Rippling Expert Review, Pricing, Alternatives - 2022

Rippling is an employee management platform for everything between onboarding and offboarding. They stand out for having a very appealing UI, with design that we find soothing to the eye. They also offer PEO services that you can keep track of through the platform.

‍Rippling is a relatively new player in the HR tools market, with a focus on helping SMBs manage HR and IT in one solution. They focus specifically on businesses with less than 2,000 employees. 

An interesting thing about them is that they are very vocal about trying to make their software easy-to-use and intuitive not just for HR professionals and recruiters, but for the CEO, IT staff, and any team member that will interact with the product.

For example, recruiters are able to get into the tool and see all the necessary HR information related to their profile that they need to consult sometimes. For example, download their pay stubs, consult PTO, number of sick days, or even check out who’s off when.

Rippling started with offering core HR, payroll, and benefit management tools with a strong focus on automation. As of 2022, however, they have incorporated many new modules to their offering, like time and attendance, talent management, learning management, and even licensed PEO services.

They now also have an IT cloud product, for app and device management. As with the HR side of it, it was always supposed to be a very self-service approach. Rippling’s products are meant to be something that you can sign up for and get cracking within a few minutes, with no long meetings or training sessions, at least after you’ve gotten a custom quote from their team.

As to the look and feel, it is exactly what you'd expect from a silicon valley-based startup, with a modern UI and eye-catching design that’s been interesting to watch evolve over the years since we first came across Rippling.

Notably, and finally, they also have over 500 integrations with everything from Slack to Github.

Rippling has always been about catering to the SMB market, who value having easy to use tools in a single place where the whole team can access them. Enterprises looking for a more robust platform might find it too simple. We would also argue that, since larger companies are not really their niche, the CS team might not be very used to dealing with larger teams.

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• 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 starts at $8 per month per user, but the final fee you pay will vary depending on which modules you'd like to use (or if you want the whole platform) and for how many people.

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.