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
SumTotal (legacy)
Score 7.9 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
The SumTotal Talent Expansion Suite included SumTotal (LMS), and was supported by Skillsoft since the October 2014 acquisition. Acquired by Cornerstone OnDemand in 2022, it is a legacy product, and Cornerstone recommends upgrading to their modern platform.
We've been using BambooHR for many years now, so I don't really remember what PeopleForce was like. But what I know for sure is that BambooHR is a much more refined product and provides more capabilities than PF overall.
I've used a few different tools for payroll and benefits. I used Rippling a while ago. I remember it was also pretty easy to use. Paylocity was also pretty easy to use, as far as I remember. Since I'm not the HR rep evaluating the tools for the benefits side, I don't have much …
These are the three that come to mind, and we use each program for different things. We stick to HR driven areas for Bamboo, as we haven't shifted to it for payroll or project management. I do find Bamboo to be the most user-friendly, with the smallest learning curve of all …
Mavenlink is a much more expensive tool, but allowed a greater visibility into time tracking against projects and resource allocation all in one place.
In the past, I've used Paycor to handle all HR and pay info and things. Paycor was fine, but it felt clunkier and more like a chore to use. Logging into BambooHR is quicker and easier, and the user experience is more friendly. Things are easier to get to, and more info is …
I have used salesforce on several different occasions ranging from customer service to client management. This is a different situational occurrence however I will say that Bamboo is the much stronger system. The UI is much more pleasant and easy to navigate, and so far it …
Its so much easier and cero complicated to use. Info is right there if you need it. I find myself looking everywhere before I foind the info i need and Bamboo is just there.
I don't know that I would say they are very similar as we use Trinet because of their PEO offerings. Trinet has everything built in and is a good platform for companies with 50+ employees. Trinet also is very legally sound given the type of reporting they do for multiple states …
In our case SumTotal platform seemed to be more complete and robust to provide the right features for managing complex ILT plans and blended programs, which was an important thing for us. It was also very easy to deploy mobile and to increase learning options for all users, …
SumTotal Talent Development is a very competitive product. In my opinion SumTotal Talent Development is better than Freshteams, Darwinbox, but not as good as Skillate, SAP Successfactors. SAP Successfactors is enterprise grade and used only by large organizations and has too …
Maestro is a little dated looking. Younger users are looking for something up-to-date, interactive, fun, and easy to use and Maestro has a ways to go with this.
When I came to my company, they had been using a "light" LMS called Articulate. It was cheap and bare bones; i.e. not a lot of features, really just a platform to launch eLearning from and not real interface for student to utilize. When I began to overhaul the training …
For companies with a "complex" PTO policy, it's one of the easier solutions to use I have seen. By complexity, I mean having different reasons for your time off and different amounts of time you can request on that end. If you need simple file sharing, it will work as well. For people who require more robust training material, it might not be the best fit.
I personally, am not a fan of SumTotal. I have worked on several different HRIS and Payroll systems which outweigh all aspects of SumTotal (Lawson Interface Desktop, Ceridian Dayforce, ADP Enterprise, and Ultimate Software's UltiPro). As antiquated as Lawson felt, it had more functionality than SumTotal. Of course, all others I worked on were for the most part cloud based and had modern functionality to go with it.
SumTotal has a very user friendly design, making it easy for non-programmers to configure their LMS interface, customize various environments for different groups, and to integrate numerous external web applications through iFraming, such as social media or news feeds. I was able to configure a custom environment for several different clients, making it feel like their own LMS, such as a custom color scheme and logos, custom widgets (which are section of any page), news feeds, training messages, and custom learning plans.
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.
JasperSoft Reporting - it is difficult to use and manage.
Exams could be more robust. Offering alternate types of questions.
Too many clicks on the administrator side. Adding new activities is not intuitive, you need to click through each section to determine what needs to be entered where. Would be better if it was guided for new activities, just prompting for 'required' fields.
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 have transitioned from a position who supported the product to a position where I use the product. I continue to be impressed with the robustness of the product and how efficient it is. It is a user friendly software that can be used to navigate and accomplish tasks to meet organizational requirements.
It is pretty intuitive and easy to use for most functions! This is helped by the clean and simple interface. The drop down filters and prompts are definitely strong points, and could be easily enhanced with more AI/automation features built in in future to make it even more efficient. I also like the playful icons, making it less dull as a HR tool :)
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 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 have used their support team over a dozen times. They have chat agents available throughout the day. They have support ticket submissions. They have their own resources website with different programs to learn BambooHR®. They also have onboarding support.
As far as I can recall, everything went well with doing it online and got questions answered. Was thankful to work with a dummy file to get used to some practices prior to getting our own domain within bamboo to then place our personnel information in the system, this helped a lot!
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.
These are the three that come to mind, and we use each program for different things. We stick to HR driven areas for Bamboo, as we haven't shifted to it for payroll or project management. I do find Bamboo to be the most user-friendly, with the smallest learning curve of all the other programs, though.
SumTotal Talent Development is a very competitive product. In my opinion SumTotal Talent Development is better than Freshteams, Darwinbox, but not as good as Skillate, SAP SuccessFactors. SAP SuccessFactors is enterprise grade and used only by large organizations and has too many modules and hence a tough learning curve. While SumTotal Talent Development has a small learning curve.
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.
improved onboarding- adding documents and due dates to tasks
time expenditure- we had printed documents initially. BambooHR® has saved me so much time with the electronic documents that automatically save in the employee record
streamlined processes- key features such as the signature documents, onboarding/offboarding tasks have streamlined my processes also allowing for increased time savings
