10 Best Compensation Management Software List
Get free help from our HR software advisors to find your match.
With so many different compensation management software solutions available, figuring out which is right for you is tough. You know you want to ensure fair, equitable, and efficient handling of salaries, bonuses, and other forms of compensation—but now need to figure out which tool is best. In this post, I'll help make your choice easy, sharing my personal experiences using dozens of different compensation management tools with teams of all sizes, with my picks of the best compensation management software overall.
What is Compensation Management Software?
Compensation management software is a practical tool designed for businesses to manage and organize employee pay effectively. It automates the process of calculating salaries, bonuses, and other forms of compensation, ensuring accuracy and consistency.
The purpose is to help companies align pay with performance, adhere to budgets, and maintain competitive salary structures. Its use simplifies administrative tasks, supports strategic financial planning, and contributes to fair and transparent compensation practices, enhancing employee satisfaction and retention.
Overviews Of The 10 Best Compensation Management Software
Here’s a brief description of each top 10 compensation management software that made my shortlist. Keep reading to find additional bonus picks at the bottom of the list.
Deel
Best compensation management software for global salary benchmarking and international hiring
Deel is a comprehensive payroll service with a robust self-service function for HR professionals. It’s designed for global teams, letting you manage and keep track of employees and contractors around the world.
Why I picked Deel: Their service is easy to use and offers a wide range of features. The platform gives you a comprehensive overview of benefits, perks, and salary expenses. You can make use of their internal research tools to benchmark salary ranges in various countries, taking into account mandatory contributions like pension and healthcare.
Deel Standout Features & Integrations:
Features include international market salary insights, employer of record (EOR) or global payroll services, payroll & tax management, a dedicated customer service manager, access to international legal and tax experts, compliant employee contract templates, compliance monitoring tools, expense management, time tracking, analytics & reporting, and 24/7 in-app support. Deel is also SOC2-compliant and ISO 27001-certified, which means it meets international standards for data security.
Integrations are available with a handful of popular accounting and HR management systems that allow you to import and export HR data easily. Key integrations include Ashby, BambooHR, Bob, Greenhouse, NetSuite, QuickBooks, and Xero. They also have an Open API solution that allows developers to build their own interfaces on top of the Deel platform too.
Deel offers flat rate pricing per worker, as well as a free demo.
Aeqium
Best compensation management software for collaborative compensation planning & reviews
Aeqium is a cloud-based employee compensation management software that gives people teams the flexibility to match their compensation planning process, including planning compensation across multiple geographies, currencies, pay bands, and job types. It's suitable for organizations of all sizes and is a comprehensive solution for managing employee salaries, variable and performance-based pay, equity grants, and compliance reporting.
Why I picked Aeqium: Aeqium uses advanced integrations to help HR teams prepare their compensation cycles by automating the gathering and validation of compensation-related data. This data, combined with their guided workflows for managers executing performance reviews, helps organizations make more data-driven decisions. You can also use Aeqium to create customized pay-for-performance plans for their employees, determine pay equity, and simulate different compensation scenarios to assess their impact on the bottom line.
Aeqium offers agile, self-service functionality so HR teams can make changes to their compensation program themselves at any time, including mid-review cycle, rather than relying on tech support for changes. In addition, HR teams have complete control over how much or little compensation details are shown to managers, including data on performance, salary, equity, and others.
Aeqium Standout Features & Integrations
Standout features for Aeqium include its performance management features that link compensation decisions to employee performance metrics. Employers can set performance goals and metrics, monitor progress, and track employee performance. The software analyzes the performance data and provides insights into which employees deserve pay raises, bonuses, or other incentives.
Employers can generate custom reports, graphs, and charts to analyze employee compensation trends, comparisons, and benchmarks. They can also track employee satisfaction and engagement levels, conduct salary surveys, and monitor employee turnover rates.
Other features include collaboration tools, customization, proofing & approvals, user-based access, budgeting, pay transparency, interactive offer letters, and market data integration.
Integrations include other HRIS, applicant tracking systems, payroll systems, performance management systems, and cap tables and stock systems like Carta.
Aeqium offers customized pricing upon request. They also have a freemium plan available.
Trinet
Best compensation management software for competitive salary benchmarking
TriNet's HR software system is designed to help small to medium-sized organizations manage their core HR needs, including onboarding, payroll, benefits enrollment, applicant tracking, document management, and workforce analytics.
Why I picked TriNet: Their Compensation Benchmark feature, part of its workforce analytics module, automatically pulls industry salary benchmarking data directly from Salary.com. This is helpful as you can run custom analytics using this data to ensure your salary ranges stay competitive against changing market rates.
TriNet Standout Features & Integrations:
Trinet also excels in their workforce analytics capabilities. You can use their software to track all the key metrics that matter, including your headcount, turnover rates, employee tenure, new hires, and terminations. You can also customize their dashboard to track other analytics and key performance indicators that are unique to your business too.
Integrations are available with Assembly, Bob, ChartHop, Compt, Greenhouse, Hyperproof, Lattice, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks, and many others.
Pricing details are available upon request.
Lattice
Best for connecting pay with employee performance
Lattice provides a comprehensive product suite to help you manage employee compensation, performance, and engagement. It combines various HR tools into one easy-to-use interface, helping you streamline your HR processes.
Why I picked Lattice: Because it's an add-on to the performance, OKR, and goals platform, this compensation management software helps ensure that pay is directly connected to employee performance. Users can create and manage workflows for how pay is determined and adjusted, keeping processes consistent and clear for managers and employees alike. Benchmarking data is included to help you make informed decisions about pay.
Record keeping is simplified, as the platform stores employee compensation history and allows you to set salary bands. You can see how your compensation strategy lines up with business goals and budgets. The software also helps you craft employee-centric communications to help people understand how their pay is determined.
Lattice Standout Features and Integrations
Features include benchmarking data, bonus and equity management, raise guidance, multi-level approval flows, customizable performance review templates, OKR and goal tracking, and 360-degree feedback.
Integrations include ADP, BambooHR, Google Workspace, Humaans, Jira, Microsoft Suite, Okta, Rippling, Salesforce, Slack, UKG, Workday, and Zenefits, among others.
Justworks
Best compensation management software with 24/7 expert support
Justworks is an HR solution that aims to simplify and streamline various HR tasks for businesses. It provides a centralized platform for managing employee-related processes, including payroll, benefits administration, compliance, and a support team that can ensure users can leverage the software effectively.
Why I picked Justworks: the user-friendly interface and robust functionality are coupled with a 24/7 expert support team to enable HR teams of all shapes and sizes. The platform helps with tax filings, workers' compensation, and other compliance-related matters, reducing the risk of penalties and legal issues.
The software also provides comprehensive reporting and analytics tools to help businesses gain insights into their compensation management processes. With intuitive dashboards and customizable reports, users can track and analyze compensation data, identify trends, and make informed decisions.
Standout features & Integrations
Features include bonus and salary management to simplify the process with flexible options for setting up compensation structures, including one-time bonuses and recurring payments. The software allows you to easily calculate and allocate payments, ensuring accuracy and transparency. Another standout feature is the ability to handle complex benefits packages, including health insurance, retirement plans, commuter benefits, and wellness programs. The platform streamlines the enrollment process and handles the necessary compliance tasks, saving businesses time and effort.
Integrations include QuickBooks, Greenhouse, Xero, Slack, Vanguard, Fidelity, Citi Bike, and E-Verify.
Decusoft Compose
Best compensation management software for pay equity analysis tools
Decusoft Compose is a comprehensive compensation, incentive, and total rewards management software. Their cloud-based software is easy-to-use and purposefully designed to mimic a spreadsheet-based experience many users are familiar with, yet with more advanced functionality.
Why I picked Decusoft Compose: Their solution not only simplifies the management of complex variable pay programs including merit-based bonuses, equity, long/short term incentives, carried interest, and deferrals but also provides enhanced analytics of your data. Diversity, equity & inclusion (DEI), pay equity, and people analytics are all simple to measure, report, compare, and visualize. Compose is easy to use, tailored to your unique needs, and SOC-2 compliant.
Decusoft Compose Standout Features & Integrations:
Features include compensation planning, budgeting & forecasting tools, a wealth of compensation planning models (bonus + equity, bonus only, bonus with deferral, equity award, exceptional impact, financial demo incentive, sales bonus, merit + bonus + equity, merit only, etc.), data dashboards, salary benchmarks, DEI & pay equity analysis tools, and employee performance & merit calibration tools.
Integrations are available with a handful of human resource information systems (HRIS) or other HR management systems including ADP, Oracle HCM, SAP, UKG, and Workday.
Decusoft Compose offers customized pricing upon request and a free demo.
Xoxoday Compass
Best compensation management software for gamified sales incentive programs
Xoxoday Compass is an automatic sales incentive compensation platform that accelerates sales through competition-based challenges and performance-based bonuses. Their software automates the entire incentive process using pre-set key performance indicators (KPIs) combined with engaging game templates, rules, and conditional logic.
Why I picked Xoxoday Compass: You can design and launch gamified sales incentive programs that will help your sales teams stay engaged and productive, including target-based challenges, milestone achievements, or through an internal team race competition. Xoxoday Compass also offers real-time visibility into performance, tracks commission information and incentive plan details, and processes incentive payments.
Xoxoday Compass Standout Features & Integrations:
Features include a library of gamified sales incentive program templates (target-based, competition-based, cascading, or special structures), live scorecards, a public score leaderboard & achievement feed, an earning tracker, one-click payments, automation, action triggers, nudges, business simulations, predictive analytics, and data insights.
Integrations are available with popular CRM systems, including Freshdesk, Freshsales, Google Sheets, HubSpot, Leadsquared, Pipedrive, Salesforce, and Zoho CRM.
Xoxoday Compass has a progressive pricing structure that decreases your average price per user as you add more users to your account. They also offer a free demo.
Xactly
Best compensation management software for offering incentives that drive performance
Sales teams come in different forms and sizes, and so do their compensation plans and benefits. Xactly Incent is an incentive compensation management software designed to continuously monitor sales teams so that HR professionals can develop compensation strategies that motivate them to achieve top performance.
Why I picked Xactly Incent: Their compensation planning platform comes with 17 years of proprietary data that links pay with sales performance. This data, which was collected across many different industries, has been aggregated and anonymized. I included Xactly Incent in this list because you can leverage this data to help you build competitive incentive-focused compensation plans to boost your sales quotas and retain your top sellers.
Xactly Incent Standout Features & Integrations:
Features include compensation data, compensation & payout planning tools, commission tracking, sales forecasting tools, advanced benchmarking data, reusable plan components, pay curves, visualizations, workflow automations, analytics, real-time reporting, and a mobile app.
Integrations are available with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and NetSuite, and other CRM, ERP, and HCM software solutions.
Xactly offers customized pricing upon request along with a free demo.
Assemble
Best compensation management software for transparent total compensation
Assemble is a compensation planning platform with a focus on transparency and equality. Their software can help you prepare compensate packages for your employees in a way that drives performance and builds trust within your organization.
Why I picked Assemble: Their compensation planning software is focused on helping organizations develop transparent compensation plans that are fair, equitable, competitive, consistent, and explainable.
This modern, proactive approach to developing a compensation plan within these parameters helps to ensure that traditionally underrepresented and underpaid demographics are paid equally when compared to their peers. To simplify this process, Assemble also automatically analyzes pay equity across your workforce data for you, and includes a special module focused on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion).
Assemble also includes a unique illustrative offers feature that helps organizations communicate the full value of an employee offer, which may include additional forms of compensation above their base salary, such as merit-based bonuses, equity plans, or tenure-based increases.
To ensure a positive user experience, their illustrative offers are sent directly from Assemble, drawing candidates into a digital portal that’s been customized with your own company branding. This positive portrayal of their total compensation package can make a big impact on candidates’ employee experience, before they even accept their offer.
Assemble Standout Features & Integrations
Features include salary benchmark data, salary ladders and compensation bands, easy-to-digest visualizations, illustrative employee offers, pay transparency and compliance tools, historical record keeping & audit logs, workflow automation, tools to manage job architecture and job descriptions, multiple currencies, DEI tracking, and a white-labeled employee portal.
Integrations are available with 60+ HR software solutions, including Alexis HR, Applicant Stack, Ashby, Breathe, Breezy, CATS, Cornerstone, Factorial, HR Cloud, JazzHR, Jobvite, Lano, Lever, Recruitee, Teamtailor, UKG Pro, Workable and others.
Assemble offers customized pricing upon request, as well as a free demo.
Spiff
Best compensation management software for commission-based sales teams
Spiff is a commission management platform with a focus on designing compensation management programs that motivate and scale. It can be used by businesses of any size, from small teams all the way up to enterprise organizations.
Why I picked Spiff: To ensure that each sales representative is paid fairly and on time, Spiff's system includes a personalized dashboard that updates as soon as a sales rep closes a deal or attains a milestone. This provides members of the sales team with a visualization of their compensation and the way it was calculated. In addition, because commissions and bonuses change often in sales, Spiff's software is designed to be flexible.
Spiff Standout Features & Integrations:
Features include configurable workflows, real-time data updates, visual data dashboards, an easy-to-access version history for previous compensation and commission plans, employee retention tools, compliance monitoring, and tools to simplify complex pay scale structures.
Integrations are available with many CRM, ERP, HCM and payroll platforms, including Amazon Redshift, Domo, Enerflo, Google BigQuery, Oracle, Pipedrive, Sage, Salesforce, Slack, Stripe, Snowflake, Tableau, Tripleseat, and others.
Spiff offers customized pricing upon request, as well as a free demo.
The 10 Best Compensation Management Software Comparison Chart
This comparison chart summarizes basic details about each of my top compensation management software selections. You can view pricing details and the availability of free trials or demos side-by-side to help you find the best software for your budget.
Tool | Trial Info | Price | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Deel Best compensation management software for global salary benchmarking and international hiring | Free demo available | Flat rate user pricing, with a free version for businesses with up to 200 people | Website |
2 | Aeqium Best compensation management software for collaborative compensation planning & reviews | Free plan available | Pricing upon request | Website |
3 | Trinet Best compensation management software for competitive salary benchmarking | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Website |
4 | Lattice Best for connecting pay with employee performance | Free demo available | From $11/user/month | Website |
5 | Justworks Best compensation management software with 24/7 expert support | Free demo available | From $59/user/month | Website |
6 | Decusoft Compose Best compensation management software for pay equity analysis tools | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Website |
7 | Xoxoday Compass Best compensation management software for gamified sales incentive programs | Not available | Pricing upon request | Website |
8 | Xactly Best compensation management software for offering incentives that drive performance | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Website |
9 | Assemble Best compensation management software for transparent total compensation | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Website |
10 | Spiff Best compensation management software for commission-based sales teams | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Website |
Other Options
Here are a few other options that didn’t make the best compensation management software list. I didn’t have room for a full review for each of these but they are still worthy of consideration:
- PaveAI
Best compensation management software for managing compensation bands at scale
- Varicent ICM
Best compensation management software for automating incentive programs for enterprise organizations
- MarketPay by Payscale
Best compensation management software for tracking global compensation volatility
- CaptivateIQ
Best compensation management software for customer-facing teams
- ChartHop
Best compensation management software for automating eligibility rules
- Xoxoday Plum
Best compensation management software for sending bonus payouts internationally
- PayScale Insight Lab
Best compensation management software for designing pay structures and managing merit increases
- CompLogix
Best for compensation management software for simplicity and flexibility in tracking, monitoring, and reporting
- Workday
Best compensation management software for data integrations
- Ceridian Dayforce
Best compensation management software for integrating talent and workforce management, payroll, and benefits
How I Selected the Best Compensation Management Software
Wondering how I selected the best compensation management software for this top 10 list? I'm happy to explain my detailed approach.
First, I evaluated and compared a wide range of compensation management platforms with positive user ratings. Next, I examined each system in greater detail using the selection criteria below.
Selection Criteria
Here's a short summary of the main evaluation and selection criteria I used to determine the best compensation management software systems for this list:
Usability:
Compensation planning, in general, can be complex, especially with a wide range of employee positions and skill sets. That's why it's important that the system you choose scores high in usability and creates a positive user experience (UX) for all your internal stakeholders who will access it.
To assess a system's usability, I examine its user interface (UI) to understand how its menu and key features are organized. I want to get an understanding of how easy-to-use their system is, or whether you need to drill down endlessly to access the details you need.
Competitive Features:
With the war for top talent never going away, you need a compensation system that offers features to help you stay competitive. The crux of this is the database upon which the compensation software rests. You want to invest in a system that includes salary benchmarking data. This data, sourced globally by trusted salary survey providers, will help you ensure your existing and future staff are compensated fairly, at current market rates.
Other modern features that fall into this category are: pay equity tools, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) monitoring systems, and compensation bands that allow you to update employee salaries at scale.
Incentive Programs:
Depending on your industry, incentive programs may be a big part of your employee compensation plan. This is especially true for businesses focused on sales or customer service. If this applies to your industry, you'll definitely want a software system that can automate the incentive process for you.
Sales or incentive compensation programs include tools to automatically track employee productivity as they strive to meet their goals or key performance indicators (KPIs). Often incentive programs include engaging gamification features too, to further motivate your employees to perform.
Software Integrations:
It's important to ensure that the compensation management system you choose integrates with your existing HR software solutions. The most important integrations to confirm are whether it will link to whichever HR management and/or payroll system you're using. If you're looking for a more specialized solution for handling employee salaries, you might also want to consider integrating with a dedicated payroll software to ensure a seamless HR tech stack.
If your compensation program includes sales-based incentives, you'll also want to ensure it links up with popular sales management and CRM systems too.
I've noted key software integrations for each system in this list. However, as you're doing your research, make sure you take the extra time to confirm the integrations you need are available.
Value for Price:
It's logical for the price of a compensation management tool to vary based on the depth of its features. While I always try my best to consider how appropriately a software system is priced, it was a little bit of a challenge for this software set.
Most of the software systems in this list only offer pricing upon request. However, you can still get a sense of the depth of their plans by visiting their websites for more details.
People Also Ask
Still trying to wrap your head around compensation management software and how it works? Here are some answers to frequently asked questions that should clear things up for you further:
What is compensation management software?
How does compensation management software work?
What main features are included in compensation management software?
What are the different types of compensation?
How does compensation management software help employers?
Additional Resources
Looking for some other ways to attract and retain high-quality talent? Here's a collection of our best resources to help you develop top-notch compensation and engagement practices within your organization:
- How to Create a Compensation Philosophy for Better Hiring and Retention
- 6 Tips for Effective Employee Compensation Discussions
- 13 Best Compensation Courses for HR, Business Owners and Managers
- Best Employee Perks Programs to Automate Rewards
- Best Talent Management Systems
- 10 Novel Employee Wellness Program Ideas to Attract and Retain Top Talent
- Best Employee Engagement Software
- Mind the Pay Gap, a podcast with Robin Turnill from Pivot HR Services
- Best Performance Management Tools Every HR Pro Should Know
- 20 Types of Employee Benefits You Should Know
- Cost of Employee Benefits
Before you go, I also recommend signing up for our weekly People Managing People newsletter. That way, you'll receive the latest insights from top thinkers in the HR space straight into your inbox.