Guideline headquartered in San Mateo offers a cloud-based 401k management software for businesses priced on a per employee basis.
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Human Interest
Score 9.2 out of 10
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Human Interest headquartered in San Francisco offers their cloud-based 401k administation platform for employers featuring flexible plan design and a dedicated account manager.
$1,205
per month
Pricing
Guideline
Human Interest
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Essentials
$120 + $5 per eligible employee
per month
Complete
$160 + $7 per eligible employee
per month
Concierge
$200 + $9 per eligible employee
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Guideline
Human Interest
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
$499 one-time fee
Additional Details
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Human Interest offers three products, for a choice of 401(k) or 403(b) that fits an organization's needs. All plans offer an all-in-one, no touch 401(k) to make it easy for employers to run and for employees to save. All plans have a setup fee of $499.
*Human Interest's average employee expense is 0.57%, compared to a 1.64% average for small 401(k) plans. Source: 401(k) Averages Book, 18th Edition.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Guideline
Human Interest
Considered Both Products
Guideline
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose Guideline
Guideline is useful to keep track of employee retirement portfolios and keep the information visible instantly for the employees. It handles contributions towards the retirement account.
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 …
We selected Guideline due to their relationship with Gusto, our payroll service. However, we did review alternative options for our 401k program and found them very competitive as to price and quality. We were thinking about going with one of the bigger companies like Schwab, …
Not listed, but I have used ADP Retirement services and we switched vendors to Empower. Both vendors have much more robust employee tools to calculate dollars needed at retirement and how percentage changes in the 401(k) allow for changes later in life at retirement. In …
The only other employer retirement planning system I've use is Voya. I felt much more in the dark about how my financial planning was working, and honestly didn't even know how much money I had deposited until I left for my new job. I also had no clue on what my risk level was …
We didn't find any viable competitive option for Gusto that had the trifecta of low fees, Gusto integration and that handled all the plan management. There were plenty of other companies like Sharebuilder, Fidelity or Vanguard (to name a few) that do have low cost 401(k) …
Paychex Flex was a terrible experience from start to finish. Bad communication, no follow-through, incorrect setups, etc... HI has been the opposite of all those things so far.
I don't know what competes with Human Interest; as an employer, this is my first interaction with a 401(k) platform. As an employee, this lacks a lot of the functionality I'm used to seeing in other platforms.
Previously we utilized John Hancock which was a nightmare from the user standpoint and a huge time waster from the administrative standpoint. The very outdated platform made it incredibly difficult to manage. The one thing I miss from John Hancock is the enrollment and …
We were using American Funds Group, but it was convoluted and difficult to understand. Human Interest calculates the numbers for us and it is so much easier.
It's not even close. Paychex Flex is expensive, confusing, and the customer service is abominable. Human Interest is better across every front, at least so far.
We just found the cost to participate in the mass marketed investing options were beyond the administrative and financial capacity of our small business.
The cost for the service was better and we felt more understood as a company and felt that Human Interest took the time to explain the 401k program and options
Insperity was horrible. Expensive, hidden fees at every corner, not communicative. They messed up my plan and didn't include the requested Safe Harbor provision and I had to pay the piper for their mistake.
Nothing Insperity did was customer first, fiduciary, or even compliant.
We went with Human interest due to its simplicity for our small business that will take few years to grow. We needed guidance and simplicity for us to understand what will be required from us as employers to help our employees have benefits. As our company grows we know that …
I have only dealt with one other retirement investment company in my career, however I find that Human Interest is very transparent and supportive of small business owners. The low cost of using their services was attractive to me and made the most sense for my company. I …
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.
Actually you guys serve a lot of variety of clients that we have. So everything from simple clients on your 316 and then you got your 338 platforms to some more of the complex clients that want to carve out their own funds. You guys integrate well with financial advisors if they wish to use that, but a lot of times it's, those aren't necessary if clients want to save money.
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.
Payroll cycles in small business can be a weekly on-cycle evolution which is not automatically recognized.
The Annual Census verification, and IRS requirement, is cumbersome as a resubmission of data already known.
Email to new participants can go unaddressed without notification to the company administrator. Better to illicit early follow-up than wait till their emails expire do to participant non-action.
It's really easy to get, well, first of all, they get enrolled automatically so they get added to the platform automatically. They get removed from the platform automatically and everything is really easy to understand for someone who doesn't have a lot of experience. And that's actually a lot of our employees have never had a retirement benefit before. They don't know anything about it. They really don't understand how it works. There's also a little bit of a fear factor with deducting money from their paycheck to be able to contribute to this. And so how easy it is for them to get it set up and then the information that Human Interest gives them about what the benefit is, how it works, all that, it's great
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.
So we had a designated rep and he was fantastic. I don't remember his name at the moment, but he was almost immediately responsive. And you guys also partnered with us for client knowledge webinars and he was great. Great at that too.
A key insight from our implementation of Human Interest is that early coordination across finance, HR, and leadership is critical. The platform itself is straightforward, but ensuring payroll integration, compliance documentation, and employee education are aligned from the start makes the rollout smoother and increases adoption. Another insight is that employees respond best when given clear, simple communication about how to enroll and the benefits of participation—this minimizes confusion and builds trust in the program. Finally, dedicating time up front to review compliance and reporting features helps avoid issues later and gives leadership confidence in the plan’s long-term stability.
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
So we had previously been with Empower, which is another 401k. They're substantially larger. Their web platform is very bulky. Their compliance was hard to get information from. We really liked when we talked with Human Interest Implementation Team that we could get pretty much right to the top. I mean, if we wanted to talk to their COO, we could do that and that all of their compliance stuff just seems to be tied in as the compliance director. That's really important to me.
I think it's a little bit hard for me to say since I have been more of a recommender of these products in my roles. I've been at a lot of early stage companies that we're looking for solutions and I've recommended human interest because I think it's easy for scaling organizations to get in place. I think in a large organization, what I would talk to is very specifically the user experience. I think 401k understanding and most large organizations is a very for, it's something that's forgotten. And what that means is basically we kind of give it to folks, but we don't actually teach them or help them leverage it. And so they're very on their own. I think human interest is so easy to use that you provide a better experience from day one there, let alone from actually really setting it up correctly.
