10 Best Employee Management Software Of 2024

As soon as a new employee joins your team, monday.com makes them feel welcome (and takes their questions off your plate) with automated onboarding. They’ll clearly be able to see their schedule of activities and tasks, and you can follow along as they complete each step in the process.

When it comes time to manage performance reviews and feedback, monday.com also excels with premade workflows that allow for direct communication between managers and their reports. You can see who’s up for review and schedule 1-on-1s all from your main dashboard.

Tracking employees’ satisfaction levels is also easy thanks to the ability to plan well-being activities and survey workers after each one. You’ll be able to find out which activities they enjoy—and which they don’t find valuable.

Paid time off (PTO) is another dreaded task to manage—but not with monday.com. You’ll see all leave requests come in on a specific dashboard. From there, you can sort them by department, week and date to make them easier to approve or deny. Managers can receive reminders if they wait too long to approve while employees can get notifications after their pending request is finalized.

monday.com also lets you create your own workflow if you have other projects or plans in mind. Switch between table, timeline, Kanban, chart or calendar mode to make it easy to completely customize your employee management experience.

Learn More: Read our full monday.com review.

Who should use it:

Small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) will love the robust flexibility of monday.com. It can help you manage nearly every aspect of an employee’s development all from one centralized workspace.

Paycor offers talent management, workforce management, employee experience and benefits administration tools to make managing your workers simple. Its scheduling tools let you assign shifts with a few clicks and then send real-time notifications and reminders to update your employees. Employees also have the option to set their availability and pick up open shifts in real time.

You can ensure workers are satisfied by conducting employee pulse surveys to monitor low morale and identify potential problems. These results are collected into executive insights, which can then be shared with the leadership team. Even more intriguing is the use of natural language processing in every survey. This is meant to help you identify hidden opinions and attitudes employees might have that they aren’t sharing.

Developing and educating employees is key to improving the company, and Paycor does this by providing built-in, self-paced training modules. You can organize training programs and personalize content depending on a worker’s department or team. These modules can help you stay compliant with learning or licensing regulations.

We also like Paycor’s career progression tools. The software makes it easy to define a role’s responsibilities so you can make sure everyone’s on the same page when it comes to expectations. Action-oriented performance assessments are created based on the job description so employees see exactly where and how to improve.

Learn More: Read our full Paycor review.

Who should use it:

For a more robust employee management platform that goes beyond simple drop-and-drag tasks, Paycor is a good pick. It offers more in-depth services that work well for medium and larger-sized businesses.

BambooHR lets you easily manage every employee in the company with an all-in-one database. You can access all of an employee’s historical data—including compensation raises, title changes, start dates and more—from one easy-to-read record. This database connects with every feature of the BambooHR software—as well as third-party integrations—meaning you don’t have to double-enter anything. To keep things simpler on your end, you can enable self-service edits while also limiting an employee’s access to sensitive data.

We like BambooHR’s employee satisfaction tools. Built-in surveys let you use the Net Promoter Score method to take your company’s pulse. Surveys are also totally anonymous so employees are more honest about their opinions. To help you quickly identify main concerns, the survey software also offers intelligent keyword tagging and a most-mentioned topics report.

You can also check on employees’ well-being with surveys that use a six-point scale that eliminates neutral answers. Every question has a free-response section so they can go into more detail, potentially providing you with key insights. You have the option to send these surveys monthly, bimonthly or quarterly to monitor changes.

Learn more: Read our full BambooHR review.

Who should use it:

If your company is going through a lot of changes, BambooHR could be the tool you need to keep everything organized while also monitoring employees’ satisfaction and well-being levels.

Workday’s best feature is its global-friendly setup. It can help you manage employees in over 200 countries, including helping you stay compliant with labor laws, taxes, benefit packages and more.

Not only that, but you can also help to engage and develop your employees based on their roles. Workday comes loaded with career development tools, such as job interest assessments and talent reviews so you can assess what your employees are best at while fostering new skills. You can then label what skills each employee has to make it easy to see where your company is the strongest and where you might need to improve. If employees want to transition to a new role, they can view the skills they need and pursue built-in learning experiences to get there.

We also like its integration with your company’s finances. If you choose to use this part of the app, it could help you visualize workforce costs and trends that could be bogging down your company. Of course, it also simplifies payroll, with both clock-in/clock-out and pay-on-demand features.

Learn more: Read our full Workday review.

Who should use it:

If you’re a global company with employees in several states or countries, Workday greatly simplifies employee management so you aren’t as stressed.

Rippling bills itself as a single source of truth for your HR, information technology (IT) and finance departments, and we agree. In particular, its HR software features robust automations that you can set up using an if/then infrastructure. This can be used for something as simple as PTO requests or as complicated as gender compensation inequity alerts. Time and attendance can also be highly automated, reducing the time it takes to review schedules and hours worked.

Our favorite feature of this powerful tool is the training modules. Rippling lets you build rules for all employment courses, as well as track the progress of who’s mid-course and who hasn’t started. You can upload your own Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) e-learning packages or use one of Rippling’s 1,000-plus courses, including modules on sexual harassment, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and cybersecurity. You can even prevent employees from clocking in before they finish certain training modules.

Benefits are also simple to manage in Rippling. You can let employees choose their health, dental and vision insurance as well as make contributions to their 401(k) or flexible spending account (FSA)/health spending account (HSA) all from the same interface. It’s also easy for employees to compare plans and choose the right one for them.

Learn more: Read our full Rippling review and Rippling pricing guide.

Who should use it:

Companies with a global presence who want to prioritize training employees with customized courses will appreciate Rippling’s in-depth learning modules. It’s also great for companies who want to rely heavily on automated processes.

Often, it can be hard to keep employees engaged and inspired. Zenefits helps you tackle that with goal management tools. You can create and display goals and their progress on each employee’s dashboard so they’ll know exactly how well the company is doing. It’s also easy to create personal goals for each employee as part of a performance improvement plan—these are integrated automatically into their future performance reviews.

When it comes time for performance reviews, you can use prebuilt templates for 360-degree, peer and manager reviews. You can also customize your own review forms and save them to use again later. To make sure you don’t miss anyone’s annual or six-month review, you can automatically schedule reviews based on employee or company actions.

There’s even a built-in one-on-one meeting tool in Zenefits that keeps track of how often you touch base with employees. During these meetings, you can share an agenda and create action items so you don’t forget about important tasks, as well as jot down private notes that only you can see.

The Zenefits dashboard itself is also an engaging tool. As soon as an employee logs in, they’ll see all of their tasks. There’s also a communication tool that functions a bit like a Facebook feed, where users can post announcements and questions that pop up in chronological order.

Learn more: Read our full Zenefits review.

Who should use it:

For companies that are struggling to track goals—both corporate and on the individual level—Zenefits holds you accountable while also making it easy to reward those who go above and beyond.

Full disclosure: ClickUp isn’t specifically an employee management software. But that’s what makes it so unique. As a project management software, it lets you customize your interface specifically to your needs through tasks, folders, lists and docs. You can choose from over 100 premade HR templates or build your own depending on what you want.

In particular, we think the 1-on-1s template is useful for employee management. It lets you define individual roles for each employee, as well as their expectations and a meeting agenda. Along the same lines is a 30-60-90 day plan that helps you set goals for both new hires and seasoned veterans. Career pathing makes it easy for employees to see the next step in their future, while a board skills matrix helps you keep track of everyone’s capabilities.

ClickUp can also be used to conduct engagement surveys (through the Likert scale) and performance evaluations. Managers can even use daily reporting to send updates to their direct reports, record issues and share feedback across the team. All data is collected securely so it’s only seen by the people you choose.

Learn more: Read our full ClickUp review.

Who should use it:

If you’d like to take the organization of every HR and employee task into your own hands, ClickUp lets you do that. You can set up everything to meet your company’s demands precisely.

UKG Pro is a superior employee management software for managing life-work balance because of its people-centered technology. For example, its UKG InTouch DX time clock lets employees clock in just by looking at a camera—convenient for you, because it eliminates time clock mistakes you need to correct. And on your end, advanced AI-scheduling features let you create balanced schedules that automatically consider employees’ availability and skills.

Intuitive dashboards curate all of your employees’ information on one easy-to-access page. You can also see hierarchical views of your company that show demographics—which can help you reach the level of diversity you want. We also like UKG Pro’s compliance updates that let you track key information for government regulations in both the U.S. and Canada.

Communication features are also a big part of UKG Pro. One such feature is the ability to create custom employee groups based on shared interests or hobbies. It’s also possible to measure communication metrics so you can gain actionable insights on how to improve your strategies.

Learn more: Read our full UKG Pro review.

Who should use it:

UKG Pro works well for businesses that have a lot of hourly employees, as AI-powered scheduling can reduce your workload.

If you’re looking to scale up your hiring, ADP Workforce Now will be a valuable tool. It features an onboarding workflow that’s configurable based on the employee type. ADP even lets you set up a meet-the-team experience, collect employee payment preferences and provide an office neighborhood map—all before the first day.

Unfortunately, benefits administration and workforce management are only available in the more expensive plans, so you’ll likely need to upgrade for a complete employee management solution. With benefits administration, you can configure plans and view various benefits reports to see which options your employees are taking advantage of. Workforce management features allow you to manage time-off requests, seamlessly integrate payroll and analyze scheduling and overtime.

Another useful tool in ADP is the research-reviewed and scientifically validated survey templates that let you get employee feedback. You can also build your own customized surveys for more individualized answers. Surveying is available for specific employee groups or the entire company, and you can analyze results based on department, location and team.

Learn more: Read our full ADP Workforce Now review.

Who should use it: Companies looking to make a major hiring push might appreciate ADP Workforce Now’s customizable onboarding workflows.

Sage HR shines when managing performance reviews. You can set aspirational OKRs and keep track of progress every step of the way with intuitive graphs. The 360 feedback reviews allow you to collect and share anonymous feedback, while one-on-one meetings give employees time to work directly on improvement with their managers. You can also create HR surveys to analyze company sentiment and gauge satisfaction and engagement.

We also like Sage’s workflow builder feature. It lets you create custom workflows based on an “if this, then that” structure—but without complicated coding. Custom fields in the employee database also let you track employees with specific hobbies or other unique facts.

Another selling point of Sage HR is the shared company vacation calendar. It allows the entire team to know when a certain member is going to be out of the office—hopefully letting them plan ahead. On your end of things, approving time off and scheduling shifts is easy with automated tools. It’s a very visual interface, and you can organize shifts by groups and areas.

Learn more: Read our full Sage HR review.

Who should use it: 

Companies that want to empower employees with good feedback but don’t need benefits administration or learning management tools will appreciate Sage HR.