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
SurePayroll
Score 3.8 out of 10
N/A
SurePayroll offers an online payroll service that lets small business owners run payroll anywhere, anytime. The vendor automatically pays and files federal, state and local payroll taxes.
N/A
Pricing
Human Interest
SurePayroll
Editions & Modules
Essentials
$120 + $5 per eligible employee
per month
Complete
$160 + $7 per eligible employee
per month
Concierge
$200 + $9 per eligible employee
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Human Interest
SurePayroll
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
$499 one-time fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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.
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 The very outdated platform made it incredibly difficult to manage.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 …
I was not part of the committee that selected SurePayroll so I am unsure about why SurePayroll was selected. I do know our Board and Executive Director looked for a platform that was cost-efficient and helped us achieve the goals of our organization without taking up too much …
SurePayroll offers a comparable service at a better rate. They are better designed for small companies who need to save money any way they can. Their fees are more appropriate than ADP but the service offerings are just as good.
QuickBooks was not user-friendly, tech support was nonexistent, and I still had to file federal and state filings. SurePayroll takes care of all that for me.
SurePayroll is lower cost than Paychex, but I would recommend using Paychex despite their higher cost because they are more closely in communication with the tax divisions that are administering payroll taxes, and are less likely to make an error in my experience so far.
I've used ADP previously. I've used Paychex, which SurePayroll is now part of. None of the solutions are perfect, so I'll stay with SurePayroll until something better comes along.
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.
We use SurePayroll to make monthly payrolls in our company, as well as to close the month and year with all the income and expenses and most importantly to make tax payments. The application is perfect for making payrolls when the personnel adapted for it is not in the head office, SurePayroll has an application for mobiles that allows to make these operations remotely. The application is perfect when you want to make immediate payments, at the time of loading the payroll to the system, it proceeds to automatically perform transactions for each employee entered without any error.
Super easy interface - honestly running payroll couldn't be easier on their site.
Incredible customer service - VERY knowledgeable, professional and friendly. They will walk you through anything you need to do on the site and understand payroll, tax and benefit issues.
Tax filing and payments and year-end paperwork for 1099 contractors and W-2s. They make it so easy.
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.
My chief complaint is the software sometimes requires me to have a code sent to my phone before I can continue with some process. That in itself is fine. The problem is the check box that lets SurePayroll remember the computer doesn't actually do that. I select that check box every time, but the software doesn't remember me or my computer.
Fees have creeped higher every year over the last two or three years. I feel like I'm nitpicking here, though. What I spend for the service is reasonably priced for the amount of headaches it prevents.
I have a case where an employee is sometimes salaried and sometimes contract. There's not a way to handle that without terminating him when he needs to switch.
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
It's a poor user interface. It feels like the interface is twenty years old. If you make a mistake with payroll in their terrible UI, and try to correct it 15 seconds later, they want to charge you $39 to correct your mistake. Overall, a very poor experience in terms of user interface.
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.
SurePayroll was great when we had questions or needed support, ie. if we messed up with a payroll, needed to submit tax documents or get documents. The ease of communication between us and the organization was great and they made it easy for users to call in with support requests.
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.
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 was not part of the committee that selected SurePayroll so I am unsure about why SurePayroll was selected. I do know our Board and Executive Director looked for a platform that was cost-efficient and helped us achieve the goals of our organization without taking up too much time, so that is why we decided on this platform.
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.
SurePayroll has made my life so much easier. Prior to using a payroll service and trying to do it myself, I was charged fees by the government for failure to file correctly or on time. Having it done professionally and correctly eases stress.
