Your company success depends how well you’re able to hire and train up new staff. Get it wrong and you may never recover. You can save hours, if not weeks of confusion on how to get this right with our focused research. We think the onboarding software that’s best for most users is Gusto. This software is made for beginners, but robust enough to transfer your current onboarding process to a streamlined work of art. Customization and functionality is not sacrificed in any way.
The Best Onboarding Software For Most
Gusto
Best for Most
Gusto gets your team onboard with minimal effort or confusion. Impress new hires with a streamlined process that gets them up and running fast. Gusto includes benefits management, 401(k) options, W-9 contractor tools, and various integrations. Pricing starts at $40 + $6 per employee per month.
Gusto tailors your onboarding process to suit your business needs, makes offers quickly while confirming all areas of your business process have been fulfilled. All without jumping through a matrix of web pages and forms. A group of templates available offers your business culture visually while the customizations available can make your process as simple or as complex as you see fit.
The 8 Best Onboarding Software Options to Consider:
- Gusto – Best for most
- ADP Workforce Now – Best comprehensive onboarding software
- Trainual – Best for employee training
- BambooHR – Best for full-service and affordability
- Waybook – Best for creating and organizing your onboarding material
- Paycor – Best for small businesses
- Zenefits – Best cloud-based all-in-one onboarding software
- ClearCompany – Best for talent management
When Does it Make Sense to Invest In Onboarding Software?
Successful hiring and retention for every company relies on clear onboarding goals and managment.
Anyone who wants a seamless onboarding process has something to gain by investing in onboarding software—it’s that simple.
The quality of your company’s onboarding experience impacts your work culture, especially considering it’s an employee’s first impression of you.
Three specific instances when you know you need to invest in onboarding software are if you’re in an industry with a lot of compliance and regulatory rules. Your company is experiencing missing documents or other issues during the existing onboarding process. Or if you have a high turnover rate.
In all three of these scenarios, onboarding software will solve the main issues by tracking, organizing, and streamlining the process.
Whether you have 10, 50, 200 employees, or more, all companies need to find the right software. With innovative features, good onboarding software will cut the onboarding process timing in half. This saves your internal staff precious time when working with new and incoming employees.
So, if you’re looking for more time to work on your business ventures, investing in onboarding software is the way to go.
#1 – Gusto – The Best Onboarding Software for Beginners
Gusto
Best for Most
Gusto gets your team onboard with minimal effort or confusion. Impress new hires with a streamlined process that gets them up and running fast. Gusto includes benefits management, 401(k) options, W-9 contractor tools, and various integrations. Pricing starts at $40 + $6 per employee per month.
Gusto is a great onboarding software for beginners, as its many customizable options are easy to use.
Within the software, you can tailor offer letters to new hires with little effort or thought. There are customizable templates that let you reflect your work culture in style.
Similar to BambooHR, Gusto lets you save ample time, however, they also make it incredibly easy to set up the software for employees in just one click.
If you have little experience in employee management and HR duties, the onboarding process can become difficult and overwhelming. Fortunately, Gusto makes it easy for beginners to set their employees up with the right software through tool integrations.
Gusto is so much more than an effective onboarding tool, with the unique feature of a benefits package to offer your employees, including medical, dental, workers’ comp, and 401(k). We broke down all of the software’s features in greater detail in our Gusto review.
Gusto has three plans to choose from, including:
- Simple: $40 per month plus $6/employee
- Plus: $60 per month plus $9/employee
- Premium: Contact Gusto
The Simple plan includes payroll automation for single-state employers, and basic benefits administration. The Plus plan includes payroll automation for multi-state employers, advanced benefits administration features, and additional HR support.
Take an interactive demo of Gusto to see how much easier onboarding can be.
#2 – ADP Workforce Now – The Best Comprehensive Onboarding Software
ADP Workforce Now
Most Comprehensive Onboarding Software
ADP Workforce Now is an all-in-one HR management solution that includes comprehensive onboarding features and automations. However, it’s best suited for experienced HR professionals because of its complexity. Includes payroll, time tracking, hiring, benefits management, and more all under one umbrella. There are four plans to choose from, depending on what you need.
If you’re looking for a more comprehensive onboarding software for larger businesses, consider ADP Workforce Now.
With simple but powerful reporting and scalable databases, ADP Workforce now is great for an experienced HR tech professional.
ADP Workforce Now is simple to use, as you can manage your entire team from a single dashboard—so the right information is always where it needs to be.
The software comes with a comprehensive HR suite that includes payroll, time, HR talent, and benefits, all under one easy to navigate umbrella. Check out our ADP review for a full breakdown of these features.
You also have the option to include other features on your dashboards, such as additional earnings, deductions, and garnishments.
ADP Workforce Now offers four pricing plans, and you’ll need to talk to their Sales team for a free quote. However, the Hiring Advantage plan is listed as the most popular on their website.
This software is definitely more suited to an experienced team, and we wouldn’t recommend it for beginners or small businesses.
#3 – Trainual – The Best Onboarding Software for Employee Training
Trainual
Best for Employee Training
Get everything you need to onboard and train new employees on autopilot. Built step-by-step asynchronous training programs with automatic notifications so new hires hit everything they need to get up to speed. Over time, you’ll have a comprehensive business playbook covering your entire operation. Pricing starts at $99 per month.
A big part of the onboarding process is training your employees. If you struggle with this step, Trainual is a great software option.
Trainual lets you get your new hires up to speed with step-by-step asynchronous training with automatic notifications, so you never miss a thing.
A unique and fun aspect of this software is that they offer a very engaging employee onboarding platform, with content like GIFS and videos—and a chrome extension for easy content search.
Trainual also has a large ecosystem of CMS tools and apps that you can seamlessly integrate into existing software to boost productivity.
An additional feature includes a business playbook where you can incorporate industry-leading resources to craft a more successful business. You can build your playbook with customizable Trainual templates—making it the perfect resource for rolling out new policies and processes.
Trainual offers two pricing plans:
- Pro: $99 per month, billed annually
- Premium: $199 per month, billed annually
You can try out Trainual with a 7-day free trial. And if your company is a non-profit, they offer 50% off any plan for life.
#4 – BambooHR – The Best For Full-Service and Affordability
BambooHR
Best for Full-Service Affordability
If you’re looking for a full-service HR tool that doesn’t break the bank, BambooHR is your answer. It’s built to help small to midsize businesses onboard new employees and streamline all HR processes, including employee management, employee offboarding, and applicant tracking for the hiring process. There are two plans, with prices starting around $4.95 per employee per month.
If you’re looking for an affordable full-service onboarding tool, then BambooHR is an excellent option.
BambooHR services medium-sized businesses by using data centralization and customizable new-hire packets.
To make the onboarding process as simple as possible, BambooHR automatically sends your customizable onboarding tasks to new hires to complete in their own time. You’re able to add due dates, times, and locations for these tasks.
The onboarding portal has an impressive structure, making it easy to navigate and read for new hires—leaving any confusion and time-wasting on the sidelines.
As we discuss further in our BambooHR review, another great feature of BambooHR is the ability to use electronic signatures without having to use an outside e-signing tool or software. The software creates less paper waste, making you a more environmentally conscious business.
Some other features included in the Advantage plan are applicant tracking, an employee database, a mobile hiring app, and an offboarding process.
Bamboo HR offers two plans—Essential and Advantage. Although they don’t have any official pricing packages on their website, many reviews conclude that its cost starts at around $4.95 per employee.
You can visit their website for a free quote today.
#5 – Waybook – The Best for Creating & Organizing Your Onboarding Material
Waybook
Best for Managing Onboarding Material
With Waybook, you can level up your onboarding and training with better organization, visibility, traceability, and dissemination. Gather together all your SOPs, best practices, templates, guidebooks, manuals, and more and improve on them with Waybook's in-platform editor and automation capability.
Whether you hire one role at a time or in bunches, it’s of paramount importance to have all of your documents and material organized, up-to-date, and easy to access.
Waybook is one the best tools out there for getting all the nuances and essentials of your workplace into one database for new hires, trainers, HR members, and anyone else to use.
Its first virtue is serving as a centralized database of everything you need for onboarding new hires, training up new and established employees, and standardizing best practices and procedures.
Anybody with access to your organization’s Waybook platform can easily find and search for documentation, forms, and more.
Waybook also makes visibility easy for both sides of onboarding and training. The software can break up complex or long SOPs and process docs into more digestible step-by-step guides.
Both admins and those being trained up go through the process one module at a time, with a nice little checklist that shows progress.
You can bolster training and onboarding modules with embedded quizzes and tests to make sure employees are properly grasping the information you’re giving them.
Waybook allows for uploading and creating an unlimited number of documents and for you to set up unlimited modules and steps for any of them.
Plus, the documentation editor in Waybook is lovely to use. It’s drag-and-drop easy, you can embed videos, images, GIFs, maps, files, and custom code, and you can create templates from any existing doc.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are loads more features that help your management get new hires going faster and continually train up employees on new best practices or skills.
Pricing for Waybook is dead simple. For up to 20 users, pay $83 per month (when billed annually—the rate becomes $99 for monthly billing) and get all of the above features and more.
Adding users beyond the first 20 is also easy. Waybook lets you either pay an extra $4.17 per month for extra seats or you can contact them to talk out a custom solution.
Plus, there’s a free seven-day trial of the platform available so you can commit with confidence.
All in all, Waybook delivers an incredible platform for creating, organizing, sharing, and replicating vital onboarding and training material. With it, you can reap the benefits of more efficient onboarding and more thorough employee development overall.
#6 – Paycor – The Best Onboarding Software for Small Businesses
Paycor
Best for Small Teams
If you have one to 39 employees, Paycor is our #1 recommendation. It’s easy to use, helps reduce manual administration processes, and increases employee engagement throughout the onboarding process resulting in better-equipped employees. Also includes payroll management, tax filing, and more. There are three plans to choose from, starting at $99 per month.
If you’re a small business owner with 1-39 employees, Paycor will be a great onboarding tool for you.
It’s an easy-to-use payroll system that significantly reduces manual administrative processes, with engaging online platforms for new hires.
Paycor has many features that can support your business and up your onboarding process game, including:
- Engaging hire platforms that make it easy for new hires to learn about your company in one place
- Fast onboarding systems to reduce time
- Compliance forms
- View and sign documents online
- Tax credit integration
- Onboard from anywhere with a mobile-optimized experience
As a feature-rich software, anyone using Paycor will engage new hires and improve efficiency. We explain this process in greater detail in our Paycor review.
There are three pricing plans to choose from, including:
- Basic: $99 per month + $5 per employee per month
- Essential: $149 per month + $7 per employee per month
- Core: $199 per month + $8 per employee per month
- Complete: $199 + $14 per employee per month
The Basic plan is suitable for most small businesses and will have everything you need to bring in new employees and get them up to speed quickly.
#7 – Zenefits – The Best All-in-One Cloud-Based Onboarding Software
Zenefits
Most All-in-One Cloud-Based Software
Start onboarding new hires in less than ten minutes with Zenefits’ streamlined onboarding system based 100% in the cloud. Simply create a task and let new employees onboard themselves, crossing things off as they go along. Also includes comprehensive benefits management capabilities, time tracking, and scheduling functionality. Pricing starts at $8 per month per employee.
Zenefits is sometimes called the #1 HR software because of its cloud-based centralization and is an excellent choice for an all-in-one onboarding software.
With Zenefits, you can hire new employees in under 10 minutes with their streamlined onboarding system.
All you need to do to manage new hires is to create an onboarding task, and you can let your new hires onboard themselves with synced benefits and payroll features.
Speaking of benefits, Zenefits simplifies the process of curating compensation and benefits packages for your team—and once an employee selects a benefit plan, you can send the correct deductions to payroll with just one click.
Zenefits’ onboarding process is all in one place and automatically connects with your existing HR system, helping you save time. Additional features include background checks, account provisioning, real-time data syncing, time-off tracking, and business intelligence.
Zenefits offers three pricing plans, including:
- Essentials: $10 per month
- Growth: $20 per month
- Zen: $27 per month
You can get the plans at a discount if you decide to pay annually.
#8 – ClearCompany – The Best Onboarding Software for Talent Management
ClearCompany
Best for Talent Management
ClearCompany delivers everything you need to optimize your onboarding process before it ever begins by streamlining your hiring and talent management processes. Get all of the recruitment and applicant tracking features you need to ensure you’re hiring the best talent from day one. Includes a sleek onboarding portal, automated task notifications, content scheduling, and more.
ClearCompany is one of the best onboarding tools for talent management, especially in today’s saturated employment landscape.
If you’re looking for a tool to help you manage your employees before and after onboarding, ClearCompany has it all, from track recruiting to applicant tracking.
New hires will be impressed with the sleek and beautiful hiring portal, and ClearCompany’s onboarding solution is user-friendly, with an intuitive interface for the best onboarding experience.
On top of all that, ClearCompany has made it easy to align team goals, manage performance, and complete talent management solutions with interactive reports and dashboards. We discuss these items in greater detail in our ClearCompany review.
Other outstanding features include:
- Predictive performance
- Candidate texting
- Personalized interview feedback
- Content scheduling for new hires
- Device and equipment management
- Automated task notifications
- E-verify, WOTC, and background checks
For pricing, you can get a free quote after filling out a form on their website.
Methodology for Choosing the Best Onboarding Software
There are several factors that should be taken into consideration as you’re looking for onboarding software. This is the methodology we used to narrow down the top recommendations in this guide. You can weigh these factors against your personal needs to find the best onboarding software for you.
Paperless Documents
Ideally, onboarding software should allow you to view, sign, and store documents online.
This is crucial in the onboarding process when there are a lot of documents to go through. Paperless software is not only easier and faster, but it’s also more eco-friendly.
Furthermore, going paperless during onboarding is much more secure. Employee onboarding documents tend to contain lots of sensitive information, including social security numbers and addresses. You may even be collecting bank account information for direct deposits.
Having this type of information on paper documents in an office drawer isn’t very secure. New hires might even see it as a poor reflection of your company. The last thing you want is to misplace or lose track of important documents. You have a responsibility to keep this stuff safe.
Opting for paperless onboarding software is the perfect way to improve the way documents are organized while simultaneously safeguarding information.
Mobile Optimization
There’s a reason why most of the onboarding software that we reviewed has a mobile hiring app or seamless syncing to all devices.
Mobile optimization is a key factor for onboarding software because it is so convenient to work from anywhere. If you currently have a remote or hybrid team, you’ll definitely want to look for a tool that offers a seamless mobile experience.
The ability to sync your smartphone with the software lets you manage the onboarding process from anywhere. It also makes it easy for your new hires to submit items and view critical onboarding information on the go.
If you have a business that requires your staff to work in the field or on the road, they’ll have fast access to important documents without having to rely on printed paperwork. This can even save them a trip to your office or headquarters before they head out to a job site.
Applicant Tracking
It’s worth noting that many entry-level onboarding plans don’t offer applicant tracking. Some do, but they’re usually fairly limited.
With that said, this is a really important feature. So you may want to consider upgrading your plan to ensure you have adequate applicant tracking capabilities.
This will make it easier for you to organize candidates and determine who is responsible for collecting certain information. You can also use applicant tracking tools to segment your hires by skills and experience to better fit within your organization.
Without applicant tracking, it’s difficult and more time-consuming to find new hires. It will require much more manual labor on your behalf. But if you’re only hiring a handful of employees every year, you might decide to skip this feature.
Offboarding Process
While onboarding is important, effective offboarding is equally, if not more important. Many of your employees will eventually move on eventually, so it’s helpful if your onboarding software offers a simple solution to this process.
Look for tools that give you a way to automate offboarding workflows.
All you need to do is set up the flow once, and the software will apply these practices whenever someone leaves. Just make sure that your offboarding process is consistent and complete for all employees leaving your business.
Since people leave on different terms, you shouldn’t make it harder on them or yourself. But investing in proper software will make life easier for everyone involved.
Gusto
Best for Most
Gusto gets your team onboard with minimal effort or confusion. Impress new hires with a streamlined process that gets them up and running fast. Gusto includes benefits management, 401(k) options, W-9 contractor tools, and various integrations. Pricing starts at $40 + $6 per employee per month.
Further Reading
If you want more information about the onboarding process and about similar software packages, we have several articles worth reading.
- ClearCompany Review
- Paycor Review
- BambooHR Review
- ADP Review
- Gusto Review
- Best HR Software
- Best Recruiting Software
- The Complete Guide to Employee Training
Summary
Our top recommendation for the best onboarding software is Gusto.
Gusto isn’t overly expensive and offers HR features like benefits packages and 401(k) options. It’s a great way for many companies to get new hires onboarded, paid, and keep them happy moving forward.
But with that said, there are many other great options to choose from—such as the five other onboarding software we discuss in this guide. Make your decision easier by weighing each option against the factors described in this guide to find the perfect onboarding software for you.
