BambooHR is designed to simplify HR tasks and manage employee data—but does it deliver on its promises?
This BambooHR review explores its key strengths and potential drawbacks, helping you evaluate whether it aligns with your organization’s needs. If you’re considering BambooHR or an alternative HR software, this analysis can support your decision-making process.
As always, conducting your own research can help you find the right fit for your team and company goals.
Key insights
- BambooHR is an HR software designed to centralize tasks like hiring, onboarding, payroll, and benefits management. While BambooHR offers effective features, some users report limitations in customization and self-service options, which may impact multi-site teams.
- Alternatives like HiBob, which stands out with its ability to support diverse teams, provide scalable and flexible solutions, enhancing team member experience through automated processes, engagement surveys, and performance reviews.
- Consider your organization’s specific needs and scalability requirements when choosing the best HR software that will fit your needs.
What does BambooHR do?
BambooHR is HR software that centralizes daily HR tasks into a single platform. It bundles different features including hiring and onboarding, analytics and reporting, and payroll and benefits management.
This cloud-based platform creates a single source of data so HR teams can:
- Manage employee data
- Find, hire, and onboard talent
- Manage payroll, time tracking, and benefits
- Measure employee experience and performance
- Connect tools with pre-built integrations
BambooHR review
Let’s explore BambooHR’s features, pricing plans, and customers’ feelings about the HR software.
Features
Recommended For Further Reading
HR data and reporting
- Team member database: Centralize and manage your people’s information
- Automated reporting: Generate HR insights with built-in report templates
- Mobile app: Give people access to HR functions via the BambooHR mobile app
Hiring and onboarding
- Applicant tracking: Manage candidate sourcing, communication, and tracking from one centralized location
- Onboarding: Set up customizable preboarding and onboarding packages
- Offboarding: Plan and execute offboarding workflows with checklists
Payroll, time, and benefits
- Payroll: Calculate wages, taxes, and deductions
- Benefits administration: Enable people to enroll in benefits and review their packages
- Time tracking: Sync time-off requests, work hours, and overtime with payroll
Employee experience and performance
- Employee satisfaction with eNPS: Measure employee engagement and satisfaction using the employee net promoter score
- Performance management: Track employee development with performance reviews goal setting, and continuous feedback
- Employee wellbeing: Offer tools to address your people’s mental, physical, and emotional health
- Employee community: Offer a central place for all internal communications
Customer reviews
Pros
Some BambooHR customers appreciate the platform’s:
- Interface: “The interface is simple and easy to navigate for both employees and admins.” – verified user
- Organization: “Having one place for all of the employee information and files is a fantastic feature.” – verified user
- Payroll: “I like that payroll is fairly easy to process.” – verified user
Cons
Other customers report having some trouble with:
- Customization: “They do not offer much in the form of customization.” – verified user
- Self-service options: “Self-service for simple options are not included, having to call customer support for simple options is time-consuming” – verified user
- Bugs: “There are a lot of bugs in BambooHR. ” – verified user
- Multi-site teams: “I don’t like that there’s…no support when it comes to the fact we have employees in multiple states. Every other HRIS has those options available to us.”- verified user
BambooHR pricing
BambooHR offers two plans, Core and Pro, but does not list specific pricing.
Core includes:
- HR Data & Reporting
- Hiring & Onboarding
- Time Off & Benefits Tracking
- Employee Experience
- Integrations Marketplace
Core Pro includes all of the above, plus:
- Performance Management
- Employee Community
BambooHR user reviews
True to the published date of this blog, BambooHR holds a 4.4/5 star ranking from customer reviews on G2.
If you’re interested in a deeper exploration of individual BambooHR reviews, you can access further details on several review platforms:
- BambooHR customer reviews on G2
- BambooHR customer reviews on Capterra
- BambooHR customer reviews on Gartner
- BambooHR customer reviews on Software Advice
Top BambooHR alternatives
We understand that BambooHR may not suit every organization’s unique needs. Let’s explore the best BambooHR alternatives for HR leaders seeking flexible, scalable, and innovative solutions to support their teams.
HiBob
HiBob is a dynamic alternative to BambooHR for businesses of all sizes. HR leaders use HiBob to handle essential HR functions like centralizing team member data, improving onboarding and offboarding flows, automating payroll, and streamlining time and attendance management. Finance teams use the same real-time people data to track workforce costs and support more confident planning. Built-in AI also helps both teams move faster with guided insights and consistent workflows.
HR leaders can elevate the employee experience by sending HiBob’s engagement surveys, setting up 360-degree performance reviews, and creating safe spaces for team members to voice their concerns.
Teams from 50 to 10,000+ can maximize HiBob’s benefits across multi-location and remote setups. This means your organization can keep scaling while ensuring every team member stays connected, engaged, and supported.
Key features:
- Core HR: Centralize and secure team member profiles, documents, and essential HR records in one place
- Finance: Connect people plans to budgets by modeling headcount and workforce costs and keeping HR and Finance working from the real-time data
- Hiring and Onboarding: Streamline the recruitment journey with applicant tracking, interview scheduling, candidate evaluations, offer letters, and guided onboarding workflows
- Payroll: Pay team members accurately and on time with automated calculations, approvals, and reporting that reduce manual work and support compliance
- Time and Attendance: Track hours, attendance, absences, and time off accurately with integrated time-tracking tools to ensure timely paychecks
- Performance and Learning: Conduct 360-degree performance reviews, set and track goals, and provide continuous feedback and then create, assign, and track learning journeys with the built-in LMS
- People Analytics: Gain workforce data to share info from KPIs, reports, proactive insights, and attrition indicators with other stakeholders
Employment Hero
Employment Hero combines hiring, HR, payroll, and engagement into an AI-powered HR platform. It offers online onboarding, performance review management, and workforce planning support. The platform uses AI to automate payroll processing, compliance management, and benefits administration.
Key features:
- Integrate with external software systems
- Automate payroll processing
- Manage the onboarding process for new joiners while maintaining compliance with employment laws
- Provide a portal for people to manage their personal information, access payslips, and request leave
Paycor
Paycor offers a human capital management (HCM) system that streamlines typical HR operations and manages people data. It simplifies payroll processing, people recognition programs, and team analytics with a single source of truth for all team member data.
Key features:
- Put all team member information into a single platform
- Automate scheduling and manage labor costs
- Offer custom training programs to promote growth
- Create development programs to build soft skills in management
Rippling
Rippling offers an HR platform that combines HR, IT, and finance operations into one system. International teams can offer global payroll to hire, pay, and manage international teams while staying compliant with over 140 local regulations. Rippling also allows organizations to manage identities, devices, and inventory globally.
Key features:
- Automate payroll processing for international teams
- Sync time tracking, scheduling, and attendance with payroll
- Manage benefits, open enrollment timelines, and deliver benefit updates
- Offer a self-service portal so people can manage their data, benefits, and performance
Sage HR
Sage HR offers customizable HR management software to manage and engage teams with fewer than 250 employees. Teams can pick and choose which features they’d like in their package like automated payroll, attendance tracking, benefits management, and more.
Key features:
- Keep track of team data in one place
- Offer mobile access to data, calendar, requests, and approvals
- Get a view of people’s performance with 360 feedback
- Log time online, from anywhere
Is BambooHR the right HR software for your business?
BambooHR offers an all-in-one system of HR tools for small to medium-sized businesses. However, growing teams may outgrow some of its capabilities or require more customization and flexibility than it provides.
For organizations looking for a more scalable, intuitive platform, consider Bob. HR leaders can use HiBob to automate manual HR and finance processes, improve workforce data integrity, and manage their growing tech stack for local, remote, and global teams.
Even as your business grows, you can keep using HiBob to facilitate each team member’s development and help them evolve into new responsibilities in their roles. This way you can get back to what really matters—your people.
BambooHR FAQs
Does BambooHR do payroll?
Yes, BambooHR offers payroll services for United States organizations to manage direct deposit, pay schedules, tax filings, and more within the platform. However, they only offer payroll services as an add-on to subscription plans for an extra fee.
How much does BambooHR cost?
BambooHR doesn’t publicly disclose its pricing at the time of writing this review. However, they offer two main packages, Core and Pro, with additional add-ons like payroll.
Is BambooHR a PEO?
No, BambooHR does not offer any PEO (professional employer organization) services. They don’t co-employ your workforce or handle HR responsibilities on your behalf.
Is BambooHR secure?
BambooHR implements security measures to protect user data. This includes data encryption, vulnerability scans, firewalls, and more. The platform also offers role-based access controls so only authorized personnel can access sensitive information.
Disclaimer:
This content reflects HiBob’s perspective, informed by our experience supporting HR teams as they evaluate and implement HR software. It is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as independent research or professional advice. Prospective users should conduct their own evaluation before making a decision.
Feature descriptions, pricing references, and availability for third-party platforms are based on publicly available information at the time of publication and may change. HiBob does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of information related to third-party products. Prospective users should verify details directly with each provider.
