As a benefits leader, you have the rewarding job of making your company a great place to work. After all, employee benefits packages and other perks can help you attract top talent, retain current employees, and build a culture that aligns with your values.
The downside, of course, is all the administrative work that benefit plans and benefits enrollment creates for you. Fortunately, benefits administration software can help you automate your benefits management, improve efficiency, and streamline open enrollment — all while staying compliant.
Benefits administration software serves as a one-stop-shop for all your employee benefits. With everything centralized, the setup and management is easier for you and open enrollment is easier for your employees.
The result? Employees make smarter, more informed decisions about their benefits, and you have less administrative work to manage. To help you find the right benefits management software, we put together the following guide with top software platforms, features to look out for, common mistakes to consider, pricing, and more.
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We take our research seriously and want to make sure we are presenting our readers with the very best solutions in a given software category. Here's how we select vendors to be in our buyer guides:
Here's more detail if you want to read further on how we research vendors.
After surveying the landscape, we came up with this short list of top benefits administration software you should check out.
Why we love it
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Deel is making waves in the payroll space, being one of the first companies to specialize in international payroll & benefits for remote teams.
Deel
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With Deel, companies can hire employees in a multitude of countries without it getting messy. From the same dashboard, you can manage international payroll, benefits, taxes, and compliance in 150 countries.
Deel
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Deel
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Deel
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A cool thing about Deel is that you can sign up for free and play around with the tool, not being charged until you pay your first team member. Once you do, pricing for Deel will vary as follows:
Best For:
Companies, big or small, who wish to stay compliant when hiring people in multiple countries.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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OnPay ensures compliance and takes no upfront payment for its benefits administration software. When you decide to use it, you'll be connected with their team of licensed brokers so that your employees can get their favorite benefits from the best companies.
OnPay
Review:
OnPay is a cloud-based payroll software that also offers features for HR management and benefits administration. It integrates with several low-cost benefits administration solutions so you’re able to offer health insurance, 401(k) retirement as well as workers’ comp. Not only that, but OnPay is also quick to set up, user-friendly and affordable, featuring a single, transparent monthly fee for everything.
OnPay
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OnPay
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OnPay
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OnPay charges a base fee of $36, plus $4 per employee per month. You can use the price calculator on their website to see exactly how much it’ll run you for your team size. You can also sign up for a one-month free trial there.
Best For:
OnPay is great for small businesses looking for a payroll solution with basic HR features.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Easy to navigate, Namely is extremely organized and uses the best-in-class technology. Its benefits administration software is integrated with its HR and payroll system to save time and complexity.
Namely
Review:
Namely’s HR software includes payroll and benefits functionality that also integrates into the rest of their HRIS. If you’re looking for a full HR software suite, check out Namely’s solution.
Namely
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Namely
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Namely
Pricing:
Namely does not provide pricing on their website. However, having no benchmark provides the unique opportunity to negotiate with sales to determine the right price for your company specifically.
Best For
Namely targets mid-sized companies. They specifically mention companies with 50 employees up to a thousand, which is a large range. Most of their customer testimonials are from companies with 100 - 500 employees.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Whether you're just getting started or looking for ways to improve your benefits, Zenefits can help you simplify your process. One of its best features is that employees get detailed reports on their benefits to see what's working.
Zenefits
Review:
Zenefits offers benefits administration alongside their flagship HRIS product. The tool allows for employees to manage their benefits themselves on any platform they want, mobile or desktop.
For employers, you get detailed insights on your employees on top of saved time. In fact, Zenefits says that their customers save up to a full week of work by using their online enrollment tool alone.
Zenefits
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Zenefits
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Zenefits
Pricing:
Zenefits has two methods of subscription, per employee per month or per employee per year. The three tiers are:
Best For
Zenefits focuses on small to medium sized businesses. Enterprise corporations might want to find a solution that is more geared towards their size.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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With Gusto, you can build the perfect benefits package for your team. Gusto Wallet, a free wallet mobile app that helps employees set monetary goals and access emergency cash is worth taking a look at.
Gusto
Review:
Gusto was previously known as ZenPayroll, and originally started as the easiest way to run payroll for smaller companies. It has since added benefits administration as well as other features that are commonly found in your HRIS (onboarding, org charts, etc). Gusto continues to scale their customer base rapidly and has now acquired over 100,000 customers.
Gusto
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Gusto
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Gusto
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Gusto has a few different plans:
Best For
Gusto is perfect for small businesses that need simple benefits administration. It's easy to scale up their plans as your organization continues to grow.
Worth Checking Out:
Gusto is a dead simple way to run payroll for smaller companies.
Why we love it
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Designed to make benefits more accessible and less complicated, Bennie is available both as a web and a mobile app. With it, employees can track claims spending, estimate cost of care, find a doctor, access a live concierge team, and more.
Bennie
Review:
Bennie is a hub for your employee benefits information on a mobile-first platform. If employees have any questions about their benefits, they simply go to the app and interact with Ask Bennie, a smart healthcare concierge.
For employers, Bennie skips the typical brokerage experience. Instead, Bennie partners with major regional and national carriers to bring your company more personalized benefits. HR teams have their own backend to manage everything in one place. Customers also get access to strategic benefits and HR technology consulting.
Bennie
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Bennie
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Bennie
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The Bennie app is free to use for your company and employees. Bennie shops around for the best plan for your company, and takes a commission from the insurance company you decide on.
Best For
Companies in the 50-500 employee range.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Rippling's benefits administration software is as interactive as its UI – you can shop for new benefits in minutes, keep your existing plans without any excess updation, and automatically enroll new hires in company benefits.
Rippling
Review:
Rippling focuses on helping SMBs manage HR and IT in one solution. The tech is what you’d expect from a silicon valley based startup with a great UI and intuitive design. They also have over 500 integrations with everything from Slack to Github.
Rippling
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Rippling
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Rippling
Pricing:
Rippling starts at $8 a month per user at the base level. Costs for additional features must be discussed with the Rippling sales team.
Best For
Rippling is great for any company with 50 - 1000 employees that want a single system to fit all of their needs.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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A one-stop technology solution that merges your HR ecosystem with benefits administration system, Maxwell Health helps employees save time and make sound decisions about their benefits.
Maxwell Health
Review:
Maxwell Health, now owned by Sun Life Insurance, offers companies a modern approach to managing benefits for employees. From open enrollment to COBRA, they can help you stay compliant, and give employees a wide range of options all available through an easy to use mobile interface.
Maxwell Health
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Maxwell Health
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Maxwell Health
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Maxwell does not release their pricing online. You will have to contact a sales representative.
Best For
If your company isn’t picky about what insurance company to work with, Maxwell Health’s partnership with Sun Life Insurance is ideal. You get a simplified end-to-end experience, requiring even less administrative work on your part.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Remote is a robust and modern platform specialized in HR, payroll, and benefits for, as their name suggests, remote-first teams.
Remote
Review:
Remote lets you offer customized benefits packages to fit each country where you have people. They let you stay compliant by providing world-class benefits and perks that are in adherence with local laws and up-to-par with standards. These range from part time off to holidays, health care, and life insurance.
How do they do this? Remote fully owns local legal entities in all the countries they cover. Since they have no intermediaries to deal with, they’re able to offer more flexibility and speed at very interesting costs.
Remote
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Remote
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Remote
Pricing:
Remote has four plans. “Contractors” lets you manage and pay global contract workers for free; you only pay for payment processing fees. Then, they have their “Global Employment” plan, which starts at $299 per employee per month. For the other two plans, “Payroll & Benefits” and “Global Employment Plus”, they offer customized pricing.
Best For
Remote-first companies that have both employees and contractors overseas but don't want to set up a legal entity in each country.
Worth Checking Out:
Broadly speaking, there are two ways to get benefits admin support: a platform that only focuses on benefits admin or a more comprehensive Human Capital Management (HCM) suite that offers benefits admin as one of many HR features.
So, you’ll need to figure out which one will make the most sense for your company. We recommend demoing a couple vendors that fit into these two buckets so you can see how their solutions and features align with your needs and budget.
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