Oyster Review 2024
Oyster HR is a global employment platform that provides a range of tools and services to enable businesses to hire, pay, and manage international talent in over 180 countries. While they offer services for companies of all sizes, their base plans are catered toward the needs of SMBs.
- Payments in 140+ currencies
- Global compliance protection and risk management
- Easy employee and contractor management
- No payroll transaction fees
- Some countries is provided by third-party vendors
Oyster HR’s main offerings include its Employer-of-Record (EOR) services that allow businesses to hire employees in other countries without having to own a legal entity in that country. Apart from this, Oyster also offers payroll, benefits, team management, onboarding, insights, and compliance and protection.
Oyster review: Ease of use
Oyster HR has a user-friendly design that supports quick and efficient navigation. This ensures your admin team gets accustomed to the function within minutes. Whether it’s running payroll or managing your team, you can get started as soon as you set up.
Oyster review: Pricing
Oyster HR offers two different pricing plans for businesses planning to hire 1 to 5 full-time employees and those planning to hire contractors only. They also offer an enterprise solution for businesses interested in hiring more than 5 full-time employees.
Employee
The Employee plan allows businesses to hire, pay, and manage full-time employees compliantly. It costs $599 per month with the monthly subscription and $499 per month with the annual subscription. It includes the following features:
- Onboarding (130+ countries)
- Payroll, expense, and allowance management (140+ currencies)
- Ongoing management and compliance
- Deep local intelligence
- IP assignment agreements and confidentiality
- Insurance coverage exceeding $8 million
Contractor
The Contractor plan is for businesses that want to onboard, pay, and manage contractors. It is available for free for the first 30 days and costs $29 per contractor per month. The Contractor plan includes the following features:
- Contractor onboarding (in 180+ countries)
- Invoice payments (in 140+ currencies)
- Expense and allowance management
- Time-off management
- Reports
Scale
The Scale plan is Oyster HR’s enterprise solution for businesses with more than 5 full-time employees. It is available for a custom price and billed annually. The plan comes with all the features of the Employee plan along with the following:
- Speedy bulk hiring and onboarding
- Dedicated customer success and account managers
Oyster review: Employer of Record (EOR)
Payroll providers that offer employer of record (EOR) services employ workers on behalf of your company. EORs do not require you to own a legal entity in the country you’re hiring workers from and neither do they require you to enter a co-employment agreement.
EORs are different from professional employer organizations (PEOs). PEOs require you to own a legal entity in the country you’re hiring workers from and enter a co-employment agreement.
When hiring international talent, businesses have to ensure they’re staying compliant with local regulations and laws. When you use a PEO, you’re solely responsible for compliance. On the other hand, an EOR will act as the legal employer and hence take care of compliance too.
It suffices to say that EOR is the best solution for businesses without legal entities in other countries they’re hiring talent from and without the resources to manage compliance in all those countries.
Opening a legal entity is also a solution, but it’s often much more expensive and time-consuming than hiring an EOR solution. With Oyster HR’s EOR solutions, you can generate locally-compliant contracts, ensure compliance throughout the employee lifecycle, and rest assured with insurance coverage exceeding $8 million.
Oyster review: Features
Oyster HR’s list of solutions includes a bit of EOR, payroll, HR management, and more. Let’s take a closer look at the key ones and the support they offer to SMBs.
Payroll
With Oyster HR, you can run payroll in 180+ countries and make payments in 140+ currencies from a single platform. The platform handles all the additional work involved in global payroll such as withholding taxes, expense reimbursements, social contributions, etc.
Global benefits management
Oyster HR enables you to offer compliant and competitive benefits that are specific to the local market. The platform also features a benefits advisor tool that you can use to find competitive benefits packages in every region. There’s also the option to let your employees customize their own benefits.
Hiring and onboarding
The multiple automation and self-service tools from Oyster HR enable you to get done with your hiring and onboarding in a breeze. A centralized dashboard ensures you’re always on top of priority tasks such as time-off approval, contract terms and drafts, expenses, etc.
Compliance
Oyster HR’s automated platform with built-in compliance along with its in-house legal expertise and localized insights help ensure your global scaling is compliant.
They also ensure your data is secure and safe on the platform and that the platform itself is compliant with global privacy laws such as GDPR and SOC II.
Software integrations
With over 5,000+ integrations, Oyster HR allows businesses to put together a seamless solution that does payroll, EOR, benefits, HR, and much more. Here are some of Oyster HR’s most popular software integrations.
- Xero
- QuickBooks Online
- Greenhouse
- Bamboo HR
- Hibob
- Oracle Netsuite
- Expensify
- Workday
- Okta
Additional features
Oyster also has some add-on features and solutions for HR-related business needs, such as:
- Worker misclassification risk assessment
- Contractor conversion guidance
- Talent Network for simplified talent search
Oyster review: Customer support
Oyster HR provides customer support via email or in-app chat. Another option is to visit their Help Center to submit a request. For detailed information on products and features, you can also check out their list of resources including FAQs, blogs, podcasts, guides, HR glossaries, and more.
