I've been a JustWorks customer since 2017, using it for my small business of <10 employees and contractors. The number one reason I got it was to have higher quality health plans (Aetna) at better prices than I could find anywhere else; many large health plans would not accept small companies. At the time, JustWorks' competitors focused on just payroll processing. The other alternative was Trinet, but I preferred the more SaaS-like engagement. At the time, even with the Justworks fees, it saved us many thousands per year in benefits cost, while getting higher quality benefits. I've not compared pricing since, as everybody seems happy with it and it's just kept pace with inflation.
Onboarding employees and contractors has been super easy. Their support through COVID was great, giving information and options for all the various aspects of it. Their online support has made compliance easy and any time I needed to talk to somebody, there was no wait time on the phone.
At first, having a PEO was confusing to some, as it is JustWorks' EIN on everything rather than my company's EIN.
My only real complaint is that one team member lives in Puerto Rico and for some reason, after a couple years, they stopped considering PR as part of the United States and refused handling payments to there; so I have to handle that person manually, including compliance and tax. More than my time, I think it's tacky to treat Puerto Rico that way.
> My only real complaint is that one team member lives in Puerto Rico and for some reason, after a couple years, they stopped considering PR as part of the United States and refused handling payments to there
How did this manifest? Did your employee get silently dropped by them or the carrier or did you get some advance warning?
Technically it was a "vendor" payment as the contractor operated under a CRL (a LLC in PR) rather than a sole proprietorship. They had no benefits, so it was just payments. Like normal, I scheduled payment per an invoice... then a week later when the payment was to be paid, it was cancelled. I thought I made a mistake and scheduled it again and again it was cancelled.
I reached out to their support and the response was: "Our payment to the vendor, <Vendor> CRL, has been canceled due to the vendor having an address outside of the US. Justworks can only send payments to vendors with US addresses." and further clarification in the chain: "Please be advised that in order for payments to be processed there needs to be a US address and US bank account on file."
This was April 2021, after about two years of successful payments. There was no warning beyond the generic cancelled payment email. They do get US 1099's and I have to use another service just for that one 1099.
We used them at a previous small tech company. My experience was pretty good. They did all the legwork for payroll, med benefits and other HR-type stuff that a team of 10 engineers did not want to bother with.
Justworks and it ilk are part of the "business as a service" model that works really well. Corporate GMail or Outlook365 allowed small companies to let go of the burden of Email management, Justwork does the same for benefits/payroll dept. I'm sure Ziprecruiter and other companies are doing the same for hiring departments too.
So if you are a startup and need services to run your business, is there any back office function needed that a combination of Justworks + Google Workspace + Stripe doesn't cover?
They were one of the first things we started paying for after raising a seed round.
Payroll, healhcare benefits, perks, state-specific compliance, 401k, etc. all managed for you. Having come from a startup that used Trinet, Justworks was a breath of fresh air. Still super easy to use.
We are very happy Just Works customers for our US operations and have been for years (migrated from another PTO). Beautiful interface, great service, timely support, fair price. When employees have a question about anything related to their benefits we just point them to Just Works and they get quality answers quickly. Can’t say enough good things about them. Happy to refer anyone.
Justworks was critical in bridging the 1 to 10 employee gap for our company that many other providers has.
The problem is, that when you hire your first employee many providers will consider you too small to provide health benefits, even if they can do your payroll. E.g. Gusto was happy to process payroll for us, even for a single employee (or just yourself), but wouldn't provide us health plans for our first W-2 hire (I think the minimum was 3 at the time). Their loss, as we switched to Justworks and provided full health benefits comparable to any big company for our first full time employee, and now we're at 10+ employees and growing and certainly not going to bother switching back.
Overall we've been very happy with Justworks. They make it super easy to hire employees in all US states while keeping compliant.
My employer (50-person Series B startup) just switched payroll and health insurance to Justworks after extensive evaluation.
I have no idea if Justworks was objectively the best, or whether they were offering a sweet deal because they need to show customer growth during their IPO year.
Anyway, the Justworks UX seems fine: it’s competent modern SaaS on par with Gusto and much less frustrating than Workday.
I was CTO of a company that was a pretty early user because they were physically located close and directly sold it to us, around 2014 IIRC. We were very happy with the service and the company still uses it.
I currently use Gusto for my own company and Justworks seems on par with that.
I used them at my last Startup, I setup the company on them and it was pretty easy.
The only negative, we were not assigned a CX or Account manager. In order to get ahold of someone you have to reach out to a chat support which is outsourced and then you will be put into contact with someone. We had a small plan so that could have been the reason.
I would totally use them again, it also showed me how easy it was to get insurance if I wanted to start my own company.
Onboarding employees and contractors has been super easy. Their support through COVID was great, giving information and options for all the various aspects of it. Their online support has made compliance easy and any time I needed to talk to somebody, there was no wait time on the phone.
At first, having a PEO was confusing to some, as it is JustWorks' EIN on everything rather than my company's EIN.
My only real complaint is that one team member lives in Puerto Rico and for some reason, after a couple years, they stopped considering PR as part of the United States and refused handling payments to there; so I have to handle that person manually, including compliance and tax. More than my time, I think it's tacky to treat Puerto Rico that way.