BambooHR is an on-line human resources solution that provides onboarding, payroll, and benefits management. It also offers automated time-off management and employee self-service.
$250
per month
PDS Vista
Score 6.2 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Vista® is a human resource, benefits, payroll, recruiting, and self-service software. Functional elements include recruitment, staffing, position and training management, compliance, and performance and compensation.
N/A
Pricing
BambooHR
PDS Vista
Editions & Modules
Core
$250
per month
Pro
$250
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BambooHR
PDS Vista
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
No matter what HR looks like at your company, we have the perfect plan for you!
License pricing is based on the number of full and part-time active employees within bands (e.g. 751-1,000). SaaS pricing is based on PEPM.
I think BambooHR is meant for companies that have more than 200 employees, because it is not cheap, but for what they are offering, it is a nice software with some easy UI to understand for everyone at a company. I think for a small company, it is way too big of a software and it is not that worth the price.
As Vista HRMS is fully customizable to suit your needs, a company should determine if they have a current employee who can do the work themselves otherwise they will need to consider the additional cost of asking PDS to do the customizations for them. There are additional modules that we aren't currently making use of, but each company should learn about the functionality of each of them as some may be more beneficial than others. When gathering your questions, ask all potential users of the system what they would want to see in an HRMS. We did so before selecting Vista HRMS and we got pages and pages of questions and comments and made sure that each item was addressed beforehand and was something that we would be able to incorporate into the system. You have the option of taking the system in house or being a hosted client. Make sure you figure out what resources your IT department has available. If you have a dedicated administrator who will do all the upgrades and enhancements great, otherwise you may need PDS to help out and having PDS host may be a better option
Customer Service - The customer service is consistent and the team is always eager to help. They are polite, patient, and there are never terrible interactions.
Communication - BambooHR communication channels are simple. There are many different ways to communicate with the team. I prefer e-mail because it helps me keep track of the conversations and they respond within the appropriate time. Also, the e-mail reminders or notifications help tremendously and it's not overbearing.
Vista HRMS is very flexible, it does everything we need for HR, benefits and payroll. It’s user-friendly and intuitive to use, when we roll out new self-service items our employees have no problems and require minimal training or documentation.
PDS has excellent customer service and support. We get answers to the majority of our questions and problems quickly, within the day that we call. More complex issues that may require PDS’ technical support are usually addressed within a few days. We were upgrading our production servers to Windows 2012 over a weekend and a key person in our organization was on leave. When we checked with PDS to see what cost would be involved if we needed their help, they said it was included in our regular maintenance, no extra cost.
The PDS User’s Conference is an excellent learning opportunity for training on everything Vista does, including using Crystal Reports for custom reporting. You also get to meet and talk to the executive and development staff and have direct input into the future product development.
Reporting - I wish that you could choose a timeframe for all reports. There are times when I need to run a report for information at a point in time, but there is no functionality to complete this (maybe this is an add-on, but seems like it should be a basic function.)
ATS - Customizable notifications and making it easier to figure out how to change notification/email settings. I figured it out, but it was difficult to find. I wish you could choose to notify managers of candidates 1/week instead of every time someone applies.
Custom Holidays - being able to set up 2 different Holiday policies for different working groups. Some of our team gets a floating holiday, but we can't set that up without doing it for the entire company.
Being able to intercept a form that was signed by an employee but not the 2nd signer. We can't access onboarding forms that new hires signed after the 2nd signer left the company. Now we have to have our team resign all their onboarding forms because we cannot access the one with their signature.
Delegation for approvals - being able to delegate this when someone is on leave or time away so that Admins don't have to manage.
Typical of any system built for the unknown requirements of hundreds or thousands of customers with varying needs, PDS sometimes doesn't fit our processes precisely out of the box. However, this con is far outweighed by the ability to configure and customize the system.
The most significant pet peeve of our users is the necessity for so many clicks to navigate between different areas or the system or to review applicants. These items are being addressed based on feedback from the user community in an upcoming release.
Overall we have not had any reason to discontinue our use of BambooHR. We have not found a better solution, and there is no pressing reason that we would want to move away from the product. If they should fail to continue to improve their features over time, I could see this changing down the road, but for now I would say we are very satisfied with them. We would definitely like to see continued growth of their product however.
I feel so invested in Vista HRMS that I don't really want to try other options. I know we as an organization are not using this product to it's full potential and that is just due to us lacking the resources to be able to invest the time into breaking it apart and making it work to the best ability for us. The system works great as is, but there are a lot of implementations we can put into place to help us out even more. For example, we would love to start using Workflow to create more efficiencies. I personally have a very good relationship with our hosted vendor who supports Vista HRMS and can help me with any issues and concerns, this is a big part of the reason that I would renew with this product and continue to be an advocate for Vista HRMS.
Is very easy to navigate. All processes once explained, you can actually create an implement process associated to your HR goals. It is like a digital file of your employees, with functionalities that let you be on track on onboarding, performance, information, among others process. Time off approvals are easy to navigate.
The interface is intuitive, even if it does require some extra clicks to get to where you are going. The screens are consistently designed and formatted. There is a logical flow and organization to the application layout and menuing systems.
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 the help chat function several times and that is easy and great to use. There are also many articles, FAQs sections and an entire learning platform to learn on your own. I believe that is great. I also have used ChatGPT to ask how to do certain functions as well, which were accurately reported.
PDS has excellent customer service and support. We get answers to the majority of our questions and problems quickly, within the day that we call. More complex issues that may require PDS’ technical support are usually addressed within a few days
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!
It was some work involved in moving all of our documents from a drive over to the correct folders and creating the system of what folders were needed and what got placed where
Ask lots of questions, ensure you fully understand the functionality (particularly history records) and train, train, train the users for correct and complete utilization of the system.
Although there are many products in the marketplace, there is no perfect system. BambooHR is the most economical HRIS for a small business, start-up, or business that has never had HR software. BambooHR was selected for its affordable functionality. However, if they continue to ingore the lack of functionality the pretty package will no longer have any value.
I've used Peoplesoft HCM in the past. The products have some similarities, but they are marketed to different sized companies, so it's a bit of apples to oranges. Peoplesoft was very complex and challenging to manage and support. Vista HRMS should require fewer technical resources and still provide robust features for HR and Payroll. We selected Vista HRMS because it met the majority of our requirements and was priced to enable us to purchase and implement it within our budget. Also, it's an integrated system (although not truly one system when you count Vista Time) which is an improvement over our current state.
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.
Positive impact would definitely be self-service for both employees and managers to view and update selected data.
Through some analytics our managers are able to track turnover for their site/department by many criteria (length of service, reason, etc) and can view a number of other analytical reports such as headcount and demographics which help them to make informed decisions about their department.
