Oyster EOR Expert Review [2026]: Features & Competitors

Spend Management & Expenses

In case your employees have expenses, Oyster needs to know, as they are the ones reimbursing the employees. Oyster includes an integrated expense system that allows EOR employees to submit reimbursements directly within the platform. Employees upload receipts, enter descriptions, and submit expenses for approval. The designated approver can then see the expense report and approve or reject. Once approved, Oyster reimburses the employee automatically through payroll.

What’s included:

• Receipt uploads (PDF / image formats)
• Employer approval workflow
• Employer can submit expense on behalf of employee
• Automatic reimbursement via monthly payroll
• Expense visibility in the payroll cycle and invoices
• Integrations with Zapier, Expensify and SAP Concur
  

Limitations:

• No mileage tracking
• No spend cards or virtual cards
• No multi-step approval chains
• No ERP sync for expenses
  

This means companies using existing expense software must maintain dual workflows (internal + Oyster), which can increase manual work for finance teams

Time-Off & Leave Management

Also EOR employees need to take vacation at one point. We can tell you that multi-country leave can get complex fast as every country has different policies. For some countries, leave days do even impact payroll.

For instance, in France employers must pay a (% surcharge on holiday pay or in Norway sick leave is paid by the government after 16 days. Oyster must know all of this to calculate salary correctly. That is why Oyster has created their own leave management system designed primarily to ensure statutory compliance across countries. Employees can submit time-off requests, and managers approve them inside the portal.

What it supports:

• Statutory leave rules per country
• Single approver
• Leave reporting
• Option for unlimited PTO policies
• Employee self-service for time-off requests

What’s missing vs other EORs:

• No multi-step approval workflows
• No custom leave types beyond basic PTO/sick leave
• No calendar integrations
• No country-specific policy customization beyond statutory minimums

For teams with simple PTO processes, it works well. For large enterprises or companies standardizing policies globally, it is limited.

Compliance Engine & Risk Controls

Oyster values data protection and compliance. They confirm compliance with major global privacy laws:

• GDPR / UK-GDPR
• LGPD (Brazil)
• CCPA & CPRA (California)
• Data Privacy Framework (EU -> US transfers)

Customer data is handled according to:

• Oyster’s Privacy Policy
• Oyster’s Data Processing Addendum

You must also comply with all relevant privacy regulations as a client.

Oyster takes a strict, compliance-first approach, offering several built-in tools that help companies stay aligned with local employment laws across 180+ countries on their platform. 

Compliance Checker (HRIS-Powered Scan)

Oyster can connect to your HRIS like BambooHR to automatically scan employee data for potential compliance risks. Once connected, Oyster reviews the employee records against its local employment rules database to highlight potential compliance gaps. It flags issues like incorrect leave allowances, minimum wage mismatches, or missing documentation and generates a country-specific compliance report. This feature is unique among other EOR providers and it gives teams early alerts before a regulator might raise an issue.

Misclassification Analyser

This guided questionnaire assesses whether a worker should legally be classified as a contractor or an employee. It uses jurisdiction-specific logic and provides “expert tips” to reduce misclassification risk, especially useful when paired with Oyster Shell protection. This is quite a common tool in the industry that is offered by most EOR providers.

Employment Terms Comparator

Oyster includes a built-in benchmarking tool that lets teams compare statutory employment terms between countries. It is quiet a basic tool but can be very useful to compare terms like vacation days, probation periods, termination rules or sick leaves across countries. This can be useful also before you make hiring decisions.

Onboarding Compliance Guardrails

During both contractor and EOR onboarding, Oyster enforces local legal requirements by:

• auto-generating compliant contracts
• validating eligibility
• applying required clauses (IP, termination, confidentiality)
• preventing risky or non-standard contract setups
  

Further, Oyster displays compliance-related reminders and required actions directly in the left-side menu, making it easy to catch issues early without digging through complex menus.

Integrations & Automations

Oyster integration is dependable and compliance first. While Oyster might focus on 19 integrations only, they do integrate with the most important ones and focus on a deep level of integrations. While some competitors have limited integration with expense management tools, Oyster integrates with Expensify and Cocu and also provides further automation and notification layers with Zapier and Slack. 

Oyster’s HRIS and ATS integrations for the backbone of its platform. Connections with ADP Workforce Now, TriNet, Workday, Personio, HiBob and BambooHR allow companies to synchronize key employees across systems. Integrations with Ashby, BambooHR ATS, and Greenhouse make it possible to transition candidates directly into new team members once a hire is approved, while Okta enables single sign-on access for identity management. 

Across all supported HRIS systems, the integration logic follows a consistent pull pattern: when a team member’s information is created or modified in the company’s HR system, the data is automatically synced to Oyster. This ensures that hiring, salary adjustments, and termination are reflected without manual inputs into oyster. This means, updates made Workday or Personio like job titles, or compensation changes trigger an automated workflow inside Oyster. The system creates a draft contract amendment or employment update for the admin to review and confirm. Termination data entered in the HRIS also creates pre-populated onboarding requests in Oyster to be finalized.

Workday integration expands this automation further. Once connected, administrators can enable time-off integration that automatically pulls and synchronisation requests between Workday and Oyster. The integration also handles updates such as approvals and rejections automatically, and even if the connection is paused, Oyster reconciles any missed requests upon reactivation to maintain consistency. 

In addition, Workday contract change integration automates employment amendments. So when salary or job titles are changed in Workday, Oyster automatically generates a contract amendment for review. 

ADP Workforce Now offers similar integration depth. When connected, it allows companies to use onboarding template codes to ensure new EOR employees or contractors are created in ADP automatically after being hired in Oyster. 

The HiBob integration provides another example of automation in action. When an employee submits or updates a leave request in Hibob, the information is automatically mirrored in oyster. Administration can map specific leave categories between both systems, ensuring vacation, sick leave or unpaid time are proceeded correctly. Once the integration is active , Oyster removes the “internal time off” button, ensuring all absences/requests originate from HiBob, while maintaining real-time accuracy in payroll. 

Taken together, all integrations Oyster enables are with high focus on compliance. Instead of replacing existing systems, it connects seamlessly with them ensuring that any changes made in HR stay aligned with Payroll and legal records worldwide.

Oyster’s finance integrations are built to take the last steps of global payroll like invoices, contractor bulls, EOR changes and drop straight into your accounting systems without you re-entering anything. Out of the box, Oyster connects to NetSuite, Xero and QuickBooks Online. Oyster pushes approved invoices to the systems as draft bills. Each line item on the invoice (like base salary, employer contributions, fees)can be mapped to the right account. When you want to connect to those systems, you would need to follow only three basic steps: select the right vendor in Oyster, confirm which contractors or employees you want to send and set a default account. 

The syncs run automatically once per approval cycle in near real time after invoice approval. Data flow is one.way (push only) so from Oyster to the ERP, and no payment statuses are pushed back. 

Admins can map by center and tracking category, so expenses flow to the right department automatically.

If sync errors occur, Oyster logs them in the alters tab, showing the cause for instance unmapped accounts or unlinked vendors. This allows immediate retry after correction and no data is lost. 

Overall, Oyster’s ERP integration is stable, accurate and finance-grade offering reliable one-way synchronisation, strong error handling and minimal setup overhead.

Oyster integrates with Zapier, Expensify and SAP Concur to automate expense reimbursements though payroll. 

For Expensify, approved expenses reports are automatically pulled by Oyster every day at 3:00 UTC, ready for reimbursements in the next payroll cycle. After the integration is enabled, team members no longer submit expenses directly within Oyster as Expensify becomes the sole system of records for expense management. This workflow ensures a single approval chain and eliminates double entry. It also accommodates multiple currencies by allowing each team member to be assigned to an Expensify policy in tejir respective payment currency. Receipts must meet strict visibility and validates requirements before syncing providing an additional compliance layer for multiple organizations.

The Concur integration functions similarly, transferring approved expenses to Oyster’s payroll for reimbursement. Together, these connections give companies a consolidated and audible view of global expense data while automating the reimbursement process within a single payroll framework.

Oyster exposes a customer API you can use to read and write core employment data to the system. Typical use cases are syncing team member records to your HRIS or data warehouse, kicking off onboarding from your own system, updating changes, and creating and syncing time off. This is a classic pull/push setup: your system can pull employment data from Oyster and push updates (like a new hire) in Oyster. This provides you the highest level of flexibility. There is a sandbox, authentication is token-based, and oyster says the are adding endpoints over time so it is designed to sit behind internal tools or custom reporting without needing to click through the UI.

Oyster has a native Slack integration that simply pushes Oyster events into Slack, but does not sync any data back to Oyster. Once connected by your Oyster and Slack admins, all users in the Slack workspace get the Oyster app. Notifications are sent as private messages in Slack, and you can only choose one workspace per Oyster account. Then things like time off requests after approval, payroll cutoff reminders, onboarding events, contractor invoice statuses, contractor termination notices get pushed to Slack. This can be useful because it moves approvals and reminders out of email and reminds you of the most important events. Frequency is near real time: when an event happens in Oyster, it is published in Slack within seconds. If you do not use

Oyster also integrates with Zapier that is a great tool to automate further workflows. Zapier can listen to events in oyster like new employees, new time off requests, new invoices and pushes those to another app. For instance this can be used to create a calendar event, add a task, or update a sheet. This is a one-way flow from data coming from Oyster to any system that integrates with Zapier.