The 8 best HR automation tools in 2026

Human resources teams have a lot on their plates—as someone who bombards HR with a zillion questions all the time, I’m personally responsible for creating a lot of that work. Between recruiting, onboarding, training, performance reviews, payroll, and offboarding (should I keep going?), there’s no shortage of moving pieces and manual tasks.  

The right HR automation tools can take the repetitive work off your plate, keep your systems in sync, and help you create smoother experiences for both employees and managers. But with so many platforms out there, it can be tough to know which one actually solves your biggest headaches, and which ones just look good in a demo.

Our Zapier app testers have explored a wide range of human resources tools to find the ones that stand out for specific use cases, and here, I’m focused on the ones that nail automation. From all-in-one platforms to more specialized solutions, here are the best HR automation tools I’d recommend—and how to choose the one that fits your team best.

The best HR automation tools

What makes the best HR automation tool?

Great HR automation tools should be able to handle manual tasks for you without adding new headaches in the process. That means tackling repetitive work across the employee lifecycle—recruiting, onboarding, payroll, performance reviews, offboarding—while still being easy for both HR teams and employees to use. Here’s what to look for:

• Smart automation. Automation is the name of the game—and I’m not talking about setting one-off reminders. The best tools let you build workflows that actually think, ideally with AI doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes. For example, in recruiting, look for platforms that can auto-score candidates, route them to the right hiring manager, and send personalized follow-ups without HR needing to touch every step. You want automation that feels like an extra set of (really efficient) hands, not another system to babysit.

• Integrations that actually work. HR doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Your automation software should play nicely with the rest of your tech stack—whether that’s payroll, scheduling, identity management, or your ATS. The goal is to keep employee data synced and accurate everywhere without creating duplicate work or version control chaos. If a new hire’s info is updated in one place, it should update everywhere else. 

• Ease of use (for everyone). If your team has to sit through a four-hour training just to figure out how to approve PTO, the tool has already failed. A good HR platform should be intuitive for both admins and employees. People should be able to submit expenses, download pay stubs, and request leave without needing a how-to guide. After all, automation only works if people actually use it.

• Breadth or depth. Not every HR platform needs to do everything, but it does need to do something exceptionally well. If it’s an all-in-one system, it should cover the full employee lifecycle without major gaps. If it’s focused on a single function, like scheduling or recruiting, it should go deep: customizable workflows, built-in analytics, thoughtful user experience.

• Strong compliance and security. This is HR, so security, privacy, and compliance have to be baked in, not bolted on. Look for tools that help you stay on top of changing labor laws, automate documentation, and manage permissions appropriately. You’re handling sensitive employee data and managing processes that have real legal implications—so your software should treat that responsibility seriously.

The best HR automation tools at a glance

The best HR automation software for AI orchestration

Zapier

Zapier pros: 

• Automation-first mindset

• Connects with 8,000+ apps

• Built-in AI at every step

• Enterprise-grade security

Zapier cons: 

Zapier isn’t your typical HR platform—and that’s kind of the point. Rather than acting as yet another destination for one slice of your HR work, Zapier connects your existing HR tools so they work together like one cohesive system. It’s an automation layer that helps you orchestrate smarter, faster workflows across the entire employee lifecycle.

For example: when someone’s marked as “hired” in your ATS, Zapier can create a personalized offer letter in Google Docs, ping the hiring manager in Slack for approval, log the info in your HRIS, and even summarize the new hire’s details using AI so your team stays in the loop. No tab-hopping or manual follow-up—just smooth handoffs from start to finish.

Zapier also offers a growing set of built-in tools designed to make HR automation even smarter and more dynamic:

• AI by Zapier can intelligently pull data from the right place, generate summaries, and draft documents.

• Chatbots can answer employee questions so your staff feels supported and empowered from day one, without overloading your HR staff.

• AI Agents can run entire workflows on their own—like checking if new hires completed their onboarding checklist, managing tasks, escalating exceptions, and updating internal dashboards—without human intervention.

• Interfaces let you build simple internal tools, like time-off request forms or manager review dashboards, without needing engineering help. 

And for teams that need enterprise-level control, Zapier has you covered with features like audit logs, granular permissions, and flexible compliance options. That way, you can scale your HR automation and AI usage without losing visibility or control.

If you already have a solid HR stack and just need a way to make it all flow together, Zapier might be your secret weapon. In fact, Premier Property Group saved $115,000 annually by building their own HRIS system in Zapier. Learn more about how to automate your HR processes, or get started with one of these pre-made templates. 

Zapier pricing: Free plan available; from $19.99/month (billed annually) for the Premium plan.

The best HR automation software for an all-in-one HR platform

BambooHR

BambooHR pros:

BambooHR cons: 

The team at Zapier has used BambooHR for years. It’s a holistic, easy-to-use platform that blends essential HR admin with a welcoming, thoughtful experience for new hires and seasoned employees alike.    

For onboarding, you get the basics you’d expect (including paperwork, task management, and eSignatures), plus a few thoughtful touches that make things feel more personal. You can create custom new hire packets, automatically assign onboarding tasks to different team members, and even collect fun facts from new employees to help them introduce themselves to the team (no awkward icebreakers required).

The real perk is that it’s all built into a full-featured HR platform that also covers recruiting, payroll, time tracking, performance, and employee engagement. That means less hopping between tools and more time focusing on people over processes.

And if you want to extend what BambooHR can do, it integrates with Zapier so you can orchestrate your HR processes across 8,000+ other tools. That means you can build intelligent, multi-step workflows that span your entire employee lifecycle. For example, when a new hire is added to BambooHR, you could automatically generate and route onboarding documents for approval, provision tools like Slack and Google Workspace, notify IT to ship equipment, and share a personalized welcome message in your team channels. 

Learn more about how to automate BambooHR, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

BambooHR pricing: Custom 

The best HR automation software for onboarding 

Enboarder 

Enboarder pros:

• Excels in an environment where you have a buddy or mentor system

• Fun, engaging way to handle the onboarding process

Enboarder cons:

Enboarder takes a refreshing approach to onboarding. It’s not just about delivering info to your new hires, but about guiding everyone involved—from new employees to their managers and even onboarding buddies—through the transition. It’s designed to create an experience, not just a checklist. Zapier uses Enboarder, so I speak from experience when I say that it’s a frictionless way to stay on top of employee onboarding tasks.

Instead of piling tasks into a static list, Enboarder lets you build out fully automated onboarding journeys using a highly visual workflow builder. Each step—emails, reminders, forms, Slack nudges—can be tailored and timed to create a personalized, interactive experience. You can assign responsibilities to different roles (manager, buddy, new hire), add milestones, and map the entire flow from preboarding to the first 30, 60, or 90 days.

I especially like that it walks you through the setup when you first log in. The layout is a shift from traditional onboarding tools, but once you get your bearings, it feels intuitive and even kind of fun to use—especially if you’re someone who likes to visualize processes.

You can start from one of Enboarder’s pre-built templates or build from scratch. The platform gives you a ton of control: set task dependencies, automate reminders, personalize emails with custom fields, and more. It’s a very detail-oriented tool, but you don’t have to tweak every setting unless you want to.

One thing to note: Enboarder is all about the journey itself. It doesn’t try to be an all-in-one HR hub or document management system—so you’ll likely pair it with other tools for things like payroll, performance, or long-term engagement. But for onboarding, it’s a standout.

Enboarder pricing: Custom 

Read more: The best employee onboarding software

The best HR automation software for payroll

Rippling

Rippling pros:

Rippling cons:

Rippling is what happens when Silicon Valley decides to tackle payroll: it’s sleek, powerful, and packed with more features than most teams will ever need—but if you love having everything under one roof, it’s a standout.

At its core, Rippling handles all the payroll essentials, like automated tax filings, direct deposit, compliance, and time tracking, but it doesn’t stop there. What sets Rippling apart is that it combines HR, payroll, and even IT management in a single platform. That means you can onboard a new hire, provision their apps, ship them a company laptop, and make sure it’s all properly synced with payroll without hopping between five different systems.

One of the most impressive features is Workflow Studio, Rippling’s automation engine. It lets you build workflows for nearly any task—whether that’s sending reminders for compliance training, routing tax adjustments based on location, or kicking off a sequence when someone changes roles or departments. It’s incredibly powerful, especially for operations teams that like to automate the edge cases.

That said, all this power comes with a few tradeoffs. Rippling can feel overwhelming if all you need is straightforward payroll, and there’s a bit of a learning curve, especially if your team isn’t used to tech-heavy tools. But once you get the hang of it, Rippling can seriously streamline your back-office workflows.

Rippling pricing: Custom

Read more: The best payroll systems

The best HR automation software for employee scheduling

Deputy (Web, iOS, Android)

Deputy pros:

Deputy cons:

Deputy is built to help you manage hourly teams without all the spreadsheet chaos. It’s an all-in-one platform for scheduling, timesheets, task management, and internal communication. 

Getting started is quick: you can manually add employees or import them in bulk, and the scheduling interface is simple and intuitive. You can build schedules by role or by employee, and when you add a shift, Deputy gives you handy options like repeating it for the rest of the week—little touches that make a big difference when you’re building out a full calendar.

But Deputy really stands out when it comes to smart scheduling. Its reporting tools help you analyze things like labor cost vs. sales or how staffing levels impact performance. You’ll also get alerts for things like employee fatigue or potential compliance issues, so you’re not flying blind when building schedules.

One of Deputy’s most helpful features is auto-scheduling. It pulls from historical data and even third-party sources—like weather forecasts or holiday calendars—to predict how many people you’ll need on shift. It then builds a schedule based on those insights. So if you’re short on time (or data skills), Deputy can help you optimize staffing without the guesswork.

And with robust integrations—including a native Zapier integration—Deputy can become part of a fully orchestrated HR system. You can automate shift updates across tools, like triggering Slack alerts when schedules change, syncing timesheets to your payroll platform, or posting weekly schedules to a shared Google Calendar. Here are some templates to get you started.

Deputy pricing: Paid plans start at $5/user/month for features like auto-scheduling, labor forecasting, and basic reporting.

Read more: The best employee scheduling software 

The best HR automation software for recruiting

Ashby (Web)

Ashby pros:

Ashby cons:

Ashby may be the newest applicant tracking system (ATS) on this list, but it’s quickly earned its place as a top-tier recruiting platform—Zapier uses it to manage our own recruiting processes, so I’ve seen firsthand how powerful it can be.

Ashby consolidates applicant tracking, interview scheduling, sourcing, and reporting into one clean, modern interface. For teams that are used to bouncing between four or five tools to keep the hiring process moving, this is a big deal. As Taylor Zigtema, Zapier’s people tech manager, put it: “We were able to consolidate four tools into one to streamline processes and save costs.” Hard to argue with that.

Ashby’s reporting is robust, customizable, and genuinely useful. Casey Firey, part of our talent strategy and ops team, says it’s “substantially better than anything we’ve had before.” That makes it easier to spot bottlenecks, report on DEI progress, or fine-tune your hiring pipeline based on real data rather than gut feel.

Ashby also includes structured hiring workflows, pipeline visualizations, and an AI assistant to help you build smarter searches faster. It’s clearly built for fast-moving teams who want both flexibility and clarity in their recruiting ops automation.

And like most tools on this list, Ashby integrates with Zapier, so you can orchestrate recruiting and onboarding workflows across your entire stack. For example, when a candidate applies via a form, Zapier can automatically add them to Ashby, enrich their profile with more data, assign them to a recruiter, and trigger a Slack alert for the hiring manager.  

Ashby price: From $270/month, billed annually, for the Foundations plan

Read more: The best applicant tracking systems 

The best HR automation software for small businesses

Breezy HR (Web, iOS, Android)

Breezy HR pros:

• Free plan available

• AI-powered Candidate Match Score automatically prioritizes candidates for open roles

• Automated emails, text messages, and scheduling

Breezy HR cons:

Breezy HR is a standout for small businesses trying to level up hiring automation processes without blowing the budget—mostly because its free plan doesn’t feel like a bait-and-switch. Unlike a lot of “free” applicant tracking systems that are either stripped to the bone or stuck in 2009, Breezy’s Bootstrap plan gives you a genuinely usable set of features with a clean, modern interface.

You get unlimited users, custom application forms, integrations with top job boards like LinkedIn and Indeed, and a visual candidate pipeline that’s actually enjoyable to use. The drag-and-drop Kanban view in the Candidates tab makes it super easy to keep track of where everyone is in the process. You can leave scorecard feedback, automatically tag in hiring managers for comments, and keep the conversation in one place—no scattered emails or backchannel DMs.

The interface is refreshingly straightforward. When you first log in, a tutorial bot and intro video gets you up to speed without the usual click-and-guess routine. Even better, Breezy gives you a customizable, branded careers page as part of the free plan. If you know your way around CSS or JavaScript, you can really tailor the look and feel—but there are clean templates ready to go if you’d rather keep it simple.

And since Breezy integrates with Zapier, you can make sure every step from application to offer flows seamlessly. You can automatically route new applicants to hiring managers in Slack, create interview tasks in tools like Trello or Asana, update candidate status in your HRIS, and even trigger personalized follow-up emails based on pipeline stage. 

Breezy HR price: Free with the Bootstrap plan for one job opening; from $157/month, billed annually, for the Startup plan

Read more: The best HR software for small businesses 

The best HR automation software for employee management

monday.com

monday.com pros:

monday.com cons:

monday.com actually started life as a project management tool, but over time, it’s evolved into a surprisingly robust employee management system. It’s especially helpful for teams who care as much about how work gets done as who’s doing it.

Thanks to those project management roots, monday.com really shines when it comes to assigning tasks, tracking progress, and keeping teams aligned. Managers can easily see what everyone’s working on, spot potential bottlenecks, and rebalance workloads before things go sideways. That’s especially helpful for remote or async teams.  

But monday isn’t just about checklists and Gantt charts. It covers the HR basics too: time tracking, leave requests, calendars, automated onboarding flows, recruitment pipelines, and even performance reviews and employee wellness tracking. The platform also has a robust automation builder, which supports multi-step workflows inside monday for things like updating tasks, sending notifications, managing due dates, and moving items across boards. You can handle day-to-day logistics and longer-term planning in the same place, which is a win for teams that want fewer tools, not more.

You can also build whatever you need. If there’s a workflow or form that doesn’t exist out of the box, monday.com makes it easy to create custom boards, automations, and dashboards to match how your team works.

And yes—monday.com integrates with Zapier. That means you can build automated HR processes across all the other tools your team uses, whether it’s automating onboarding checklists, updating Slack channels, or syncing time-off requests to a shared calendar. Learn more about how to automate monday.com, or try one of these pre-made workflows.

monday.com CRM pricing: From $12/seat/month for the Basic plan, which offers one custom dashboard and 1,000 active contacts and deals.

Read more: The best employee management software and apps

Which HR automation software should you choose?

The apps I’ve covered each bring strong capabilities, but what matters most is how well they fit your reality: the size of your business, the structure of your processes, the platforms your people already use, and the problems you’re trying to solve.

Here’s how to think about making that choice:

• Start with your biggest pain point. Is it recruiting? Onboarding? Scheduling shifts? IT and payroll handoffs? Pick the tool that gives you the most relief.

• Check how it connects to your stack. If your payroll, ATS, scheduling system or communication tools don’t talk to each other, you’ll still be doing manual work. A tool that integrates or lets you automate across systems is a multiplier.

• Look at how your team and employees will use it. If it’s got powerful features but a steep learning curve, you might spend more time training than delivering value. And if your employees avoid using the tool, it won’t end up doing anyone any good.

• Think about scale and flexibility. Today’s setup might handle your needs, but what about six months from now? If you’re growing fast, have variable staffing, global teams, or evolving workflows, you’ll want a platform that adapts rather than locking you in.

• Make sure compliance and security are covered. HR handles sensitive data, regulated processes and often multiple jurisdictions. Your tool should make it easier to stay on top of risk, not harder.

• Match breadth to depth. Do you need something that handles every function end‑to‑end? Or would a best‑in‑class solution for one area (e.g., scheduling or onboarding) serve you better? Sometimes it’s smarter to play to your strengths than buy an all‑in‑one that does everything only ok.

The goal isn’t to build a tech stack that looks impressive—it’s to build one that works silently, reliably, and in a way that supports your HR team and your people. The best tool will feel invisible, freeing your team to focus on people, not processes.

Zapier can help you connect all of your team’s tools—and orchestrate automations intelligently across your entire employee lifecycle.

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