Remote Review: Level Up Your Distributed Team

Remote

$

29

• Try Remote
• How we test →

Remote allows you to automate the legal and logistical challenges of international hiring. Whether it’s an employer, EOR, or contractor, this platform helps you hire the right candidate for your organization while handling the team’s HR and payroll.

Though the remote work trend grew exponentially during the pandemic, it did not end with that. Instead, it has become the favorite mode of work worldwide. A Buffer study shows that 98% of the respondents prefer to work remotely. Any growing company would want to utilize this interest to hire the top talent from anywhere in the world. And this is where the Remote comes into play.

If you are planning to expand globally or want to grow your global team, you need to learn in detail about the features of Remote to determine whether it is the right fit for your business. Read my unbiased Remote review to understand its top features, pros, cons, and pricing structure.

Features

• Hire EOR, contractors, and freelancers globally.
• Run global payroll and pay in local currencies.
• Quickly recruit employees with AI-powered matching.
• Complete HR suite with time tracking and expense management.
• Employee self-service portal for handling documents and payroll.

Pros

• Manage unlimited employees in Remote HR.
• Built-in risk protection for international hiring.
• Constant monitoring of local legal updates.

Cons

• Phone support is not available.
• Does not offer any free forever plan.

5 Main Remote Product Offering

Established in 2019, Remote boasts a distributed team with people from 75 countries. Remote is ideal for startups, SMEs, and enterprises expanding internationally. Industries that benefit from its solutions include SaaS companies, EdTech, healthcare, agencies, and FinTech. The highlighted products of Remote are:

1. Employer of Record (EOR)

Remote offers global EOR services spread in 75+ countries. By opting for this service, you can reduce the paperwork and cost of establishing legal entities in a foreign country. Remote customers save an average of $74,000 in employment costs, and you can have that benefit as well.

Once you decide to hire someone as EOR, Remote onboard them compliantly in minutes, adhering to local laws. You can even pay them accurately and on time using the integrated payroll consolidation system. It offers complete visibility into your global payroll process round the clock so that you can stay updated about the payment status.

You can attract the best international talents by offering them competitive benefits packages with local standards. Remote enables you to provide your employees with company equity options. Even when hiring from other countries, it’s risk protection tools ensure the same level of security as local hires through risk assessment. As a result, you can compliantly and confidently hire from anywhere in the world.

2. Contractor Management

If you are into contractor hiring and management, Remote’s contractor management features will greatly benefit you. It lets you hire, manage, and pay contractors in 180+ countries. You can access industry experts who offer personalized guidance from onboarding to offboarding. Using this platform, you need to spend less time and effort managing invoices and making payments in 70+ currencies.

Remote takes care of the local compliance issues regardless of your hiring location. It creates localized contracts for hiring contractors, keeping you compliant with local laws. I appreciate its built-in AI tools that Remote uses for misclassification risk mitigation, ultimately saving you from heavy penalties. It boasts powerful tools for automated onboarding and global payments, making life easier for you and your contractors.

3. Global Payroll

Remote is a comprehensive platform where you get integrated global payroll services. It performs unified payroll processing so that you can accurately manage the salary and tax of your employees. It reduces the complexities of global employee benefits management, such as juggling multiple brokers, transferring data from other software, and negotiating contracts by implementing benefits packages from a unified platform.

No matter where you want to pay your employees, it ensures you stay compliant with local regulations and laws. Moreover, Remote has payroll experts in all the countries they operate. Thus, you get guidance, support, and clarity about local payroll benchmarks, expectations, and regulations from them.

4. Recruitment

Remote is your global hiring partner that lets you find the best talents from the market. It’s AI goes beyond generic keywords and matches skills, eligibility, location, availability, and remote work preferences to find the perfect professionals for your job openings. Thus, you are left with candidates that are actually interested and suitable for your vacancies. 

I like how its global talent finder lets you enter your budget, role, and time zone, based on which it shows you the best places to hire from. Remote help with calculating hiring costs, exploring average salary, and providing country hiring guides, enabling you to make smarter hiring decisions.

5. HR Management

Remote offers a complete HRIS platform to handle all HR tasks of your company. From onboarding to offboarding, from documentation to PTO access — it lets you perform all the necessary tasks from the same platform, no matter what your company size is. It’s built-in controls and active monitoring ensure maximum security of employee data.

You can use the same solution to manage employee documents like contracts and other legal documents, all of which can be accessible from the same place without any difficulty. Its transparent time-tracking feature, integration with payroll, and reporting ensure accurate payroll. You can use this for expense management of your organization.

Remote has a self-service portal for your employees so they can perform tasks such as accessing data, choosing payroll preferences, and document management by themselves, saving time for your HR team.

It even has a mobile app for Android and iOS that allows company employees to upload receipts, review expense details, track approval status, and access payslips. All these reduce the manual labor of your team and improve employee satisfaction.

7 Reasons to Use Remote

Wondering why you should opt for Remote for your global team management? Find out the major reasons below.

1. Hire International Employees, Freelancers & Contractors

Remote is a single platform that enables you to hire employees, contractors, and freelancers worldwide. It frees you from the obligation of setting up a legal entity in every country from where you wish to hire. Therefore, you save money, resources, time, and administrative paperwork. 

Remote functions as an Employer of Record (EOR) and hires employees on your behalf from various countries. It manages payroll, taxes, benefits, and local compliance of the EORs. At the same time, it empowers you to hire freelancers and contractors from a global talent pool. By handling the complexities of the international workforce, Remote enables you to build international teams without administrative and legal burdens or get help from different relocation or expansion consulting services.

2. IP Protection (Remote IP Guard)

Protecting your intellectual property and invention rights is tough, and it becomes more challenging when you have to work with a distributed team of EORs and contractors. Remote resolves this problem with its remote IP Guard. It uses a transparent two-staged approach to trace the IP transfer chain from the employees to you.

Since Remote has legal entities in all the countries it operates, you do not have the risk of getting your IP transferred to partner vendors. It mitigates compliance risks by constantly monitoring and updating IP law changes.

3. Run Payroll

Remote functions as the in-house payroll partner of your organization. It helps you run global payroll for all your locations while staying compliant with local payroll laws. As per your requirement, Remote lets you have a weekly payroll cycle instead of a monthly cycle. It ensures that your employees are paid accurately and on time, and that too in their local currencies. 

Remote uses multiple payment methods such as wire transfer, credit card, ACH, and SEPA to pay your contractors. It saves you from the risk of costly errors and helps you maintain compliance with the legal framework.

4. Offer Global Benefits

If you are planning to attract global talents, Remote lets you do so by offering best-in-class employee benefits packages based on the local standard. Such competitive global benefits strictly adhere to the specific legal and cultural nuances of the resident countries. It saves you from navigating the complex web of international benefits regulations, which can be time-consuming and costly. 

The experts from the Remote team ensure comprehensive benefits, such as health insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance, mental health support, pension, 401(k) plans, retirement plans, and other perks. Hence, it enhances employee satisfaction and strengthens your company’s position as a desirable employer.

5. Recruit Top Talents

Remote breaks down the geographical barrier of traditional hiring by letting you hire the top talents worldwide. In today’s landscape, the most skilled professionals may reside anywhere in the world, and Remote facilitates access to this global talent pool. 

By handling the complexities of international employment, such as compliance, payroll, and benefits, Remote enables businesses to access the most skilled and experienced professionals for a position. Thus, they can easily identify and secure the best candidates without having to worry about their location. 

6. US Expansion

Remote hires and manages your team in the US for your business. It centralizes your HR workforce management in one place while offering a smooth and self-serving experience to your employees. It simplifies multi-state payroll and tax with hand-selected benefit packages for 401(k) and life insurance.

Remote’s intuitive interface is easy to use, and you won’t need to use multiple tools anymore for your HR processes. You can run monthly or semi-monthly payroll with state and federal tax calculations. Above all, it manages necessary registrations, keeps all your compliance documents organized, and gives real-time alerts on any state regulation changes that might affect your business.

7. Offer Stock Options to Employees

Remote enables you to manage an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) to grant stock options to your global employees. Its equity experts provide you with necessary information about country-specific guidance so that you can quickly issue the equity at a lower legal cost. It offers in-depth analysis reports of your employee stock plan, offering you the latest data on its impact on your team and organization. The equity incentive planning and management page on Remote looks like below:

Remote Integrations

Remote supports integration with HRIS and ATS systems, along with payroll and communication software from your existing tech stack. Thus, it enables you to streamline the hiring, onboarding, and people management processes of your organization. All integrations save you time, reduce manual and duplicate data entry across multiple platforms, and enable you to share information across your tech stack. Some of the popular Remote integrations are:

• Slack: Automates notifications about completing actions.
• Workday: Sync EOR and Contractor employee data from Workday to Remote.
• QuickBooks: Moves contractor invoices generated in Remote as a bill into QuickBooks.
• Gusto: Manages EOR details and payroll.
• Zapier: Allows you to create automated workflows between Remote and 5000+ apps.

Furthermore, the API access of Remote enables you to create custom automation with any tool.

Remote Pricing

Remote offers no free plan, but you can opt for its free 7-day trial after signing up. Remote has different plans for the services it offers. In my opinion, this is a cost-effective option for the users as it lets them pick only the services they need. Find its subscription plans with pricing and features below.

Plans	Pricing (employee/month)	Features
Employer of Record (EOR)	$599	Hiring without opening a local entity, dedicated local expert, local payroll with localized benefits
Payroll	$29	Transparent international payroll, simple self-service platform, personalized support from specialists
Contractor Management	$29	Supports international contractors, create and sign localized contracts, one-click contractor approval
Contractor Management Plus	$99	Zero hidden fees, indemnity protection and local compliance, penalty coverage
Contractor of Record	$325	Direct contractor engagement and payment, AI-powered misclassification detection tools, uncapped indemnity
Equity	$999/year	Fully compliant equity for global team, tax handling assistance, equity program insights

Remote Support

When it comes to customer support, Remote can be contacted through live chat and email. From the Remote dashboard, customers can access the help widget, using which you can either get help from Remote AI, chat with its expert team, or submit a support request.

Remote has a Knowledge Base that contains answers to software-related how-to’s. Clients are also assigned dedicated account managers who help them with their queries.

How Does Remote Manage Security and Compliance?

Being a platform offering payroll, benefits, and tax compliance for global teams, Remote ensures data security with enterprise-grade data protection. It is ISO27001 certified and SOC 2 compliant, all of which reflect its commitment to the security of the highest standards. Its dedicated security team tests vulnerabilities in the network and maintains audit logs. 

For personal data security, it complies with GDPR and encrypts data in transit and at rest. Thus, you can be assured that your personal data will not be sold to anyone or used for unintended reasons. 

To prevent unauthorized access, Remote implements single sign-on (SSO) and two-factor authentication (2FA). Apart from these, Remote regularly monitors applications and infrastructure, daily backs up data, and ships application logs to an off-site location, to be kept for 30 days.

Remote ensures HR compliance using Remote Watchtower. This robust tool constantly looks for any changes in international HR and labor laws and turns complex updates into simplified action insights for you. It also implements the legal changes and shares additional compliance tips.

Remote Alternatives

If you want to hire global talents without establishing legal entities, Remote is not the only option. Here are some Remote alternatives you might want to try.

Who Should Use Remote?

Remote is particularly beneficial for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) looking to expand their reach internationally. It helps them establish a presence in new markets without the overhead costs of setting up physical offices. Moreover, companies that require multi-country compliance automation and startups aiming to onboard global talent should use Remote.

Who Shouldn’t Use Remote?

Remote is not ideal for organizations with predominantly local or limited international operations. Companies with minimal HR needs and organizations that do not need to make multiple payments to international contractors or freelancers should also skip this software and go for other tools.

Remote Verdict

Remote is an excellent choice as a global EOR and payroll solution that simplifies international hiring and compliance. Businesses seeking rapid global expansion without establishing local entities can use it to manage their employees from the same platform. Remote receives the Geekflare Innovation Award for its global compliance features.

Its user-friendly interface and services, including payroll and benefits management, make it ideal for startups and mid-sized companies. However, if your company has complex HR needs, you must reassess the integration capabilities with existing systems before choosing it.