optimize HR, improve employee experiences, and free everyone to focus their valuable time and energy on what matters in their role. Keeping its core audience in mind, the user interface is simple and straightforward – possibly too much so for some. But for companies looking for a general HR platform that's easy to use and maintain, this is a strong option.

BerniePortal offers three paid subscription bundles, starting at $9 per employee per month if you pay annually. The entry-level Standard bundle includes 50 features across the categories of applicant tracking, onboarding, benefits, paid time off, time and attendance, employee performance, and compliance. The Plus plan, starting at $14 per employee per month, adds benefits support for short- and long-term disability, voluntary life, critical illness, accident, HSAs, and FSAs through four plan options. It also adds more featured administrator roles, PTO subgroups flexibility, and access to BerniePortal's open API. The top-tier Enterprise plan, starting at $19 per employee per month, adds unlimited benefit types, plan options, subgroups, approvers, and the option for deferred contributions. Alternatively, BerniePortal is distributed by health insurance brokers across the country that provide special pricing and ongoing support to their clients.

Cezanne is a modular HR software system built to work the way your company does business. It's also designed to be fast and easy to implement and modify, working alongside the processes you already use to manage and support your employees anywhere in the world. Cezanne was built specifically for U.K. and international businesses, with language support for U.K. and U.S. English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish, and Romanian at no additional cost. It also has localization for date and currency formatting that won't affect anyone's reporting abilities. This global-focus configuration also means that the software supports non-Western characters such as Chinese, Japanese and Greek. It also features customizable security permissions that can be conveniently cloned to streamline security protocols and keep your international business compliant.

Cezanne's core focus is people management. Its online form-builder lets you drag and drop field types to create custom documents that represent your requirements and approval process for everything from travel expenses to requests to work from home. The personnel files include comprehensive information on your employees' career histories, training records, and much more at a  glance with flexible reporting and analytics. You can stay in close contact with your team by uploading or creating the appropriate template, then selecting which group to send it to and how the communication should be tracked. Other features, such as integrated SMS texting to employees in over 120 countries, can help you keep your workforce aware of urgent updates no matter where they happen to work. Additionally, Cezanne HR now lists employee goals and check-in events in the Upcoming Events widget. This allows team members to easily keep track of important upcoming events, regardless of location. This feature is valuable for managing performance and keeping employees on track.

Namely is a people operations platform for midsize companies designed to make life easier for everyone in the organization. The company states that its average client saves 11 hours per week with Namely keeping their payroll, benefits, compliance requirements, and other HR tasks in sync. It also touts its ability to get your employees using the platform regularly, meaning your HR team won't have to field so many questions throughout the week. You and your HR staff can use your newfound time to dive into the platform's analytics and reports to better understand all the data about your employees and confidently make strategic decisions.

This people-focused platform has powerful tools for new-hire onboarding, custom review cycles, performance tracking and more. The enrollment wizard makes it easy for your employees to find the right benefits when they join your team or enroll in a new plan after a major life event, such as a wedding – with new deductions automatically synced to payroll.

Paycor's human capital management software keeps your team out of the weeds when it comes to payroll, talent acquisition, workforce management, benefits administration and, perhaps most importantly, your employees' overall experiences. For over 30 years, the platform has helped business owners and managers across industries recruit, develop, compensate, and retain their employees. Today, more than 40,000 organizations use Paycor to support their staff.

Paycor offers two main service bundles based on the size of your company, with a base fee starting at $99 per month. The Small Business plans (Basic, Essential and Complete) are designed for companies with up to 39 employees. Its Basic plan features include payroll, tax filing, reporting, mobile access, garnishments, and child support self-service starting at $99 per month. The Essential plan adds custom reporting, new-hire onboarding, compliance checklists and templates, and PTO requests and approvals for an additional $50 per month. The Complete package, which starts at $199 per month, adds one-on-one support, financial benefits integrations, and advanced analytics with benchmarking. You may also add services to any Small Business bundle, including benefits administration, talent development, and recruitment, with custom pricing available.

Sage HR (formerly CakeHR) is a complete solution to handle employee onboarding, with automated processes and reports that offer meaningful insights. It also offers a great deal of mobile functionality to let your company's admins and managers remotely track, manage, and engage with everyone on their team with ease. The software provides intuitive "recipes" for custom workflows to manage all of your critical HR tasks.

The standard features in the Core HR + Leave Management module include onboarding and offboarding, analytics, custom and scheduled reports, mobile apps, time and attendance, and Active Directory integration. From there, you can add feature-rich modules for performance, timesheets, shift schedules and expenses. Via its partnership with PlanSource, Sage created Sage People U.S. Benefits. With this, you can conveniently control benefits costs, automate administration, increase accuracy and provide personalized employee experiences.

SAP's human experience management (HXC) suite builds on its leading cloud-based solutions with the expressed goal of "elevating people experiences." It focuses on four key areas for its HR services: employee experience management, core HR and payroll, talent management, and HR analytics and workforce planning.

The core HR and payroll features help enterprise-level businesses manage their global workforce through easy-to-use, cloud-based technology to optimize HR operations, maintain accurate payroll with standardized processing, and benefit from a service-level agreement for compliance. The system is designed to be flexible, keeping up with internal and external challenges facing your organization. Everything is managed through a centralized hub with simplified access to employee content.

Ultimate provides companies of all sizes with human capital management (HCM) solutions for HR, payroll, talent acquisition, time and attendance, performance, and more. Its "people-first" software is developed around the idea that how you treat people affects everything within your organization. Features such as "employee voice," "learning," "people assist," and "people analytics" combine with artificial intelligence and machine learning to give you the insight-driven tools and data you need to reduce turnover and increase your employees' success.

The full HCM package unites every aspect of your company, with features for recruiting, onboarding, payroll and taxes, health and financial benefits administration, performance management, career development, reporting and analytics, succession, and more. The all-inclusive, cloud-based solution delivers the full suite of benefits to support teams of any size. The payroll system makes it easy to process hundreds of payroll computations for your employees in the U.S. and Canada, with smart tax tools that automatically recommend the correct taxes based on your employees' locations. You may also be able to utilize Ultimate's banking relationships to process employee payments on your behalf, saving time, money, and resources so you can get back to what matters in your business.

Workday's human capital management software offers enterprise-level service to help you manage your workforce seamlessly. The cloud-based platform handles compensation, benefits, time tracking, and all the other HR details a large company needs to support its biggest asset – its people.

Workday keeps an eye on the future in a fast-changing business world. For its client businesses, that means getting the insight necessary to make critical decisions, the agility to act quickly, and the experiences to help teams grow and thrive. For example, Workday recently released Workday Everywhere. These packaged connectors enable businesses and employees to access Workday from within other applications, collaboration tools and intranets. Instead of toggling back and forth between platforms, you can seamlessly access Workday when and where you need it.