Best PEO Companies

PEO Company Reviews

To help you find the right solution for your business, our researchers and experts analyzed 23 popular providers before narrowing it down to our top picks. We chose to highlight vendors that offer comprehensive HR solutions, competitive pricing, excellent customer reviews, and quality customer support.

It’s worth noting that PEOs typically serve businesses that already have established entities and are looking to outsource HR functions. Employer of Record (EOR) services, on the other hand, are often used by companies that want to hire employees without establishing a formal business entity, especially in foreign markets. Our review includes leading providers in the space that are best for various use cases and business types to help you find the one that’s right for you. Jump to our methodology section for more details on our selection process.

ADP TotalSource – Best for Scalable PEO Services

ADP TotalSource is an all-encompassing PEO solution for businesses looking to simplify and improve their HR activities. It supports end-to-end payroll services, benefits management, compliance management, risk management, and talent development. With expert advice and advanced technology, ADP TotalSource helps businesses simplify HR activities, reduce administrative inconvenience, and stay compliant with evolving rules and regulations, making it a practical choice for businesses looking for a flexible and reliable HR solution.

Get Pricing Visit ADP TotalSource’s website

ADP TotalSource features

• Compliance Management – ADP TotalSource helps businesses navigate complex federal, state, and local laws using expertise and automated compliance tools to reduce exposure to the law and ensure compliance with payroll and HR procedures.
• Security & Fraud Protection – Complemented with built-in security features and rigorous data protection protocols, ADP TotalSource helps safeguard confidential payroll and employee information, lowering instances of fraud and data breaches.
• Streamlined Onboarding – ADP TotalSource simplifies hiring with an integrated onboarding process that manages payroll setup, benefits enrollment, and compliance paperwork within one comprehensive platform.
• Employee Self-Service Portal – Payroll, benefits, and HR information can be easily accessed by employees through a simple-to-use self-service portal that reduces administration and improves the employee experience.

How ADP TotalSource pricing works

ADP TotalSource doesn’t post prices on its site. Instead, businesses must request a customized quote based on business size, payroll needs, and selected HR services. However, ADP TotalSource provides full PEO services such as payroll processing, benefit administration, compliance support, and risk management. Its single-platform solution allows businesses to streamline HR tasks, providing professional guidance and full employee benefits.

What markets does ADP TotalSource serve?

ADP TotalSource is ideal for mid-sized and growing firms that require an all-inclusive HR solution. It suits firms that want to automate payroll, benefits, and compliance and provide employees with competitive benefits and professional HR services.

Read our full ADP TotalSource review

Remote – Best for Global Talent

Not all PEO solutions cater exclusively to the U.S. market. For businesses with employees spread across the globe, Remote emerges as the ideal Global HR solutions software company to manage an international team. It offers self-service employee onboarding and support to simplify and unify the process for every employee around the world.

Schedule Demo Visit Remote’s website.

Remote features

• Global Expertise – Remote understands what it means to hire, manage, and pay employees around the world. Its global expertise and knowledge is embedded in the platform, and supported by in-house experts, allowing you to quickly expand your team without becoming an expert in local laws.
• Tax and Government Compliance – Remote prioritizes compliance with local laws and regulations for payroll and tax issues, wherever you and your employees are located.
• Self-Service Portal – Your employees can onboard, access their employment information and paystubs, track PTO, and submit expenses, all within the Remote platform.
• Benefits – Your employees can access their employment information and paystubs, track PTO, and submit expense reimbursement requests without contacting you or your team.
• Contractor Management – Remote helps businesses manage their freelance and contract workers, streamlining payments, and ensuring compliance with local labor laws around the world.
• Global HR Support – Remote provides access to HR experts with experience in various international labor markets, offering guidance on best practices and helping businesses navigate complex HR scenarios across different countries.

What markets does Remote serve?

While Remote can be effectively used within a single country, spanning multiple states and industries, its true strength lies in supporting businesses operating across multiple countries. As the name suggests, Remote’s offerings for a global workforce are among the most comprehensive available. For organizations managing complex, international teams, Remote is a perfect choice.

Read our full Remote review

Rippling – Best PEO for Growing Companies

Rippling is a young company (around since only 2016), but their team has a lot of experience in growth. A lot of Rippling’s leadership team have worked at big-name companies like Apple and Amazon. Their idea: create a PEO solution for companies that are managing the best of business problems: rapid growth.

Get Started Visit Ripplings’s website.

Rippling features

• Direct Deposit – Interruptions to direct deposit can mean time-costly issues like having to print out manual checks. Rippling’s Direct Deposit feature, however, got rave reviews from customers.
• Compliance Management – Complying with payroll laws, especially across multiple states, can grow increasingly complex as you grow, but Rippling’s compliance management features were robust and intuitive.
• Benefits Dashboard – Review the benefits available at your company, adding visibility to what you offer employees and what actions you’ve taken to contribute to those benefits.
• HIPAA Compliance – Not every PEO software can claim to be HIPAA compliant, but Rippling can help with this — making it easy to use across different industries without missing a beat. Rippling doesn’t house any confidential patient information, medical records, or anything that would fall under HIPAA regulations. Since they are only processing a customer’s employee information, although they are not a HIPAA-covered entity, they can help customers with their HIPAA compliance by assisting with single sign-on and encrypting their computers.
• Payroll Reporting – Need to see the status of your payroll at a glance? Rippling’s Payroll Reporting offered plenty of visibility and simplicity to what can sometimes seem like an overly complex list of information to gather.
• Compliance – With constant changes in labor laws, staying compliant isn’t easy — especially with employees in multiple states. And if a customer is using a PEO, chances are they don’t have a large HR team with the bandwidth to help either. Rippling helps customers stay on top of HR compliance with state and local law alerts, sexual harassment training, living handbook builder, and HR experts to help you with your most complex employment questions.
• Flexibility – One day, a customer might outgrow their need for a PEO. If that day comes, you’ll want to avoid the disruptive, multi-month switching headache that other PEOs demand. With Rippling, customers can seamlessly move to large group benefits while keeping the software they love.

What markets does Rippling serve?

We chose to list Rippling under “growing companies” because it’s so versatile. The pricing makes sense for smaller companies, but the features help add simplicity to extremely complex employment situations. This makes Rippling an ideal combination of PEO software that’s great for small companies, great for medium companies, and great for large companies—and every stage of growth between these key milestones. (Note: check under our pricing comparison to see why Rippling makes sense for growing companies).

Read our full Rippling review

Paychex – Best for SMBs

Paychex originally started as a payroll software, so it’s no surprise that it provides strong payroll and HR support to small- and mid-size businesses. In addition to payroll and HR, PEO features include employee benefits and compliance management. With a range of features and add-ons, you can tailor your plan to fit your needs to increase productivity and profitability.

Get Started Visit Paychex’s website.

Paychex features

• Payroll
• Tax compliance
• Employee self-service
• HR support
• Benefits administration

What markets does Paychex serve?

For small to mid-size businesses needing a PEO, Paychex is an excellent choice. It offers payroll, compliance, HR, and employee benefits that help you attract, hire, and retain the best employees.

Read our full Paychex review

Justworks – Best PEO for Small Business

As you might expect from the name, Justworks is all about simplicity—the ability to get a company up and running on PEO software with minimal muss and fuss. They even offer a connected option so you can onboard with their team, eliminating the need to handle technical work yourself. (Note: you do need a minimum of two employees at your business to use Justworks).

Get Started Visit Justworks’ website.

Justworks features

• Guided onboarding – If you’re new to using a PEO, you may find this process intimidating—simply because you haven’t done it before. Justworks offers assisted onboarding to reduce confusion.
• W2 Preparation – If you’re a new company working with your first hires, this can get complicated in a hurry. We also consider Justworks as the best PEO for startups thanks to how it helps you get started on its platform with issues like W2 preparation.
• Self-Service Portal – Justworks offers self-service portals that make it ideal for a remote team. This may seem like an unnecessary feature as you’re starting out, but a growing business may need to hire remote workers as it grows.
• Time-Tracking – Offering time tracking for hourly pay reports and project management, there’s some flexibility in how you use Justworks to get work done—not just pay people for their work.

What markets does Justworks serve?

Although Justworks doesn’t embrace the complexities of the offerings on our list so far (i.e., HIPAA compliance), we found that this simple, straightforward solution can be a great option for any company that’s just starting out. If you’re doing your first W2 preparation with early hires, for example, onboarding with Justworks will feel like the right choice.

Read our full Justworks Review.

TriNet – Best for Growing Companies

TriNet provides comprehensive HR solutions for small and mid-sized businesses looking to scale quickly. It offers everything from payroll processing and benefits administration to compliance management.

Book Demo Visit TriNet’s website.

TriNet features

• Automated Payroll
• Access to top-tier benefits options, like health insurance and retirement plans
• Risk management
• HR professionals to guide businesses through HR issues

What markets does TriNet serve?

TriNet is designed for businesses of all sizes. With comprehensive services, it’s ideal for growing companies that need support managing HR functions while focusing on their core business activities.

Read our full TriNet review

Papaya Global – Best for International Teams

Papaya Global is a global payroll and payments solution for companies with a wide reach. We found a comprehensive list of features and even case studies that highlight how well Papaya’s services line up with the needs of businesses with a global workforce. Here’s how.

Schedule Demo Visit Papaya Global’s website.

Papaya Global features

• Compliance Management – Given its global reach, Papaya Global’s emphasis on compliance management pays off, dealing with third-party payments easily, which keeps your business moving.
• Fraud Management – Anti-fraud features built into the Papaya Global system help you stave off data breaches and keep payroll information secure.
• Onboarding – The all-in-one onboarding features for your workers (payroll employees, contractors, etc., all go to the same place) help add simplicity to what can sometimes feel like a complicated regulatory process.
• Self-Service Portals – Good for global remote teams, but also ideal for getting people up and running without feeling like you have to manage everything from a centralized location.

What markets does Papaya Global serve?

Global remote teams, nonprofits, and U.S.-based markets — we don’t want to pigeonhole Papaya Global into any one of them. But in searching for an especially nonprofit-friendly solution, we found that the combination of quality features and sensible pricing made Papaya Global a natural choice here.

Read our full Papaya Global review

Insperity – Best PEO for HR Services

Insperity provides comprehensive HR solutions that scale with your business. They’re focused on giving their clients a personalized PEO experience, ensuring you can focus on growing your business. One unique feature is that Insperity offers thousands of learning materials to help your team increase their skills, empowering them to handle complicated leadership and liability issues.

Get Started Visit Insperiy’s website.

Insperity features

• Employee benefits – Insperity offers a wide range of benefits for employees, ensuring your employees have access to valuable medical care and 401ks. Some of the benefits include medical, dental, and vision, a health savings program, basic disability insurance, personal accident insurance, and employee assistance programs.
• Talent management – Insperity’s talent management tools allow you to create your ideal recruitment program. They offer various training programs too, ensuring that your supervisors can handle common issues in the workplace. Some of these include liability training, leadership development, and over 6,500 online learning resources.
• HR support – HR is one of the most vital aspects of any organization; however, it is time-consuming. Insperity gives you a dedicated, personalized HR team that you can rely on. This team of professionals helps you with compliance issues, offers proactive notifications, and has over 60 years of combined experience.
• Compliance – Compliance is a big issue for many companies, especially those hiring between states or regions. Your HR team stays on top of any changes to keep your business compliant. They also handle issues like workers’ compensation, unemployment claims, liability insurance, EEOC services, and other tax and legal issues.
• Predictive analytics – Using robust technology, Insperity integrates routine HR services into a program that helps you stay ahead of trends and make workforce decisions to support your business goals. Their technology scales with your business and has an ever-growing security system. It also places all your HR services in one convenient location, so you can easily access and manage employee data and reports.
• Self-service HR technology platform – ALEX is Insperity’s interactive support tool included in Insperity Premier™. This tool helps your employees find benefits that best suit them. Rather than reading through all the options, ALEX narrows down the options based on their individual needs, letting employees quickly find a solution..

What markets does Insperity serve?

Insperity is best suited for small businesses looking to outsource their HR and payroll to a U.S.-based team of professionals. Middle-market businesses are also a great fit for Insperity’s full-service HR and PEO services that are customized to meet your business’s unique needs.

However, unlike some other companies on our list, Insperity does not offer international support and our research suggests that they require businesses to have at least 5 employees. Pricing is also not listed on their website, and users report pricing as higher than other PEOs. So Insperity is best for small to medium-sized businesses with at least 5 employees who are looking for full HR and employee benefit services.

Deel – Best for Startups

Although not exclusively for startups, Deel’s combination of startup-friendly pricing and features like adding hires from a new country “within minutes” make for good software for any ambitious company that’s just getting off the ground.

Get Started Visit Deel’s website.

Deel features

• Compliance Management – If you’re a startup and you don’t want compliance issues derailing your company, you want compliance management as robust as Deel’s. They offer signing and editing contracts within their dashboard, for example, working in conjunction with their reviews of local laws to ensure compliance.
• Compliance Documentation – Hiring in a new country for the first time? Deel offers some robust global hiring features that help it rival other options on this list, including documentation that’s easy to review for every new hire.
• Self-Service Portal – What if your startup begins achieving fast growth? The Self-Service Portal makes the software responsive to employee needs without clogging up your HR pipeline.
• Payroll Reporting – Stay on top of your payroll needs with a simple payroll dashboard that keeps you in the loop with what’s going out, what you’re expected to pay, and the cash flow needed to maintain your current workforce.

What markets does Deel serve?

Like many of the top PEO providers, you’ll find that Deel is more versatile than its selection on this list might make it seem. There’s no reason you can’t use it at more complicated levels of employment well beyond the startup stage. But the combination of features and pricing make it a great pick for anyone who wants to ensure that their startup is taken care of.

Read our full Deel review

Compare the best PEO companies side-by-side

What is a professional employer organization?

PEOs are human resource outsourcing organizations that make it easier for companies to handle issues like benefits and payroll. What distinguishes PEO from HR, or human resources? PEO is all about the entire experience of payroll, hiring, benefits, and generally the economics and finances of employment, while HR may also deal with issues that directly affect how the company operates as a matter of policy. And a PEO is an organization to which a company might outsource this work, whereas HR can often serve in-house.

Who uses PEO services?

Companies need technology to keep an eye on what’s going on with their employees. HR professionals keep their eyes on PEO services, but anyone in C-level management—CEOs, CFOs, and the like—will find that it helps them keep a gauge on their obligations to their employees. From an organizational level, companies of all types can use PEO:

• Small to large private companies
• Public and government institutions
• Global companies running remote teams
• Nonprofit organizations

In fact, over 200,000 U.S. companies across all industries use a PEO, allowing them to focus on their core operations.

What does a PEO do?

A PEO can help organizations with tax filings and obligations, payroll, HR administration, retirement benefits management, compliance and risk management, and a host of other issues that relate to hiring and employing people. A PEO can help smaller companies offer big-corporation benefits even if they only have two employees, making your small company more competitive with the bigger organizations when hiring talent. It can also provide self-service options for employees, so they can log in and check on their current benefits and reports and better understand their position within the company. Think of PEO software as the employee-facing end of how your business runs.

Benefits of using a PEO company

Using a PEO does more than just simplify and save time—though it does those very well. Let’s point out some specific benefits to using PEO software:

• Ensuring HR and regulatory compliance, often in different states and countries. This helps you ensure that your company is meeting its obligations to employees, even though those obligations can be complicated and differ from one regulatory environment to the next.
• Detailing your financial obligations for payroll and benefits package, often with a reporting dashboard (which is why we include these dashboards as an important feature). This is critical for C-level executives who are using this information for project and budgetary planning.
• New employee onboarding and processing, making it easier to hire more people as your company grows. This is especially important for small businesses and startups that are quickly growing and don’t want onboarding new talent to be an obstruction to effective growth.
• HR administration. Don’t have much of an HR infrastructure to speak of? If you’re not quite ready to hire an HR manager, a PEO platform can offer many HR features that will give your company the legitimacy it needs with new hires.

How much do PEO services cost?

On our list, we typically found that PEO services charged by the employee/user—but there was also a surprising lack of transparency with some options that didn’t end up on our final list. PEO services come with highly customizable pricing, which is why you might see a typical price of $20 to $50 per employee per month—but it can run the gamut up to much higher prices.

For instance, Rippling’s low cost of $8/month/user was our favorite pricing on the list, while Remote’s $299/employee/month seemed much more prohibitive—though the services on offer are a bit different. Expect anything within this price range as you explore the PEO services right for your organization.

Here’s a real number example: in a recent survey, users told us they pay anywhere from $700 a month to $30,000 a month for their PEO software. These are from two employees using the software up to 300. And that pricing seems accurate. For the company paying $700 a month with two employees using it, they pay around $350 per person per month. The company that pays $30,000 a month for 300 people to use the software comes to roughly $100 per user per month.

PEO Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What companies use a PEO?

Any type of company can use a PEO—especially the more people you hire. On our list, we found that Justworks, for example, would work with companies with at least two employees. We came across a wide range of clients and customers in our research, from nonprofit organizations to senior HR leaders at private companies.

What does a professional employer organization do?

A PEO is an organization that offers outsourced HR services to help your company offer the same benefits and advantages that big companies can offer. Think of them as friendly partners who help you in your role as a burgeoning employer.

What is the difference between a PEO and EOR?

As a company, you can use either a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) or an Employer of Record (EOR) to outsource specific tasks related to your employees. However, each offers unique roles and responsibilities.

A PEO is a firm that provides comprehensive HR solutions for small and mid-sized businesses. You can contract with a PEO to assume responsibilities and provide employee benefits, payroll services, workers’ compensation, recruiting, risk/safety management, and training and development. By entering into a contract, a PEO hires your employees, becoming their employer of record for tax and insurance purposes – a practice known as co-employment.

On the other hand, an EOR serves as the official employer for tax purposes while your employee works at your company. Like a PEO, an EOR handles your employee payroll, benefits, taxes, insurance, and other HR responsibilities.

The critical difference between an EOR and a PEO lies in the employment relationship. With an EOR, there’s no co-employment arrangement. The EOR is the official employer, and your company, where employees perform their work, becomes the EOR’s client.

Who is a good fit for PEO?

Growing companies that need to establish a legitimate hiring presence will often work with a PEO for payroll and retirement benefits, making them more competitive with larger companies with enormous HR budgets. This streamlines the hiring process and payroll reporting and makes life easier for your company. If that sounds like your company, you’re probably a good fit for a PEO. Just make sure you identify a service that will grow with your business.

One PEO user we recently surveyed recommends, “Think five years from now and plan for the number of employees/contractors you anticipate hiring.”

How we chose the best PEO companies

In curating this list of the best PEO software companies, we ran through a master vendor list of about two dozen offerings. We then whittled that down to the best 15 companies, which we looked at more closely, rating them for a variety of categories, including:

• Features. How comprehensive were features like compliance management or HIPAA compliance? We selected five core features to give us an idea of the breadth of what each PEO solution had to offer.
• Pricing and transparency. Our rating went beyond dollars and cents. We also explored whether a company offered free trials, offered pricing transparency, or structured its pricing in a way that would make sense to its target market.
• Customer support. We looked at the customer support features, including everything from chat features to online documentation for getting set up, ultimately using a 1-5 rating to gauge which companies were more likely to offer user-friendly support.
• Brand reputation. How well-regarded is the brand online? We took this into account, using online reviews as a double-check to ensure that the PEO solutions we vetted had good reputations online.