Employee Navigator vs bswift vs Zevo

Swapping benefits administration platforms is no easy task, even if you time it right. You need to evaluate vendors, export and import employee data, set up eligibility rules, and test everything thoroughly before going live.

Not to mention the fact that implementations can drag on for months.

During your vendor search, you’ll commonly see three recommended options: Employee Navigator, bswift, and Zevo. Which one is right for you? We’ll break down each platform to help jump-start your search.

What are Employee Navigator, bswift, and Zevo?

All three are excellent choices for a benefits administration platform, but they serve different purposes and niches.

Employee Navigator

Employee Navigator is a legacy player in the space and has a long history of stability.

Employee Navigator has grown through acquisition, buying Ease in April 2023. As a result, Employee Navigator updated its platform to match Ease’s functionality and intends to port over existing Ease customers to expand its revenue base.

As a legacy player in the space, 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.

bswift

bswift has long been a good choice 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 get insights from their data. For enterprise employers running complex programs, that extra layer of help can be a great asset.

Zevo

Founded in 2015, Zevo is the newest of the three, but its team isn’t new to benefits administration; the founding team’s experience in core and voluntary benefits goes back more than 40 years.

We’ve seen firsthand the frustrations employers face once they enter the “messy middle,” where simplistic platforms no longer meet their needs, but enterprise platforms are prohibitively expensive. Our answer to this problem was to build a highly configurable benefits administration platform that puts the power of plan design directly in your hands. Whether you want to hire across states, offer a unique set of benefits, or set up a custom employee-facing portal, you can do it all on Zevo.

How Employee Navigator Compares to Zevo

Both Employee Navigator and Zevo serve brokers and employers directly, but the experience can differ greatly depending on your needs.

As an established player in the space, Employee Navigator has a strong broker base, making it a great partner for brokers looking to manage client relationships at scale. But legacy software can be rigid, especially for more unique situations. With employers hiring in more states and offering newer benefits than ever before, a templated approach may feel limiting at times.

In contrast, Zevo Benefits was built with complex use cases in mind. Zevo was designed for employers and for brokers scaling their book of business, and it lets you manage standard benefits such as:

• Medical, Dental, & Vision
• Tax-Advantaged Accounts: HSA, FSA, and HRA
• Life & AD&D
• Disability Insurance
• Whole Life

And voluntary benefits as well, like:

• Health & Lifestyle: Critical illness, accident, hospital, cancer, and pet insurance
• Protection & Legal: Legal and ID theft coverage

Along with configurable controls for notifications, election mapping, scripting, and reusable custom templates. You also get full EDI lifecycle monitoring, employer-level white labeling, and 40+ automations to run your benefits at scale. Zevo includes compliance tools for data monitoring and validation, ACA support, decision support, and dependent verification.

Use Case	Platform	Reasoning
I want a templated plan design	Employee Navigator	Zevo can offer templates as well, but if you don't need complex plan design, Employee Navigator is just as good.
I value carrier network breadth	Employee Navigator	Employee Navigator is the right choice here with over 600 partners.
I value access to my data and the ability to generate reports on the fly	Zevo	Zevo offers a scriptable reporting engine and expert help to build custom queries off of your data.
I have a specific or unique combination of benefits that I want to offer	Zevo	Zevo excels here. With Zevo, you can offer voluntary and specialty benefits thanks to its highly adaptable platform.
I value having a responsive support team	Zevo	Zevo’s median support response time is just under one hour, and every support ticket is answered within 24 hours.

How bswift Compares to Zevo

Of the platforms on this list, bswift is the strongest enterprise choice, partly because of its blend of sophisticated software and high-touch services. bswift is also one of the most AI-forward benefits administration companies, thanks to Emma, its AI assistant that answers questions and automates tasks.

In comparison, Zevo works up- and down-market. With powerful automations, support for custom setups, a scriptable engine for custom reports, and dozens of configurable settings, Zevo can reliably serve simpler use cases as well as more complex needs. Automation doesn’t mean you can’t reach a person, though. At Zevo, we pride ourselves on our knowledgeable, hyper-responsive support team, which is on hand to answer questions or help you get the most out of the product at any time.

As for AI, Zevo takes a responsible approach to AI that keeps a human in the loop where it matters most while progressively automating tasks. This helps to mitigate errors that can cause confusion or lead to compliance failures down the line.

Use Case	Platform	Reasoning
I value the combination of software and services	bswift	While Zevo offers services, bswift is known for its pro services layer.
I want an enterprise platform	bswift	Of the two, bswift is designed and sold to enterprise employers.
I value wide carrier breadth	bswift	Like Employee Navigator, bswift offers a wide carrier selection.
I want a platform designed for brokers as well as employers	Zevo	Zevo was built to be book-of-business native for brokers, while bswift is built for employers.
I want to be able to generate reports on my own	Zevo	Zevo gives you full access to scriptable reporting with help when you need it, while bswift requires consultant help for reporting.
I don’t want to sacrifice human judgment for AI automation	Zevo	With Zevo, AI is introduced where it is most helpful while leaving room for human judgment and oversight where it matters.

Why HR Teams Trust Zevo to Manage Benefits

Why consider Zevo over some of the more established or enterprise vendors? Here are three reasons:

• Zevo is fast to implement
• Zevo offers enterprise-level configuration without the price tag
• Zevo’s support team is responsive

Fast to Implement

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
• Migrating your data
• QA and thorough testing before going live

Here’s what one customer had to say post-implementation:

It can be hit or miss when you use a new system. Zevo has been a hit all the way! The system is great, and the service is great.

Enterprise-Level Configuration Without the Price Tag

Enterprise-level configurability is one of the top reasons companies trust Zevo with their benefits administration.

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 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. When it comes to benefits orchestration, it’s our attention to detail and willingness to help – especially during those hectic times of year – that separates Zevo from the rest.

Looking for a Configurable and Quick-to-Implement Ben Admin Platform? Check Out Zevo

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.

Employee Navigator, bswift, and Zevo can unquestionably handle your benefits administration.

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, show you how your plans would be built on Zevo, and lay out a realistic implementation timeline.