The Best HRIS Systems for 2020... And Who They Work Best For

At the mid-way point of 2020, we've decided to do a quick recap of the most effective HRIS systems in 2019, describing which organizations benefit most from each vendor's services.

Brett Ungashick
OutSail HRIS Advisor
July 4, 2023
user comparing HRIS systems

Anyone who's tried to buy HR software knows how overwhelming the marketplace has become. It can take companies an entire month of research and calls just to create a shortlist.

One of the reasons that finding the right software partner is challenging, is because there isn't a perfect HR tools that solves all of a company's needs.

Because there isn't a perfect solution, we instruct our client to look for three things:

  1. Partners who offer the functionality you need
  2. Partners who work with customers who look like your business
  3. Partners who share your key values.

OutSail's free software advisory services help businesses get all this information, including cost estimates, integration capabilities and the biggest pros/cons of each solution. If you're going through a software buying process, reach out and learn about how we can help out.

That being said, some people enjoy going at their research alone. Here is a quick guide to help get you started, detailing each vendors' modules offered, average customer size and biggest strengths:

PEO Solutions

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TriNet

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Time & Attendance, Ben Admin, Onboarding, ATS, Performance, and Learning

Average Customer Size: 5-100 employees

Vendor Snapshot: TriNet is great for smaller companies that are looking for a system that can facilitate all employee functions from hire to retire (recruiting, onboarding, payroll, benefits, performance, etc.), and also want to offer top tier benefits at a competitive rate.

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Insperity

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Time & Attendance, Ben Admin, Onboarding, ATS, Performance, and Learning

Average Customer Size: 5-100 employees

Vendor Snapshot: Insperity can offer their clients an HRIS platform that covers all employee needs from hire-to-retire, but Insperity really differentiates themselves by being a true strategic partner to their clients. They offer high quality professional services teams, have local personnel in almost every major metro and are very proactive partners to organizations that don’t have the bandwidth to manage every aspect of HR in-house.


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Justworks

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Ben Admin, Onboarding, PTO

Average Customer Size: 5-100 employees

Vendor Snapshot: Justworks is a modern leader in the PEO space and their technology is much more user-friendly than their older peers. Justworks has become the preferred platform of many high-growth start-ups due to their easy-to-use platform, quality support and modern benefit offerings.

SMB Solutions

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GoCo

Modules Offered: HRIS, Ben Admin, Onboarding, PTO

Average Customer Size: 10-150 employees

Vendor Snapshot: GoCo is a wraparound HRIS that allows companies to stick with their existing payroll provider while providing a modern, easy-to-use HRIS on the front-end. Their platform is great for employee self-service while also creating automated syncs between payroll and benefits carriers to make an admins life easier too.

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Flock

Modules Offered: HRIS, Ben Admin, Onboarding, PTO

Average Customer Size: 10-150 employees

Vendor Snapshot: Flock is also a wraparound system that has deep integrations with ADP and Paylocity for payroll and allows companies to offer a modern, mobile-first HRIS front-end to their employees. The benefits admin module is a standout feature of the Flock platform and is sometimes bought standalone for larger companies due to its quality.

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Sapling

Modules Offered: HRIS, Onboarding, PTO

Average Customer Size: 10-150 employees

Vendor Snapshot: Sapling also provides a wraparound tool that can sync up with your existing payroll tool, while delivering a modern employee experience for HR. Sapling's onboarding module is particularly robust, which has made their platform a popular choice for high-growth companies.

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Gusto

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Ben Admin, Onboarding, PTO

Average Customer Size: 5-100 employees

Vendor Snapshot: Gusto is a modern leader in the small businesses space, delivering a user-friendly payroll and HR experience to modern companies. Gusto's platform can meet the payroll, benefits and HR needs of most small businesses, and they back their product with high quality customer support.

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Hibob

Modules Offered: HRIS, Time & Attendance, Onboarding, Performance, Engagement

Average Customer Size: 25-250 employees

Vendor Snapshot: For companies that are highly focused on developing, engaging and retaining their workforce, Bob can be a great HRIS. The platform puts employees at the center of the experience, by creating a one-stop-shop for employees to request time, view pay stubs, do performance reviews and give recognition.

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Rippling

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Ben Admin, Onboarding, PTO

Average Customer Size: 25-200 employees

Vendor Snapshot: Rippling offers some of the most advanced technology in the HRIS space, by offering a platform that can meet all of HR and IT's needs at the same time. Rippling can integrate with just about any of your existing HR tools, while drastically simplifying your employee's onboarding, payroll and ben admin experience

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Zenefits

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Time & Attendance, Ben Admin, Onboarding, Performance

Average Customer Size: 25-200 employees

Vendor Snapshot: Zenefits offers a sleek, easy-to-use HRIS platform that is used by many growing, modern companies. Zenefits' platform can cover all Core HR needs including payroll, HRIS, onboarding, time and performance. And the only modules they don’t make in-house are an ATS and LMS, where they partner with market leaders instead.

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BambooHR

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Time & Attendance, Onboarding, ATS, Performance, Engagement

Average Customer Size: 25-250 employees

Vendor Snapshot: BambooHR has been a market leader for the past decade in creating easy-to-use HR tools for small to mid-sized companies. The platform can cover a wide breadth of functionality, is offered at a competitive price, is easy to deploy and utilize and is supported by proactive account support.

Namely

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Time & Attendance, Onboarding, Performance, Engagement

Average Customer Size: 50-300 employees

Vendor Snapshot: Namely is a great choice for companies that want to drive employee self-service, as they provide one of the sleekest, easiest-to-use HRIS platforms on the market. Namely offers functionality to support most businesses' Core HR needs and they offer pre-built integrations for the areas they don't cover themselves.

Mid-Market Solutions

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Paycor

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Time & Attendance, Ben Admin, Onboarding, ATS, Performance, Engagement and Learning

Average Customer Size: 25-300 employees

Vendor Snapshot: Paycor offers a strong suite of HR tools that can help manage the entire employee lifecycle from hire to retire. Like many HRIS companies, Paycor delivers a strong payroll module, but unlike many of their peers, they also have strong capabilities in performance management and recruiting too

iSolved

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Time & Attendance, Ben Admin, Onboarding, ATS, Performance, Engagement and Learning

Average Customer Size: 50-350 employees

Vendor Snapshot: iSolved may not be a household name yet, but they’ve filled a big market need by providing a modern end-to-end platform that works for small-to-mid-sized companies. iSolved’s core competencies are around payroll, time and HR, but they’ve recently invested quite a bit in their employee engagement tools too.

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Paylocity

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Time & Attendance, Ben Admin, Onboarding, ATS, Performance, Engagement and Learning

Average Customer Size: 50-350 employees

Vendor Snapshot: Paylocity has a large market share in the mid-sized HRIS space thanks to a robust hire-to-retire offering, efficient implementations and competitive price. The Paylocity team has built out quite a few integrations over the years to accommodate a best-of-breed approach as well.

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Paycom

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Time & Attendance, Ben Admin, Onboarding, ATS, Performance, Engagement and Learning

Average Customer Size: 50-500 employees

Vendor Snapshot: Paycom is a true single database solution, which isn’t very common in the HRIS space; this architecture can be a huge benefit to administrators who find the system to be fast, efficient and accurate. Paycom's platform is modern and intuitive for end-users, while also being robust enough to support most HR needs on the back end.

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SagePeople

Modules Offered: HRIS, Time & Attendance, Ben Admin, Onboarding, ATS, Performance, Engagement

Average Customer Size: 100-1,000 employees

Vendor Snapshot: SagePeople was originally called Fairsail and was a market leading HRIS in the UK. Their platform is designed for mid-sized, global companies and Sage supports their product with a proactive, dedicated account support team. The SagePeople software is built upon the Salesforce platform, which allows every field to be customizable and makes reports easy to build.

Mid-Enterprise Solutions

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ADP WorkforceNow

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Time & Attendance, Ben Admin, Onboarding, ATS, Performance, Engagement, Learning

Average Customer Size: 100-2,500 employees

Vendor Snapshot: ADP rarely needs an introduction. They are the largest payroll provider in the US, with 1 in every 6 Americans being paid by ADP. Their WorkforceNow platform offers buyers every module from hire-to-retire and ADP also provides a host of outsourced services for companies that want to focus on more strategic initiatives.

UKG Ready (formerly Kronos)

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Time & Attendance, Benefits Admin, Onboarding, ATS, Performance, Engagement

Average Customer Size: 200-5,000 employees

Vendor Snapshot: Kronos is famous for their workforce management software (time collection, scheduling, workforce forecasting). They have used this expertise to build a powerful HRIS platform that is highly effective for companies with large hourly workforces. The Kronos platform is often competitively priced an their support teams are broken out by industry, so the support you receive can be knowledgeable to your business.

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Ceridian

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Time & Attendance, Ben Admin, Onboarding, ATS, Performance, Engagement and Learning

Average Customer Size: 250-10,000 employees

Vendor Snapshot: Ceridian’s platform offers arguably the most powerful Core HR engine on the market. Their technology has been built on a single database, and the close integration of payroll, time and benefits delivers some of the most real-time data insights and accuracy in the industry.

UKG Pro (formerly UltiPro)

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Time & Attendance, Ben Admin, Onboarding, ATS, Performance, Engagement and Learning

Average Customer Size: 250-10,000 employees

Vendor Snapshot: Ultimate Software has a long track record of delivering smart automations to complex, global companies. They offer a robust, highly capable and reliable HRIS platform that can scale with any organization's growth. Despite being a full featured system, UltiPro’s user interface is still accessible and intuitive for admins and employees alike.

Enterprise Solutions

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SAP SuccessFactors

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Time & Attendance, Ben Admin, Onboarding, ATS, Performance, Engagement and Learning

Average Customer Size: 1,000+ employees

Vendor Snapshot: The SuccessFactors platform has evolved through a variety of acquisitions of best-in-class point solutions. This approach allows SAP to offer cutting edge solutions around the employee experience, conversational AI and workforce analytics. Rather than being an all-in-one solution, they will readily bring in partners to fill potential gaps,

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Workday

Modules Offered: Payroll, HRIS, Time & Attendance, Ben Admin, Onboarding, ATS, Performance, Engagement and Learning

Average Customer Size: 1,000+ employees

Vendor Snapshot: Workday offers a single database solution that is configurable to any organization’s needs and user friendly for employees. When they do acquire companies, they translate the new code into the existing code base to keep the back-end databases and front-end user experiences uniform. Workday also spends a huge sum on R&D and is on the leading edge with AI and 3rd party integrations

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Meet the Author

Brett Ungashick
OutSail HRIS Advisor
Brett Ungashick, the friendly face behind OutSail, started his career at LinkedIn, selling HR software. This experience sparked an idea, leading him to create OutSail in 2018. Based in Denver, OutSail simplifies the HR software selection process, and Brett's hands-on approach has already helped over 1,000 companies, including SalesLoft, Hudl and DoorDash. He's a go-to guy for all things HR Tech, supporting companies in every industry and across 20+ countries. When he's not demystifying HR tech, you'll find Brett enjoying a round of golf or skiing down Colorado's slopes, always happy to chat about work or play.

FAQ

Everything you need to know about OutSail
What is OutSail?
OutSail is the first-ever broker of HR Software. We offer market insights, evaluation tools & advisory services to help organizations research, evaluate and select the right HR software. And best of all - OutSail is free!
How is OutSail free?
OutSail is free due to our one-of-a-kind software broker model. When a company makes a purchase through OutSail, the winning vendor owes us a small fee for making the introduction.

No Hidden Fees - You don't pay for our services and the vendors don't pass our costs along either
Vendor Agnostic - OutSail partners with 220+ HR Tech vendors including every market leader
What are the benefits of OutSail?
1.) Market Insights: Access the industry's most trusted data. Read user reviews of every leading HRIS vendor. Access verified pricing data. Use proprietary tools to sort & filter by your selection criteria.
2.) Evaluation Tools: Access to project plans & timelines. Customize your own scorecard tools. Leverage expert-generated demo questions. Collaborate with your team
3.) Advisory Services: Work with HRIS industry experts. Assistance during proposal review and guidance for negotiations. Implementation readiness
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We love partnering with brokers & consultants and bringing innovative vendors to our customers. Follow those links to learn more about how we can partner together and bring OutSail's benefits to your customers.

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