Rippling Expert Review, Pricing, Alternatives - 2023

Rippling is an employee management platform for everything between onboarding and offboarding, with a soothing design and a great user experience.

Expense reporting and reimbursement is prone to error. Any number of human or computer blunders can happen during the handoff to the payroll system, the handoff to accounting, and the handoff(s) along the approval chain. These problems are amplified if the handoffs are between systems designed by entirely different companies with a third party brokering the information exchange between the two.

Rippling’s spend management system puts digital intelligence where once a (probably very frustrated) human admin would choreograph the awkward software dance between one piece of middleware and another.

A small, level org with simple spending needs would not use most of the features offered by Rippling’s HRIS, and therefore their global payroll.

Proxy, Dwell, Superhuman, Expensify, Checkr

• Manage devices: Among other things, Rippling lets you manage and protect the computers, phones, and tablets that your employees use for their work.
• App management: Another feature that's particular to Rippling is their mission control for work apps. In brief, you can manage users and their access for tools like Slack, Office, Google Workplace, and Dropbox.

Rippling also offers:

• Payroll
• Benefits
• Talent Management
• Time & Attendance
• Automated Onboarding & Offboarding
• PEO

When it comes to integrations, Rippling is one of the leaders in the HR tech space, being able to integrate with over 500 tools. Some of them are Lever, Greenhouse, and Quickbooks, for example.

Rippling's Core HR platform starts at $8 per employee per month. Contact Rippling regarding a custom Spend Management quote.

This software is best for companies of medium to large size, globally or nationally distributed with multiple levels of organization.

Typically, Rippling takes around 2 weeks to implement, but times will vary depending on the scope of each project.

Rippling has a Customer Success department, a CSM toolkit, and a help center.

Rippling has an interesting origin story, in big part because they were founded by the former Zenefits CEO and one of its Co-Founders, Parker Conrad, after a somewhat dramatic exit. Conrad co-founded Zenefits in 2012. Part of what inspired him to help create the product was the launch of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and his experience as a cancer patient.

Zenefits became one of the quickest-growing tech startups of its era, getting valued at $4.5 billion within two years of its inception. Since then, it has remained a constant household name in the world of HR software for American SMBs. Even after some controversy.

In 2015, it was reported by Buzzfeed News that the startup had allowed salespeople to sell health insurance that they were unlicensed to sell, since in the US the law requires insurance brokers to be licensed. The company came under heavy scrutiny for failing to enforce these legal requirements, to the point that Conrad had to step down from his role as CEO.

From the ashes, Parker Conrad teamed up with Zenefits’ former director of engineering and founded Rippling. The driving idea was to create a platform that could simplify HR in general through automated workflows. The focus was on going beyond benefits and payroll and touching upon everything that HR is traditionally supposed to do.

Founded in 2016, the product caught on somewhat slower than Conrad’s former project, but they solidly built a name for themselves by orienting their product towards companies with less than 2000 employees.

Then, in 2020, Rippling was named a "Next $1B Startup" by Forbes. They became an actual $1B startup just months after that mention, getting valued at $1.35 billion in August 2020. Shortly after, they managed to top even that, getting valued at $6.5B in October 2021, and then at aghgb staggering $11.25 billion in May 2022. 

To this day, they continue to grow consistently and are considered one of the top players in the HRMS space for SMBs. Also, they now hold their own licenses for insurance services, PEO, and payments. You can consult the exact info on those via their website.