While GoCo undeniably drives home value with its all-in-one small business-centric HR offerings, the platform’s main attraction is its customer service. To start, every client is assigned a dedicated customer service representative that intimately learns your business’s specific needs.

This is in addition to a full-service initial setup configured specifically to your liking, plus a customer support team entirely based in Houston, Texas. The company also serves up HR professionals that provide unlimited advice with a one-business-day turnaround. This professional advice is solicited via a live concierge that clarifies your specific questions to ensure a high-quality answer.

And when it comes to GoCo’s day-to-day functionality, the platform rallies a mean HR game. The software suite covers all the essentials, like payroll and benefits, starting at just $5 monthly per employee.

Further, every function boasts a highly customizable interface to perfectly match your work style. Most visual components in the software can be manipulated, and many tasks can be automated and deeply customized. These small touches add up over the course of a day to produce meaningful time savings and boosted productivity.

Industry headliner Paychex certainly stands out for its all-in-one platform that melds payroll with benefits administration. However, the platform particularly impresses with its top-notch retirement planning expertise gained from overseeing some 90,000 401(k) accounts—which the company claims is the most of any US-based retirement account provider.

Beyond retirement, Paychex dishes out other superb benefits administration functions. For example, the company provides dedicated HR professionals personally assigned to each client. What’s more, employees can enjoy long-term perks like financial planning tools and health savings accounts (HSA).

Paychex's expertise and long-term planning tools are difficult to beat if your business yearns to retain employees for the long run.

Zenefits stands out for its simple but thorough approach to benefits that includes full-service brokers on standby, free of charge. For reference, this straightforward, full-service approach to securing benefits usually comes at a premium, making Zenefits uniquely valuable in this sense.

No worries if you’d rather not tap into Zenefits’ recommendations, though. For only $5 monthly, you can still handle your own insurance dealings or connect with a third-party broker.

To further sweeten the deal for resource-constrained small businesses, the platform offers live support from HR and payroll professionals for $8 monthly per employee. This effectively eliminates the need for previous HR knowledge, allowing you to focus more on your business and less on personnel administration.

Once you’ve got your benefits administration plan squared away, Zenefits handles everything HR like a savant. For starters, its user interface is extremely intuitive and playfully themed, which is ideal for people of limited technological expertise.

When you want a full-fledged workhorse to nail down for the long run, ADP delivers. This household name manages benefits administration like it’s nobody’s business, dishing out everything from health insurance to SEP-IRA retirement plans. That’s in addition to its full array of HR bells and whistles that thoroughly eliminates the need for more software.

The platform goes a step above by also offering benefit fraud prevention measures. One such feature is the software package’s dependent verification process to crack down on false birth and marriage certificates, among other fraudulent documentation. This helps eliminate waste and recoup some of the higher monthly costs of a complex suite like ADP.

And you’re in luck if you only want ADP for benefits administration. That’s because the suite boasts its smörgåsbord of third-party integrations that even plug into non-HR titles, like inventory management tools.

ADP certainly isn’t for everyone considering its complexity. But for those yearning for horsepower, it undeniably delivers for the long haul.

We get it—you didn’t pursue your small-business dreams to spend all day managing health insurance policies (unless you’re an insurance broker). That’s why we love Gusto’s intuitive, rapidly understood platform that is certain to return more free time to your day.

Businesses of all sizes can benefit from the software’s à la carte menu that offers each benefit as a separate add-on. So if health insurance excites your employees, but college savings accounts don’t, you can save money by only using Gusto to keep your staff healthy.

And while not benefits-related per se, the platform’s free automated payroll tax-filing feature is an undeniable boon for resource-strained entities.

Best of all, you don’t necessarily need a full-fledged HR team to reap the rewards, either. That’s because Gusto’s top-tier Concierge plan includes unlimited support from certified HR professionals. This frees you up to focus on your passions instead of reading jargon-heavy manuals all day.

Keep in mind that many features only work if you use Gusto for payroll. So if you’re not interested in switching paychecks over to Gusto, then you might want to look elsewhere.

While The Hartford isn’t a software platform, it is an incredibly comprehensive workplace insurance company. This means you’ll find every essential offering that employees need from this Connecticut-based corporation.

We particularly admire the company’s over 220 years of experience since its founding in 1810. This means small businesses can comfortably trust their employee benefits offerings with this thoroughly experienced, centuries-old entity.

And for business owners, there are plenty of insurance options to protect their livelihood. This includes the usual suspects, like general liability and fire insurance. But it also extends to the uncommon, such as cybercrime protection and environmental liability insurance.

Bottom line, if you’re serious about rock-solid insurance products for everyone under your business’s roof, The Hartford is your endgame. You’ll just need to secure software to manage insurance policies elsewhere, though.

BambooHR’s panda-themed interface certainly delivers an impressively colorful, social media-like approach to personnel administration. Anybody can quickly grasp the platform, regardless of their technological background.

Beyond a cute interface, the software suite excels with its thorough, all-in-one approach chiefly targeted toward small businesses. Payroll, performance management, and timekeeping can be optionally added on, while the core platform still delivers insightful analytics and powerful recruiting tools.

Further advancing its user-friendliness, BambooHR also offers a thorough mobile application that includes many essential features for on-the-go productivity. Employees will also be dazzled by the platform’s similarly social media-esque self-service offering that takes just a few clicks to access pay stubs and other valuable data.

It’s hard to tell if the platform’s approachability is worth the price, though. The company keeps its pricing model under lock and key, and our inquiries went ignored. As a result, this lack of clarity certainly begs for careful investigation before committing to a shiny new subscription.

We admire OnPay for its synchronization between payroll, recruiting, and benefits. This means the platform automatically takes action on an employee’s benefits once it detects a life event, such as termination, marriage, or the addition of a new dependent. As a result, you’ll eliminate the manual labor traditionally involved in handling benefits updates after life events.

The platform’s dedication to automation is evident elsewhere too. OnPay shines with its 401(k) retirement plans that put onboarding and maintenance on autopilot, with no transfer fees for employees’ existing plans. Employee onboarding tasks and year-end tax filings are streamlined with minimal manual processing needed. Meanwhile, prominent third-party integrations with QuickBooks, Xero, and others make OnPay a seamless, low-maintenance part of your overall business machine.

Finally, we especially adore OnPay’s unlimited payroll runs for no additional cost. This limitless paycheck-cutting feature is rarely seen in HR platforms, and it allows you to pay your employees more frequently, boosting morale as a result.

While many platforms squarely target employers, UZIO goes a step further and proactively lures benefits brokers to its platform. The platform offers key performance indicator (KPI) reporting to help salespeople evaluate their goals. Meanwhile, 24/7 customer support enables you to have a flexible work schedule to optimize productivity.

Brokers also relish in the UZIO Legal subscription that dishes out round-the-clock attorneys ready to respond within two hours. This makes it a piece of cake to constantly stay legally compliant without hiring an expensive in-house lawyer.

Beyond attorneys, the platform also plugs into Salesforce and other customer relationship management (CRM) tools, so you’ll always have client data immediately available.

Employers also stand to reap the rewards from UZIO. The platform branches out most of its functions, with payroll, personnel support, benefits, and time tracking all offered as separate packages. Since each option starts as low as $2 a month per employee, even the tiniest of businesses should find UZIO to be an affordable solution.