Rippling HR Software Review
- Rippling is a robust, cloud-hosted HR software platform that offers all of the features businesses need to onboard employees.
- The software can manage your onboarding paperwork, benefits administration, payroll processing, and time and attendance needs.
- We selected Rippling as the best HR software for onboarding employees.
- This review is for small business owners who are considering implementing Rippling as their HR software.
Rippling is an employee management platform that turns the often arduous task of people operations into a seemingly effortless digital experience with the help of intuitive automation. With the platform, employers can send offer letters, run background checks, collect new-hire paperwork, add employees to payroll and process health insurance enrollments. The platform can also be used to order and ship work equipment to new hires and set them up with everything they need to be successful, including Google Workspace, Slack and Microsoft Office 365. This makes it an ideal option for seamlessly onboarding remote, hybrid or in-person employees.
Rippling HR Software
The Verdict
Rippling is a modern, automation-focused HR software and service solution suited for small to medium-sized businesses that want to effortlessly manage their employee operations.
Rippling Editor’s Score: 96/100
| Features | 100 |
|---|---|
| Pricing | 90 |
| User interface | 100 |
| Integrations | 100 |
| Customer service | 90 |
Why Rippling Is Best for Employee Onboarding
The onboarding process with Rippling is manageable and user-friendly, even for small business owners who don’t have a dedicated HR employee to manage the process. The CEO of Rippling even reportedly onboarded all of the initial hires himself using the platform. It has extensive features for each step of the onboarding process, including the offer letter, E-Verify, payroll setup, benefits selections and onboarding paperwork.
We also like how simple and user-friendly the onboarding process is on the employee side. Rippling’s device management functions are also helpful for onboarding remote hires, making Rippling great for today’s remote work climate. Rippling also has an applicant tracking system that allows employers to track applicant data and easily convert that data when someone is hired, eliminating the need for duplicate data entry.
Rippling recently added an applicant tracking feature to its platform. Employers can now post jobs, review candidates and schedule interviews within the system. Credit: Rippling
Pros
- Rippling makes the onboarding process user-friendly for both employers and employees.
- The company offers prompt customer support via live chat.
- Rippling allows business owners to automate a wide range of HR processes.
Cons
- Rippling does not offer a free trial, so you won’t get to take the platform for a test drive before signing up for the service.
- Rippling offers customized pricing only. This does offer some flexibility in terms of building a package to fit your budget and needs, but it also means that you need to speak with a sales agent.
Usability
We found Rippling to be one of the more user-friendly HR software solutions in terms of day-to-day navigation. Once setup is complete, administrators can use the “Quick Action Springboard” on the left side of their dashboard to jump to tasks, including onboarding new employees, creating custom reports and syncing new third-party applications. The home dashboard view keeps administrators on track with a to-do list that’s tied to high-level deadlines, approval requests and significant milestones.
The Rippling dashboard makes it simple to navigate the software. Credit: Rippling
Rippling provides you with easy access to its applications for payroll services, onboarding and preconfigured company devices to ship to your different facilities or the home of your newest remote hire. Rippling apps are followed by a list of third-party software applications, letting admins manage user access across the organization from a single sign-on page.
The App Shop layout makes it easy to find and sync essential business tools, including Slack, Zoom, Asana, Zendesk, Dropbox, Adobe, HubSpot, and other business software solutions and service providers, that are manageable from the administrator’s dashboard.
We liked how easy it is to create valuable reports and visualizations that can lead to better business decisions across the entire organization. Administrators are prompted with six report types for new reports, each of which has a seemingly endless list of customization fields.
While it may seem like it’s easy to get lost with so many options, the layout does a good job of presenting you with useful fields to explore your data. Each time you make a selection, the dynamic reporting tool populates the selected variables in the top right corner. If you don’t see which variable you’re looking for on the left-hand navigation menu, you can use the search function to find it. Once you’ve identified the raw data for analysis, you can then hone in on details or rearrange your data sets to your liking. While they weren’t our top choice for reporting and analytics (that honor went to Paycor), we did find that Rippling’s reporting functions are more robust than those of other HR software services.
Rippling customers can onboard new employees in as little as 90 seconds.
Rippling Features
| Onboarding | You can handle all of your new-hire paperwork and onboarding tasks in as little as 90 seconds. |
|---|---|
| Third-party integrations | Find more than 500 popular software apps to seamlessly integrate with your HR software. |
| Benefits | Shop thousands of plans from the nation’s leading health and financial benefits providers. |
| Device management | Give your in-office and remote employees the hardware they need to succeed. |
| Reporting | Create any report you can dream up to visualize employee turnover, track app usage and more. |
Onboarding
Every HR software platform strongly emphasizes speeding up the onboarding process, but nobody does it as well as Rippling. With its highly automated software, administrators can accomplish everything from sending out offer letters to new-hire paperwork to payroll to benefits enrollment in only a couple of minutes from the home dashboard.
Rippling makes sending out offer letters easy with simple templates. Candidates can use Rippling to digitally sign and accept their offer. Credit: Rippling
Third-Party Integrations
Rippling’s open API allows you to share information with the applications your business already uses daily. Your team has access to more than 500 third-party cloud-based tools, all accessible with a single sign-on from one location. The administrator’s dashboard makes it simple to modify access to the software and apps your employees need to do their jobs.
Rippling integrates with a number of popular software tools. Employers can sign up employees for new accounts with these tools during the Rippling onboarding process. Credit: Rippling
Benefits
Rippling makes it incredibly easy for administrators to auto-enroll new hires, update payroll deductions, define contribution strategies and complete other tasks from the home dashboard. New employees and existing team members with a qualifying life event can find guided enrollment features, with intuitive navigation and side-by-side comparisons of your company’s health and financial benefits. All of your employees’ benefits automatically sync with payroll deductions for seamless management.
Rippling allows employees to select and review their benefits data. Credit: Rippling
Device Management
Many employers are now choosing to provide company devices rather than taking a BYOD approach. With the Rippling platform, you can manage all of your company-issued laptops and devices from the dashboard. Admins can view equipment inventories, set password policies and configure hard drive encryption. You can purchase and ship equipment through Rippling’s online store, as well as preconfigure software based on each individual’s role in your organization. You can also remotely wipe and reassign a device upon the termination of an employee.
While onboarding new employees in Rippling, employers can order or ship devices such as company computers or cell phones to new hires. Credit: Rippling
Reporting
Make better business decisions for your organization with easy access to built-in reports. There are also customizable reporting options for companies that need more in-depth information. You can visualize data from any endpoint tracked within the platform. This includes a wide array of data, such as payroll, documents, time off, hardware and insurance.
Rippling provides flexibility to create reports that provide the most value to your company. Credit: Rippling
Rippling Pricing
The basic service starts at $8 per user per month. Rippling does not offer the standard monthly service options often seen with other providers in this category. That means most businesses will need to explore custom pricing options with a Rippling sales agent.
Basic features include a unified employee database, onboarding/offboarding automation, e-document management, time and attendance tools, workflow and approval automation, customizable reporting, an open API, and more than 500 third-party cloud-based application integrations.
You can also read our reviews of Rippling’s PEO service and Rippling’s time and attendance service to learn more about other software that can be used in conjunction with the Rippling HR platform.
Rippling Time and Attendance
For small businesses wanting to automate time tracking and reporting processes, Rippling is among the best time and attendance solutions. It offers hundreds of templates for setting up automatic alerts, reports and actions based on predefined triggers. Since this module integrates with other Rippling tools, data from the different services automatically syncs. As a result, employees can see PTO accrual details in real time, and leaders can glean insights about job or client costs at a glance.
Time Tracking
Rippling provides smart check-in experiences for employees. It allows workers to use their iOS or Android smartphone, a shared kiosk or a desktop computer to clock in and out. Conversely, they can use their mobile phone to scan a QR code for contactless logins. If your staff performs several job roles or works at multiple sites or for different customers, they can use codes to assign their work to the appropriate position, location or client. Salaried employees can forgo the daily check-ins and enter hours on a timesheet. The timesheet also lets workers attach notes, pictures and documents, which can be useful for tracking job- or site-specific details.
Employees can view shift summaries after logging out to see information about their hours, PTO accrual, and paid or unpaid breaks. Speaking of breaks, Rippling tracks meal and rest downtime and can even ask staff to confirm if they were offered a mandated break. For employers concerned about time theft, Rippling enforces your policies with GPS and geofencing tools, or you can require workers to take a selfie.
Time and Attendance Automation
With Rippling, once you update your organizational chart, the system automatically updates user permissions across Rippling products. For example, once you promote an employee to general manager, they can begin approving time cards and receiving overtime alerts. Likewise, you can automatically apply overtime pay according to your company holiday calendar. But the automation benefits really stand out when it comes to complying with local and state labor laws.
Rippling software has information for all U.S. states and updates the platform when regulations change. Suppose your state government makes changes to your overtime, meal or break laws. Rippling will automatically create a default policy and apply the new rules, helping your company prevent costly noncompliance fines.
Employee and Manager Notifications
Like other time and attendance tools, Rippling sends alerts and reminders via email, text or the app. Common notifications include reminders for breaks that a shift is ending or to submit timecards. Supervisors get alerts when an employee clocks out early, timecards are awaiting approval and workers are nearing overtime. It can even notify different departments by sending finance a note to expect excessive overtime hours or alerting HR for noncompliant breaks.
However, we were impressed with the ability to craft custom notifications for managers and employees. These can help organizations implement new policies and encourage recruits to develop good time and attendance habits. In addition, companies can use analytics to determine which reminders or alerts would be most effective and push those notifications to employees on their preferred devices.
Setup
According to Rippling, the average time to implement the platform is two and a half weeks, which is somewhat longer than that of most other HR software platforms we reviewed. However, reaping the time-saving benefits Rippling offers requires that you lay a solid foundation, which then allows your repetitive processes to run smoothly and accurately. You’re not building everything on your own from scratch, as Rippling’s intuitive forms will guide you through the most common processes, with easy-to-answer questions and preconfigured fields for every aspect of your HR tasks.
You can shop for more than 4,000 health and financial benefit services with Rippling.
Customer Service
During setup, you’ll work with a dedicated contact who is available by phone and email; once your system is up and running, you can use email or Rippling’s self-help tools, which are available with your login information. Your employees will need to reach out to your team’s Rippling administrator to troubleshoot issues that come up.
Rippling users can receive live chat and email support. The company prides itself on providing prompt support over live chat, so much so that it shares up-to-date data on response times on its website. If you want one-on-one support from certified HR pros, you can add the HR Help Desk feature to your plan for an extra monthly fee.
Drawbacks
The lack of phone support could lead to frustration, especially for smaller teams without a tech-savvy HR administrator on staff. This means your admins should dedicate time to understanding how the system works and anticipate issues or concerns employees are likely to have accomplishing tasks or understanding their benefits. For some employees, the option to speak with someone outside your organization about a technical HR issue is usually the most attractive solution, which is something we’d like to see improved with Rippling.
If you are looking for a platform that provides 24/7 phone support, you might be better served by a solution like the one in our Paychex Flex review.
Very small businesses may not find the benefits of automation worth the time it takes to build the right workflows. For example, if your company is onboarding and offboarding only a handful of employees each year, it may not be worthwhile to build a custom workflow for a single position that may be used only once or twice each year.
Methodology
We conducted comprehensive research and analyzed dozens of HR systems to identify the top HR software solutions on the market. We watched product videos and attended a software demo with Rippling staff. When looking for the best HR software for employee onboarding specifically, we prioritized features such as onboarding and implementation, payroll processing, benefits administration, usability, integrations, reporting, and customer service.
Rippling FAQ
Is Rippling an HRIS?
Rippling is an all-in-one employee management platform. It includes basic HRIS tools as well as advanced features that integrate payroll and IT functions for more comprehensive onboarding and employee management functionality.
Does Rippling have performance management?
Employers can use Rippling for performance management through one of its many compatible third-party integrations. Rippling does also have a learning management system for training and development.
Is Rippling a PEO?
Rippling does offer PEO services, but employers can fully utilize the HR platform without engaging in a co-employment model. Rippling’s PEO services allow small and midsize businesses to share ownership of their employees and access better HR benefits.
Overall Value
We recommend the Rippling for …
- Any business looking for an automation-focused, all-in-one HR software platform that can integrate with all of your existing business software, benefits and apps.
- Midsize businesses that want to save time and ensure accuracy with all of their HR-related tasks, from onboarding to offboarding and everything in between.
- Any business looking for the flexibility provided by a highly customizable HR software platform with endless reporting options.
We do not recommend Rippling for …
- Small businesses that do not have a high frequency of repetitive HR tasks, including hiring, onboarding, equipment allocation, benefits management and offboarding.
- Small and midsize businesses that need a lot of help from customer service when managing or modifying their operations-related tools and software.
Rippling HR Software
The Verdict
Rippling is a modern, automation-focused HR software and service solution suited for small to medium-sized businesses that want to effortlessly manage their employee operations.