Zenefits

Zenefits has been great for our small startup as it is FREE!!! Easy to use online interface for comparing and selecting plans. They seem to have most if not all of the major health insurance providers for medical, dental and vision. We use Blue Shield for health insurance through them along with Delta Dental and VSP.

I'll admit that I don't know all of the regulations around benefits but with them, you can only choose one health insurance provider. If you choose Blue Shield, all employees have to have plans provided by Blue Shield. It wasn't a big deal for us as we are small and can get HMO, PPO and HSA plans all through the same provider. I'm not sure if you can have Kaiser as well as none of our employees wanted to pick them so we didn't bother investigating.

We had a bit of a issue with our open enrollment. Was a bit disorganized as well as unclear what emails we needed to send out to employees and which would be automated. We wanted to switch over some of our plans to different carriers and that also wasn't clear on the website as to how to do that. Ended up just doing everything through emails with our account rep. This was fine as they are extremely helpful and quick to respond.

Our employees got emails saying they had to choose their new plans even though we were told that if they didn't, they would auto roll over to the new corresponding plan. The email to them was not clear and caused a bit of confusion on everyone's part.

The open enrollment process is the reason for the lower score on quality. Besides that, can't be happier with them from onboarding of new employees to the unfortunate event you have to let someone go.

Strengths: Biggest strength is the price = $0. It is good enough for small companies to use and when you are trying to watch every dollar out the door, this is a no brainer.

The website is easy to use to look at plans and if you have an issue, can always contact a real person.

Needs to improve: The open enrollment process for our 2nd year was a bit of a mess. We got through it all right but wasn't a clear and easy as would have hoped.