Flare vs Employment Hero vs Rippling: Which HR Platform is Right for Your Australian Business?

Three HR platforms come up constantly when Australian small businesses start comparing software: Flare HR, Employment Hero, and Rippling. The problem is they’re not really the same type of product. Comparing them directly is like comparing a payroll system with a device management platform: possible, but only useful if you understand what each one actually does.

This post breaks down what each platform is built for, what it costs, and who should use it.

Quick verdict

Platform	Best for	Cost
Flare HR	Any AU business wanting to offer employee benefits and automate onboarding: for free	Free for employers
Employment Hero	AU SMBs (2–200 staff) needing full HR, payroll compliance, and Fair Work coverage	From ~$6/user/month
Rippling	Tech-forward businesses (30–500 staff) wanting HR, IT, and payroll in one system	Modular, from ~$8/user/month

The other thing to know upfront: Flare and Employment Hero integrate with each other. Many Australian businesses run both simultaneously. Flare for benefits, Employment Hero for HR and payroll. They’re not always an either/or choice.

Flare HR: free employee benefits and onboarding automation

Flare is a Sydney-based HR tech company focused specifically on employee benefits and onboarding. It’s used by over 100,000 Australian businesses and covers more than 1.2 million employees. The core platform is free for employers. Flare makes money through the financial products (salary packaging, novated leasing, insurance) it offers employees.

What Flare does well:

• Digital onboarding: tax file number declarations, superannuation choice forms, and benefits enrolment in one workflow
• Salary packaging and novated leasing, available to all employees regardless of employer size
• Retail discounts, cashback, and financial wellness tools via the Flare app
• Payroll integration with Xero, MYOB, KeyPay, and Employment Hero

What Flare doesn’t do: Flare is not a full HR system. There’s no performance management, no leave tracking, no contracts module, no Fair Work compliance layer. If your HR needs extend beyond onboarding and benefits, you’ll need to pair it with something else.

Best for: Any Australian employer: regardless of size: who wants to offer structured employee benefits without paying for it. Particularly valuable for businesses competing with larger employers for talent.

Employment Hero: full HR for Australian small business

Employment Hero is the closest thing Australia has to a default small business HR platform. The Sydney-based company manages over one million employees and has spent a decade building its platform specifically around Australian employment law: modern awards, Fair Work obligations, superannuation, STP reporting, and state-specific requirements.

The platform covers the full employee lifecycle: job posting, onboarding, contracts, leave management, performance reviews, payroll, and offboarding. Its 2026 AI features include AI-generated job ads, pay compliance monitoring that flags underpayment risk before it becomes a problem, HR policy generation, smart interview scoring, and engagement survey analysis.

Pricing starts at around $6 per employee per month for the HR platform, with payroll as a separate module. Most SMBs end up in the $10–20 per employee per month range once both are running. Employment Hero also offers a free tier for very small teams with limited features.

The compliance angle matters. Australian businesses with employees face genuine legal complexity: award rates, superannuation, leave entitlements, Fair Work obligations. Getting any of this wrong is expensive. Employment Hero automates most of it and surfaces risks before they become penalties.

Best for: Any Australian business with 2 to 200 employees that needs a proper HR system. It’s the platform most comparable to what larger employers use, at a price point SMBs can afford.

Rippling: HR plus IT in one platform

Rippling is a US-based platform that’s been expanding its Australian presence. Its core proposition is different from both Flare and Employment Hero: it combines HR, payroll, IT management (device provisioning, app access), and finance in a single system.

When you hire someone through Rippling, it can simultaneously set up their laptop, create their email account, provision their software licences, add them to payroll, and enrol them in benefits: all from one workflow. For Australian businesses, it handles superannuation, TFN declarations, and Single Touch Payroll (STP) reporting to the ATO.

Pricing is modular: you pay for the components you use, starting at around $8 per user per month for the HR module. A full HR + IT implementation for a 50-person business typically runs significantly higher once you add device management and app provisioning.

The trade-off: Rippling’s depth of Australian compliance coverage is strong but not as deeply localised as Employment Hero. It’s also more expensive for equivalent functionality, and the complexity of the platform means setup takes longer. For businesses where IT and HR are genuinely intertwined: a software company onboarding 10 engineers a month: the unified workflow is worth it. For a 15-person retail business, it’s likely overkill.

Best for: Tech companies and fast-growing businesses (30–500 staff) where IT provisioning and HR overlap, and where the efficiency of a unified system justifies the cost.

Head-to-head comparison

Feature	Flare HR	Employment Hero	Rippling
Cost to employer	Free	From ~$6/user/mo	From ~$8/user/mo (modular)
AU payroll compliance	❌ Not included	✅ Core feature	✅ Native
Fair Work / award rates	❌	✅ Built-in	Partial
STP reporting	❌	✅	✅
Employee benefits	✅ Salary packaging, novated leasing, discounts	Basic	Basic
Digital onboarding	✅ Strong	✅ Strong	✅ Strong
IT / device management	❌	❌	✅ Core feature
AI features	Benefits personalisation	Job ads, compliance, policies	Automation workflows
Xero / MYOB integration	✅	✅	✅
Best staff size	Any	2–200	30–500+
AU-built	✅ Sydney	✅ Sydney	❌ US-based

Can you use more than one?

Yes: and many Australian businesses do. The most common combination is Flare + Employment Hero. Employment Hero handles HR and payroll; Flare handles benefits and onboarding. The two platforms integrate directly, and because Flare is free to employers, there’s no cost penalty for running both.

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Rippling is generally an either/or choice against Employment Hero: both cover payroll and HR, so running them in parallel doesn’t make sense.

Which one should you choose?

• You want to offer better employee benefits at no cost → Flare. Start here regardless of what else you use.
• You have 2–200 staff and need proper HR and payroll → Employment Hero. The AU compliance coverage is the strongest of the three.
• You’re a tech company with 30+ staff and IT provisioning is a pain point → Rippling. The unified HR + IT workflow is genuinely useful if you’re onboarding technical staff regularly.
• You want the most complete solution → Flare (free) + Employment Hero. Many Australian SMBs run this combination and get best-of-breed benefits and HR compliance in one stack.

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Sources

• Flare HR. Pricing page
• Employment Hero. Pricing page
• Rippling. AU Pricing page
• ATO. Single Touch Payroll
• Fair Work Ombudsman. Small Business Resources