Item: Rippling
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a small and growing startup in the market research industry (2.5 years old, now at 52 team members), with team members across the globe. Rippling has been a fantastic tech solution for all things related to managing our global team, including payroll, benefits administration (in the US), compliance trainings, app management and more. Rippling helps us stay organized and keep things in one system.

Pros and Cons

Excellent prompts and guided assistance for hiring and terminating employees
Easy-to-use and intuitive interface; much better than other platforms I've used
Impressive list of integrations
Discounts with key partners that we also use, such as 15-5
Guided assistance with adding new states to payroll platform
Reporting functionality is incredible! Endless possibilities for custom reports that are easy to put together
Benefits enrollment module is super clean and easy to use; it's great not to send employees to a different platform

Org chart functionality could be improved
The applicant tracking system UI could be improved; we pivoted to another provider with more robust features that integrates with Rippling
Functionality around manually creating checks or running edits on checks could be improved
User permissions need some work; there should be the ability to have an IT admin profile that can edit user emails without seeing sensitive comp data (we have requested this feature)

Return on Investment

Increased bandwidth for 1-person HR team
Increased bandwidth for 1-person IT team
Decreased administrative burden for tracking international employees in separate location

Alternatives Considered

Paylocity and Paychex Flex

The ease of use and admin and employee interface of Rippling blows Paychex Flex out of the water. For a young and tech-oriented startup, Rippling is by far a better fit for our team!

Paylocity has some more nitty-gritty payroll editing and adjustment capabilities, which I hope Rippling will develop at some point, but Paylocity reporting was a nightmare to use. Users constantly complained that they didn't like the interfact, didn't know where to find things, and the benefits module wasn't very intuitive. Also, Paylocity doesn't offer the comprehensive IT suite of services. Overall, I've been super happy with the move from Paylocity to Rippling in my function (two separate companies).

Support Rating

Overall, the support is good. It took some time to get used to not having a dedicated account manager. The model works, and gives you quick responses, and the built-in ability to see your list of outstanding and resolved tickets, as well as search your submitted tickets. That tracking is awesome!

The reason for the 8 is that when it comes to the tax operations team and making sure things are set up properly, we ran into two issues. #1 - Our request to change our entity from LLC to Inc was incorrectly answered by a junior employee that didn't know what they were doing. We listened to that support answer and it caused a world of trouble. Rippling has since adjusted their practices so that entity changes force setting up a separate entity within your account.

The second issue was that the tax operations team wasn't communicating internally. I had to ask 3-4 times to have a single, dedicated point of contact while we worked with our external accounting firm to adjust our 941 reports, W2s, and 940 report. It was a pretty frustrating experience.

That being said, despite this one negative period, I am still so pleased with Rippling functionality and overall support model that we are about to sign a 2-year contract with them.

Key Insights

Do you think Rippling delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Rippling's feature set?

Yes

Did Rippling live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Rippling go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Rippling again?

Yes

Usability

Intuitive interface. Great list of features. Constantly expanding product lines and feature enhancements. One stop shop for all things people and IT operations. Enables tech stack consolidation.

Other Software Used

Salesforce CMS, monday.com, TINYpulse, Pinpoint ATS

Likelihood to Recommend

We are continually expanding our use of Rippling. Although we moved away from their ATS, we added app management in the fall and will be adding device and inventory management shortly. Rippling has proven to be well suited to the following situations:

1) our fast-growing, multi-state, multi-country workforce
2) bringing IT and people operations together (with app, device, and inventory management) and boosting the reach and impact of our 1-person IT team
3) consolidating your tech stack. We use separate software for spend management and survey engagement, but will consider pivoting to Rippling's products in these areas in the future

One-stop-shop for all things people and IT operations!

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Rippling