It’s official: Ease will be sunset in 2027.
Nearly four years after Employee Navigator acquired Ease, new companies won’t be able to join Ease, and existing customers will need to move off Ease later that year.
Whether you’re ready or not, you will need an alternative to Ease soon. Since some benefits administration platform implementations can take up to 3 months to fully roll out, it’s best to start your search sooner rather than later.
Below, we’ll share the best alternatives to Ease to consider as you look for a replacement. Browse the list and start your search process now; 2027 is fast approaching.
The Best Alternatives to Ease
Below, we summarize the four best alternatives to Ease and where each platform excels. The four best Ease alternatives are:
- Zevo
- Employee Navigator
- bswift
- PlanSource
Keep reading for an in-depth review.
Zevo
Let’s start with one of the newer and more flexible platforms that meets the needs of modern brokers and HR teams. Of the platforms on this list, you’d be hard-pressed to find one more configurable, flexible, and affordable than Zevo Benefits.
Founded in 2017 and backed by a team with many years of benefits experience, Zevo Benefits is a highly configurable benefits administration platform that puts the power of plan design directly in your hands. Many platforms cater to the extremes: smaller companies with simple benefits needs and large enterprises. Zevo Benefits was purpose-built for the “messy middle,” providing a complete benefits administration experience for employers with 10-10,000 lives.
What do we mean by complex needs? If your plan document says it, Zevo can build it. We customize your benefits exactly to your specifications rather than forcing them into a rigid template.
Core Health & Savings
- Medical, Dental, & Vision
- Tax-Advantaged Accounts: HSA, FSA, and HRA
Life & Disability
- Life & AD&D
- Disability Insurance
- Whole Life
Voluntary Benefits
- Health & Lifestyle: Critical illness, accident, hospital, cancer, and pet insurance
- Protection & Legal: Legal and ID theft coverage
Continuity & Specialized Plans
- COBRA
- Defined Contribution
- Union & Association Products
- Grandfathered Plans
You also get full EDI lifecycle monitoring, employer-level white labeling, and 40+ automations to run your benefits at scale. Zevo matches that with a complete suite of compliance tools, including data monitoring and validation, ACA support, decision support, and dependent verification.
Where Zevo Excels:
Zevo is a small, flexible challenger going up against larger legacy players in the space. Zevo is best for brokers, enrollment firms, and voluntary carriers that need a configurable engine, as well as price-sensitive groups with complex voluntary or affinity programs. We like to say that Zevo offers the enterprise-level experience without the enterprise-level complexity or price tag.
Employee Navigator
Since Employee Navigator purchased Ease, why not stick with them for convenience?
As a legacy player in the space, Employee Navigator has a long history of stability. Since the acquisition, Employee Navigator has worked to ensure feature parity, developed an internal migration toolkit, and added over 300 features to make the transition easier for Ease customers.
Convenience matters, but it’s worth asking whether the platform will keep up as your book of business grows. Employee Navigator typically performs best with standard plan designs, while employers with more sophisticated plans or custom reporting needs may lean on support or add-ons to get there.
Where Employee Navigator excels:
Employee Navigator is one of the legacy players in the space. By many accounts, it trades depth for simplicity: complex HR needs often require add-ons, and key features like EDI feeds are gated by tier. It’s best for brokers running a book of small employers with standard plan designs, roughly 10–500 employees.
bswift
What if you want a platform that marries services with software? bswift has long been a good option for companies looking for a full-service benefits partner and not just a standalone platform.
In the past year, bswift has gone all in on AI-powered support. With its new Emma intelligence, bswift can help employers automate open enrollment, answer employee questions, and generate reports on the fly. For enterprise employers running complex programs, that extra layer of help can be a great asset, but mid-market teams that would rather manage benefits directly in the platform may find it’s more than they need.
Where bswift excels:
bswift pairs technology with outsourced services; that sophistication also means it can be heavier and costlier than smaller groups need. It’s best for large employers that want a full-service benefits partner, not just software.
PlanSource
If you’re looking for another mid-market option, PlanSource could be a good alternative to Ease.
Like Zevo, PlanSource handles complex needs well, with flexible controls over benefit offerings, EDI setup, and plan design. In practice, it tends to serve the upper end of the mid-market and into enterprise, and that depth shows up during setup. Custom reporting typically runs through PlanSource’s professional services team, so build a generous buffer into your implementation timeline as you plan your move off Ease.
Where PlanSource Excels:
PlanSource is built for complex mid-market and enterprise benefits, with strong customization, carrier billing, ACA/COBRA modules, and enrollment decision support. Like Zevo, it’s best for HR teams with roughly 200–10,000 employees managing multiple carriers and complex eligibility rules.
Compare These 4 Ease Alternatives Side-by-Side
You have a wide range of options, from platforms that cater to enterprise needs to those for smaller employers. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the four platforms above so you can see how they stack up.
Why Companies Trust Their Benefits to Zevo
Between the platforms above, you have great options. Why consider Zevo over some of the more enterprise vendors? Below are the reasons that brokers and employers alike trust Zevo for their benefits.
Fast to Deploy
An employer-branded benefits portal, dozens of automations, complex plan designs – all of that probably sounds great, but the key question is how long it will take to deploy for your company or client.
Implementing benefits administration software isn’t exactly like setting up a CRM, but the Zevo team does its best to make your rollout as painless as possible. We can’t speak for every platform on this list, but we can share that a Zevo implementation from kickoff to go-live can take as little as four to six weeks.
We break our implementation process into the following steps:
- Gathering your data and eligibility rules
- Building the shell of your benefits plan and HRIS integrations
- Migration
- QA and thorough testing before going live
We’ve even finished implementations in as little as two weeks, depending on your carrier and EDI setup.
Enterprise-Level Configuration Without the Price Tag
This is likely the top reason companies trust Zevo with their benefits administration. Zevo offers enterprise-level customizability.
Practically speaking, that means if your plan document says it, you can build it on Zevo.
From a simple dental plan to a stacked, grandfathered whole life plan with underwriting, Zevo can support you. Zevo covers core benefits like medical, dental, and vision, and also supports medical-related benefits like telehealth, fertility, HSAs, FSAs, and voluntary and supplemental benefits. Want to offer a wellness credit, commuter and transit benefits, or tuition reimbursement? You can do that and more too.
When you match that with Zevo’s built-in validation checks that automatically catch issues like mismatched SSNs, missing dependents, and incorrect coverage codes, you have a complete operating system for benefits orchestration.
Responsive Support
If you ask Zevo customers what they like about Zevo, the answer is usually something like, “I don’t have to think too much about it.”
On other platforms, your support request might go into a queue that takes days to work through. For Zevo, your request goes to a dedicated secure channel that our support team monitors around the clock. We answer every request within 24 hours of submission, but our median response time is just under one hour.
Whether you need help with open enrollment or have a question about scripting a report, you can expect to hear back from the Zevo support team.
Looking for an Alternative to Ease? Check Out Zevo Benefits
Between evaluating platforms, getting buy-in, and working around open enrollment, the window for a smooth transition is shorter than it looks. Start now, and you get to choose your next platform on your terms. Wait, and you’ll be choosing under pressure.
Every platform on this list can take over from Ease.
The real question is which one fits the way you work. If you need room for complex plan designs, voluntary and specialty benefits, and EDI feeds you don’t have to babysit, without paying enterprise prices or sitting through an enterprise-length implementation, Zevo is built for you.
The best way to find out is to see it for yourself. Schedule a free demo of Zevo for your team. On the call, we’ll go through your current setup on Ease, show you how your plans would be built on Zevo, and lay out a realistic implementation timeline.
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