Our Pick Of The Best HR Software Of 2024

Employment Hero leads as an all-in-one employee management system that’s comprehensive in its HR, payroll and benefits management features. Additionally, it gained extra points as it’s Australia-based and caters to workplaces here, from managing local employment compliance to processing superannuation.

It was difficult to find what Employment Hero’s automated, cloud-based system cannot do. It helps to streamline processes from before an employee is onboarded, assisting in finding new team members through its applicant tracking system. It then manages and administers an employee’s work life cycle, from allowing onboarding employees to input information into its platform, acknowledge policies and access induction documents to allocating shifts and automating timesheets.

Employees can modify their personal information, review how much leave they have left to take and request time off. Accessing information and documents such as payslips, policies and expenses on the go, is all a matter of opening the provided app. Businesses can gather information on how their employees are feeling, any concerns or highlights through the feedback and survey generating features, while reporting tools monitor compliance and manage the company’s assets.

Although Employment Hero is in tune with the needs of Australian workplaces, its optional Global Teams feature enables owners to scale up their companies by allowing Employment Hero to act as the Employer Of Record (EOR), to source and manage team members overseas on their behalf.

Learn more on the Employment Hero website.

Who should use it:

Small and medium-sized businesses that want access to an array of features, but would like flexibility in payment options from a totally free subscription for basic services to separate subscriptions for HR and Payroll features. Global Teams, as an optional feature, may be useful to small businesses planning to scale up in the future.

It’s rare for software to get full points in every category, but monday.com HR pulls it off. It offers a robust recruitment pipeline that can automatically coordinate hiring managers’ and candidates’ schedules—all while keeping track of where candidates are in the process. Once you hire an employee, onboarding is simple with a ready-made template that prevents new workers from bombarding you with questions.

monday.com HR also helps with managing current employees by letting you collect feedback to gauge their well-being. If they have leave requests, you’ll get a notification right away—plus reminders if you let them sit for too long. Performance reviews are also easier than ever with a management system that tracks outcomes and schedules meetings.

It’s also possible to use monday.com as a communication platform so you can keep messages from managers and their direct reports all in one place. If your company is looking for work management solutions in other sectors, monday.com can also be used to manage customers, projects, roadmaps and more.

Learn more: Read our full monday.com HR review.

Who should use it:

With stellar consumer reviews and five different pricing tiers, monday.com is an excellent and affordable option for businesses large and small that want an all-in-one, cross-departmental HR management solution.

Paycor might be best known as a payroll solutions tool, but it also packs quite the punch with its HR features. It gives you the ability to automate mundane routine tasks to save you a ton of time. The software also has employee self-service tools so that they can update their profiles, sign digital documents and complete any assigned tasks without interrupting your day.

We also like Paycor’s transparent employee reports. You can have instant access to your headcount, turnover rate, compensation levels and absenteeism. Company-wide communication is also easy with mobile push notifications and chat messages.

You’ll get unlimited workflows with Paycor, meaning you can set up as many automated tasks as you’d like. If you’re in the healthcare, manufacturing, restaurant, professional services, education, retail or nonprofit industries, you can use pre-made workflows for recruiting, scheduling and paying staff. You can also use Paycor to design and implement benefits your employees will love.

Learn more on the Paycor website.

Who should use it:

Businesses with fewer than 50 employees can benefit a ton from Paycor’s combination of HR and payroll software. If you have more than 50 employees, pricing is obscured until you talk with a rep, so we’re not sure if it still offers a good deal.

One of the interesting things about Rippling is that it helps four major departments in your company: HR, information technology (IT), finance and engineering. That means you can use automated workflows in HR and beyond. In particular, Rippling excels at automation based on trigger actions, such as an employee’s PTO balance, tenure or job title. You can set up your own if/then statements that perform whatever tasks you desire, including tasks on third-party apps, based on a specified factor.

If you don’t know where to get started with your workflows, you can choose from hundreds of recipe templates, including options, such as a work-life balance enforcer, benefits enrollment deadline reminders and upcoming PTO notifications.

Benefits administration, payroll, applicant tracking and learning management are also some of the impressive features included in a Rippling subscription. It takes 90 seconds to run payroll, and the system also calculates all payroll taxes automatically to eliminate your payday headaches. When it comes to benefits, you can browse over 4,000 plans to find the best medical, dental and vision coverage for your employees. Rippling also lets you send offer letters, run background checks and perform other onboarding tasks with a few simple clicks.

Learn more on the Rippling website.

Who should use it:

Companies that want to get their HR, IT, finance and engineering departments running on the same software while also taking advantage of simple, preset automations will appreciate Rippling.

If you’re tired of having employees bombard you with questions, BambooHR could help slim down your inbox with a ton of employee self-service features. All plans allow self-editing of employee profiles, along with a robust employee directory and org chart that provides contact info with a few clicks. A company calendar also lets everyone know their coworkers’ paid time off (PTO) schedules and work holidays. Best of all, these features can be accessed via mobile app for added convenience.

Customised data inputs let you record any stats you’d like about your employees. And all of this information can be synced up to third-party apps to eliminate double entry and improve accuracy. As with the other picks on this list, BambooHR also includes automated HR workflows so you can stop spending your time chasing down paperwork.

One downfall—basic features, such as payroll, performance management and time tracking are all add-on components. Since pricing isn’t listed online, we can’t say for sure whether these tools are worth it or if you’d be better off with a more comprehensive system.

Learn more: Read more on the BambooHR website.

Who should use it:

Companies that would like to give employees more hands-on access to their information will love the self-service tools BambooHR provides.

Workday excels at offering customised reports about your workplace. You can set up your home screen to show data automatically, such as year-to-date (YTD) turnover—sorted by voluntary, new hire and high performer turnover—headcount, open positions and hire and terminations by quarter.

But perhaps its most unique feature is its global compliance support. Managing HR for a company with employees in different states—or even different countries—can be a headache. Workday eliminates the stress by helping you stay on top of regulatory changes in over 80 jurisdictions to reduce labour or tax violations. You can spend less time investigating location-specific laws and more time improving your company’s culture.

Another feature that makes Workday a top pick is its informative org charts that allow you to give feedback or promotions right from the same drag-and-drop interface. Talent procurement is also easy thanks to a skill-focused strategy that narrows down applicants based on their knowledge. Workday even offers benefits administration that lets you manage eligibility and available plans easily, no matter where your workers are located.

Learn more on the Workday website.

Who should use it:

Workday is best for mid- to large-sized companies who need custom HR and financial management over several locations.

Unlike some of the other picks on our list, Zenefits is totally upfront about its pricing. You can easily see what each plan costs and includes without needing to reach out to a company rep. Furthermore, services, such as payroll, advisory services, recruiting and using your own benefits broker, are all add-on costs, meaning you only pay for what you need.

According to Zenefits, it helps you with everything from hiring to retiring. You can create a compensation package directly in the system and then auto-send offer letters to new hires. One unique feature of Zenefits is that it can also manage contractors and freelancers in addition to full-time employees. Once employees join your organisation, they can then onboard themselves as well as edit their own records.

Zenefits allows you to take things digital with electronic documents, including W-4s and I-9s. This makes things easy come tax or payroll time when everything can be handled online without the time and labour of physically mailing documents. Finally, we also like Zenefits time off tracking features, which let you manage your company’s PTO policy, including time-off blackout dates and automatically calculated balances.

Learn more on the Zenefits website.

Who should use it:

Companies who manage a lot of freelancers and only want to pay for features they’ll use via add-ons will appreciate Zenefits.

Though ClickUp is more well-known as a project management software, it also comes with a specific setup for HR management. Your HR team will have its own Space—a place to store all of your files and information. Within that Space, you can add new folders and create unlimited lists of tasks organised by stage, due date or priority.

ClickUp works well for recruiting since you can organise applicants easily and keep track of all your outreach efforts. Add them into your Space, and you’ll be able to move them around depending on the stage of the process they’re in. The same goes for onboarding—you can create trackable tasks and docs, as well as leave comments and feedback right from the app.

Keep in mind—since ClickUp is primarily for managing projects, it doesn’t come with a lot of extra features like some of our other picks. It can help you stay extremely organised, but it doesn’t offer things, such as payroll, benefits administration, contractor payments or peer reviews.

Learn more: Read our full ClickUp review.

Who should use it:

If you’ve got other solutions for things, such as payroll or benefits and just need help staying organised with everything you need to do, then ClickUp is a good option.

AI-powered analytics delivers insights into payroll, pay equity and more. Users can visualise data in various ways including bubble charts, heat maps, scatter graphs and other formats. UKG Pro also uses AI to support performance management by removing bias, but the vendor’s site doesn’t make it clear how exactly this capability works. Finally, UKG Pro utilises AI to help shift managers quickly create employee schedules, complete with compliance checks.

UKG Pro’s team of compliance experts push regular updates, helping businesses stay on top of evolving regulations related to HR and payroll for Australia. The system even proactively alerts pertinent teams and employees when the company is at risk of violating a regulation.

UKG Pro offers various ways to customise its look and feel. Customers can white label the interface to display the company’s logo and branding. It also allows users to customise the interface to their role and preferences. For instance, they can set up frequently visited links for easy access and change up the dashboard tiles to their liking. That way, they can view the information that matters most for their day-to-day work. Users can also easily configure automatic workflows and generate reports using one of the system’s built-in reports or by building a custom report.

Learn more on the UKG website.

Who should use it:

Midsized to large businesses looking to automate HR processes, use AI for smart insights and tailor the system and its functions to meet their unique needs.

ADP Workforce Now centralises payroll, benefits administration, time tracking, HR and talent management within one system. It comes in three different plans for flexibility. Each plan includes payroll and tax capabilities, such as a payroll dashboard with error detection alerts and expert services for tax filing and payment.

ADP Workforce Now electronically dedicates and files taxes and proactively alerts payroll administrators or HR staff if it detects any calculation errors. It offers expert regulatory and compliance support in Australia and abroad in more than 140 countries. This is a plus for companies that have a remote workforce distributed across the country and globally. ADP Workforce Now helps simplify the payroll process by reconciling multiple pay rates and schedules. If your needs outgrow Workforce Now’s capabilities, you can upgrade to ADP Vantage HCM.

Learn more on the ADP website.

Who should use it:

Situated between its ADP Run platform for small businesses and ADP Vantage HCM suite for enterprises, ADP Workforce Now is designed for midsized businesses prioritising efficient and compliant payroll. ADP Workforce Now is especially suited to businesses that employ across the country and internationally because it reconciles varied pay schedules, rates and currencies.

Users can add any modules they need on top of its core HR functions so that no tools go unused. After selecting the modules that make the most sense, users can tailor Sage HR to fit their daily tasks and workflows rather than the other way around.

For instance, users can create custom reports for HR metrics that Sage HR doesn’t already report on by selecting all relevant fields and applying any filters they wish. Users can also set up workflow “recipes” to streamline their most repetitive tasks by stringing a sequence of actions together and applying triggers. These workflows accelerate multi-step processes involving multiple people for things such as reimbursements and timesheet approvals.

If you opt for the leave management module, HR teams can also create unlimited, customised time off policies, whether fixed annual vacation and sick days, unlimited PTO or something else. Everyone’s time off populates into a shared calendar, so everyone’s on the same page about who’s in and who’s out. Users can also generate custom reports for individual or team time off.

Learn more on the Sage website.

Who should use it:

A company should opt for Sage HR if it already has a payroll and benefits solution in place, has specific workflows and reports to track and prioritises customisation. Sage HR is also flexible, offering an array of add-on modules on top of its core HRIS. Otherwise, customers can opt to integrate their existing tools or upgrade to Sage HRMS to unlock access to payroll, benefits and other features.