Guideline vs. Rippling

Guideline is well suited for a comprehensive 401k service to most any business, whether small (10 or fewer employees) or far larger businesses. They can help employees understand how to invest their money and provide options for them. An employee can allow the people at Guideline to invest their money based upon a simple algorithm of conservative/moderate/less moderate risk or the employee can invest as they choose. Guideline is probably not the best suited as far as the type of financial advice one might get from more established investments and financial groups.

Incentivized

I highly recommend Rippling for any company, regardless of its size. Many well-known companies trust it, and if you go onto their LinkedIn page, you will likely find that many of your friends and colleagues are already familiar with them. Along with a highly flexible and easy-to-use UI, many other companies use it, making it feel like a small world. Any company that needs software for expense management and payroll and wants consistency should consider using Rippling.

Incentivized

• Administrate individual 401(k)
• Understand the contributions accumulated in total and per year
• Understand the percentage of salary being contributed per pay period.

Incentivized

• I did not expect Live Chat Support and Email Support when we moved to Rippling. Their Support team is quick and very knowledgeable. I have had multiple instances where we have gone back and forth on a situation to come to the correct conclusion, never feeling they were trying to just close the case unsolved.
• Being able to manage employees from application to separation is huge. Having a built in ATS that we can hire candidates from directly, and immediately have their payroll, benefits and employee profile setup has saved me countless hours for each hire.
• Rippling allows us to manage retirement plans across the US, Canada and UK with automation and file feeds. Before Rippling I manually managed these in multiple portals, now Rippling does it for me automatically.

Incentivized

• I feel that the customer support was abysmal - In my experience, we were consistently given conflicting advice and statuses as we closed our account with Guideline. Despite many, many follow-ups attempting to clarify our current status and remaining steps to close the account, Guideline's reps continued to provide, I believe, misleading and inaccurate steps. This cost us thousands and thousands of dollars given Guideline was not able to appropriately pull the funds before closing the account.
• Guideline's integrations - I believe there is clearly a broken pipeline between Guideline and Rippling. In my experience, contributions were not funded as expected when we first opened the account, and when we closed our account, there was no communication between Guideline and Rippling. Guideline continued to expect contributions into perpetuity despite closure of the account
• I feel that Guideline's product itself is just broken in critical places - most importantly, statuses of contributions were reflected incorrectly in the software (Guideline thought funds were transferred, but they were not and Guideline never attempted to pull the funds from our bank). This, combined with the terrible customer support, cost us thousands and thousands of dollars after we closed our account. There are many absolutely critical features that are broken -> to give just one of many examples, it was not possible to update the bank account information and no error message was thrown. I was told that our account ended up in an exceptional state given our last payroll contribution date and account closure, but these seem like very basic things a 401k provider has to get right if there are going to manage people's money.

Incentivized

• It is hard to think of ways that Rippling could improve. The one area that we did have a bit of a slowdown was in the onboarding process. It was not intuitive and we expect to have some learning curve so if I could say anything needs improvement it would be this area.

Incentivized

Rippling continues to innovate and amaze me with their new innovations and features. Product feedback is taken seriously so I always give it whenever I can and end up seeing results. Rippling is the new wave of HRIS that cannot compare against others in the industry just due to the fact they are super user friendly!

Incentivized

Well thought out and intuitive user experience for employees and administrators. Educational documentation has been a plus

Incentivized

Rippling is a great product that has streamlined our payroll and leave management processes. The interface is intuitive, and it’s very convenient to manage everything in one place. While the initial setup was a bit lengthy and the mobile experience can sometimes be a little slow, overall, it’s been a reliable and effective solution for our needs.

Incentivized

I like that the availability in using Rippling at any given time is useful to me. Getting on the site freely when I need gives me security of knowing that I can be in control of viewing health insurance and hours information. I have yet to get any errors in using the Rippling app.

Incentivized

Rippling's performance has been great, no errors or glitches yet so far. I am confident that Going from one page to the next and all its complexity usage does not lag or times out, it works effectively and efficiently. While using Rippling and other apps it does not tend to slow it down, works great. No complaints.

Incentivized

The few questions that we've had have been answered quickly and helpfully. The implementation was a breeze and the onboarding contacts were really helpful. There was some stuff I had to learn about 401(k)s in making the decision to implement Guideline, but the Guideline team was helpful in pointing me in the right direction.

Incentivized

When I did have to reach out to Rippling for assistance I was able to get quick help and my problem resolved in a time efficient manner with out any type of hick up. The customer support team is professional, kind and always available. This makes Rippling more welcoming to use on a daily basis.

The trainer went slow and and answered our questions.

Incentivized

It's really easy to implement in comparison to other tools or applications. Different key points are easily configured and implemented as per need, having different configurations in systems. Implementation is something which binds the different parameters of an organization in a single row. Implementation of rippling is much easier, quicker, and error free than any other software. I recommend it strongly!

Incentivized

We went with Guideline as it was more affordable than alternatives. I believe this ended up being a terrible mistake. Invest in a stronger 401k partner. Human Interest was the other provider we were considering. I don't know if closing an account would have been as complicated with other providers, but I certainly know the support would have been better and more transparent with a provider like Human Interest

Incentivized

We switched from Gusto to Rippling and I wish we would've done it years ago. Rippling is so much more robust than Gusto and has made the lives of our HR team and each of our employees so much easier! I'd recommend Rippling over Gusto to every organization without any hesitation

Incentivized

I can go on here and see all my hours and pto plus health benefits. I like to have the work handbook handy to refer to legal things. How to work my role within it's limits. Being able to put in my hours and view when they are approved is a huge benefit for me.

Incentivized

• Allow small employees to enhance benefit package
• Great recruitment tool for new employees
• Connection with payroll vendor allowed for less manual work

Incentivized

• Routine things like PTO requests and document uploads now take a few clicks instead of hours of email back‑and‑forth. I’d estimate I spend at least half the time on those tasks compared to before, which frees me up to actually help employees.
• What used to drag on for days now gets done in a morning - I've just asked them this now. New hires can log in, set up their tools, and start training almost immediately, so they’re productive much sooner.
• Payroll and benefits errors used to pop up regularly, but now I almost never have to fix things or follow up on missing info. That means less stress for me and for everyone involved.
• Having everything in one platform cuts out the “where did you send that?” and “who approves this?” questions. It feels like we’ve reduced our back‑and‑forth by at least a third.

Incentivized