Guideline headquartered in San Mateo offers a cloud-based 401k management software for businesses priced on a per employee basis.
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Human Interest
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Human Interest headquartered in San Francisco offers their cloud-based 401k administation platform for employers featuring flexible plan design and a dedicated account manager.
$125
per month
Pricing
Guideline
Human Interest
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Essentials
$120 + $5 per eligible employee
per month
Complete
$150 + $7 per eligible employee
per month
Concierge
$200 + $9 per eligible employee
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Guideline
Human Interest
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
$499 one-time fee
Additional Details
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Human Interest offers three products, for a choice of 401(k) or 403(b) that fits an organization's needs. All plans offer an all-in-one, no touch 401(k) to make it easy for employers to run and for employees to save. All plans have a setup fee of $499.
*Human Interest's average employee expense is 0.57%, compared to a 1.64% average for small 401(k) plans. Source: 401(k) Averages Book, 18th Edition.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Guideline
Human Interest
Considered Both Products
Guideline
Verified User
C-Level Executive
Chose Guideline
We went with Guideline as it was more affordable than alternatives. I believe this ended up being a terrible mistake. Invest in a stronger 401k partner. Human Interest was the other provider we were considering. I don't know if closing an account would have been as …
I believe that the only thing more broken than Guideline's product is their customer support. From initial contribution dates to the disastrous account closure that cost us personally thousands of dollars, this has been by far the worst SaaS and customer experience I've ever had in my career. If only 1) Guideline's product or 2) customer support had individually been broken, we would not have ended up in this state. I sent dozens and dozens of emails inquiring about oddities I was seeing in the product, but Guideline's reps only gave more conflicting and what ended up being grossly inaccurate feedback and status updates. I hope this review reaches anyone who is thinking of closing their Guideline account. Be extremely wary of what Guideline says and does in the account closure process and exact for detailed and exact timelines (you'll have to follow up many times...). For those of you who haven't yet selected a 401k provider, I'd recommend staying as far away from Guideline as possible.
From an HR standpoint, Human Interest was a seamless integration for our company. It has also been easy for us, as far as regular maintenance because there is nothing that we need to do when we have a new hire come aboard. Human Interest does all of the work for us and without the need for micromanagement. In my position, there is not a single scenario that I can think of where Human Interest is not well suited for a business of our size and type
I feel that the customer support was abysmal - In my experience, we were consistently given conflicting advice and statuses as we closed our account with Guideline. Despite many, many follow-ups attempting to clarify our current status and remaining steps to close the account, Guideline's reps continued to provide, I believe, misleading and inaccurate steps. This cost us thousands and thousands of dollars given Guideline was not able to appropriately pull the funds before closing the account.
Guideline's integrations - I believe there is clearly a broken pipeline between Guideline and Rippling. In my experience, contributions were not funded as expected when we first opened the account, and when we closed our account, there was no communication between Guideline and Rippling. Guideline continued to expect contributions into perpetuity despite closure of the account
I feel that Guideline's product itself is just broken in critical places - most importantly, statuses of contributions were reflected incorrectly in the software (Guideline thought funds were transferred, but they were not and Guideline never attempted to pull the funds from our bank). This, combined with the terrible customer support, cost us thousands and thousands of dollars after we closed our account. There are many absolutely critical features that are broken -> to give just one of many examples, it was not possible to update the bank account information and no error message was thrown. I was told that our account ended up in an exceptional state given our last payroll contribution date and account closure, but these seem like very basic things a 401k provider has to get right if there are going to manage people's money.
The platform fully integrates with our payroll system and makes onboarding and management of plan participants extremely easy for our team. The portal is super easy for all employees to use and feel comfortable rather than intimidated with their retirement account
The few questions that we've had have been answered quickly and helpfully. The implementation was a breeze and the onboarding contacts were really helpful. There was some stuff I had to learn about 401(k)s in making the decision to implement Guideline, but the Guideline team was helpful in pointing me in the right direction.
They have a general support email that doesn't provide a case when an email is sent. I had to email multiple times to have an issue addressed which was frustrating and impacted the rating above. Human Interest doesn't have specific account managers which means that it is especially important that the support team is responsive to questions, otherwise, it is unclear if a problem is being worked on. On the other hand, their support team proactively reached out to communicate that an employee of ours was eligible for an additional contribution as they were over 50 years old. Our payroll system had capped the individual's contribution at $19K which is the current year max for most individuals. Human Interest let us know about the additional contribution availability enabling us to quickly update the employee record for future payrolls.
We selected Guideline due to their relationship with Gusto, our payroll service. However, we did review alternative options for our 401k program and found them very competitive as to price and quality. We were thinking about going with one of the bigger companies like Schwab, E*TRADE, Ally, etc., but found Guideline to be the best choice for us based on price and ease of use.
In my other profession, CPA, I have worked with and been involved with numerous other 401K Plan providers. Paychex, Ascensus, Modern Woodman, etc. Some have been very time consuming from implementation to ongoing contributions. Human Interest is a quality organization and has a great platform with easy access and reporting. No heavy lifting and no ongoing tedius work.
Our time and effort in managing the 401K plan should be considerably reduced.
We have now one contact as opposed to three that we had with our old plan which will help me get answers to questions without having to determine who is in charge of what aspect of the plan.
