BambooHR is an cloud-based human resources solution that provides onboarding, payroll, and benefits management. It also offers automated time-off management and employee self-service.
$10
per month per user
Clockify
Score 8.3 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Clockify, from COING in Palo Alto, is a time tracker and employee timesheet software for teams of all sizes. Clockify lets users track how much time is spent working on tasks, as well as keep track of employee timesheets and billable hours, project completion, reports, and schedules.
$0
forever, unlimited everything
Gusto
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Gusto offers payroll, benefits and compliance capabilities. Gusto is scaled for small to mid-sized businesses, and emphasizes an easy to use interface.
$49
per month
Pricing
BambooHR®
Clockify
Gusto
Editions & Modules
Core
$10
per month per user
Pro
Contact Sales
per month
Elite
Contact Sales
per month
Clockify Free
$0
forever, unlimited everything
Clockify Plus
$9.99
per month, per workspace
Clockify Enterprise
$9.99
per month, per user, per workspace
Clockify Premium
$29.99
per month, per workspace
Clockify Server
Starts at 450
Simple: A streamlined set of automatic payroll features and benefits integrations
$49/month + $6/mo per person
per month
Plus: Comprehensive payroll, benefits, and HR tools for employers building a great place to work
$80/month + $12/mo per person
per month
Premium: Scalable payroll and benefits, expert HR, and dedicated support for the complex needs of growing teams
$180/month + $22/mo per person
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BambooHR®
Clockify
Gusto
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Unlimited usage and number of users for free. Paid plans are solely for access to additional features. Self-hosting software on own servers available.
Gusto offers three pricing plans for payroll, benefits, and HR.
Gusto has an applicant tracking system that we considered using. However, the tool was to simple and did not offer enough customization with application question types, pipeline, and automated emails.
In my experience, I prefer overall reporting and functionality of Rippling, Gusto, and Ease. It is on par with Employee Navigator and Paycom (due to more user friendly design) Prefer to Worklio, Paylocity, and ADP Workforce.
We chose BambooHR® as we generally found their UI and flow of key capabilities to be more straight forward, easy to understand and better designed. Compared to Zoho People we found BambooHR® to offer a more established and well rounded set of features that would suit us not …
Verified User
Executive
Chose BambooHR®
Not as well as any of them. I am not a QBO Payroll fan either but they are better than BambooHR®.
When reviewing which HRIS to go with, BambooHR came out on top for a few reasons. One was the cost compared to others and what you get for that cost. It saved the company money versus what we had, including Lever, ADP, Calamari, etc., and condensed it into one system. Next, the …
Payroll is on par, however, the benefits management is not even close. BambooHR and TriNet both offered better benefit plans and over the course of years, never caused my teams to be uninsured for any period of time. BambooHR and TriNet support teams have always communicated …
ADP is cumbersome, complex, and hard as ever to find anything on the site. The ADP program is focused on Payroll only and does not offer the all-in-one feature that Gusto does. Gusto gives ease of use and practicality, while other programs, such as ADP that boast this, but end …
Gusto allows us to verify time easier. Employees can not manually change time without inserting a note. This helps to hold them accountable and to know they are working efficiently
In terms of GUI, Gusto is well-made. It's much prettier than APS and Bamboo. Bamboo and APS both have a lot more capability and, thus, are a little more complicated to use. Bamboo does not have a built-in payroll, though they do have a partner. We ultimately ended up going with …
I felt that the customer reviews and feedback for Gusto spoke volumes, and the Gusto interface was straightforward and simple to use. The value of the tier-based subscription model is great too. I found that other HR software plans were more expensive and more cluttered, less …
Performance management - the prompt questions are really helpful in distilling thoughts! Though it would still be great to have an optional box for additional feedback that might not be directly related to the prompt questions. The clean interface and user friendliness is a definite plus! But some specific features, eg. on TOIL application - it would be helpful to ensure it is intuitive to use, rather than confusing with the input process.
Clockify is an easy 10 over 10 recommendation for me. I would recommend this anyone especially if they're required to track their time and productivity while on the job. Office workers, tellers, bankers - any desk jobs really can very well use the awesome features of Clockify to the fullest extent. It is easy to use, very simple to set up, and doesn't require that much resource from your computer for up-keep
Gusto is a great fit for small teams and startups that want a simple, reliable way to run payroll, manage tax filings, and give CPAs access without constant micromanagement. It’s especially useful for founders who need something that “just works.” The human support has been excellent—especially when forwarding confusing IRS mail. That said, it’s a bit less intuitive when it comes to benefits and compliance for fully remote companies. For example, labor law poster distribution isn’t streamlined for digital teams, and setting up benefits felt more complex than it needed to be. Still, I’d recommend Gusto to any startup looking to get payroll right from day one.
Recruiting- communications are easy for both the internal team and candidates
Onboarding- the onboarding tasks are great. I love being able to attach documents as well as delay sending out tasks
Communication- the employee community is a great tool to keep our communications clean and organized. I love that we now have insight as to who has viewed the comms
Clockify records exact times on a per project basis when you click Start/Stop.
User interface is very easy. It is easy to add a project on the fly, change the times I just recorded if I forgot to click Stop for example. The interface is intuitive and gives me the flexibility I need.
Reporting gives me everything I need from times, hours per project, billable or not, per client and any tags I've created. This provides enough flexibility for many different use cases.
Gusto really kills it on the simplicity. The app and website are very clear and straightforward.
Gusto also does a great job at being easy to navigate, visually pleasing, and logically posed.
Gusto communicates very clearly and provides just the right amount of communication.
Gusto makes the onboarding process very easy. I recently started at a new company and the process of filling out the necessary documents, filling out forms, and getting my benefit information input was soooooo easy!
The biggest issue is on performance assessments. We are not able to customize the reminder dates so the automated reminder dates shown to people and on the email reminders is often misaligned with our actual internal deadlines. This causes a lot of confusion each review cycle.
Also on performance management, there is no way to push feedback to a supervisor for their direct report. The only way is if the manager requests the feedback from you. This limits the opportunity for people to give real time feedback throughout the half.
I wish we had a way to track notes from employee 1:1s in BambooHR® so when we do our performance reviews we can track. That may be a module we didn't purchase but it would facilitate more continuous and comprehensive evaluation of people at review time.
In general, manuals or how to use instructional videos are always welcome - just covering the very basic are very good to get everyone up and running.
Maybe work on your scalability - the main reason why we switched to a different provider is because the company was ramping up and the competitors have more features that come with not just time and productivity tracking.
I always like the classic blue and white pallets on the app but sometimes I just wish there's more option to customize how it looks just to give it a little more flavor.
Adding in previous time manually could be more accessible.
Notifications for when employees manually change hours.
We should allow 1099 users to use the mobile app instead of restricting them to the website, especially since they can just log into the full website on their mobile device.
There's nothing wrong with this platform. I would recommend it to any business starting with more than 10 employees. I will continue to use the program for as long as I need to, hoping they continue being tremendous and finding other ways to incorporate more technology.
I'm using the free version at the moment and loving it. What a great product, easy, responsive and has better up time than Yahoo Mail. :) What isn't there to like?
Unless they break it, I'm never leaving. It's just too easy. Gusto is also really affordable, and for what I pay, it's worth having the historical record within the system. I like that I can go back and pull up W2's for year's past. This sort of easy access reporting, has been helpful especially when getting reports for PPP loans.
Just because there's a little complex with everything that's rolling out and so I have had to walk some people through functionality because there's just so much to click at this point. Another thing is the review process doesn't allow for ratings with a number scale, and I know we're kind of getting away from that as an industry, but with our previous system we have been rating people for their merit percent increase on their wages at the end of the year and it doesn't have the functionality to do that.
Very affordable, accessible and simple. For this very reason I would say, it culminates to Clockify being very beginner and start-up friendly. It is its strongest suit after all, and this is the main reason why I would recommend this to anyone. I am very thankful for me ex colleague who recommended this to me, we're no longer working together but I still hear that he's still using Clockify to this very day on his own business
The overall platform and its speed of response are amazing. I would recommend this to any other business owner for ease of use and reliability. Email reminders are great if I’m super busy and have forgotten a few tasks. The price point compared to local payroll service is hands down a huge win.
Yes, there is a huge team in the back of the online platform or it looks like it because I have never been left without an answer when I have a question or waiting from a response on my chat .... There must be a huge team, this is so great and I always seem to have someone that is very knowledgeable too. So many times in the past I had to leave with customer service that would connect you with someone else because of the expertise, here everyone seems to be some kind of an expert in the HR function.
I have never had an issue logging in or it not being available. I use Clockify every work day during the week, frequently starting/stopping projects. I've had past experience with other systems that suddenly aren't usable for an hour and that is something I have never experienced with Clockify. They are doing something right on their backend. Nice job, Clockify folks
I love BambooHR. Reports are easy to run and download and it usually covers any types of requests I get from the management team. You get excel or .csv downloads/reports and it is fast and simple, not too crowded so it is easy to read through. We don't integrate the tool yet but again, soon we will. we just did not had the time to utilize it yet but that's the plan.
I already mentioned how it feels light across the wire. Pages load fast in the web browser. I have not tried the browser plug-in nor the mobile app. I give it a 9 instead of 10 as the desktop app seemed to hesitate when I clicked the start/stop of a project/task
I use the chat feature most often and the wait times can be long, but often I do get right in. When they promise to follow up, they always do. It seems the "support hero's" are very well training and knowledgeable. There are lots of resources in the form of print or video, too.
I dealt very little with customer support because Clockify is so easy to use. That being said, the few times I did, I got fast responses and any issues that I did have were solved in a very fast manner.
Gusto's customer service has really deteriorated lately and they seem to have really changed their focus. It used to be when you called you were routed to an individual who knew about payroll, benefits, reporting, etc. but now you get someone who seems to have not received the correct training. My last call about a dismissal payroll took me over an hour of my time and the person still could not help me and finally transferred me to someone else.
Overall this training was great and our implementation specialist was wonderful and very helpful. We felt really prepared once our training was completed, But we could get additional help immediately even when we were live. The continuation Support heros after implementation are wonderful and you can always get a LIVE person each time you call into their office.
We implemented bambooHR in Fall, 2023 then implemented Payroll 1/1/24. A vital piece of information was not known or missed in that we are exempt from State Unemployment Tax and have a Reimbursement Set-up, so bambooHR did not send Payroll Reports to the State. Those reports need to be sent regardless if we are exempt or not.
Reach out to support immediately if you are having trouble setting up Gusto. Rather than being confused and trying to figure it out yourself, it's much better to talk to someone who knows what they are doing. Save yourself time and frustration and reach out to support
Lattice is much more oriented towards performance management. It includes many more advanced performance management features from building actual assessments to also performance development planning. BambooHR® for us was a place to centralize our data and build from within as well as connect to external integrations. PerformYard is what we used prior to BambooHR® for onboarding workflows and performance reviews, but BambooHR® is far superior.
Harvest is very similar to Clockify. The only difference is that Harvest also has an invoicing and billing system built into it. So if you're billing your clients based off of time directly, Harvest may be a better option as far as that goes. Of course, Harvest only has minimum billing increments of 6 or 10 minutes, there is no 10-minute option so that's something where Clockify has them beat. They are both very easy to use.
It's been a while since I used QuickBooks for payroll, but it doesn't even come close to it. Gusto is infinitely easier, allowing for employee time tracking, handling calculations and payments of payroll and payroll taxes, managing regulatory compliance in the background, and more. I had a lot of moments using QuickBooks Payroll where I thought, "Am I even doing this right?" — it felt like you had to have additional knowledge of HR regulations in your state to do everything correctly. Gusto has it ALL handled so you can focus your time on higher-impact tasks in your business.
Since my organization has dropped with employees, I always find ways to reduce costs. I thought there would be a cheaper option, but I was glad that my package included a lot for the price, and downgrading would cost more. The rep could have let me downgraded and taken me to a higher package. I am thankful that didn't happen.
There is so much you can do with this platform, it is incredible and so welcoming. We don't utilize it 100% yet just because we are growing and the HR team has not been able to concentrate on other areas offered to us but but we will soon. Which is also why we got the product, specifically because what BambooHR can do to help us meet our growing business needs.
Because it feels light on the wire and runs so smoothly with great up-time. I have to assume that the same is true as it scales. I'm a single user so maybe I don't see if there are any scalability issues. With the way it seems architected to run so quickly across many platforms (desktop, mobile, web, browser plug-in), I have to think that it is using recent technology that provides scalability options
Time Savings: Automating onboarding, payroll, and employee record management has cut HR admin time by up to 30%, allowing teams to focus on strategic initiatives instead of paperwork.
Improved Onboarding: Streamlined workflows have cut onboarding time by nearly 50%, ensuring new hires are productive faster, reducing turnover risk in the critical first months.
- Enhanced Informational Clarity: Centralized employee data means fewer errors and faster access to essential information, reducing compliance risks and increasing accuracy in reporting.
The free plan really did everything we needed for the 6 months or so we used it. Without Clockify, we would have had to pay roughly $40+/month for a software tool.
When we upgraded to the paid version, it was still only $10/month and helped us be able to have minimum billing increments which is a huge monetary increase.
For me, it is hard to quantify payroll software as having an ROI. It does save quite a bit of time per pay period, so perhaps we could assign a theoretical number to an employee taking that time. I'd say, at the least, it saves 30-60 minutes a pay period compared to a more difficult-to-use payroll software.
