8 Best HRIS for Small Business Owners for 2023

Its online employee database makes it easy to organize and store staff data and helps create a strong onboarding process. You can add an applicant tracking system if you’re hiring a sizable number of employees. Background checks are available too.

If you work with a lot of different applications, then Rippling is a better choice than the rest of the software we reviewed because it integrates with over 500 business programs, including Slack, G Suite, and other popular business applications. Add this to Rippling’s App Management module, and it’s super-easy to grant new employees access to the software they need as part of onboarding. It’s equally easy to remove accounts when offboarding.

Rippling’s payroll module can handle pay processing in all 50 states and includes tax filings, direct deposits, garnishments, multiple job codes, and multiple pay rates. Gusto and Rippling both pay international contractors, but Rippling ranked as one of our top international payroll providers (ADP can handle global payroll, while others on our list work with partners or third-party apps).

You have access to a wide range of benefits that are available in all 50 states—which is not the case with Gusto. Rippling’s benefits include health, dental, and vision insurance plus flex plans (FSA, HSA) and commuter benefits. Rippling will also send your Affordable Care Act notices and handle COBRA notices.

If you need a learning management system to help organize and deploy your training programs, Rippling offers a robust solution for you. Its learning management module has a full list of compliance training programs, including automated sexual harassment training for all 50 states, cybersecurity training, and more. It partners with Go1 if you want to purchase custom course bundles of over 70,000 courses—some of which are industry-specific. While Paycor has extensive learning management tools, Rippling automates enrollment, sends reminders and certifications, and even ties training requirements into its time and attendance product.

You can partner with Rippling to buy, set up, secure, and manage employee work computers. It also provides single sign-on (SSO), provisioning, multi-factor authentication, and API support. While others on our list offer some of these tools, like SSO, Rippling has the most complete and encapsulated program.

Paycor has pay-on-demand features, garnishments, benefits, 401(k) integrations, and more. It also handles tax filings and keeps an eye on tax laws at the federal, state, and local levels. Like most of the services on our list, you can add time tracking—but this provider also has a scheduling app that lets you create and automate schedules and allows employees to request shift swaps.

Paycor’s suite of HR solutions is designed to streamline the employee lifecycle. Aside from an employee database, it offers recruiting, compensation planning and analysis, single or bulk onboarding, and talent development tools. It can help you run employee performance reviews, track work goals, and capture feedback. Paycor’s learning system even offers canned and customized courses and “gamification” to make completing training programs fun for employees and teams (Rippling’s learning management solution does not have “gamification” features).

With its benefits solution, employees can manage, shop, and enroll in a benefits plan through Paycor’s self-service portal and mobile app (iOS and Android). It offers dashboards and reports to help you understand the costs, plus you get automated alerts and reminders (such as for re-enrolling).

Employees can access co-worker profiles, the company org chart, W-2s, benefits information, and more. They can also make changes and request a PTO on the app, as well as sign documents and complete tasks. HR and managers can edit and update information, approve requests, send communications, and more.

Paycor’s mobile apps offer tools for employees to request time off, check pay stubs, and even see their tasks and notifications. Managers, meanwhile, can track applicants and approve time cards and workflows. While all the services on our list (except Gusto, as it lacks a mobile app) have highly rated mobile apps, Paycor’s app is one of the best-rated, with 4.4 out of 5 on Google Play and 4.7 out of 5 on the App Store as of this writing. While Paychex’s mobile app scored higher on iOS compared to Paycor, it earned lower ratings on Android.

Gusto, our top recommended payroll software for small businesses, can handle pay processing and tax filings in all 50 states. It pays via check and direct deposit, as well as offers its Gusto Wallet—an online employee account with a mobile app that lets your staff get paid faster, manage finances, and take salary advances. It’s a great alternative for employees without traditional bank accounts (although ADP has something similar with its Wisely card). Like Rippling, Gusto can help you pay international contractors.

Gusto is on our list of top onboarding software because its hiring tools make it easy to send offer letters and onboard new hires through its customizable checklists and online signing of documents. It also has applicant tracking and simple job posting tools—although it doesn’t post jobs to popular job boards like most leading recruitment software do.

While Gusto can help you set up and remove business software and email accounts for your employees, its provisioning and de-provisioning processes aren’t as robust as Rippling’s. The latter provides a wide range of IT tools to help you manage company-assigned computers, device inventory, and business software access.

Gusto is not as feature-heavy as most of the software on our list, but it offers the basics: time and paid time off (PTO) tracking, employee surveys, performance reviews, and integrations with third-party business software. The Premium Plan, its most premium tier, comes with a library of HR documents (such as job descriptions and policy templates), plus dedicated HR advisers and a direct phone line for the support team.

It does not, however, offer learning management tools. If managing and deploying employee training programs are important to you, consider Rippling, ADP, Paychex, Paycor, and Zoho People.

Gusto can help you manage employee benefits—although some, like health insurance, are limited to 39 states. It also offers commuter benefits, flexible spending accounts (FSAs), health savings accounts (HSAs), 530 college savings, pay-as-you-go workers’ compensation, and financial wellness tools.

Employees have access to the company directory and organizational chart, plus online HR documents. They can even make profile changes, request time off, and renew benefits plans as well.

Time and attendance tracking feed directly into payroll, making it easy for you to process your employees’ actual hours worked (including overtime). Like Gusto and ADP, you can pay workers by check, direct deposit, or pay card. Paychex handles your tax filings and state new hire reporting, including wage garnishments—provided you sign up for either its Essentials or Pro plans. It also assigns a dedicated payroll specialist to its clients, a service that isn’t available with the other software we reviewed.

Paychex offers hiring services, including job postings and applicant tracking tools. It also provides onboarding tools, such as background checks and online direct deposit and tax forms.

With its labor compliance posters, HR and business documents, and employee handbook builder, you are granted access to online tools to keep your workers informed of regulations and HR-related policies. If you want a performance management system and online learning courses, Paychex provides these solutions to help you assess employees’ work performance and maintain a well-trained workforce. It also offers HR consulting services and alerts you of changes in local, state, or federal labor laws.

You can provide your employees medical, dental, vision, retirement, and other benefits options, and have the applicable deductions for these managed through the payroll program. Paychex also offers an employee financial wellness program similar to that of Gusto.

Employees can view pay stubs and benefits information via Paychex’s mobile apps (for iOS and Android devices), but managers can handle payroll and view employee information, including benefits programs. It has the highest rating on the App Store of all on the list—4.8 out of 5 as of this writing (Android users give it a respectable 4.1 on Google Play, which is above average).

You can manage HR and payroll from its platform and then transition to its professional employer organization (PEO) service once your HR needs grow, but you don’t want to expand your in-house team. Paychex’s PEO, one of our top-recommended PEO companies along with Rippling and ADP, can help you efficiently handle day-to-day HR administrative tasks while keeping you compliant with labor and tax regulations.

You can create offer letters with its templates and make it easy for employees to self-onboard with onboarding checklists, online forms, and e-signatures. TriNet Zenefits also handles background checks and can help you onboard global employees. Aside from ADP, only TriNet Zenefits handles international onboarding.

TriNet Zenefits’ highest tier, Zen, includes a Slack-style communications hub for one-on-one or group communications plus document storage. None of the other software on our list (apart from Zoho People) have a Slack-style communications tool. It also offers employee surveys with its Zen plan (BambooHR, Gusto, and Paycor have staff surveys in their advanced plans).

TriNet Zenefits’ performance management solution offers 360 feedback, with reviews by managers, peers, and the employees themselves. And, to help you retain and reward employees, the provider also has compensation management tools, which include real-time comparison salary data and custom salary benchmark reports.

TriNet Zenefits manages benefits to keep you compliant and offers additional plan options like commuter benefits. However, its health benefits are unavailable in Hawaii as of this writing. If you want extensive health insurance coverage, consider any of the HRISes in this guide—except Gusto (health benefits limited to 39 states) or BambooHR and Zoho People (neither offer benefits plans).

Although its payroll tool is an add-on, TriNet Zenefits provides unlimited pay runs, garnishment support, and tax filing services.

Get unlimited access to a team of HR and payroll experts who can advise you on changing labor and tax laws, dealing with difficult employees, writing the company handbook, and terminating employees fairly and within regulations. However, it’s a paid add-on—with Gusto, Paychex, ADP, and Paycor, this service is included in their plans.

Employees can view important information, from policies to their W2s and leave balances, through an employee portal. They can request PTO (and managers can approve it), see announcements, contact co-workers, and more. The employee portal also has a mobile app version (for iOS and Android devices).

BambooHR offers online tools for tracking applicants and onboarding new hires. Its document storage with online signatures lets you keep employee records handy. What really makes it stand apart from the rest, however, is its mobile hiring app, which lets you review candidates and communicate with applicants and your hiring team using your smartphone. Paycor’s mobile app, by comparison, allows you to track applicants only.

With its HR tools, you can track benefits plans, monitor PTO, and manage employee data. Its Advantage plan even grants you access to advanced reports and customizations. BambooHR also offers prebuilt and customizable workflows to reduce the time you spend coordinating with other departments—and it includes email alerts to make sure people don’t forget time-critical tasks. However, if you want robust workflow automation tools with customizable workflow templates that you can use, consider Rippling.

Employees can access a company directory, organization chart, and company calendar online. It also lets your staff access their records and manage time off. Managers, on the other hand, can track who is working and who is taking PTO.

BambooHR’s payroll add-on with tax filing services and end-of-year tax forms make it easy for you to stay compliant with federal and state laws. Over 100 standard payroll-related reports help you analyze your workforce expenses—this is more than what most payroll software include. Gusto, for example, has 20+ customizable reports.

Available as a paid add-on, its time tracking tools with reminders and overtime calculations are integrated into its payroll module to help streamline employee payment processes. This is similar to Paychex and ADP, which can also add time tracking tools to its payroll solutions for a fee. Gusto, however, includes this in its higher tiers.

BambooHR’s performance management solution (a paid add-on) is designed to help employees grow professionally through self-assessments and feedback from managers and peers. It also includes work goal tracking and performance review reminders, including sample questions to help managers conduct effective evaluations with less subjectivity.

While you will have to move from ADP Run to ADP Global if you need international HRIS services, this is the only provider on our list that can help you. Services include hiring, onboarding, payroll, and compliance assistance with local laws in over 140 nations. It’s on our list of the best international payroll services along with Rippling, although Rippling only does international contractors.

ADP Run has HR tools for the entire employee lifecycle. It offers recruitment and onboarding tools, including background checks and job postings to 25,000+ job sites (none of the other HRIS systems on this list offer a wide job posting reach). Its higher-tier plans include a team of HR professionals to provide expert advice and help you manage compliances. You also have access to learning and performance management tools. And, like Paychex, it has a huge number of HR and payroll functionalities, but what you select determines your price.

Similar to Paychex, Rippling, and Gusto, ADP has a full-service payroll solution, which includes tax filing services, but year-end tax reporting costs extra. You can pay by direct deposit, check, or Wisely direct debit card (Paychex and Gusto also offer debit card options). You can even pay international employees (Gusto and Rippling only pay international contractors). In addition to pay processing tools, you can get its benefits management and time and attendance modules as paid add-ons.

ADP Run’s mobile apps (for iOS and Android devices) let your employees access their pay stubs, tax forms, time sheets, and benefits information while on the go. Similar to Paycor, its apps are among the highest-rated on our list: 4.5 out of 5 on Google Play and 4.7 out of 5 on the App Store as of this writing.

You can view, run, customize, and print a wide range of payroll and HR reports. You can also create your own reports, although exporting the data to Excel can get tricky.

This includes an employee database, document storage, personal file uploads, e-signature integrations, and templates for employee signatures.

With Zoho People, you get tools for recruiting, applicant tracking, and even social media posting of open jobs. The onboarding portal walks employees through policies, setting up profiles, signing documents, and more. However, if you want an expansive job posting reach, consider ADP, as it can post your jobs to more than 25,000 job sites.

From shift scheduling to performance reviews, your managers can efficiently manage employees through Zoho People. Aside from planning work shifts, it provides performance management solutions for setting goals, identifying skills, conducting self-appraisals, and collecting peer feedback. There’s also an online tool for receiving and responding to employee queries and complaints.

Zoho People has customizable workflows and approval processes, plus a learning management system that includes online, classroom, and independent learning—although, we suggest Paycor if you want to inject gamification into your training programs. Its communication tool is similar to Slack for employee chat, and you can send employees announcements, host forums, and share HR and/or business manuals for employees to access through the system.

While the payroll plan offered with Zoho People is listed specifically as the India version, it offers pre-payroll tools to help automate and streamline processes. With Zoho People, you can monitor employee attendance and add geolocation restrictions to ensure that workers clock in for work within the GPS parameters you identified. Apart from time tracking, it also allows you to approve time sheets, track and grant PTO, and manage expenses and salary advances.

A Human Resources Information System (HRIS) is software that manages employee information. It serves as a centralized database to electronically store your workers’ pay rates, hire dates, Social Security numbers, benefits details, and basic information, such as legal name, dependents, and address, among others.

Apart from providing a centralized employee database, an HRIS makes tracking changes to pay rates, job titles, and other staff-related data easy. It removes the need for storing paper forms, as most HRIS systems have document management tools, allowing you to digitally store files like tax forms, new hire requirements, policies, handbooks, and more. It also makes generating compliance reports easy because most of the information needed is stored in an HRIS.

If your business requires employees to complete work certifications, licenses, and training, an HRIS can help keep you compliant by tracking essential information, such as the certification courses completed and when employees attended these. If you employ mostly hourly workers, most HRIS systems interface with time tracking solutions so that you only have a single data source and prevent errors due to incorrect manual data inputs.

With an HRIS, you can manually enter data into its online database, and it will store and track the information across the employee life cycle—from hiring to retiring. Some HRIS software providers even offer data upload tools or services so that you don’t have to manually input the information yourself. This is great if you are a new HRIS user or are switching to a new system and have more than 10 employees in your workforce.

While most HRIS software require you to input the employee data yourself, some offer self-service tools that allow your workers to view and update their own personal information, like changing their status (from single to married) and adding dependents. Others even provide onboarding solutions that let you enter only basic employee data into its system and then have your new hires complete the rest, which saves you time and streamlines the process.

HRIS software allows you to store and track employee records online. Some offer basic tools for tracking applicants, managing employee attendance, and paying workers. Several provide integration options with third-party solutions, enabling you to utilize the same employee data across multiple systems.

On the other hand, a Human Resource Management System (HRMS) provides a wider range of tools to help you manage the entire employee lifecycle. It typically comes with recruiting, performance management, analytics, and employee engagement tools. Most HRMS software have features that are similar to an HRIS but with more advanced functionalities. Some providers even offer a starter package with access to free HR software and basic tools (such as time tracking and payroll)—although you need to subscribe to its paid plans to unlock other functionalities (like learning management).