Written by: Anna Courtney

What Is Rippling?

Rippling, a hybrid HR, IT administration, and payroll platform, provides organizations with an out-of-the-box solution for maintaining centralized control over employee administration such as onboarding, benefits management, and even payroll processing. Rippling, which serves businesses of various sizes, endeavors to integrate all aspects of workforce management such as HR and IT into a singular system. In this rippling review 2024, we’ll delve somewhat deeper to encompass what the platform has to offer.

Development

Launched in 2016 by Parker Conrad, Rippling was built to be a one-stop-shop HR and IT management system from the outset, setting itself apart early on for its automation of core HR functions and integration of IT management, such as employee onboarding and system set-up.

Thanks to a steady stream of massive venture capital, the company was able to quickly scale up its capabilities and add features, including global payroll and deep third-party integrations. Rippling now provides HR processes and IT management tools, making it a unique player in the category that’s rapidly evolving to meet the needs of businesses today.

Pros

✅ The reason that Rippling has been successful is that it has integrate payroll, HR and IT management into a single user experience.

✅ It helps to automate many routine administrative activities, from onboarding to benefits enrollment, which can save time and human error.

✅ Easy to set up

✅ Rippling’s interface is intuitive, making it easy for both employees and administrators to navigate.

✅ Businesses can tailor Rippling to their specific needs, choosing only the features they require and thereby optimizing costs.

✅ Rippling suits businesses of all sizes, capable of scaling up as a company grows.

✅ The platform provides strong security measures to protect sensitive data, including two-factor authentication and encrypted databases.

Cons

❌ For smaller businesses or those that don’t require the full suite of services, Rippling may be cost-prohibitive, particularly when adding multiple modules.

❌ Smaller businesses with straightforward operations might find Rippling’s extensive feature set overwhelming.

❌ The software is otherwise easy to manipulate but, for purists, it still presents a learning curve of features.

❌ While customization is a benefit, some users may find that there are limits to how much they can tailor certain features to their exact preferences or workflows.

❌ Sometimes, bringing together too many third-party applications can increase complexity or require extensive effort to ensure that all the systems work together.

❌ There is no standardization of pricing, each business receives a custom quote

❌ No free trial

❌ Payroll is an add-on only service

What Rippling Offers

• Streamlines onboarding, offboarding, and employee data management.
• Automated payroll capabilities with tax filing and compliance management.
• Manages employee benefits like health insurance and retirement plans.
• Oversees company devices and software, ensuring security and efficiency.
• Integrates with a wide array of third-party apps for extended functionality.
• Supports payroll management for international employees.
• Tracks employee hours and manages time-off requests.
• Helps businesses stay compliant with various employment laws and regulations.
• Full service payroll provider – Runs payroll in only 90 seconds

Key Features of Rippling

Payroll Management

The automated processing of payroll offered through the platforms service is a great help in saving time. All necessary payroll activities, such as the calculation of amounts for each individual employee and payments for groups of employees in bulk, can be accomplished within days instead of weeks. This feature optimizes the entire payroll workflow, requiring minimal human involvement and thereby reducing the all too familiar risk of errors that comes with every manual action.

Rippling allows a company to set the pay schedule, for example: a company may only want to process a payroll twice a month or on demand (which may be weekly or monthly). All changes in employee status, such as salary adjustments, promotions, or departures, are automatically updated, which ensures that each payroll cycle accurately reflects the latest employee information.

A central feature is the integration with HR data: when an employee’s details are updated, the changes are reflected straight away in the payroll system, across all records. There can also be automatic notifications and reminders for payroll administrators to help them to keep on top of deadlines and approvals.

This automated payroll system provides benefits for employees by delivering them digital pay stubs after each pay period. The stubs feature detail their earnings and deductions, which in turn making it easier for employees to track their compensation

Rippling lets you run payroll in 90 seconds (Source: Rippling)

(Source: Rippling)

Time Tracking – Rippling lets you effortlessly monitor employees’ hours from clock-in to paycheck, eliminating the need for manual data entry, syncing issues, and delayed supervisor approvals. (Source: Rippling)

Usability

Rippling’s software is refreshingly intuitive and user-friendly. Quite simply, it is pleasant to use. Even for managers and employees with little tech savvy, the software is intuitive and easy to use.

The interface of the system is simple and arranged well. When you log into the system the dashboard of the home page is showing you key information, it gives a brief overview of fundamental data at glance, for instance, number of hours worked, and the date of next pay roll and so on, you can see the façade of time off and pay roll tools are quickly accessible on the home page. The tools are arranged in various integrated icons/apps.

(Source: Rippling)

Menus are easy to read, and well-structured with lots of white space. The system is devoid of the usual complexity that would create cognitive overload, such as HR management systems and IT support apps, and feels refreshingly uncluttered. It’s possible to check information about employees, raise payroll requests, or create IT infrastructure just with the click of a button. Having a responsive design makes it accessible via a variety of devices, too, so HR and IT tasks can be completed on the go.

Onboarding

Rippling’s onboarding experience is slick and efficient. There’s no fluff, just walking you through what you need to do to get started in as few steps as possible.

From the very start, it’s clear that Rippling has put thought into how to make the onboarding process user-friendly. New users are greeted with a sequence of steps laid out clearly for them. The guidance assists in the set-up of core pieces, like employee profiles, payroll information and IT configurations, which make a normally daunting process much simpler and faster.

Rippling lets you onboard and off-board employees in 90 seconds (Source: Rippling)

One example of how Rippling’s onboarding can automate the onboarding process is the entry of data into the system. This data can be populated, if you use other HR systems, through automated integrations. And there are even ways to do the data populating through easy-to-use upload tools.

The onboarding training is thorough, and includes any number of in-app tutorial videos, step-by-step manuals or direct support from the Rippling team. The onboarding dashboard tracks your progress and makes things a little easier. You’ve also got help and supportive resources there whenever you need them.

In short, the onboarding experience with Rippling feels like there’s nothing that could have been done better because of the thoughtful effort that went into making the process as easy as possible from the end-user’s perspective.

Automatic Tax Withholding

When you run Rippling’s onboarding for a new employee, it automatically sets up the proper tax withholding for that employee, a process that is one of the more complicated tasks in payroll, showing just how much automation Rippling provides. The platforms expertise in automation, in this case tax calculations is a standout feature.

When running payroll, Rippling can calculate the correct withholding taxes owed by an employee to federal, state and local governments – a necessity that would be nearly impossible to update regularly if done manually. For a business that has employees across multiple states or with different local governments, tracking the most current tax rates and regulations becomes much more complicated, which makes Rippling’s assistance all the more important.

And going beyond the tax calculations, Rippling also takes care of withholding and remitting the taxes to the appropriate authorities. Businesses no longer need to pay attention to tax forms and are protected from penalties should they incorrectly or too late transfer money to tax authorities.

Rippling keeps employees informed of any tax law or rate changes as legislation changes, adjusting the payroll accordingly without requiring any action on the part of the business owner or HR staff.

Rippling’s automated tax withholding feature both streamlines one of the most tedious functions of the payroll management process and delivers a level of accuracy and compliance that is of paramount importance to even the largest of employers. This is what Rippling looks like when it figures out how to incorporate mission-critical payroll features into a worry-free experience.

Benefits Administration

We found that Rippling’s benefits administration feature was an amazing boon, designed to handle this usually frustratingly complex process in a user-friendly manner. Rippling’s benefits administration feature stands out for its ability to consolidate a large variety of benefits on to a single, well-organized platform.

We had the chance to tour the benefits administration module. It was stunning just how easy it was for businesses to set up and manage their various employee benefits, be they health insurance, retirement plans or more unusual benefits (they do that too) like gym memberships.

Everything from signing up and terminating employees, to setting up eligible benefit plans for them, to managing benefits like insurance and doling out equity, to tracking how they’re using it all, can be done in Rippling.

One of the biggest user-friendly features we found was benefits enrollment tied right into the HR system. This integration means that when an employee is onboarded, they are shown their enrollment options in a very simple fashion, making the whole benefits process seamless and simple. Employees can select these benefits, or modify them in the future, and easily view their plan status afterwards.

(Source: Rippling)

Beyond making life easier for the employees, Rippling’s benefits administration functions also help to alleviate the HR department’s administrative burden. The platform automates a lot of the day-to-day operation of providing benefits, in part by maintaining live, accurate information on each employee’s eligibility and enrolment status to avoid problems that could arise if, say, a new hire was left out of a health plan.

With many areas of the benefits management process automated on the platform, these benefits become less of an administrative headache for the business. This also means that the business can be confident in staying compliant with healthcare laws and other benefits-related regulations without having to manually track and verify every aspect of benefits administration.

The other, and perhaps even more useful, was the real-time notifications and alerts. Because of those notifications, either to HR managers or to employees, everyone’s kept timely informed about deadlines for certain processes – such as open enrolment periods for benefits, policy paperwork updates, etc.

Rippling’s reporting workflow automatically reveals which benefits employees are actually using, and what they’re costing employers. Access to all this data can help companies fine-tune their benefits offerings and program costs.

To sum up, the standout tool within Rippling’s benefits administration feature is the ability to streamline the complexities of benefit management for a variety of employee benefits in a significant way. The combination of integration, automation, and ease-of-use provide HR and employees with a benefit management system that is unrivaled in its ability to boost efficiency and effectiveness in this key HR function.

Third Party-Integrations

Running payroll efficiently requires an increasingly complex mix of software tools and databases. No individual company is building a complete solution in-house. Services such as Rippling’s enormous suite of third-party integrations are necessary for payroll solutions to become more useful to new employees and more legible to regulators.

We also found that Rippling integrates with more than 500 third-party applications that can cover pretty much every line of business required software – from your go-to accounting software, to your CRM tool of choice, your preferred project management system and communications software.

Rippling connects with over 500 third-party applications (Source: Rippling)

And Rippling connects with flagship accounting and banking software such as QuickBooks, Xero and NetSuite, automatically pushing payroll information and financial data between the apps and evening out the workload for financial reconciliation and reporting.

The approach is common in CRM (customer relationship management), where Rippling connects with Salesforce and HubSpot, for instance. Such integration allows for the synchronization of sales and customer data with employee records.

In the CRM domain, Rippling integrates with Salesforce and HubSpot. Such integration allows for the synchronization of sales and customer data with employee records, streamlining operations across various departments.

When it comes to project management and collaboration, Rippling integrates with task-management tools such as Asana, Trello and Slack to help keep employee data up to date across project teams, and communicate internally.

Rippling’s open API also hooks into specialized apps such as Greenhouse for hiring or applicant tracking, and GitHub for software development processes. This kind of broad integration rapidly creates a unified technology stack within an organization.

In sum, Rippling’s vast third-party integrations are part of its pitch – they can extend the full potential of the platform, and they also help make a business’s whole technology stack much easier to manage, particularly if it uses multiple software platforms at once. Rippling could be a boon to that business.

Pricing and Plans

Rippling’s pricing model is a la carte – you can choose the HR and IT features that your business needs and pay only for them. The standard tier typically includes HR and IT management tools. You can add payroll processing to your plan, and the price depends on the number of employees you have, as well as the frequency of payroll cycles. Benefits administration is also priced based on the complexity and customization of the benefit portfolio you choose.

Other aspects of HR that are built into the platform, such as time tracking and compliance services, are billed per-seat as well. Pay-as-you-go IT services through Rippling can include things like device management and integrating with other apps. Rippling even offers enhancements such as international payroll and state of the art security.

Larger businesses, or ones with bespoke needs, can get tailor-made packages through Rippling. The platform may charge for setup or premium support, but the company’s cloud-based billing keeps their pricing transparent at all times. Rippling claims humans still make up the centre of most enterprise operations, which is why it wants small and medium businesses to rely on them rather than multitudinous software packages to run a company.

Rippling offers a ‘unity’ plan that costs $8 a month for every end user. Rippling Unity has four plan pricing options. The details of these plan pricing options are not publicly available. It is only possible to get a quote by speaking with Rippling through a demo. Moreover, the monthly base cost is not certain, as it may vary with the HR Cloud, IT Cloud, and Finance Cloud products included in your choice of plan.

Ripplings Customer Service

Rippling provides customer service via live chat and email. You can call them too, or convert an active live chat into a phone call.

Rippling have shared live-time data about their customer support metrics (corporate speak for ‘we try to be transparent’). Their latest average response time for live chat is about 20 seconds, for email around 1 hour and 31 minutes, and their first contact resolution rate is above 90 per cent, indicating that many of their users’ queries resolve satisfactorily in the first response.

Customer Reviews

Reviews found on Ripplings main page (Source: Rippling)

Conclusion

We would recommend Rippling for the following businesses/companies:

• Mid-sized to Larger Businesses: Its broad HR, IT and payroll functionality makes it excellent for organisations with more complex operational needs, whose employees require configuration, workflows and automation of further functionalities.

• Companies with a Need for Integration: Companies That Should Integrate: Rippling fulfils the need for integration across all departments. It’s great for companies that want to unify a number of software and systems that they use to do business. It can easily connect with a wide variety of third-party applications and services.

• Organizations with Complex Payroll and Compliance Requirements: Companies With Complex Payroll Considerations: Companies with complex payroll needs – including those with multiple tax responsibilities and compliance obligations – will benefit from Rippling’s fully automated and complete payroll system.

• Businesses That Want to Consolidate HR and IT Management: Rippling allows companies to manage new hire onboarding and other tasks in a single place, making it particularly suitable for businesses that want to consolidate such tasks into their IT departments.

We would not recommend Rippling for the following:

• Very Small Enterprises or Solo Entrepreneurs: Very Small Enterprises or Solo Entrepreneurs: The breadth and cost of Rippling might be overkill for solo entrepreneurs or truly small businesses that require little more than core functionality.

• Businesses Looking for a Simple, Basic HR Tool: Companies that need only basic HR functionalities might find Rippling too advanced and may prefer a simpler, more straightforward tool.

• Organizations with Limited Budget for HR/IT Solutions: Smaller companies or startups with strict budget constraints might find the cost of Rippling a bit steep, especially if they are not in need of all the features it offers.

If you are not sure if Ripplig is the right fit for your company check out its close competitor Deel in our review here