Devon Hennig

Everything you need to know about Paycor, including Paycor reviews, features, support, pricing, alternatives and more.

Hi there, and welcome to SelectHub’s ultimate Paycor review.

We’re here to give you a detailed tour and our honest, unbiased opinions about Paycor.

If you’re more of a binge-watcher than a bookworm, good news! We’ve recorded a whole video series about it. Check out the first video of our Paycor review below.

Since you’re already here, you know that Paycor is a major player in the HCM space. Now you’re doing your homework and trying to figure out if it’s right for you and how it stacks up against the likes of Workday, Oracle, SAP, UKG, ADP, Ceridian and others.

This Paycor review is here to guide you like a bloodhound on a hot trail. Let’s go.

Table of Contents

• What Does Paycor Do?
• In-Depth Paycor Review
  • Who Is Paycor Best Suited For?
  • Who Is Paycor NOT Suited For?
  • Top Paycor Features
  • Features NOT Supported by Paycor
  • Paycor Pricing: How Much Does It Cost?
  • Paycor Alternatives: How Do They Stack Up?
  • Paycor Reviews: Themes From Users
• Final Paycor Review & Score
• What’s Next?

What Does Paycor Do?

Paycor enables the management of all aspects of human resources, including payroll, talent management, workforce management, benefits administration and more.

Paycor offers an extensive platform for HR + Payroll, Talent Management, Workforce Management, Employee Experience, and Benefits administration. Get the full scoop on their Overview page.

Paycor provides the following solutions in its HCM suite:

• The HR + Payroll module provides core HR and payroll, analytics and expense management capabilities. Users can manage employees’ tasks and information, pay employees, obtain real-time actionable insights for workforce analysis and planning, and review and reimburse employee expenses.
• The Talent Management module includes recruiting, onboarding, talent development and compensation planning. All this helps in hiring new candidates, onboarding new hires, evaluating employee performance, and planning employee bonuses and rewards.
• The Workforce Management module consists of time and attendance functionality and workforce scheduling capabilities, which allow for tracking work hours and scheduling employee shifts.
• The Employee Experience module provides pulse surveys, learning management and career management capabilities. You can gather employee feedback, provide personalized learning content, determine competencies and role-based reviews, and educate and motivate employees.
• The Benefits Administration module offers access to a benefits advisor, ACA reporting and worker compensation capabilities. It guides administrators through the open enrollment process, sends alerts and reminders, automates insurance payments and more.

From a “jobs to be done” perspective, Paycor empowers leaders and helps users to do the following.

• Streamline recruitment. You can view job candidates and their statuses, prioritize job listings, create career pages, provide interview scorecards, submit employee referrals and promote remote hiring for recruiting purposes.
• Perform new hire onboarding tasks and ongoing training. From talent development and onboarding software to learning management, career management and pulse surveys, Paycor has many learning and development features.
• Access and update employee information, including timecards, pay rates, and contact information.
• Manage, organize and schedule employee shifts. Workforce management features include time, attendance and scheduling features.
• Review, reimburse and report on employee expenses. Expense management is a key piece of Paycor’s overall HR and payroll software.
• Create, assign, share, sign and store digital documents. As you’d expect from any HR platform, Paycor offers a centralized place to handle HR communications.

Now that we’ve covered the basics of what Paycor offers, let’s get into our deep dive.

Get a Free Demo for Paycor

In-Depth Paycor Review

Paycor is popular, but popularity doesn’t always make for a perfect fit. Dig in to see whether Paycor is the best HCM platform for your particular needs.

Who Is Paycor Best Suited For?

In our review, SelectHub’s analysts determined that Paycor is best suited for small and medium businesses that may be large enough to require professional HR services but for whom hiring a team of professionals can be prohibitively expensive.

Instead of hiring a team dedicated to recruiting, onboarding, employee management, benefits administration and payroll, Paycor can handle much of the manual work through its software suite. This lets business owners manage all aspects of their HR and payroll administration.

Paycor’s small business pricing in particular is for organizations with 50 or fewer employees. Paycor also offers a mid-market plan for businesses with 50-1,000+ employees. Additionally, it can be a good fit for nonprofits, as, again, it may be able to fulfill many duties of an HR department without the cost of hiring various full-time employees.

As far as industries, Paycor can be tailored to the likes of health care, manufacturing, restaurant, retail, professional services, nonprofits and education.

Who Is Paycor NOT Suited For?

Below are some scenarios in which Paycor may not be a perfect fit.

• Ultra budget-conscious business owners. While Paycor is designed to cater to small and medium businesses, it may not be suitable for very small or very frugal companies that may also need more advanced HR functionality. Paycor’s small business plans include advanced HR features, but to get features like new hire onboarding, e-signatures, access to HR experts and 401(k) provider integration, users have to purchase higher plans than the Basic plan. The pricing plans ranging from $99–$199 plus $5–$14 per employee monthly may be costly for small businesses.
• Mom-and-Pop shops needing basic features only. Paycor may not be suitable for small outfits needing basic payment processing only, as its Starter tier can be expensive for small teams. The plan includes tools like company chat and a news feed that smaller mom-and-pop businesses may not require.
• Certain international use cases. Paycor may not be suitable for businesses with employees in international territories, as it doesn’t support certain global HR operations.
• Anyone requiring self-hosted solutions. Since Paycor is not available as a self-hosted solution, businesses with that preference shouldn’t opt for Paycor.

Compare Paycor to the Top Competitors

Top Paycor Features

Beyond table stakes features that every HCM platform offers, our Paycor review found the following top 10 differentiating capabilities.

Key Feature 1: Customizable Homepage

Paycor’s system is highly customizable, and one area where that’s on display is the user’s Homepage. You can control exactly what your team sees when they sign in — for example, put compliance items or turnover stats front and center. Don’t want to miss when someone moves into a new tax locale? Feature that information.

Furthermore, widgets and snapshots can show at a glance time-off requests, who’s at risk of overtime, who has birthdays coming up and a lot more.

Key Feature 2: Leader Insights & Report Card

Paycor’s Leader Insights page empowers leaders with a Leader Report Card that shows which meaningful actions have and have not been taken. For example:

• What’s the track record of leaders promoting their people?
• Are they recognizing their employees?
• Are pay rate changes and increases taking place?
• What are their 1:1 completion and performance review rates?

Paycor’s Leader Insights page, which empowers leaders with system and survey-driven data.

Beyond the reports above, you can also get readouts on soft skills. A prebuilt-leadership survey can be sent to a leader’s reports, and all the feedback from that survey will tee up the results on their Leader Insights page and serve content to help leaders improve.

Key Feature 3: Integrations With Job Boards and Referrals

With Paycor, you can push jobs to job boards automatically, including the most popular sites like LinkedIn and Indeed. There’s also referral functionality, which is powerful and unique. Employees can refer job postings with automatically generated referral links and earn rewards. They accumulate points, which can be redeemed for whatever incentives the organization wants to offer.

Get a Free Demo for Paycor

Key Feature 4: AI-Powered Smart Sourcing

Smart Sourcing uses AI to help you narrow down a database of 1.5 billion potential profiles to a qualified pool that’s right for you. Essentially, you’re shown candidate profiles and you click on what you like and don’t like.

Example of Paycor’s AI-powered smart sourcing.

Once ideal characteristics are identified, the AI sourcing will launch a campaign to all the folks in the pool and find interview-ready candidates automatically. As candidates come in, they’ll hit the job board and you can manage them from there.

Key Feature 5: AI-Powered Job Descriptions

AI-powered job descriptions are exactly what they sound like. Instead of having to write job descriptions manually, you can click a button and AI will fill out any JD based on the title and information you give it. From there, you’re able to personalize it to your heart’s content.

Key Feature 6: Onboarding Made Easy

Onboarding information like tax credit screening, I-9 verification, direct deposit and more is well integrated with Paycor. Forms make completing certain documents easy, and with W4s, you’re able to complete and present final ready-to-go versions on the spot.

Onboarding workflow in Paycor.

Key Feature 7: Powerful Performance Insights

Paycor’s performance section offers tools to help leaders make better decisions. Some of these tools include:

• Cascading goal tracking (OKR compliant)
• 1:1 tracking and scheduling
• 360-degree feedback made simple
• Recognition features related to core values
• Sophisticated performance reviews that offer tons of templates
• AI scoring to help leaders improve the tone of their feedback by showing them the sentiment of their messages

Overall, these make a big difference in establishing a strong culture around tracking and improving performance.

Get a Free Demo for Paycor

Key Feature 8: Benchmarks & Analytics

Paycor Analytics leverages predictive analytics and provides a variety of charts and graphs that not only report on an organization’s current workforce data but can also predict future workforce trends and performance drivers. Some of the highlights include the following.

• Benchmarks compare your data, such as resignation rates, and show how you stack up against your industry rates.
• AI can uncover who is most at-risk of turnover by studying the data set and learning what happens from a variety of inputs at your specific organization.
• DEI breakdowns and comparisons against benchmark data.
• Ability to set delivery rules. You can set it up so you get notified if certain metrics change. For example, if labor cost goes up by X% or turnover crosses Y%.
• AI-Powered Assistant. Paycor’s new AI digital assistant adds a conversational interface to the existing Paycor Analytics platform, allowing leaders across businesses the ability to ask HR and workforce management questions about their teams and receive instant answers and insights. [Set to be released in March 2024.]

Key Feature 9: OnDemand Pay, AutoRun, & Child Support Services

Paycor’s OnDemand pay option is one of its standout features that allows workers to choose when they get paid for completed work. Additionally, AutoRun allows payroll administrators to set payroll to run automatically at regularly scheduled dates. What’s more, users are able to manage child support services online. You can set up child support deductions and add them to employees.

Key Feature 10: Apps Marketplace

Paycor’s marketplace offers customers an extensive network of service and technology partners to integrate with popular benefits, retirement, background check and hiring tools. There are currently 200+ apps available.

Get a Free Demo for Paycor

Features Not Supported by Paycor

Not a lot is lacking from Paycor when you take into account its integrations and out-of-the-box features. That said, there are some drawbacks for certain users and organizations.

• Since tax compliance in each country varies widely, the system requires using plugins or integrating with other software to be used in certain areas.
• Paycor doesn’t provide a native mobile app specifically for recruiting purposes.
• Paycor’s customers don’t have a dashboard that can show the outstanding questions/tickets that are waiting for resolution and the stage they’re in.
• Paycor doesn’t support worldwide operations for businesses with foreign personnel.
• Since Paycor lacks AI-based candidate scoring, users who prefer leveraging machine learning to identify suitable candidates won’t find Paycor to be an ideal fit. Plus, Paycor can’t leverage artificial intelligence capabilities to offer behavior-based recommendations to individual employees, such as curated content, tips and tools based on various events captured in the platform.

Compare Paycor to the Top Competitors

Paycor Pricing: How Much Does It Cost?

As Paycor offers several modules to handle different aspects of employee administration, the overall cost of the platform varies depending on what parts of its suite an organization chooses to use. Consistent with most HR software platforms, customers will also pay more or less depending on how many employees they manage within the system.

Paycor pricing breaks down into small business pricing and medium-sized business pricing.

Paycor Pricing: Small Businesses (<50 employees)

Paycor’s subscription costs include a monthly base fee and per-employee fees for small businesses. As of the publishing date of this article, the setup fees are waived on all plans.

Paycor offers four pricing tiers for small businesses: Basic, Essential, Core and Complete.

Paycor’s pricing model and plans for small businesses are as follows.

Per user per month pricing model (PUPM)

• In this pricing model, every pricing plan has per-user-per-month pricing.
• The features and the license fees advance progressively from the basic tier to the enterprise tier.
• The license fees can be paid on a monthly or annual payment plan.
• The subscription cost is as follows:
  • Basic: $99 per month + $5 per employee per month.
  • Essential: $149 per month + $7 per employee per month.
  • Core: $199 per month + $8 per employee per month.
  • Complete: $199 per month + $14 per employee per month.

Get a Free Paycor Price Quote For Your Specific Needs

You can customize plans further by adding products or services like Workers Comp, Time + Scheduling, Benefits Admin or Recruiting as add-ons with additional monthly fees. If you need more tools or features, you can upgrade to best suit the needs of your business.

For small businesses, the total cost of the license includes:

• Set up fees (currently waived) +
• Flat fee +
• Per employee fee (as per the tier opted) +
• Any additional fees for services/ products opted

Following is an overview of the highlights of the different pricing tiers to help you get a sense of what’s included in each and which may be best for your organization.

• Basic: Entry-level functionality for customers. All features provided in the Basic plan, like Payroll and Tax Service, Online Reporting and OnDemand Pay are also offered in all other plans except for Basic Wage Garnishments, which is only offered in the Basic plan.
• Essential: The Essential plan offers all functionality of the Basic plan, plus additional features like Onboarding and E-verification, HR Support Center and Time Off Manager.
• Core: All features included in the Essential plan are also part of the Core plan. This plan offers additional functionality like Paycor Expense Management, Employee Import, Paycor HR and Paycor Career Management.
• Complete: The Complete plan offers the full suite of features offered by Paycor. Apart from the features in its Core plan, the Complete plan also offers Paycor Analytics, Paycor Compensation Planning and Paycor Talent Management.

SelectHub recommends opting for a three-month free trial before purchasing any of the paid tiers. Other than that, here are some reasons why you might choose one tier over another.

• Basic offers essential features required by startups or very small businesses interested in mainly payroll-related features and not looking for extensive customizations and integrations. It lacks some functionalities like Onboarding, E-verification, HR Support Center and Time Off Manager.
• Essential offers additional features as compared to the Basic plan. It’s ideal for small businesses requiring features like Onboarding, Report Builder and HR Support Center.
• Core is the most popular license edition, including all the features of the Essential plan, plus integrations. It’s commonly used by companies looking for a few more advanced features over the Basic and Essential tiers. It offers functionality like Paycor HR, Paycor Career management, and Paycor Expense Management.
• Complete is suitable for businesses requiring a complete suite of HCM solutions, including advanced features like Paycor Analytics, Paycor Talent Management, Paycor Compensation Planning, etc. Additionally, Complete Plan offers automated workflows and document management.

Paycor Pricing: Medium-Sized Businesses (>50 employees)

For medium businesses with 50 to 1,000+ employees, Paycor provides a custom quote. SelectHub recommends contacting the company directly to learn more about that offering.

Get a Free Paycor Price Quote For Your Specific Needs

Paycor Alternatives: How Do They Stack Up?

Here are the top seven Paycor alternatives and how they stack up, including heavyweights UKG Pro, Workday, Oracle HCM Cloud, ADP Workforce Now, Infor HCM and Ceridian Dayforce.

Want more? Our data-rich Paycor alternatives comparison has you covered.

UKG Pro vs. Paycor

UKG Pro is HR management software that has the following advantages over Paycor.

• UKG Pro Employee Voice provides administrators personalized delivery of recommended well-being content, tools and training that trigger based on their employees’ responses, for benefits administration. By contrast, Paycor doesn’t offer actionable recommendations.
• UKG Pro Learning gives the option to create automated registration rules for groups based on specific organizational criteria. Once an automated registration rule is created, all users that match the set criteria will be automatically registered in the group. Paycor lacks automatic assignment of learners to learning groups based on specified criteria.

On the flip side, Paycor has the following advantages over UKG Pro.

• Paycor lets users create records of recruitment agencies and assign job postings to them. UKG Pro doesn’t provide recruitment agency access.
• Paycor provides a native expense management solution, Paycor Expense Management, which allows employees to upload receipts and enter expense data from either their web or mobile devices. A native expense management solution isn’t available in UKG Pro.

For more, see our in-depth UKG Pro vs. Paycor comparison.

Workday vs. Paycor

Workday has the following advantages over Paycor.

• Workday supports workforce modeling, as it allows using multiple scenario models to compare workforce capacity to talent availability. Paycor doesn’t support workforce modeling.
• Workday provides native mobile applications with features specific to recruiting for Android and iOS devices. Paycor doesn’t offer native mobile applications for recruiting purposes.

On the flip side, Paycor has the following advantages over Workday.

• Paycor offers an AI-based benefit advisor tool, Ask Emma, to assist employees in the benefits selection process. Workday lacks a built-in benefit advisor tool.
• Paycor offers extensive gamification features like leaderboards, badges and more within its learning module to reward and motivate employees for course completions. In contrast, Workday doesn’t include gamification as a built-in feature.

For more, see our in-depth Workday vs. Paycor comparison.

Oracle HCM Cloud vs. Paycor

Oracle HCM Cloud has the following advantages over Paycor.

• Oracle HCM Cloud provides workforce modeling that uses current and historical indicators to predict performance and attrition, determines correction action through what if scenario modeling, and provides the ability to implement that corrective action. Paycor doesn’t offer workforce modeling capabilities.
• Oracle HCM Cloud can automatically assign learning assessments to different groups based on various criteria, including job title and. Paycor lacks rules to automate assignments to groups based on specific criteria.

On the flip side, Paycor has the following advantages over Oracle HCM Cloud.

• Paycor provides Job Costing reporting within Reports and Analytics that includes Labor Hours Summary, Labor Hours Detail, Labor Hours with Estimated Cost, and a pre-post export for a Job Costing Export. Oracle HCM Cloud doesn’t provide job costing reporting.
• Paycor is affordable for small and mid-size businesses. Oracle HCM Cloud caters mainly to large enterprises.

For more, see our in-depth Oracle HCM Cloud vs. Paycor comparison.

Compare Paycor to the Top Competitors

ADP Workforce Now vs. Paycor

ADP Workforce Now has the following advantages over Paycor.

• ADP Workforce Now provides local and global payroll, HCM and outsourcing services in 140+ countries. Paycor doesn’t support global HR and payroll operations.
• ADP Workforce Now provides an employee wellness engagement program, which Paycor lacks.

Paycor has the following advantages over ADP Workforce Now.

• Paycor provides 360-degree feedback for employees, a feature not offered in ADP Workforce Now.
• Paycor offers a team chat feature to send messages to the team and also supports sending direct messages to individual team members. ADP Workforce Now lacks built-in chat functionality.

For more, see our in-depth ADP Workforce Now vs. Paycor comparison.

Infor HCM vs. Paycor

Infor HCM has the following advantages over Paycor.

• Infor HCM has an on-premise deployment option, whereas Paycor doesn’t.
• Infor HCM has extensive case management capabilities, such as automated case routing, support, and agent manager queues, case reporting and analysis, and SLA tracking. Comparatively, Paycor only offers a knowledge base.

Paycor has the following advantages over Infor HCM.

• Paycor’s ACA Connect is a dedicated solution for accurate ACA tracking that offers tools like ACA reporting, including Affordability report, Applicable Large Employer report, and ACA Employee Eligibility report. Conversely, Infor HCM doesn’t offer native ACA features and requires integration with ADP solutions like ADP SmartCompliance and ADP Health Compliance to offer its customers ACA reporting capabilities.
• Infor HCM is generally more expensive to implement than Paycor, making it difficult to afford for small businesses.

For more, see our in-depth Paycor vs. Infor HCM comparison.

Ceridian Dayforce HCM vs. Paycor

Ceridian Dayforce HCM has the following advantages over Paycor.

• Ceridian Dayforce HCM provides COBRA administration. Paycor doesn’t support COBRA administration.
• Ceridian Dayforce HCM is a global payroll provider, supporting employee payments across 160+ countries, while Paycor lacks global HR and payroll support.

Paycor has the following advantages over Ceridian Dayforce HCM.

• Paycor lets users create records of recruitment agencies and assign job postings to them. Ceridian Dayforce HCM lacks recruitment agency access.
• Ceridian Dayforce HCM is generally more expensive to implement than Paycor, making it difficult to afford for small businesses.

For more, see our in-depth Paycor vs. Dayforce comparison.

Compare Paycor to the Top Competitors

Paycor Reviews: Themes From Users

The benefits mentioned most in Paycor reviews by its own users include the following.

• Analytics offered by Paycor provides deeper insights into important data like turnover, headcount and gender pay equity. The software uses a predictive data model to identify trends in behaviors, such as identifying the probability and extent of employee turnover in the next 12 months. The software offers advanced analytics charts and graphs that not many other competitors offer and which users seem to like.
• Paycor offers more ways for employees to punch time in and out than most competitors. It has everything from kiosk apps with facial recognition and proximity badge readers to card readers, facial recognition scanners and fingerprint scanners. It also offers mobile and telephone punching and web timesheet entry.
• Paycor offers highly competitive benefits administration tools. It offers a software bot for employees who need assistance with benefit selections. Employees can also view and manage their benefits and log life event changes in Paycor.
• Paycor offers a serviceable learning management system (LMS) that combines virtual, classroom, mobile and social capabilities in one platform to offer education and training. It’s also able to create and publish professional courses through an advanced course builder. While not as advanced as larger LMS players, it may be enough for small and medium businesses looking for a rudimentary LMS.
• Paycor offers many employee self-service features that aren’t available with other providers, like access to Online Pay Stubs, Time-off Requests, Mobile Punching, Attendance Management and ESS-based Onboarding.
• Paycor offers the ability to integrate with a 401k system and track 401k loans by setting goals. Again, not all providers offer this functionality.
• Paycor offers ease of use and simplified onboarding features. Onboarding can be a painful, drawn-out process with some of the more enterprise-focused HCM platforms. Paycor makes a lot of it quicker and easier by comparison.
• Paycor offers simplified direct deposit payroll. A lot of online reviewers mentioned that they liked its simplified direct deposit options for payroll.

Conversely, here are some of the cons mentioned in many Paycor reviews.

• Small companies with basic needs may find Paycor expensive compared to other HR solutions. What’s more, the report builder and analytics aren’t available in the more affordable pricing tiers. Compliance support also comes at a higher cost.
• Some of the popular essentials of an HR management suite are still add-ons with additional monthly fees. For example, if a user needs a time tracking or a benefits management package, they’ll pay more per month. Unlike Paycor, some of the other popular HR management software don’t charge for time tracking, applicant tracking or learning modules.
• Paycor has a slow implementation process compared to other HCM competitors. The complete implementation can take from a few weeks up to a couple months.
• Paycor doesn’t provide access to a dedicated representative, leading to less ownership of issues and longer response times.
• Paycor lacks a dedicated team of customer service representatives leading to less ownership of issues and longer response times.
• Paycor offers limited options for integrations compared to other HCM platforms. By comparison, ADP has 700+ integrations and Workday has 600+ pre-built integrations versus Paycor’s 200+.
• Paycor doesn’t have a way to limit clocking in or out on a mobile device to a specific geographical area or IP address.

Get a Free Demo for Paycor

Final Paycor Review and Score

SelectHub’s overall analyst score for its Paycor review is 85.

Paycor is a comprehensive, all-in-one HCM system catering best to small and mid-market businesses. It offers cloud deployment with a multi-tenant architecture and offers solutions for recruiting, onboarding, reporting, timekeeping, payroll, tax and more.

For small businesses, Paycor’s Basic plan — ideal for fewer than 50 employees — may not provide the best value. In some cases, those businesses will require more reporting, benefits and scheduling features found in higher tiers.

In other words, to get started, small businesses may have to upgrade to higher plans to access functionality like analytics tools, report builder and compliance support options. Therefore, Paycor’s target customers of smaller companies with the most basic requirements may find the service expensive compared to other HR software providers.

For mid-market or larger business, Paycor provides advanced tools that provide business owners with real-time insights and valuable benchmarking. It uses a predictive data model to help businesses assess future turnover risks and labor costs. The reporting function offered by Paycor includes access to a wide range of prebuilt reports and customizable reporting capabilities.

That said, Paycor’s marketplace falls short with integrations compared to many of its competitors. What’s more, its customer support leaves something to be desired for larger businesses used to working with enterprise support teams.

Ultimately, if a friend said, “Hey, I’m thinking about using Paycor” here’s what I’d say…

Paycor HCM is potentially more expensive than its competitors on the small business side. However, it’s a tremendous option for organizations looking to empower their leaders and embrace AI with candidate scoring, content creation, and better employee feedback.

The platform lacks an on-premise deployment option and may be a drawback for larger businesses with unique deployment needs. However, it shines with small and mid-size businesses looking for a full suite of HR + payroll, talent management, workforce management, employee experience, benefits administration and more.

What’s Next?

Still haven’t decided on the right HCM platform? Behold these resources.

Get Paycor demo

Get Paycor pricing quote

About the Author

About Devon Hennig: Devon is SelectHub’s sultan of software selection. He most recently served as VP of Marketing for Docebo (Nasdaq: DCBO), and, prior to that, he was VP of Demand Generation at Vendasta, the leading provider of white-label products and services for resellers. His passion is helping companies find the right solutions for their tech stack.