| Functionality | 5 <p>While Breathe appears to offer a wide range of features on paper, including core HR, performance management, an integrated ATS, and learning & development, much of this functionality feels half-baked and unintuitive.</p><p>For example, the "performance review" module merely allows you to attach an appraisal to an employee's profile, offering no capability to create a company-wide performance review cycle with pre-set questions. </p> | 2 <p>Calamari is limited to core HR tasks and falls short for anything beyond the basics. It only offers employee data storage, time-off and time tracking.</p><p>It lacks any other features such as performance reviews, employee surveys, onboarding workflows, and detailed reporting.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 3 <p>We found some aspects of Breathe's platform bizarrely unintuitive. For example, viewing the company's time-off calendar requires you to go into the "reports" section. Instead of creating performance reviews for groups of employees, you can only add performance reviews to each employee one-by-one. Furthermore, there are no separate tabs for onboarding and goals - these are all hidden away under a single “company” tab.</p> | 9 <p>Calamari is an exceptionally user-friendly platform, making it easy for most SMB employees to become comfortable with its features in as little as half a day. The interface is well-organized, with information neatly categorized into intuitive tabs, allowing users to navigate the platform effortlessly. This simplicity ensures a smooth onboarding experience and efficient day-to-day usage.</p> |
| Look and feel | 4 <p>The homepage of Breathe features a modern design, creating a strong first impression. However, as users navigate deeper into the platform, the design becomes less consistent with the initial modern aesthetic, and the layout feels cluttered with information.</p><p>Load times are efficient, averaging under 2 seconds.</p> | 7 <p>Calamari has a very minimalist look with information being presented in easily digestible manners.</p> |
| Customisability | 3 <p>Breathe offers very limited customizability across its modules, which can be a significant drawback for many teams. For instance, users can only create 3 text fields and 2 date fields as custom fields. When setting up a leave policy, there is no option to specify which group of employees the policy applies to.</p><p>Additionally, in the workflows module, customization is restricted to renaming tasks, with no flexibility to tailor the workflows further.</p> | 4 <p>Calamari offers a standard level of customizability across most of its features. Users can create custom fields, define tailored leave policies, and configure approval workflows to suit their organizational needs. However, the platform falls short when it comes to analytics, offering no options for customization. This limitation is likely to disappoint data-driven companies that require flexibility in generating and analyzing reports.</p><p>In conclusion, while Calamari provides adequate customization for operational features, its lack of adaptability in analytics may not meet the expectations of companies relying on data-driven decision-making.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 9 <p>Breathe offers a self-serve free trial which doesn't require you to talk to sales in order to gain access. Purchasing doesn't require talking to sales. Due to Breathe' very limited customisability, fully customizing the platform can be done within 1-2 business days.</p> | 10 <p>Calamari offers a free trial without needing to speak to sales. Purchasing doesn't require you to speak to sales if you purchase after the free trial. It takes <10mins to complete basic setup (entering company information, adding employees). Fully customizing and setting up the platform can be done within half a day,. Customization and setup is simple enough that you don't need an expert and more complicated processes can be done with help from the help center.</p> |
| Customer Support | 3 <p>Users have access to help center with articles explaining the features available on the platform. Breathe also has a built-in AI chatbot, however, we found this chatbot to be quite useless. It answers queries by referring users to the help center. Furthermore, wait times for a human agent is a couple hours and only during UK office hours.</p> | 8 <p>Calamari has a help center which provides articles explaining features of the platform. We found the articles to be very well explained and helpful. There is also an in-platform chat function with customer support agents responding, on average, in under 10 minutes. This is quite impressive compared to most HR systems.</p> |
| Integratability | 4 <p>Breathe lacks a lot of basic integrations such as Slack. However, they do provide an API.</p> | 5 <p>Calamari has integrations with commonly used softwares such as Slack, Google Workspace Microsoft 365, and Jira. They also have an API you can use.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 5 <p>Breathe's exporting functionality is standard with users being able to export most data within the platform from reports to employee information.</p> | 5 <p>You can export most data from the platform through the reports.</p> |
.png/public){kind=small}
.png%2Fpublic&w=48&q=75){kind=small}
.png%2Fpublic&w=640&q=75)
