| Functionality | 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> | 9 <p>Employment Hero offers functionality most UK SMBs will need. In addition to core HR functionality, it also offers more advanced functionality such as an AI-powered ATS, end to end payroll, powerful automation and access to HR advisory services. The only functionality we found missing is the ability to directly manage employee's devices from the platform.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 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> | 6 <p>We found Employment Hero to be a relatively easy product to pick up. After only a couple of hours, we think that an average SMB employee should be able to become confident in using most of the key functionalities of the software. Specific tasks and actions were located where users would expect them, making use intuitive, and navigating between pages was easy.</p> |
| Look and feel | 7 <p>Calamari has a very minimalist look with information being presented in easily digestible manners.</p> | 5 <p>Employment Hero manages an average look and feel, in line with most of the market. Whilst it won’t impress compared to the most well designed in the space, it manages decent navigation and individual page designs considering the breadth of product features it contains.</p> |
| Customisability | 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> | 7 <p>Employment Hero offers a standard level of customisability. Lots of aspects of the software can be customised, from standard features such as workflows, to less common aspects such as the branding of the software itself. Some aspects of customisation, however, let the software down, such as the inability to differentiate between mandatory and optional questions in a performance review.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 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> | 8 <p>Access and setup is straightforward, with Employment Hero's free trial accessible without any sales calls. Basic setup (adding employees, setting up company profile) is quick, and takes around 20 minutes. Fully customising the platform is straightforward, but will take more time, given Employment Hero's breadth of functionality.</p><p>In testing, we would estimate the average HR team can get started and running one or two modules within the first 1-2 days of use.</p><p>We also liked the dedicated payroll support and test runs to ensure everything works perfectly before going live when adding the payroll module to the functionality.</p> |
| Customer Support | 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> | 5 <p>The self-service help centre provided online is a decent resource, and we found it to be helpful in ascertaining how to solve a problem. We found, however, that the more personalised support options let Employment Hero down - the AI chat is less effective at solving problems than other HRIS (e.g., KiwiHR), and you are unable to live chat with an agent, making obtaining support quite a long process (> half a day).</p> |
| Integratability | 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> | 5 <p>Employment Hero provides some, but not many, pre-built integrations with relevant third party products, such as Xero, and provides an API that allows users to build their own integrations. Again, this feature is only available at certain subscription tiers.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 5 <p>You can export most data from the platform through the reports.</p> | 7 <p>Employment Hero allows users to export key data, either using pre-built reports or by creating custom reports. It lacks the function to view all of these reports as dashboards in-app, however.</p> |
