Wage Against the Machine

My opinions about Rippling, Deel, ADP, Paylocity, Gusto, Bamboo, and Justworks based on my experiences with the products

The opinions in this post are just that: opinions. They’re informed by my experience with the products in question. Where possible and appropriate, I have shared the details that have informed those experiences. Some details have been changed to protect confidentiality. Some stories are composites of several incidents. Some details have been removed for narrative flow. And while I’ve tried to be true to the best of my recollection, my memory is flawed.

In this issue:

• I take sides on the Deel vs Rippling feud

• I trauma dump on just some of the reasons I won’t work with ADP

• I share thoughts on whether Gusto, Bamboo, or Justworks is better for SMB (and which one I prefer working in)

• I get a little bit rant-y about Paylocity

Some of my experiences may resonate with other users familiar with these products. Your experiences and opinions may be different. I welcome you to share yours in the comments.

Good faith self-interest and bias is welcome. Ad hominem attacks and other bad faith nonsense will be deleted with or without response.

I look forward to engaging with other opinionated and experienced users of these products in the comments.

Disclosure: I have formal relationships with the following companies
Rippling
Gusto
Justworks
Insperity
I also have informal relationships with representatives at several other providers. I don’t accept any form of compensation from any of these companies. If a vendor doesn’t allow me to pass monetary incentives on to the client as a discount, I donate the commission/revenue share to charity.

If I endorse a company, it is because I think they do a good job. If I recommend a product to a client, it’s because I like to work in that product myself and think it’s the best fit for their needs. I don’t accept formal partnerships from companies that I haven’t used or whose user experience I don’t endorse.

Wage War

Where I fall on the Rippling vs. Deel debate

Deel is like if a pickup artist did payroll.

Deel is the stereotypical tech-bro, “move fast and break (your) things,” the-rules-are-for-thee-and-not-for-me, all-glitz-no-substance disappointment. It looks pretty in the demo, even if those fancy buttons and cool apps never work as expected.

🔨 Features are bolted-on

Some HR software systems develop their own features, following consistent software architecture, development practices, and operational processes. Deel took another path, acquiring dozens of small point solutions into a Frankenstein’s monster of features that are like a labyrinth to navigate and follow standardized processes only when they don’t make any damned sense.

🦹‍♂️ Noncompliance as a service

Deel has this one service called “Shield” that I swear to god is just contractor misclassification as a service. It works like this: If you have people overseas who look a lot like employees, you’re supposed to pay them as employees by withholding taxes and following labor laws.

But it’s difficult to set up your own entity overseas. EORs that let you “rent out” international business entities are expensive. Plus you have to pay for all those benefits and taxes. And figure out how to follow local laws. Who wants to do that?

Enter Deel Shield. It lets you hire people as contractors who probably should be employees, and for a fee, you can designate Deel to be the one that’s sued for contractor misclassification rather than you. No crimes here. Probably.

☹️ Unsupport

Deel’s “support” is objectively awful. They ignore open tickets for days to weeks, and sometimes come back with more non-answers. Often, they don’t respond at all.

If they do respond, you’ll get another email after 2 hours that says they’ll close your ticket for nonresponse if you don’t get back to them soon. This email often comes in the middle of the (US) night. By the time you get back to your keyboard, it’s closed and you have to start again.

The support team probably hasn’t heard about whatever feature you’re asking about anyway.

Let’s get this out of the way: No. Rippling doesn’t have any dirt on me.

I don’t have any financial interest in the company whatsoever. I just really, really love Rippling.

Because I’ve used it. And I’ve used its competitors.
And, in my opinion, Rippling is better. At (just about) everything.

🤩 Product

Have you ever tried something for the first time and heard angels sing?

That was the feeling the first time someone showed me their Rippling setup.

Every resentful “why isn’t this easier” moment I’d had with other providers was fixed.
Elegantly.
And it was better than I’d ever expected.

My first introduction wasn’t through a salesperson, just another user showing me the ropes so I could take over their payroll and benefits administration.

It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Problems still happened.
But it was like slipping on an Ironman suit. Suddenly, everything I did was 100x more powerful.

💥 Hours of onboarding cut to minutes
💥 Reporting that gave me insight into everything
💥 Integrations that put the information right where I wanted it (except documents in the employee view. Why can I never find these?)
💥 Edit logs that showed me when and how things had changed, and by whom

I was ruined for any other provider forever.

🍰 UX

Rippling is not a “beginner’s” platform.

Since it touches everything, you can get into some blind alleys. Especially if you don’t have a strong intuitive sense of software architecture and how it abstracts over various compliance concepts.

I’m not your average user in this area. I work in this stuff all day e’ry day, so I can catch issues and get them back on track more quickly than some users. Not everyone has spent their career surrounded by software developers and thinking about obscure compliance edge cases.

Most HR pros were hired to be good with people, not complicated technology. If you’re someone who’s better with people than software, you might want to have someone tech-savvy on your team to jump in when things break.

Sometimes you run into a problem whose root is in a totally unexpected corner of the platform. Occasionally, it happens with important stuff. That’s the downside of “the Rippling effect.”

You need to be able to pull threads and have an open mind about where they’ll lead you, or else you’ll wind up thinking that support is full of 💩 and have a very grumpy afternoon. Most of the complaints I’ve heard about Rippling seem to happen here.

I have a lot more to say about why I love Rippling. You can read the full post here.

Want an intro to my buddy at Rippling so you don’t have to deal with the direct sales team? Get in touch. I’d be happy to introduce you.

Look Mom (and Pop), No Net!

Gusto or BambooHR for SMB

Would you rather stare at a waving panda or a marching pig as you wonder if your career is over?

🤖 Product

🐷 Gusto is a much more solid product. There are plenty of limitations (especially when your business is the exception to a rule), but Gusto is generally successful in making payroll simple enough that a non-specialist can manage it easily.

🎍Bamboo works, mostly. But they’ve made a bunch of weird product decisions that invite errors. Changes that take two steps in Gusto might take four or five steps in Bamboo and require moving between several screens.

More steps = more opportunities to miss something. Bad things happen when there’s an error in your HRIS or payroll.

💵 Payroll

🐷 Gusto has always been good at payroll. As they expand to support more edge cases, it’s getting a little harder to use*, but pretty much any boob can look at the various payroll and tax screens and figure out what they say.

When something needs your attention, Gusto is good at alerting you and giving you guidance on what to do next. I often look at Gusto’s help docs, even when I’m working in another platform.

(* Which I think is why their partner program is moving away from HR providers and toward accountants and managed payroll services)

🎍Bamboo’s payroll feature is the result of an acquisition, and it shows. For a while the payroll screens looked like something out of the late 90s. It was jarring to move back and forth between the Ninja Panda and something that had the look and feel of Windows 95.

❤️‍🩹 Benefits

🐷 Gusto’s benefits team is a hot mess. Always has been, always will be. But if you already have a broker to help you navigate insurance, Gusto’s ben admin feature is great.

I never recommend using Gusto as your broker after setting up your first plan. They’ll get you signed up and then they’ll never talk to you again.

But if you already have a broker to help you navigate insurance, Gusto’s ben admin feature is great. Simple, clean, and easy for even the most tech-unsavvy broker to use.

🎍Bamboo’s ben admin tool is relatively new. Transparently, I haven’t used it yet.

🤝 Support

🐷 Gusto’s support used to be amazing. I literally wrote to a friend at Gusto asking if I could be connected to the person who designed their Customer Support org to learn from them. Then they outsourced it and everything went to hell. The slow decline of Gusto support is my biggest disappointment in the platform.

Their US support team and the fine folks who serve as dedicated reps are still best-in-class, but it’s hard to reach them or you have to pay dearly for the privilege.

🎍Bamboo’s support team is consistently excellent. They’re knowledgeable, patient, kind, and genuinely want to help. Let me take this opportunity to apologize for every time I’ve been grumpy when they told me something I didn’t want to hear.

📈 Growth

🐷 You will outgrow Gusto at about 50-100 employees. They know that, and they’re very classy about letting you go.

Employees will be able to see their old records forever, and Gusto won’t hold anything against your admins for moving on. I can still see my pay stubs from a company I worked at in 2019.

🎍People tend to stay with Bamboo long after the size and complexity of their orgs has outgrown the platform. Probably because it’s inexpensive (if you don’t factor in all of the extra services you pay for because Bamboo doesn’t support them) and it sorta works.

People tend to stay with Bamboo long after the size and complexity of their orgs has outgrown the platform. The panda will wave nicely as you go, but once you’re gone, so is your data.

Want to read this comparison with more examples?

Benefit of the Doubt

My experience with Justworks

Have a small business with a multi-state team?
Is the person who runs payroll responsible for a gajillionty other things?
Had it up to here with the state tax BS?

Have you talked to Justworks?

Justworks just works.
Whether you’re reading that sentence positively or negatively, you’re right.

I have my complaints about Justworks, but I still think they’re the right solution for small businesses with limited budgets who struggle to keep up with multi-state payroll and labor compliance.

☂️ PEO

To oversimplify, a PEO is a service that basically hires your employees on paper and leases them back to you. They take on the compliance responsibilities and you get to keep running your company. It means you don’t have to deal with state tax registrations, managing deductions, or pay close attention to sick time regulations.

But it also means that you have an employment nanny that will micromanage you when you least appreciate it. And it blocks you from certain employee data that you might want access to.

The best thing about Justworks is that it offers a PEO option at an affordable price.

The less awesome thing about Justworks is you get what you pay for.

💁‍♂️ People

The people are absolutely lovely. Every single one of them, without exception. You can tell that they have a great working culture and everyone is treated well. I really appreciate that.

But you can tell the team is trained in the company protocols, not the actual systems they manage.

❤️‍🩹 Benefits

Justworks’ health plans are more affordable than what most small groups can find on the open market. But dollar-for-dollar, they’re less competitive with other PEO plans.

Justworks plans with similar deductibles and premiums will have a slightly higher cost of care (copays, coinsurance, etc.) than comparable PEO plans. I suspect that this might be where they make up some of their margins for the lower overall cost of the platform.

Justworks also makes it easier to get and manage the less exciting benefits plans like worker’s comp, disability, and life insurance. The plans are basic, but they get the job done.

I have more to say about Justworks, including examples.

Buy Now, Pay Later

A few of the reasons why I hate ADP

You think my takedown of Deel was harsh? There’s a company that I hate more than Deel.

A company so bad that I won’t take a client who uses them unless they’re planning to leave. Because I simply cannot take on the liability of how long problem solving takes when I use them.

Everyone who knows me knows I hate
loathe
detest
abhor
despise
am repulsed by
and resent

A D P

“But ADP cuts the checks of 26 million workers in the US. That’s like 70% of all workers!”

No. No it isn’t.

There are almost 163 million workers in the US. That’s 17% of them. Poor bastards.

And you know why their checks are cut by ADP?
Because most of them work at big, old companies and switching payroll providers is really, really hard at that size.

And because people don’t know any better.

ADP is the worst, and here’s why:

🤬 Employment Practices

I want to put this one at the top, because it’s important. The people who work at ADP are dedicated, talented, hard-working, and knowledgeable. If you get a resume from someone who worked at ADP, hire them RIGHT NOW. It’ll be one of the best decisions you ever made.

🦕 Product

ADP was probably a revolutionary product in 1996, when software came in boxes.

It was still probably the best thing out there in 2010, when “the cloud” was an exciting new concept.

And then they stopped.

Payroll is an incredibly complex process. Think about all of the layers of SOPs, operations, org structure, software architecture, revenue modeling, and training that go into building a 75-year-old company of 67,000 employees that processes billions of dollars of highly-regulated financial transactions.

⏳ Support

The people at ADP are wonderful. But the support system is awful. It takes days for them to respond to a written ticket.

By the time they respond, you’ve forgotten about the whole thing.

They much, much prefer to talk to you by phone. They will keep you on the phone for HOURS, while they happily work their way through their ancient systems.

I have had multiple 4+ hour calls with ADP support. Half of them didn’t fix anything.

There’s no way to prevent them from directing your support requests to the phone when they want to talk to you.
They’ll call you when you specifically said, “Please follow up by email.”
They’ll call you when you said, “I don’t pick up my phone, so email is the only way to reach me.”
They’ll call you at 5am your time.
They’ll call you when you invoke CCPA to tell them that they’re not authorized to call you on the phone number you gave for two-factor authentication only.

Then they’ll say that they’re not authorized to schedule a specific time for a call in advance.

And then you die.

I have more to say about why I won’t work with ADP. You can read about more (but not all) of the reasons here:

Checks and Imbalances

My experience with Paylocity

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you threw five cats in a bag and asked them to run your payroll?

Or have you already tried Paylocity?

Paylocity is like the dollar store version of a full-stack HRIS.

It has all the parts:
✅ payroll
✅ time and labor
✅ applicant tracking system
✅ ben admin
✅ performance
✅ learning management
✅ expense management

... all with the feeling that the wheels could fall off at any moment.

It’s cheap. And that’s about all you can say for it.
But you get what you pay for.

🦨 Product

Finding your way through a Paylocity setup is like wandering through a desiccated wasteland.

You find signposts for things that really should be there, but are just... gone.
Reports that come up empty.
A half-mad chat bot that chases its own tail, feeding you the same unrelated help center article over and over no matter how many ways you ask the question.
Standard processes that don’t reflect any human law or logic.
Menu paths that read like magical spells... or nonsense.

🤦 Team

I heard about Paylocity’s turnover before I ever worked with the product. Survivors described a culture like one of a war-torn country.
The coworker that sat next to you yesterday was gone today.
Constant restructuring to cover gaps. People being pushed into unfamiliar positions with little training.
Decaying infrastructure that leaves everyone to fend for themselves and make it up as they go along.

On the customer side, this manifests as
a revolving cast of “dedicated” reps swapped out before they ever get to know your company or its needs,
inconsistent and contradictory instructions,
how-could-this-even-happen type mistakes,
and despair.

🪠 Support

Dealing with support is like dealing with the Cheshire Cat.

“By the by, what became of your quarterly tax correction?” asked the cat.
“It turned into a pig,” you say.
“I thought it would,” said the Support Cat, “when I saw it.”

Where most bad support teams seem to have an unhelpful script and rigid procedures that guide them when to escalate, Paylocity reps seem to be thrown into the ring with no structure or training.

Whether it’s a boxing ring or circus ring depends on what kind of day you’re having.

They can escalate some tickets to the subject matter experts, but these experts are completely isolated from the customer themselves. The specialist teams must be just as overwhelmed and under-resourced as the support team, because most questions get thrown back after a few days with nonanswers like “compliance” or simply restating your question as a statement.

Meaning that you’re at the mercy of the undertrained support rep who happens to pull your ticket.

You’re reliant on them to know when to escalate and who to escalate to. And when the answer comes back, it must be translated through their perspective and superstitions about “compliance.”

I have more to say about Paylocity, but I’m nearing my email length limit.

Resources:

These aren’t the only platforms we’ve worked with, so be sure to subscribe to get the next installment.

Not sure which platform is right for your company? We’d love to talk about your situation and make a recommendation based on what we’ve seen.

We can also introduce you to our friends at Rippling, Justworks, Gusto, Insperity, Workday, UKG, and Paycom. We have formal relationships with some of these providers, but don’t get money from any of them. We just like working with them and think you will, too.