BambooHR Review, Pricing & Features

What is BambooHR?

BambooHR is a human resource software solution best for businesses with 25 to 300 employees. It is primarily used by businesses to create job postings and time track employees. Its standout features are its recruiting capabilities, as well as its onboarding and offboarding features.

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Table of Contents

BambooHR Review Summary

BambooHR was founded in 2008 by Ben Peterson and Ryan Sanders. Since its inception, it has served over 20,000 small and medium businesses from its headquarters in Lindon, Utah. In general, BambooHR is used by small businesses with up to 300 employees.

BambooHR’s best feature is its job posting. It also supports time tracking, and onboarding and offboarding automation. However, you cannot run payroll or employee benefits directly from BambooHR. You also cannot track expenses through BambooHR.

BambooHR’s pricing starts at $99 per month for 12 employees. You can add employees for $8.25 each. Payroll, performance management, and advanced time tracking features all have additional costs.

Overall, BambooHR is effective for companies in need of user-friendly job posting features alongside basic time tracking and reporting capabilities. These businesses will also find its onboarding and offboarding automation helpful. We do not, however, recommend BambooHR if running either payroll or benefits are priorities for your business.

  • If you want to primarily run payroll or benefits for your business, consider Gusto.
  • If you want to offer benefits to employees that work in states not supported by Gusto, you should consider Justworks.
  • If you still need job posting features alongside performance and expense tracking, try Sage HR.

BambooHR Pricing & Cost

BambooHR’s pricing starts at $99 per month for 12 employees. Each additional employee is $8.25 per month.

If you want to run payroll for your employees, you will need to pay an extra $75 per month for 10 employees. Each additional employee is $4.25 per month.

Finally, performance management and time tracking features are an additional $4.25 and $3.00 per employee per month, respectively.

BambooHR Features

Below, we'll discuss BambooHR’s key features. We include product screenshots to give you a sense of this solution’s interface and usability.

Recruiting

BambooHR comes equipped with applicant tracking capabilities for recruiting applicants. BambooHR's ATS capabilities enable you to easily manage job postings and candidate information from one central location.

Although its capabilities could replace the need for a dedicated ATS, BambooHR does not allow you to edit your applicant pipeline like in Sage HR, and other more advanced solutions.

BambooHR Job Posting

Creating and editing a job post in BambooHR is easy to do. BambooHR generates a landing page for your post alongside a sharable link. You can also post directly to Glassdoor and Indeed through BambooHR’s native integrations with both applications.

Editing your application is also easy. A number of common application requirements such as a candidate’s resume, their LinkedIn profile, and their first date of availability are all automatically added. However, you can choose to leave these fields out or even add your own unique questions with the following question types:

  • Short answer
  • Long answer
  • Yes/No
  • Multiple choice
  • Checkbox
  • File upload

Candidates all have their own profile inside BambooHR. Their profile includes information such as resumes, cover letters, and feedback from interviewers. This saves time and also prevents the need to track this data in spreadsheets or emails.

BambooHR Employee Rating System

The two biggest disadvantages to BambooHR’s recruiting capabilities are its lack of custom scorecards and pipelines. You are limited to the basic five star ratings and the candidate pipeline that BambooHR comes with.

Finally, BambooHR integrates with a number of other popular applicant tracking systems if you already use an ATS for your business. These include:

  • Greenhouse.io
  • Lever
  • Workable
  • Jobvite

Employee Onboarding and Offboarding

BambooHR allows you to automate employee onboarding and offboarding tasks in its settings. This means that sending necessary documents and tasks to employees when they’re entering or exiting your company is easy to accomplish.

BambooHR Onboarding Tasks

Creating and editing a task is straightforward. You can select your task name, description, and due date, as well as the candidate you want to assign the task to. Furthermore, you can categorize tasks by departments. This means that your HR team, IT department, and managers will know exactly what tasks they need to do when employees are being onboarded and offboarded.

BambooHR also allows you to create a new hire packet template. This is a template that contains information such as when and where your new employee should arrive and who they should contact upon arrival. You can create an introductory email that is sent on the morning of your employee’s first day. These are all effective ways of welcoming and assisting your new hires.

Time Tracking

BambooHR’s time tracking tools are helpful for small businesses with hourly employees. Your employees can clock in and out and request time off. Managers can set paid-time-off (PTO) policies, monitor hours, approve timesheets, and approve time-off requests.

BambooHR Paid Time Off Policies

You can create as many PTO policies as you require for your employees. Common policies include sick days, vacation days, or bereavement. You can customize the amount of time employees can take off, define PTO accrual methods, and select eligibility for certain employees.

Monitoring hours in BambooHR is easy to do. As you can see below, you have a top-level overview of your employees’ schedules with BambooHR’s calendar view.

BambooHR Time Tracking Calendar

Benefits

BambooHR only allows you to track benefits offered by your company. Although this is helpful, alternatives like Gusto guide you through the entire process of choosing benefits and making them available to your employees. If you are looking for an HR software that can assist you in selecting and running your benefits, consider Gusto.

BambooHR Benefits Dashboard

As you can see, BambooHR organizes the benefit plans your company offers in a user-friendly manner. You can add new plans to track in this menu as well. Some typical plan types you can add include:

  • Health
  • Dental
  • Vision
  • Retirement
  • Life insurance
  • Disability

Analytics and Reporting

BambooHR comes with a comprehensive amount of important reports, but creating reports is far less intuitive than alternatives like Gusto.

BambooHR dynamically tracks your company’s progress in many different categories. Here is an overview of some of the most common reports your company might need:

CategoryReports
Benefits
  • Benefit summary
Data Review
  • Audit trail
  • Change history
  • Missing data
Employee Info
  • Age profile
  • Birthdays
  • Salary history
  • Years of service
Headcount and Turnover
  • Additions and terminations
  • Employee turnover
  • Headcount
Hiring
  • Candidate funnel
  • Candidate sources

Integrations

Integrations in BambooHR are primarily run through the BambooHR Marketplace. Here are some of BambooHR’s most popular integrations:

Customer Support

BambooHR’s customer support team is attentive and helpful. They do not, however, offer live chat. They are reachable through phone and email. Hours of operation are Monday through Friday, 8 AM to 5 PM MST.

BambooHR’s secondary resources include a blog as well as a content library. The content library includes ebooks, infographics, and how-to guides. These are all effective resources to learn more about BambooHR and HR software as a whole.

Customer Support ChannelsPhone, email
Other Support ResourcesBlog, content library
Application Status PageNo

BambooHR Alternatives & Competitors

BambooHR competes with a variety of human resources management solutions that offer similar functionality. The best choice for you will depend on your budget and feature preferences. Its most comparable alternative is Sage HR.

BambooHR's top competitors are:

Learn more about how BambooHR stacks up against its top individual competitors:

Is BambooHR Right For You?

Overall, BambooHR is effective for companies in need of user-friendly job posting features alongside basic time tracking and reporting capabilities. These businesses will also find its employee onboarding and offboarding automation helpful. We do not, however, recommend BambooHR if running either payroll or benefits are priorities for your business.

  • If you want to primarily run payroll or benefits for your business, consider Gusto.
  • If you want to offer benefits to employees that work in states not supported by Gusto, you should consider Justworks.
  • If you still need job posting features alongside performance and expense tracking, try Sage HR.

If you're interested, you can try BambooHR here.

You can also schedule a live demo with the team at BambooHR here.

Yousef Fatehpour

Yousef Fatehpour is a Junior Research Analyst at SoftwarePundit. He graduated from University of California, San Diego, where he studied Human Centered Design and Communications. His work at UCSD's Design Lab emphasized UX research and product management.

Yousef's primary areas of interest are software design, user journeys, and how user experience is handled across software markets. Yousef also has experience in product design and multimedia content production. You can connect with Yousef on LinkedIn.

Yousef is an expert in several software categories including:

  • SMS marketing software
  • Document management software
  • Human resource software
  • Applicant tracking software
  • Design software