Paycor Review 2024: Pricing, Pros and Cons (2024)

Read our HR methodologyto learn more about how we tested these products.

Paycor is an HR software provider with 30 years of experience in the industry. They are a software and analytics company that offers functionality for a variety of industries and organizations. Here’s a breakdown of Paycor’s top features:

• Payroll
• Recruiting
• Time and attendance
• Employee self-service
• Performance

Like many human capital management (HCM) software solutions on the market, Paycor does not have upfront pricing information. You have to contact the sales team to discuss your needs and get a personalized quote.

That being said, we spoke to a Paycor representative to give you a basic idea of what it would cost:

There is also one more cost associated with Paycor: an implementation fee. Paycor charges up to 20% of your annual subscription to set up your platform.

Basic Plan

The Basic plan focuses on Paycor’s primary offering: payroll services. Features that fall under the payroll services bucket include:

• Wage garnishments
• Off-cycle pay runs
• On-demand payments
• New hiring filing
• Online check stubs

At around $99 plus $6 per user per month, the cost of Paycor’s Basic offering is cheaper than what you might expect from other payroll solutions.

Essential Plan

The Essential plan is the second tier of Paycor’s offerings. Some of its features include:

• Time-off tracking
• Onboarding
• Job costing
• 401(k) processing
• Basic analytics

At $159 plus $9 per user per month, the Essential plan provides businesses with better support for onboarding hires and managing finances.

Core Plan

The Core plan offers a few more features on the employee management side. They include:

• Expense management
• Leadership training
• Employee engagement

The Core plan has an estimated cost of $199 plus $12 per user per month.

Complete Plan

If you’re looking for a complete human resources information system (HRIS), the Complete plan might be your best choice. Here’s a breakdown of its features:

• Advanced analytics
• Career management
• Compensation planning
• Talent development

The Paycor Complete plan costs the most, averaging at $229 plus $16 per user per month.

Paycor Free Trial

For new users, Paycor offers a 14-day free trial. However, this free trial is hidden from site visitors, requiring you to do a bit of digging to find it.

Below, you’ll find some areas where Paycor excels and struggles.

Paycor is a cloud-based platform, so you can access the following features from mobile and desktop devices:

Recruiting

Paycor’s Essential package comes with recruitment tools that support everything from job posting to virtual interviewing. The job posting feature connects to major boards, including Glassdoor and ZipRecruiter, and the built-in video conferencing tool lets you score employees as you interview them.

There’s an integrated dashboard for candidate tracking. From there, you can establish custom hiring workflows that differ depending on individual jobs. For example, you might have a writing test for writers, which wouldn’t make sense for programmers. As you push candidates through their respective workflows, you can notify them of their status via text or another communication method.

Paycor is also one of the few HCMs that supports AI throughout the recruiting and hiring process. For instance, it has a built-in AI writer to help hiring managers craft job descriptions. The sourcing system also uses AI to recommend candidates to you.

Time Tracking

Starting with the Essential plan, Paycor helps with approving time-off requests, awarding PTO and other time tracking tasks. What makes Paycor unique is its user-facing mobile app, which employees can use to clock in and out.

This app also has a back-end dashboard. Managers can use this dashboard to create rules and messages that automatically respond to given situations. For example, it can send a warning to the employee’s app after three instances of tardiness.

Benefits Administration

The Essential plan helps with health care, retirement planning and other benefits. There is a benefits dashboard that employees use during onboarding and annual open enrollment to elect benefits. Employees can also use it throughout the year to report life changes.

Another important benefits feature from Paycor is Benefits Advisor. This feature sends notifications to employees as important events come up. For example, it’s common for people to forget about open enrollment, so you can set up a notification in November reminding them.

Onboarding

Like many of the other features on this list, onboarding support starts with the Essential plan. Paycor’s onboarding process is built into the mobile and desktop self-service tools. This means that much of the information you gather on people can be provided by them, saving your staff time. Paycor also helps you create your EEO reports and store electronic documents as new hires send them in.

Payroll

Paycor’s primary offering is its robust payroll management system. It comes with all plans and contains must-have payment features, such as direct deposit and automatic payroll processing.

The second half of Paycor’s payroll system is its expense tracking capability, which is hidden in the highest plan. Because this functionality is not a part of the primary plans, it is not mentioned in our round up of the top expense tracker apps. Employees are the main users of this feature, submitting expense reports and attaching receipts for business-related expenses that they need reimbursem*nt for. We wouldn’t classify it as a receipt scanner app. However, managers can also use this tool to create expense policies.

Taxes

Tax support is built into Paycor’s payroll system. It helps you apply tax credits and handle new hire filings. There’s a financial dashboard to help you see all of your financial data from a single place. There, you’ll also find notifications on the latest payroll tax rates and regulatory changes.

Analytics and Reporting

There is some form of data collection, interpretation and/or visualization in every Paycor plan. There is online reporting in the Basic plan, online reporting and basic analytics in the Essential and Core plans and online reporting and advanced analytics in the Complete plan.

Paycor’s analytics dashboard stores information on everything from team headcounts to overtime hours. Paycor provides graphs, charts and other visuals alongside this data. The major feature locked behind the expensive plan is predictive analytics. This capability makes predictions about your future based on historical data.

Like with recruiting, Paycor has made the choice to integrate AI into its reporting tools. A common use of AI under this umbrella is to translate raw numbers into written explanations to help leadership understand what the numbers mean.

Employee Self-Service

As we hinted at earlier, Paycor has a mobile app for both iPhone and Android phones. The mobile version of Paycor does what the desktop version does, but its shining use is for employee self-service. Employees put in PTO requests, view pay stubs, clock in and out and more from their phones.

Customization

Customization is in every Paycor plan. It lets users create custom forms, calculations, views and more based on what makes sense for their business. That being said, customer reviews have noted how confusing it is to learn how to use this customization capability at first.

Paycor offers live chat, email and phone support to all of its customers. However, if you want priority support, you need to pay for a Core or Complete plan. This has caused issues for customers on the Basic and Essential plans who report delayed responses from Paycor’s customer service team.

Paycor points out a few of its security practices to protect user data. For instance, it has a risk assessment team, multi-factor authentication, an intrusion detection system and encryption.

Learn more: Payroll Compliance Guide

Paycor vs. Sage HR

Sage helps with basic HR tasks like Paycor does, but it also has offerings for more unusual aspects of business operations, such as project, inventory management and even a Sage accounting software. That being said, one area where Sage is lacking is with benefits administration.

Paycor vs. BambooHR

Both platforms are easy to use, but BambooHR is more affordable. However, BambooHR is easy to use because it has a limited number of features. On the other hand, Paycor has a comprehensive list of capabilities; it’s just easy to use because it’s intuitively designed.

Paycor vs. UKG Pro

Being some of the bigger providers, UKG Pro and Paycor both offer a wide range of features. The main difference is in user experience, with UKG having a learning curve and Paycor being easy to use right off the bat.

Paycor offers affordable, comprehensive payroll services with its base plan. We recommend this plan for entry-level businesses that have small budgets and limited HR needs. If you are a larger business, one of the other three Paycor plans is going to be the better HR software for you. We recommend one of the top two plans if you want to be able to reach customer support whenever you need help.

At its core, Paycor is a payroll software. For additional fees, you can add on more services to make it a more complete HR platform. In other words, Paycor can work for any size business depending on which plan you pick.

Choosing human resources (HR) software for your organization is an important decision. To help you with it, we at the MarketWatch Guides team have researched and reviewed 50 leading HR software companies, including Paycor, ADP, Workday, Gusto, ZipRecruiter and Clockify. These providers help with some or all of the following HR disciplines:

• Payroll
• Time tracking and workforce management
• Recruiting and job posting

We conducted a survey in 2024 of 200 professionals who were currently using HR software or had used HR software within the past year. We analyzed the results of this survey to determine the following rating criteria:

• Features (25%)
• Value and Pricing (25%)
• User Experience (20%)
• Customer Support (15%)
• Reputation and Reviews (15%)

Visit the full HR methodology page for more details on our rating system.