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> | 5 <p>Workable’s strength lies in its seamless integration with the Workable ATS, making it a great option for companies already using their recruiting platform. As a standalone HRIS, however, it focuses on core HR functionality like time-off management and onboarding. While it covers the basics well, it lacks some features SMBs might find valuable, such as time tracking, engagement surveys, and performance review management.</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> | 8 <p>Workable has an easy-to-use system with a clear layout. Setting up new processes and policies is set up in a logical order, with tutorial videos often provided to assist users. An average SMB employee would require around an hour and minimal guidance to master the product.</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>Workable has a pleasant look, with a simple layout and decluttered design. We experienced fast load times when navigating between pages.</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>You can customise most things on Workable, from entities and office locations, to data fields and report filters.</p><p>We found, however, that it lacks the deeper customisability offered by more mature HRIS (e.g., Rippling, Deel), such as creating workflows with conditional logic.</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> | 6 <p>Workable does offer a self-serve free trial that doesn't require talking to sales to gain access. However, purchasing requires talking to sales first. Fully customizing and setting up the platform can be done within 1 week. Customization and setting up is simple enough to complete without assistance from an expert and more complicated processes (eg: creating custom automated workflows) 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> | 6 <p>Workable has a number of customer support options. A detailed FAQ section provides considerable information. The AI-chat function was able to answer some of our questions about functionality, but struggled with more complex requests. Despite messaging during regular business hours, we were unable to speak directly with an agent on the live chat, and were faced with several hours of waiting until we heard back from an agent via email.</p> |
Integratability | 4 <p>Breathe lacks a lot of basic integrations such as Slack. However, they do provide an API.</p> | 4 <p>Although Workable allows for integration with numerous third-party products, we found that its offering among the most relevant products was less impressive. If you're looking for integration with software such as Jazz HR, Ravio, or Guideline, you'll be disappointed.</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> | 7 <p>Workable provides a number of report types that are possible to export, from payroll information, to time-off. It does not provide functionality to generate reports using information outside of its standard categories.</p> |