2025 Culture Comparison: The Top HRIS Vendor
Cultures
83% of HR leaders indicated a vendor’s company culture was critical to satisfaction with their HRIS solution.
August 27, 2025
By Chris Harvey
How important is vendor culture to success with an HRIS solution? In a recent LinkedIn survey, 83% of HR leaders indicated a vendor’s company culture was critical to satisfaction with their HRIS solution. Yet, in most evaluations, culture still isn’t formally considered.
Why Vendor Culture Matters
Healthy, vibrant company cultures support employees who are invested in both business growth and customer success. Put simply: when vendor employees thrive, customers benefit.
In practice, that means:
- Stronger HRIS Implementations — Engaged employees focus on making your deployment on-time, on-budget, and exceeding your expectations.
- Better Customer Support — Motivated teams ensure challenges are resolved quickly and to your satisfaction.
- More Innovation — Employees aligned to long-term business success focus on delivering features and functionality with true business impact, rather than following a static roadmap.
- Consistency — Culture drives consistent execution, helping vendors better meet your needs and expectations.
Current HRIS Vendor Culture Trends
Over the past three years, we’ve seen many HRIS vendors shift toward greater financial discipline and profit focus, often at the expense of customer experience and retention. This isn’t unusual in business, but it’s notable in HR technology, where solutions are marketed to HR leaders—professionals who deeply value culture within their own organizations.
A recurring theme we hear from HR leaders is that many vendors seem to be moving away from an ‘employee- first’ culture.
This creates a gap in the market—and an opportunity for culture-centric vendors to differentiate themselves by demonstrating the link between culture, employee satisfaction, and customer success.
How to Assess Vendor Culture
There’s no perfect metric, but several public sources provide meaningful signals:
- Glassdoor overall rating (weighted most heavily)
- 2022 Glassdoor rating (shows culture trajectory over time)
- Glassdoor “Would Recommend” scores
- Indeed Employee Rating (based on thousands of employee experiences)
- HR Technology Advice (HRTA) Culture Scores (where available)
When vendors offer similar functionality, support, and pricing, culture often becomes the deciding factor for long-term success.
What if you don’t have time to sift through vendor culture data? No problem. We’ve done it for you.
Our Culture Benchmarking Approach
We analyzed 18 leading HRIS vendors using publicly available employee-experience data.
Here’s how we categorized them:
- Culture Leader: Glassdoor ~3.9–5.0, CEO approval ≥80%, “Would Recommend” ≥70%, with strong results on other sources.
- Standard Culture: Glassdoor ~3.4–3.8 and/or
- CEO/Recommend scores in the 50–80% range.
- Lagging Culture: Glassdoor ≤3.3 and/or low CEO/Recommend ratings.
Culture Leaders
Standard Culture
*Deel, despite the highest current Glassdoor rating, scored much lower on Indeed. Without additional data and such a wide delta between the data sources, we opted to list Deel under Standard Culture.
Lagging Culture
Final Thoughts
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. One thing that always set the HR Tech industry apart was its embrace of positive workplace culture. However, that’s simply not as true today.
Have vendors abandoned culture as a primary focus? From 2020 to 2023, many companies refocused on culture to engage employees, retain talent, and reduce
turnover in a competitive market. Now, with a shift toward employer leverage and tighter labor markets, culture seems to be deprioritized—with every vendor (except Dayforce, which remained unchanged) seeing employee ratings decline between 2022–2025. The biggest drop: Paylocity, down 0.7 points.
There’s always a strong temptation to focus on shareholder value and bottom-line results. However, leaders at HRIS firms are beginning to feel the reality that customers have choices—and will quickly move away from vendors that fail to meet expectations.
Investing in company culture pays dividends —those vendors that nurture positive, dynamic environments will rise to the top, excelling not only in attracting and retaining talent but also in winning and keeping clients.
Caveat:
The vendor culture analysis was conducted in August 2025. Glassdoor and other ratings change continuously. We encourage you to do your own due diligence on your final vendors to double-check that these ratings remain valid.
Read more HRIS solution research on HR Technology Advice. https://www.hrtechnologyadvice.com/
Why Are Customers Leaving
HRIS Turnover Analysis
Why Are Customers Leaving ADP, Paycom, and Paylocity?
At HR Technology Advice, we have received hundreds of inquiries from HR professionals researching their next HRIS. Among the most frequently mentioned vendors customers are switching from include ADP Workforce Now, Paycom, and Paylocity.
This analysis distills insights from those HRIS switchers to help HR buyers understand 6 key dissatisfaction drivers and identify areas for deeper due diligence.
Download Your FREE HRIS Turnover Analysis.
