PurelyHR Reviews & Product Details

It’s a very simple way to book time off and to see who will be away for any period of time. It’s also helpful for knowing whose birthday it is, and for checking how many sick days or vacation days you have remaining. It cuts down on having to call or email people in HR to book time off or discuss details, since you can request a day off directly and add notes for them to review. It also makes it easier to see when your managers or co-workers will be away in case you need them for a project. Overall, it keeps everything on the up and up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I had quite a bit of trouble signing in at first. You have to remember your company tag to sign in correctly, and that wasn’t obvious to me in the beginning. I also wasn’t clear on how time off works for things like bereavement leave or jury duty, especially when it comes to whether it uses bankable hours or sick time. Overall, the app works well enough, but I did struggle a bit with getting started and understanding how everything was set up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like best about PurelyHR is how lightweight, practical, and user-friendly it is for our small public library team at Maplewood Community Public Library. We only have around 21 paid staff members and no dedicated HR staff or IT support, so we cannot handle complicated, enterprise-level HR software with tons of unnecessary features. PurelyHR is perfectly built for small teams like ours — it only includes the core tools we actually need, which makes our daily personnel work so much smoother. My favorite feature by far is the simplified leave management dashboard. Before we used PurelyHR, all staff leave requests came through emails and messy shared spreadsheets. It was super easy to miss a request or forget to update the schedule, which would almost cause staffing shortages for our virtual author talks, youth reading workshops, and online community events we host on Teleport.Video. Now every staff member submits leave requests directly inside PurelyHR, and I can view, approve, or deny them instantly from one single dashboard. I can also see a clear visual overview of everyone’s upcoming availability, which helps me build monthly event schedules confidently and avoid last-minute staffing gaps. I also really love PurelyHR’s centralized record storage system. We used to store staff onboarding paperwork, training certificates, event moderator qualifications, and performance notes all over different folders and devices. Whenever I needed to confirm whether a staff member was fully trained to assist with our virtual events, I had to search through multiple files, which wasted a lot of time. Now every employee has their own dedicated profile where I can upload, organize, and retrieve all personnel documents anytime. It keeps our team’s qualifications well-documented and easy to verify before launching new online programs. On top of that, the customizable performance review templates are extremely helpful for our library-specific roles. I can tailor reviews around event coordination, community engagement, and virtual program support instead of using generic corporate templates. Best of all, the system requires almost no technical maintenance. It runs steadily, updates automatically, and needs zero IT oversight, which is perfect for our small library team. Overall, PurelyHR eliminates messy manual HR work and lets me focus more on creating quality community programs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Even though PurelyHR works great for our basic paid-staff HR needs, it has several noticeable downsides that create extra manual work for my library team every single month. The biggest issue is that the platform has almost no functional volunteer management tools, which is a huge limitation for a public library like ours. We heavily rely on volunteers to moderate our Teleport.Video virtual author sessions, assist kids during online reading workshops, help with event setup, and support community educational livestreams. However, PurelyHR is designed exclusively for formal paid employees, so it does not let us separate volunteer profiles from regular staff accounts. I cannot create customized volunteer permission levels, track volunteer service hours independently, or set up automatic reminders for volunteer training renewals. Every time we recruit new volunteers for seasonal virtual programs, I have to manually label their profiles and maintain a completely separate external spreadsheet just to track their shifts, training status, and availability. This creates duplicate work and increases the chance of human error every programming season. Another major downside is its very basic and inflexible reporting system. As the program coordinator, I regularly need to prepare quarterly staffing summaries, check upcoming staff absences, and verify training compliance before launching our summer and fall virtual event series. Unfortunately, PurelyHR only lets me view data one individual profile at a time. It does not support bulk filtering, customized date ranges, or consolidated exports. I cannot pull a full list of pending leave requests team-wide, nor can I quickly identify which staff members have expired or expiring training certificates. Whenever library leadership asks for official staffing reports, I have to manually open dozens of profiles, copy information one by one, and compile everything myself. This whole process is extremely time-consuming and inefficient. Additionally, the platform lacks integrations with our event and storage tools, so I can’t sync staffing rosters or program schedules automatically. These limitations don’t make PurelyHR unusable, but they definitely hold back our team’s productivity and force us to rely on outdated manual workarounds every month. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As part of our mid-sized German tech team, I rely on PurelyHR to streamline all our daily core HR processes. Its biggest strength is centralized employee records and document management. Everything is stored in one secure, well-organized platform, so we no longer have to rely on messy spreadsheets and scattered email files. It keeps our personnel records well-structured and fully compliant with local regulations. I also really appreciate the employee self-service portal. It’s clean and easy to use, letting staff access their own HR information independently. This has greatly cut down repetitive routine questions sent to the HR team. On top of that, the initial setup was seamless with clear built-in guidance. We didn’t need extra IT support, and the intuitive interface let us configure settings easily with no formal training required. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The main downside is its rather basic reporting and analytics functions. We want to track strategic HR data such as staff turnover trends, onboarding completion rates, and department-level leave usage patterns, but the default reports lack depth and customization options. We have to export raw data manually and create our own spreadsheets every month to prepare reports for management, which adds extra repetitive workload. The platform also lacks robust native third-party integrations, forcing us to rely on manual workarounds to connect data across our internal tools. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I really appreciate PurelyHR's user interface. It's very easy to use, especially for handling tasks like attendance management, payroll, and leave management. As someone working in HR, it's super helpful for managing a large team of over 900 employees. I can easily monitor attendance, identify gaps, and communicate with employees if needed. The setup process is straightforward too, and the system guides me through assigning employees to departments and designations. Overall, PurelyHR makes my job much simpler and helps manage all the HR related systems efficiently. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I think the system is a bit complicated when we open the PurelyHR app, as it does not show our attendance system in the front. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ease of requesting time off (PTO) and managing my PTO at a glance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Helpful to see all employees on vacation or days out of the office. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is user friendly and guide me every step of the way. It also helps employees to keep track of his vacation and sick leaves. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I don't see anything that makes it not helpful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Purely HR is very straightforward and intuitive to use. The 'Estimated Balance on a Specific Date' feature is valuable for employee's holiday planning. The 'at a glance' calendar makes seeing who is available or away quick and easy...this is essential for holiday and resource planning. The 'Time-Off Summary' function contains useful information including a summary of all time-off requests approved, pending, rejected and cancelled and can be shown for a user-selected time period. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only issue I have noticed is when booking a partial day off...the system is set to a standard workday (i.e., 7.5 hours), but when not all employees work the same number of hours in a standard workday, it can be somewhat confusing. For instance, if the company standard is a 7.5 hour workday, an employee's half-day is 3.75 hours, but if an employee works non standard hours (i.e., an 8 hour workday), that employee must enter 3.75 hours for a half-day even though their half-day is technically 4 hours. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Being able to see the schedule of all of my coworkers has been a huge help. I think the system and interface of Purely HR is very simple and easy to use for everyone. I thoroughly enjoy how easy it is to make sure I am taking the correct amount of time off, how much time I have remaining, whether it is PTO, Vacation, sick time, or bereavement, Purely HR has made it very simple for us to use here at Simply Business. I also enjoy every Friday submitting my time sheet, as it could not really be any easier than it is. Something that has helped me and my coworkers out a lot is the reminder email that gets sent out every Friday, if the time sheet is not submitted. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

When I think of anything I dislike about Purely HR not much comes to mind. One thing that I think could be fixed would probably be the "Special Dates" section, but that may be internal. Something else that maybe could be fixed or updated is also the documents page, as of right now, I have no need for the documents page and it is empty, maybe some documents could be uploaded in there? Again this could be for documents from my company and not Purely HR. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

PurelyHR shows me all my time used and time to use, both good and bad, but clear to both my employer and me. It also shows me my tasks working with the new HR Manager easily to know what is expected of me and what I need to do specifically. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My HR manager hasn't been able to find a "trigger" feature. For instance, some of my tasks are a counterpart of someone else's tasks to complete first before I can do mine. And to work remotely and efficiently; if there were a way to trigger my job once I knew Employee "X" had finished, that would be more helpful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

PurelyHR is definitely easy to navigate, and the overall design is pleasing to the eye. I enjoy that they send me an email a couple of days before a holiday or a day off because it's nice to have a reminder for scheduling purposes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The interface itself is quite clunky. The boxes in the monthly calendar view are too small to contain all of the folks who are taking off during a common vacation time. It is difficult to visualize the scale of absences on one particular day as a result. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.