BambooHR Reviews 

Support staff is incredibly hard to connect with, far too often they are simply not available during normal weekly business hours when companies might need help. Functionality of the system is fine, but apples to apples they aren't any better than most other systems out there and substantially worse in other areas. Shop around before purchasing BambooHR

BambooHR isn't HR software. It's a psychological experiment designed to answer one simple question:

"How many support tickets can a human being endure before they begin talking to their monitor?"

Creating an account is effortless. Escaping it feels like a side quest written by someone who genuinely dislikes people.

At first, everything seems normal. Friendly interface. Helpful promises. Cheerful support responses. Then you make the mistake of trying to leave.

Suddenly, you're trapped in an endless administrative purgatory where every answer creates two new questions, every solution somehow isn't quite a solution, and every conversation leaves you less certain than when you started.

Support interactions became a fascinating exercise in creative optimism. I was repeatedly assured things were being dealt with, resolved, escalated, reviewed, investigated, or otherwise placed into a mysterious dimension where problems apparently go to retire.

Days pass. Weeks pass. Hope passes.

At some point you stop asking whether the issue will be fixed and start wondering whether BambooHR itself can actually be deleted, or whether it simply continues existing forever like a cursed Victorian doll that keeps reappearing in different rooms of the house.

The experience feels less like managing HR and more like being slowly processed through a bureaucratic black hole. Information goes in. Time goes in. Sanity goes in. Nothing comes back out.

The most impressive feature isn't employee management.

It's the ability to make a grown adult question whether clicking "Create Account" years ago was the single greatest administrative mistake of their life.

To BambooHR's credit, bamboo is famously invasive. Once it takes hold, it's incredibly difficult to remove.

I can only assume the company views this as a product roadmap.

Their customer service is absolutely horrific. You are not able to speak to a human over the phone. Our company has been with them for 1 1/2 years and it was the biggest mistake we ever made.

Credit checks as part of the application process, especially for a Human Resources-focused company (which should know better), are the epitome of classist, unprofessional behavior. I wouldn't work there or hire them because they either don't know better or don't care. I'm not de-escalating clients for a company that doesn't know the root of what it is they do. Simply because someones Dad gave them a piggy bank to open a company with. This is why capitalism is failing. Enjoy it!

The platform itself is very rigid, with little to no customization options available.
Customer support and the product team have been disappointing. Response times are extremely long, and when I do receive answers, they are often generic and fail to address my specific questions or concerns.
We were working on setting up a clone account, and unfortunately, the project management experience was poor. The process took significantly longer than expected, and there were periods of several days without any response, despite the team being aware of our tight deadline. The overall attitude came across as nonchalant, unresponsive, and lacking accountability.
Improving responsiveness, communication, and client-facing professionalism would make a substantial difference. Ensuring that your team engages with customers in a timely, proactive, and respectful manner would go a long way toward improving client retention and strengthening your online reputation.

Sold to us as a full ATS. “Post jobs to Indeed + LinkedIn directly from BambooHR”.
Not true for Canadian companies.
After weeks of emails + back and forth… suddenly “oh yeah there’s a workaround.” Had to switch our account to USD just to try making it work.
Then told job board posting wouldn’t work until onboarding period finished. Waited the full month.

Still not posting to Indeed.
2 months in now.
Salesperson disappeared after the sale.
Customer success just keeps saying “we’ll make it work.”
I wish i had read these reviews earlier.
What a joke! Stay away!

Warn people about the double blind assessment function that can not be disabled, before they purchase the system, any previous good customer services was then ruined by this unhelpful function. Managers want to see and employees self awareness and how they have scored themselves before they submit their own response scores. My managers were furious when they realised the system won't allow it, apparently it is on a product map but they can't say when, unfortunately I will need to leave and find a new system after only 1 year in place

after using BambooHR for our HRIS at two different companies I've worked for, I would not recommend them. This hurts to say, because the first company I worked for that used Bamboo it seemed to work pretty well (other than the mobile app not working very well). Having used them at my current employer, I am very dissatisfied. The lack of communication, not being able to talk to a person and getting directed to the "help center" which does not give very accurate step-by-step directions is ridiculous. When asked why some information was not shared with me that was pertinent to resolving and issue the customer service representative wanted to place the blame on me (not professional). I have also asked for updates on issues that we are facing after putting in a support ticket and have not received any response at all. When trying to sell you on their platform and even when onboarding your company, they seem very nice, but once you've been "graduated" and on your own its a nightmare. Their payroll system is not intuitive and after switching to their services, I have regretted it. ADP here we come!

We used BambooHR for human resources and payroll for many years among our three different companies. Reaching Customer Service agents was an ongoing struggle. When you did finally reach a person, you could hear children and dogs in the backgrounds which was distracting and unprofessional. Their website is clunky and not easily navigated. My biggest complaint was their methods of communication from email addresses that were inconsistent leading to missing emails and notifications. I would NOT recommend using them and upon further investigation, neither would most. BambooHR did not even make the Forbes 2026 Top Ten HR Service companies.

All emails to employees are sent from an external domain, app.bamboohr.com, so all employees get an alert that the email came from an external domain and makes them complacent. We had successful phishing attacks performed against our company using fake bamboohr emails due to this. Also product is very unintuitive, convoluted mess. Logins using adfs fail on first try always. extensions load in a small frame and some are unreadable.

Cheap tactics getting Google to redirect searches for another company's name.

If I could give no stars I would. Bamboo hr is more of a joke than Gusto. They cant even keep track of properly scheduling an intro meeting.

I truly wanted to have a positive experience with BambooHR, but unfortunately I did not. During the sales process, I was led to believe that certain features, training support, and onboarding guidance were included in my package. Once my account was activated, I realized the level of customer assistance that was advertised was not what I actually received.

When I expressed concerns, I felt dismissed rather than supported. I made multiple attempts to resolve the issues professionally and to continue the partnership, but my concerns were minimized and never properly addressed.

Instead of collaborative problem-solving or ownership of the misunderstanding, I was redirected to additional paid services. This was extremely frustrating after already investing both time and money.

I hope the company takes feedback like this seriously, because small businesses rely on honesty and transparency when choosing HR tools. I expected a true partnership, but unfortunately that wasn’t my experience.

They keep raising prices with hidden fees.

It started so well, their sales team were brilliant and couldn't do enough for you. Move over to the implementation team and the customer service fell off a cliff... No flexibility, the timeline offered started before they were available; most questions we had took several attempts to glean an answer. Come out of implementation and there is literally no-one to support us. The process to obtain answers to general queries is so elongated and complicated. It also wasn't highlighted at any stage that support post implementation is chargeable.
The general operations of the system has worked well for us, as we learn more about it, we are getting better and using the facilities it offers. But most of the learning has been self taught.
When we signed up, we were reliably informed that their annual leave element was being set up to automatically update Outlook by Q1 2025 - still waiting and now in Q4!

Unfortunately, they lack integrity. The sales person sold us on their payroll service, that it could do all that our payroll process required. 1st step, load all info in the HRIS system, 2nd step set up payroll. They started charging for the HRIS system right away so we could load our 150 employees info. Over a hundred hours of prep work went into this. After multiple attempts to get the payroll to process for us, it came down to the fact that it couldn't, unless we added a manual process not previously needed. We didn't want to add any manual work. So we cancelled. They said, "we'll refund for the payroll part, but not the HRIS part." We wanted a full refund since the product was misrepresented. After multiple emails explaining that we would not have signed up for the HRIS if they hadn't misrepresented their product in the sales process. They said their final answer is that we used the HRIS to set up for payroll and so they would not refund those fees. It cost us thousands of dollars for the HRIS system and we only used it because they sold us a package deal, assuring us that their system could fully perform our payroll process. The sales person either lied, misrepresented the information, or was ignorant to their system's ability. We simply wanted our money back. They refuse to refund what we paid for the HRIS portion. Very disappointed that they lack integrity to own their mistake. They are putting revenue above doing the right thing and owning the fact that 100% of our costs were incurred because their sales person misrepresented the product. And, we have the misrepresentation all documented in emails. They still won't own it.

Bamboo HR covers everything we need and it provides a easy to use UI for the majority of our HR needs. I predominately found their onboarding of our employees to be very good and its also easy to generate reports and view insights. Pricing is a little more than what I would like for our size company but its a compromise I made for ease of use compared to other platforms we looked at.

Have been trying to get pricing for their service, but their sales people have consistently been shifty in the process of trying to obtain their pricing. Why can't companies just list out their pricing with transparency and integrity?

Clumsy and unintuitive product; and support is all self-led as so hard to reach anyone. Initial implementation was poor and unfortunatly i have used google and chat threads to answer questions as i will wait 24-48 hrs for a response. (UK - USA time difference)

Support services need to be far more reactive, with staff taking more ownership of issues.

There is a bug in their signing document feature and they haven't resolved this for more than a month. They said they will inform me as soon as they have an update but there is no update unless I reach out to them.