| 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> | 9 <p>GoCo offers all of the functionality that most small to medium companies will need, though it lacks some more advanced functionality that more sophisticated companies might expect. Sophisticated payroll functionality, an integrated applicant tracking system, and managing benefits are a few examples of functions that users can expect from GoCo. For larger companies, however, users may expect more, such as managing hardware and software access (which is on GoCo's roadmap).</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> | 5 <p>GoCo is reasonably easy to understand and use, though it does require some getting used to - we think that an average startup employee might require up to half a day and some guidance to proficiently use all key functionalities of the product. While the layout makes it easy to navigate to a desired page, we found that there were times where specific settings were not always where we expected them. For example, if you wanted to adjust permissions for who could view a specific performance review, this cannot be done when creating the performance review - instead, this needs to be set in the permissions app.</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> | 8 <p>GoCo is visually appealing - the collapsing/expanding sidebar enables users to view more information on their screen, without compromising functionality. Pages are fast to load.</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> | 7 <p>GoCo provides users with a high degree of customisability. users are able to customise most aspects of their workflow, from specific workflow automations, to which reports they would like to generate.</p><p>While the ability to customise is far-reaching, however, we found that the ease with which users can select specific groups for a policy to apply to lets it down. Users are unable to select 'groups' for a workflow to apply,your to, instead having to select either all employees or specific employees. This not only means that selecting employees takes longer (even though you can filter employees by groups when selecting them), but it also means that selected employees becomes a static list, rather than dynamically following changes in your business.</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> | 4 <p>GoCO does not offer a self-serve free trial and purchasing requires talking to sales. It takes 10-30mins to complete basic setup (entering company information and adding employees). Fully customizing and setting up the platform can be done within the week. Customization and setting up is simple enough to complete without help from 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> | 7 <p>GoCo provides all users with a dedicated client success manager, client success specialists, and a dedicated support team who are able to offer HR support to clients. The combination of these provisions mean that users should feel incredibly well supported when using GoCo. GoCo also provide client success analysts who are on hand to support employees, meaning that your employees will also feel well supported.</p><p>We found that customer support was generally quickly to respond to questions (<1 hour), although the lack of a live chat is disappointing for a product with this level of customer support. Users instead either need to call or email customer support. For customers outside the US, calling support requires contacting an American phone number during American hours of operation.</p> |
| Integratability | 4 <p>Breathe lacks a lot of basic integrations such as Slack. However, they do provide an API.</p> | 7 <p>GoCo offers pre-built integrations with most relevant third party products (such as google and outlook calendars), however it lacks integrations with some popular third party products such as Lattice and Ravio, which some users might look for.</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> | 6 <p><span style="background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248); color: rgb(29, 28, 29);">GoCo allows for the exporting of key data via reports (which can either be from templates, or be custom made). Its selection of pre-built integrations also allows users to export data to these third party apps, such as payroll data to Xero. Its inability to export data via an API holds it back, however.</span></p> |
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