Many brokers and HR teams struggle with the complexity of managing employee benefits across multiple carriers and plan types. Ease and Employee Navigator are two of the most widely adopted platforms built to solve this exact problem. Despite offering similar features, they serve different types of users and handle the process differently.

Ease works well for brokers and small businesses looking for a straightforward and organized way to manage enrollment and clients. Employee Navigator, on the other hand, suits mid-to-large employers or agencies needing deeper automation and branded workflows across teams or clients.

In this guide, you'll get a feature-by-feature comparison of Ease vs Employee Navigator, including how they differ in benefits management, HR workflows, onboarding, and more.

Ease Vs Employee Navigator: At A Glance

Features

Ease

Employee Navigator

Benefits Administrations

Built for fast setup with 6,000+ pre-mapped carrier forms

Offers broader integrations (400+ partners) for payroll, carriers, and TPAs

HR Management 

Basic HR tools with PTO tracking, org charts, and shared calendars

More advanced with automation, document storage, and real-time reporting

Onboarding

Simplifies document collection and e-signatures for multiple hires 

Customizable checklists, automated task tracking, and role-based onboarding 

Offboarding

Built-in termination workflows with COBRA support and carrier notifications

Integrates with Kept, Inc. for employee-centered offboarding, less focused on benefit automation

ACA Reporting

Automated, low-touch setup with built-in coding verification and form filing

Flexible ACA tracking with user-defined periods, audit trail, and pricing by company size

Pricing

Starts at $530/month for up to 2,000 employees and 3 agency users

Starts at $630/month with unlimited employees

What Is Ease?

Ease (formerly known as Ease Central) is an online benefits administration platform that helps insurance brokers and small businesses manage employee benefits more easily. Instead of dealing with paper forms and manual updates, over 2,300 agencies use this system to handle enrollment, track changes, and stay compliant.

Not only that, but Ease is also HITRUST CSF® certified, which means it follows strict rules to keep sensitive employee data safe and secure. This makes it ideal for industries like insurance, benefits consulting, and small businesses that need to manage sensitive employee information with confidence.

Standout Features Of Ease

Marketing Tools: It includes ready-made materials, educational content, and campaign templates that brokers can use to promote their services. These tools are designed to simplify outreach and support enrollment efforts

Built-In Form Management: Ease offers an extensive library of over 6,000 carrier forms, including those for medical, dental, and vision plans. These forms are digitally mapped, enabling seamless online enrollment without the need for paper forms

Pros And Cons Of Ease

Pros

  • Employees can manage their own benefits and elections, saving admins time
  • Many users appreciate its visual layout and ease of use
  • Enrollment files are pre-formatted for carriers, simplifying submissions

Cons

  • No option of date filters in reporting forces users to sift through unnecessary data
  • Customer support is slow and unresponsive

What Is Employee Navigator?

Employee Navigator is cloud-based software that helps businesses and insurance brokers manage employee benefits and Human Resources (HR) tasks at one place. More than 170,000 companies use it to handle benefits administration, onboarding, and compliance.

One example is Caravus, a benefits agency that replaced manual processing with Employee Navigator to reduce administrative overhead. By fully adopting the platform and using its 300+ carrier integrations, they improved data accuracy to 99.5%. This shift allowed them to cut down on repetitive admin work.

That kind of impact makes this system valuable for benefits agencies and growing HR teams that often deal with frequent plan updates and complex enrollment workflows.

Standout Features Of Employee Navigator

Priority Phone Support: Instead of waiting in the general support queue, the Platinum plan gives you priority access—so your calls are prioritized. This is especially useful when urgent issues come up

Customizable Branding: It offers customizable branding as part of its Benefits Administration and HRIS platform. This feature allows brokers and employers to personalize the platform to reflect their organization's identity, enhancing the user experience

Task Trigger On Plan And Life Events: When an employee experiences a qualifying life event—such as marriage, the birth of a child, or a change in employment status—the system can automatically generate and assign relevant tasks to HR personnel or other stakeholders

Pros And Cons Of Employee Navigator

Pros

  • It allows employees to compare benefits plan options and enroll online
  • The ‘Wall’ feature gives HR admins a single screen view of daily employee activity
  • The system offers real-time tracking of benefits enrollment for administrators

Cons

  • Change alerts lacks context, forcing admins to check the system manually
  • Lacks digital signature functionality for forms

Ease Vs Employee Navigator: Key Feature Comparison

Benefits Administrations

Ease is built for quick setup and user-friendly workflows, making it especially helpful for brokers and General Agents (GAs). It includes tools like custom ACA rate libraries and allows GAs to manage multiple employer groups efficiently. One big advantage is that it comes with over 6,000 pre-mapped carrier forms, meaning brokers and HR teams can handle enrollments and changes without needing to upload or map forms manually. This saves a lot of time and reduces the chances of errors.

In contrast, Employee Navigator doesn’t specify a fixed number of mapped forms, which suggests that users might need to handle form setup themselves or rely on carrier-specific support. However, where Employee Navigator truly stands out is in its integration capabilities. It connects with over 400 partners, including insurance carriers, payroll providers, and third-party administrators (TPAs). This broad network makes it easier for larger businesses to sync systems and minimize manual work. While Ease also supports payroll integration, Employee Navigator offers greater flexibility through a wider range of connections.

Winner: This one’s a tie. Ease is better for brokers who need fast setup and built-in forms, while Employee Navigator is ideal for larger teams that rely on deep integrations.

HR Management

Ease helps manage time-off requests, holidays, and vacations. Employees can request PTO, and managers can approve it after checking the team’s schedule through a shared calendar. You also get a basic employee directory and org chart that shows job titles and connections across your company.

Onboarding and offboarding are handled directly inside the platform. You can also connect it to your payroll provider, but most of its HR functions mainly revolve around benefits and employee tracking. It’s limited in the sense that it doesn’t offer in-depth customization, automation, or detailed reporting—so it works best if you want a straightforward, benefits-focused HR setup that’s easy to run.

Employee Navigator, however, gives you more control over how your HR system works. It’s designed to centralize employee data, reduce double entry, and keep everything in sync. Employees can manage their profiles, request time off, access documents, and even make life event changes independently.

What makes it stronger is automation—if an employee updates their address or leaves the company, those changes automatically reflect across payroll, carriers, and other tools without manual updates. It also stores all your company documents and keeps an audit trail for every change. You can customize your org by setting up departments, locations, and classes, which makes it easier to pull reports or communicate with specific groups. Plus, the real-time reporting tool lets you quickly check open enrollment progress, pull employee data, or view termination reports.

Winner: Employee Navigator clearly wins this round for its stronger automation, customization, and centralized control.

Onboarding

With Ease, HR teams can have employees fill out not just the standard federal forms, but also any company-specific documents like employee handbooks or policy agreements—all within the system. These forms are electronically signed and saved securely in one spot for both the admin and employee to access later. This helps HR avoid juggling email threads or physical paperwork. It’s especially useful for businesses onboarding multiple employees at once, since it saves a lot of time and reduces errors.

Employee Navigator, on the other hand, takes onboarding a step further by offering more customization and automation. It lets you create custom onboarding checklists and assign tasks based on your industry or location. You can also track a complete audit trail of what forms were sent, signed, and completed—helping with compliance. New hires manage all their onboarding tasks, benefits enrollment, PTO setup, and company policies in one intuitive dashboard. This makes it more flexible for larger or more complex companies that want to tailor the onboarding experience based on different roles or regions.

Winner: Employee Navigator wins for onboarding because it offers greater flexibility and automation, which is key for companies with varied roles, locations, or compliance needs.

Offboarding

Ease handles offboarding directly within its platform, focusing on the practical steps HR teams need. When an employee leaves, you can mark their status (terminated or retired), add a reason for leaving, and have their benefits automatically ended. If you're connected with a carrier, it also notifies them automatically. It supports COBRA too—if integrated with a TPA, Ease pushes the employee’s data and sends the COBRA notice without extra manual steps. This makes it efficient and ideal for compliance and benefits management.

Employee Navigator, in comparison, offers offboarding through its partner Kept, Inc., which focuses more on the employee’s emotional and financial transition. This ‘compassionate offboarding’ gives departing employees guidance, insurance options, and helps maintain a positive experience—possibly even encouraging rehires in the future. However, it doesn’t highlight built-in automation for COBRA, carrier notifications, or benefit termination the way Ease does.

Winner: Ease wins this round for offboarding due to its built-in automation and compliance-friendly workflows.

ACA Reporting

Ease aims to simplify ACA (Affordable Care Act) filing by automating the entire process. Once the system determines an employer is required to file, HR teams only need to enable the ACA module, fill out employee templates, and connect payroll data. Ease then automatically tracks eligibility—especially for variable-hour employees—and calculates affordability using W-2s, rate of pay, or the federal poverty line. The platform verifies coding accuracy for 1094/1095 forms and prepares everything for e-signature and IRS submission. It’s designed for businesses that want ACA to run quietly in the background, with minimal hands-on setup.

Employee Navigator, meanwhile, also offers a robust ACA solution, but it gives users more control and flexibility. It lets you set up measurement, stability, and administrative periods to fit your company’s unique needs. You can track hours, import data easily, assign Safe Harbor codes, and generate/send all IRS-required forms directly from the platform. One standout feature is its transparent pricing structure, which breaks down costs based on company size. It also partners with Nelco for secure, high-volume filing and has earned certifications for its data accuracy and reliability. This makes it a strong choice for agencies and larger employers that want full visibility, precise control, and budget clarity.

Winner: This round is a tie. Ease is best for hands-off ACA filing, while Employee Navigator suits teams that want more control and customization.

Final Verdict: Which One Wins?

With a score of 2:1 in favor of Employee Navigator, and two categories ending in a tie, Employee Navigator comes out ahead overall.

That said, the right choice depends on what matters most to your team. If you need a platform that offers fast setup, built-in carrier forms, and automated handling of offboarding and ACA compliance, Ease is a great fit. On the other hand, if your business needs more flexibility, deeper integrations, and control over onboarding, HR workflows, and ACA reporting, Employee Navigator is the stronger choice.

If neither platform fulfills your needs, consider exploring other HR software solutions like Gusto HR Software or BambooHR.