An In-Depth BerniePortal Review—Key Features, Pricing, and Alternatives

In the past decade, many aspects of running a modern business have been improved, empowered, and streamlined with software, and human resources is no exception. Plenty of human resources information systems (HRIS) have been developed for giant corporations that manage hundreds or even thousands of employees.

However, comprehensive HRIS platforms usually aren’t cheap—at least for small and medium-sized enterprises. BerniePortal was designed to fill that niche. It grew out of a health insurance brokerage called Bernard Benefits, but nowadays, it’s a separate HR platform. 

According to its creators, BerniePortal helps companies digitize every facet of HR work—from candidate tracking and assessment to PTO, benefits, and performance management. 

In our unbiased review, we’ll see if BerniePortal lives up to its marketing—and whether alternative candidate tracking systems do a better job regarding recruitment. 

BerniePortal—Key Features

The BerniePortal platform rests on three main pillars:

• Applicant tracking and onboarding
• Benefits administration
• Payroll, attendance, and PTO management

As any HR professional could attest to, this is an ambitious portfolio of features. Plenty of HR software only focuses on one of them. So, the question is, does BerniePortal integrate them all seamlessly, or are you better off finding individual solutions? 

We’ll explore BerniePortal’s key groups of features to find out. 

Candidate Tracking and Onboarding

Like most other HR platforms with ATS features, BerniePortal aims to simplify the recruitment and onboarding process by putting everything “under one roof.” It creates candidate profiles for everyone who applies to your open positions.

The candidates are tracked throughout the recruitment process, divided into the following default stages: 

1. Initial application
2. Email screening
3. Phone interview
4. In-person interview
5. Reference check
6. Onboarding

All team members receive notifications about an applicant’s status on BerniePortal, and they can all comment and communicate to arrive at a joint hiring decision. Also, all the hiring stages we’ve noted above can be customized according to each company’s specific hiring process. 

Once a candidate is accepted, BerniePortal helps with the onboarding process, too. The platform provides forms for standard tax documents, such as:

• Direct deposit
• State withholding
• I-9
• W-9
• W-4

Benefits Administration

BerniePortal wants to help employers offer better benefit packages with less tedious paperwork. And they’ve done so by creating a Benefits Administration page to increase employee engagement through a self-guided, transparent experience. 

The employer can upload videos, links to helpful websites, and images to make the enrollment stage simpler and easier to understand. These resources should help future employees make benefits elections they’re confident in. 

Once they’re done, employees can also use the BerniePortal mobile app to review their benefits at any time. For example, they can see which dental options are available in minutes and act accordingly when they need to use them. 

The process is also simplified for employers because they can track their staff’s benefits in real time and generate reports for tax compliance from the employee data already imported to BerniePortal. 

Payroll, Attendance, and PTO Management

The platform has a simple but effective tracking feature—employees easily clock in and out, and BerniePortal generates real-time reports. These can also be used for accurate payrolls for hourly employees later on. Managers can view everyone’s hours at a glance, control restrictions, and track their labor costs—all in the same interface. 

Various BerniePortal features collectively simplify payday for employers by: 

1. Pulling all relevant employee data from the platform
2. Deducting benefits automatically
3. Calculating attendance and time
4. Taking PTO days into account
5. Generating pay stubs

BerniePortal Downsides

All of this sounds great in theory. Unfortunately, BerniePortal doesn’t deliver on its promised ease of use in practice.

There’s a reason why many HR software only tackle recruitment, tax compliance, or onboarding—human resources is a complex field to automate, and mistakes are costly. And a lot of BerniePortal’s users seem to agree. 

Many have reported that changes to employee health insurance plans aren’t always adequately reflected on the platform. This leads to much confusion and creates precisely the kind of manual work by individual HR reps that these platforms should eliminate. 

The same goes for onboarding—reportedly, employees can’t save their progress, and you can’t include additional forms later. 

There are problems with benefits management, which is supposed to be the core of BerniePortal’s offer. The platform doesn’t do a great job when employers offer a dozen different plans with multiple tiers and options. Plus, you can’t customize the reporting features, making cumbersome data extraction necessary. 

However, the biggest issue is that BerniePortal doesn’t cover one of the most critical aspects of HR work, especially for smaller businesses: candidate sourcing and recruitment. 

Sure, it lets you track a candidate’s progress through your recruitment process, but there are no options for testing a candidate’s professional skills in practice. 

It offers integration with Indeed, and you can post job descriptions on Indeed directly from BerniePortal—but that’s as far as it goes regarding candidate sourcing. There’s no support for other job boards. As you’ll see below, the list of BerniePortal’s API integrations is surprisingly short.

BerniePortal Integrations

BerniePortal offers only three potential integrations:

• Proliant
• Paycor
• ADP Workforce Now
• Indeed

Except for Indeed, all three are HRIS platforms or payroll management companies whose features mostly overlap or complement the ones offered by BerniePortal.

BerniePortal Pricing

BerniePortal’s pricing page lists four monthly subscriptions:

• Free—$0 per employee
• Standard—$11 per employee
• Plus—$16 per employee
• Enterprise—$21 per employee

Apart from the number of supported employees, the different tiers don’t differ all that much—except for the free one, which only offers limited recruitment and hiring features. 

Other notable differences between the other three tiers are:

1. The different benefits you can manage on the platform
2. The number of different plans you can offer to employees
3. The number of PTO approvers
4. The available performance tracking and reporting features

BerniePortal is more transparent about its prices than its biggest competitors—but when a platform wants your entire HR department to work on it, the software should function with fewer bugs and design flaws. 

Also, it’s worth noting that BerniePortal is only compatible with companies based in the United States—it was designed for U.S. tax codes, forms, and business regulations. Of course, it would be hard for a platform with U.S.-specific compliance features to work in all countries. 

Alternatives to BerniePortal

While BerniePortal has a lot going for it, there are tons of alternatives that handle particular aspects of your HR work. If you’re wondering whether some of them have better ATS features or more robust payroll management options—we’re here to help.

We’ve reviewed some of the biggest HR platforms out there, and we’ve got all the data you need for an informed choice:

Workello vs. BerniePortal

BerniePortal has some decent features when it comes to onboarding hired candidates. Still, there’s no getting around the fact that it falls short in actual recruitment and candidate assessment. 

If your company is more interested in efficient, high-volume recruiting and actual skill assessments for potential employees—Workello is an excellent alternative to BerniePortal. 

Workello focuses on what it does best: recruitment. As a result, it’s devoid of bugs and other annoyances that generate more manual work for your HR reps.

The platform automates and streamlines every step of your hiring funnel from the first moment you include a Workello link on any online job posting. Plus, Workello supports plenty of third-party integrations, which are available regardless of your subscription tier.

However, the crux of the platform lies in its pre-hire skill assessments. They ensure you won’t waste time interviewing unqualified candidates—only people with the skills you need make it to the next phase. 

Also, the streamlined recruitment you get through Workello can help you save precious work hours and cut hiring costs in half. 

BerniePortal vs. Workello Overview

Here’s a comparison of what both platforms offer:

Bottom Line

BerniePortal aims to be your one-stop-shop for HR software, digitizing everything from employee recruitment and onboarding, to payroll, PTO, and attendance tracking. However, in many ways, the platform turns out to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

The execution leaves much to be desired, and many users have reported bugs and design flaws. Also, many features related to candidate sourcing and recruitment, which HR professionals expect from this type of software, aren’t there.  

All in all, BerniePortal could benefit from a tighter design focus—and Workello is a worthy alternative for growth-oriented companies that want to streamline their recruitment efforts while optimizing costs. You can try it for free and start recruiting the top 1% of candidates as soon as possible.