Hiring the wrong person costs the average small business between $4,000 and $7,000 — plus three months of lost productivity while you fix the mistake. Bad HR software makes this worse. It buries you in admin, misses red flags in candidates, and leaves your team managing compliance in spreadsheets. The tools below solve these problems. Some will save you a part-time employee's worth of admin hours every month.
Best overall: Rippling — handles HR, payroll, and IT access in one system without requiring a PhD to set up.
Best free option: Homebase — useful scheduling and time tracking at no cost, not a stripped-down trial.
Best for beginners: BambooHR — clean enough that a non-HR person can run it from day one.
Best value paid: TestGorilla — skills-based hiring screening that starts free and scales without punishing growth.
How We Chose These Tools
We cut anything that requires a dedicated HR team to operate. For small businesses, the tool has to work for a generalist — an office manager, a founder, someone juggling three other jobs. We weighted setup time, candidate filtering quality, payroll accuracy, and whether free tiers actually work or just frustrate you into upgrading. Price transparency mattered. If a vendor hides pricing behind a sales call, that tells you something.
The Best HR & Hiring Tools, Ranked
1. Rippling
**ToolWise Score: 9/10 | From $8/month | Free plan: No**Rippling comes closest to a complete HR operating system for businesses under 50 people. Most HR platforms make you choose between payroll, people management, and hiring. Rippling does all three — and when someone joins your team, it automatically provisions their laptop access, Slack account, and benefits in the same workflow. You notice on day two when onboarding used to take half a day.
The platform is sophisticated, which means setup takes longer than most competitors. Invest a few hours upfront configuring your workflows properly. Don't start the week before a new hire's first day.
Pricing is modular — you pay for what you use, but the bill can creep up as you add features. For teams between 10 and 50 people who need payroll plus HR in one place, the ROI calculation is straightforward. Under 10 people, it may be more tool than you need.
Read our full Rippling review.
2. Homebase
**ToolWise Score: 9/10 | From $0/month | Free plan: Yes**If you run a business with hourly workers — a café, retail shop, small clinic — Homebase is probably the most useful free tool in this entire list. The free tier includes scheduling, time tracking, and basic team communication for one location. That's legitimately useful, not a gimped version designed to frustrate you into upgrading.
Homebase earns its place through the combination of simplicity and depth. Building a weekly schedule takes minutes, shift reminders go out automatically, and the time clock integrates directly with payroll. Most owners report that the scheduling feature alone saves them an hour or two per week compared to spreadsheets.
The honest limitation: Homebase is built for hourly, shift-based teams. If your business is primarily salaried knowledge workers, it will feel wrong — because it is. Hiring and applicant tracking features exist but are basic. Paid tiers start at $24.95 per location per month and add solid value for multi-location businesses.
Read our full Homebase review.
3. TestGorilla
**ToolWise Score: 8.7/10 | From $0/month | Free plan: Yes**Résumés lie. Not always deliberately, but a confident CV from the wrong candidate has cost most business owners at least one painful hire. TestGorilla fixes this by putting skills testing before the interview stage — candidates complete assessments before you spend a minute on a phone screen.
The test library covers over 400 skills, from Excel proficiency and customer service scenarios to cognitive ability and personality fit. The free plan gives you access to a limited set of tests, enough to trial the approach properly. Paid plans start around $75/month and unlock the full library, which will more than justify itself if you're making even two or three hires a year.
The weakness: TestGorilla is a screening tool, not a full ATS. You still need somewhere to manage candidates, post jobs, and communicate with applicants. It works well alongside Breezy HR or another hiring platform, but it's not a standalone solution.
Read our full TestGorilla review.
4. BambooHR
**ToolWise Score: 8.7/10 | From $6/month | Free plan: No**BambooHR has one significant advantage: a non-HR person can open it and figure out what to do without a manual. The interface is clean, the logic is obvious, and the onboarding experience for new hires is polished enough that employees actually complete it rather than ignoring half the forms.
For small businesses moving off spreadsheets, BambooHR handles the core well — employee records, time off management, performance reviews, and basic hiring workflows. The reporting features are more useful than they initially appear; the headcount and turnover reports alone are worth having once your team gets past 15 people.
Where it falls short: BambooHR is not a payroll processor in most markets, so you'll need a separate tool or integration. Pricing isn't publicly listed — you need to request a quote — but it typically lands around $6–$9 per employee per month. Not cheap for very small teams, but reasonable for what you get.
Read our full BambooHR review.
5. Toggl Hire
**ToolWise Score: 8.5/10 | From $0/month | Free plan: Yes**Toggl Hire takes a similar philosophy to TestGorilla — screen with skills tests first, interview second — but wraps it in a more complete hiring workflow. You get job postings, a candidate pipeline, and testing in one place, which removes the need to stitch together multiple tools when you're hiring for one or two roles at a time.
The free plan is functional for small hiring volumes, covering up to three active jobs and basic test access. For most small businesses hiring occasionally rather than continuously, this is enough. Paid plans are affordable and add volume, team features, and deeper analytics.
The limitation: Toggl Hire is built for simplicity, and at scale or for complex hiring processes it starts to feel lightweight. For a business owner hiring a few people per year, that simplicity is a feature.
Read our full Toggl Hire review.
Side by Side Comparison
| Tool | Best For | Starting Price | Free Plan | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rippling | All-in-one HR + payroll | $8/month | No | 9/10 |
| Homebase | Hourly & shift-based teams | $0/month | Yes | 9/10 |
| TestGorilla | Skills-based screening | $0/month | Yes | 8.7/10 |
| BambooHR | First-time HR platform | $6/month | No | 8.7/10 |
| Toggl Hire | Simple, affordable hiring | $0/month | Yes | 8.5/10 |
How to Pick the Right One for Your Business
If you have hourly or shift-based workers and your biggest headache is scheduling and clock-ins, start with Homebase. The free plan handles most of what you need, and you can upgrade when your team grows or you open a second location. No reason to pay for a full HR platform when your core problem is a Tuesday shift that won't fill itself.
If your team is salaried, you're past 10 people, and you're managing HR, payroll, and onboarding in spreadsheets and email threads, Rippling is the answer. Yes, it costs more and takes longer to set up. You'll make that time back within the first month, and you won't be rebuilding your stack in two years when you outgrow something cheaper.
If hiring is your primary challenge — you're growing, getting flooded with applications, and you've made at least one expensive hiring mistake — pair TestGorilla or Toggl Hire with a lightweight ATS. TestGorilla has the deeper test library; Toggl Hire has more complete pipeline management. Both start free.
For businesses ready to move off spreadsheets but not ready for Rippling's scope, BambooHR is the sensible middle ground. It's not the cheapest option per employee, but the time saved on onboarding admin and the clarity it brings to people management makes it worth the cost once you're past 10 employees.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do small businesses really need HR software, or is this just for larger companies?
Once you're past five employees, you're managing enough complexity — time off, onboarding paperwork, payroll variables — that doing it manually starts costing you real time every week. The free tiers from Homebase and Toggl Hire mean there's no financial reason to keep doing it in spreadsheets.
What's the difference between an ATS and HR software?
An ATS manages candidates before they're hired — job postings, applications, interviews, offers. HR software manages people after they join — records, payroll, time off, performance. Some platforms like Rippling and BambooHR do both. Others, like TestGorilla, do one thing specifically. Know which problem you're solving first.
Are free HR tools actually good enough, or do they always push you to upgrade?
Homebase and Toggl Hire have free plans that are useful for single-location businesses with modest hiring volumes. TestGorilla's free tier lets you run real assessments. None will scale indefinitely without a paid plan, but you'll get real value before you hit that ceiling.
What happened to Breezy HR and 15Five — why aren't they in the top six?
Both are decent tools. Breezy HR scored 8.3 — it's a solid ATS, but Toggl Hire offers comparable core features with a better free tier. 15Five, also at 8.3, is a good performance management platform, but it's narrower in scope than what most small businesses need first. Neither made the cut because the tools ranked above solve more problems for more businesses at better value.