Best Onboarding Software in the Middle East

An effective and well-structured employee onboarding process makes employees feel welcomed and supported from day one instead of overwhelming them with loads of information.

Recent surveys show that companies with a strong employee onboarding program saw an 82% increase in the retention rate. And a great onboarding experience makes 69% of employees more likely to stay in a company for at least 3 years.

This highlights the importance of effective employee onboarding, especially in Middle East countries with diverse cultural landscapes and language barriers, especially in the GCC countries, with foreign workers constituting 95% of the total workforce in the UAE. This is where employee onboarding software comes into play, eliminating tedious manual processes and helping streamline employee onboarding for companies.

In this article, we’ll dive deep into some of the best employee onboarding software you can find for your Middle East business or organization.

Benefits of Employee Onboarding Software: Why Your Business Need It?

Employee onboarding software is a tool that helps companies automate and streamline the process of welcoming and integrating new joiners into a company.

It automates and manages tasks such as documentation and communication, providing access to company information, training, and compliance to ensure a smoother and hassle-free onboarding experience for employees.

Employee onboarding software brings several other benefits both to the employees and the organization beyond enhanced employee experience, which include:

• Automated workflows: Employee onboarding software automates workflows and administrative tasks, including paperwork, such as signing e-signatures, communication, and documentation, especially in Middle Eastern countries where a common concern is going paperless and automation adoption. It sets up and auto-generates a pre-defined onboarding checklist and sends automated reminders to ensure employees complete onboarding tasks on time.

• Reduced administrative burden: Automating repetitive administrative tasks, which can be time-consuming, significantly reduces staff workload and manual effort, reduces errors, and speeds up the onboarding process. It also allows the HR staff to focus on more strategic tasks.

• Improved communication: Employee onboarding software facilitates instant meetings and discussion forums and facilitates easy communication between new hires, colleagues, and managers. This helps boost teamwork and strengthen workplace relationships.

• Improves compliance: Onboarding software improves compliance by automating tax forms and benefits enrollment, maintaining accurate records of NDAs, employee agreements, and safety policies, and providing necessary compliance training—ensuring companies meet all necessary legal requirements.

• Culture integration: The onboarding platform enables organizations to share their values, culture, mission statements, and vision with new hires—integrating them with their existing culture and work environments.

• Boosts employee productivity and retention: With structured training and a mandatory assessments module, easy access to relevant resources, and access to managers and colleagues, employees feel confident about their roles and contributions from the start, enhancing productivity and retention rates.

Why Is Effective Employee Onboarding Essential for Middle East Countries?

A successful and effective onboarding process is particularly crucial in the Middle East.

Given the diverse economic and multi-cultural workforce and the competitive talent market, ensuring employees feel welcomed, valued, and involved through a seamless onboarding process is the key to improving employee engagement and retention.

With millennials and GenZs making up approximately 80% of the Middle East region population, offering a smooth, well-structured, flexible, and supportive employee onboarding becomes even more crucial as the new generation expects and demands from a company.

Competing for top talent and improving employee retention becomes even more critical for Middle Eastern companies, especially given the Saudi Vision 2030, USE’s push for innovation, and rapid economic development. Emphasizing performance, productivity, and efficiency in employee onboarding can help companies retain the best talent.

Besides, with expats making up more than half the population of Middle Eastern countries like the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, an onboarding platform that helps new hires familiarize themselves with workplace norms, cultural expectations, and communication styles fosters inclusivity and builds engagement and collaboration.

Moreover, different Middle Eastern countries, like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, have distinct and specific labor laws and regulations regarding workplace rights and contracts. A streamlined onboarding process ensures employees understand and are aware of these laws, ensuring compliance and reducing the risks of legal penalties for both employees and employers.

Top 10 Employee Onboarding Software in the Middle East

Consolidated solutions with comprehensive all-in-one HCM solutions for businesses with complex HR needs and looking to streamline HR operations, ensure built-in local compliance, and provide global scalability—enabling multi-region workforce integration

• Darwinbox for a fully digital, customizable, automated, localized to specific regions, and personalized, and compliant-rich employee onboarding experience for businesses of all types and sizes

• Zimyo for seamless onboarding and pre-onboarding experience with reports and analytics features

• PeopleStrong for a simple and beginner-friendly employee onboarding need

• HRCloud for customized and personalized onboarding experience with compliance features for SMBs

• Workleap for basic onboarding software features for small businesses without unique, advanced, or complex requirements

Point solutions that offer specialized employee onboarding software for businesses that focus on making their onboarding processes more efficient

• Talmundo for simple onboarding software for SMBs without complex onboarding requirements

• Workbright for a remote and mobile-friendly onboarding experience

Local solutions provide region-specific onboarding software tailored to meet local compliance requirements and client-specific needs.

• Artify360 for an intuitive, structured, and consistent employee onboarding solution

• ZenHR for user-friendly onboarding software with an ESS portal

• Bayzat for an integrated employee onboarding and offboarding solution

Consolidated solutions

1. Darwinbox

   

   Darwinbox provides an employee onboarding solution that offers highly efficient, effective, and digitally seamless onboarding experiences to new hires.

   It offers a completely digital onboarding experience to new employees, including digital offer letters, document sign-offs, and smart forms, which are highly configurable and help you go paperless. Besides, you can also do location-specific configuration and customization by country to meet compliance requirements.

   Being an end-to-end HCM system, Darwinbox offers seamless integration with enterprise systems and modules, such as ATS and core, to ensure smooth data flow through the lifecycle.

   Darwinbox understands that personalization is the key to high employee engagement. It builds a highly personalized experience for employees with custom welcome pages, role-wise onboarding journeys with premade templates and onboarding surveys, and a way to connect with peers and relevant networks so employees can familiarize themselves with their team.

   Key features:

   • Automates and builds custom workflows that trigger the right actions whenever needed to ensure your new employees are fully equipped.

   • It facilitates bulk onboarding and AI-powered document validation to verify documents like passports and social security IDs. It autogenerates pre-populated statutory forms, including ESI declarations, insurance policy forms, and PF transfers from the captured employee data.

   • It auto-generates employee profiles through an integrated employee profile creation tool by importing pre-joining or application employee data.

   • It helps meet global and local compliance needs by making it easier to design unique onboarding experiences for employees from different geographies.

   Best-suited for: Organizations of all types and sizes with unique employee onboarding requirements.

2. Zimyo

   

   Zimyo offers employee onboarding software as one of its HR products that helps you set up a customized onboarding workflow for your employees and create employee profiles that provide a detailed overview of each employee.

   You can either profile them in bulk or manually view them in a Kanban layout for seamless visualization. These profiles are stored in one place and can be downloaded with a click.

   It provides new hires with an onboarding kit that includes documentation, including HR forms, policies, and benefits, an employee handbook, and audio and video for better insights. This helps ensure that new employees are well-equipped with all the necessary resources.

   Key features:

   • It provides a seamless pre-onboarding experience with personalized texts, BGV, letter of intent, and employee verification through a digital locker.

   • It supports E-Signature integration to capture the time, date, and employee’s IP address, enhancing security.

   • It helps create customizable workflows for different organizations; however, users have found it challenging to navigate around complex configurations, making it not so suitable for small businesses and startups.

   • It helps generate reports on intuitive dashboards and helps analyze onboarding trends for better decision-making. However, several HR professionals have found the software lagging and running slow.

   Best-suited for: Mid-sized businesses and large enterprises

3. PeopleStrong

   

   PeopleStrong provides employee onboarding software for your business to provide an individualized onboarding experience to your employees.

   It facilitates the pre-onboarding experience for your employees by sharing your organization’s resources and story before they join. It also automates workflows with triggers and notifications and provides configurable checklists to ensure timely and effortless employee onboarding.

   Key features:

   • It auto-parses document collection and verification and auto-populates statutory forms, such as PF and ESI declarations, to ensure automated workflow.

   • It provides a single dashboard for viewing and managing onboarding-related data and documents and enabling data sync.

   • It provides a built-in Employee Self-service (ESS) feature that comes with automated nudges, allows you to make announcements, and makes it easier for new hires to access personal and professional skills and stay up-to-date.

   • While it ensures compliance with local and international standards and regulations, specific features, like payslips, lack advanced security measures like 2FA.

   Best-suited for: Small-to-mid-sized businesses (SMBs)

4. HRCloud

   

   HRCloud offers employee onboarding software that simplifies the onboarding process to provide employees with a seamless and efficient experience.

   To simplify and automate your onboarding workflow, it provides a customizable form builder with existing templates. The forms allow you to create onboarding checklists and role clarification to set expectations and track onboarding progress through real-time visibility.

   To make onboarding a breeze for your employees, you can create personalized employee portals that contain all the information a new hire needs—welcome messages, team introductions, onboarding tasks and progress, and on-demand access to company videos, FAQs, and other crucial resources.

   Key features:

   • It provides digital approvals and e-signs with intuitive drag-and-drop functionality and mobile access, making it easy for employees to fill out forms and sign documents. However, the mobile app has limitations, such as a lack of reporting and admin controls, slow document uploads, file format restrictions, and less responsive e-signature functionality.

   • It automates redundant managerial tasks, such as assigning and monitoring tasks, sending reminders, and managing timelines with built-in prioritization tools. However, it doesn’t offer multi-lingual support for local businesses.

   • It comes with a dashboard that provides detailed insights and reports of onboarding task completion and identifies trends and potential bottlenecks to optimize internal processes further.

   • It provides automated compliance checks and I-9 form completion to reduce manual errors and ensure accuracy. While it provides such advanced security features, many users find the initial setup complex with a high learning curve.

   Best-suited for: Mid-sized and large enterprises

5. Workleap

   

   Workleap provides onboarding software with a user-friendly interface that provides welcome videos, centralized resources, pre-onboarding communication, and seamless HRIS integration to make onboarding a breeze.

   It helps automate onboarding workflows, such as booking multiple meetings with the nifty meeting scheduling automation and Google and Outlook integration.

   Key features:

   • It provides AI-generated templates that help you convert existing onboarding material into interactive plans with the help of a drag-and-drop builder. The plan lets you set up tasks and goals for new hires and add resources and surveys to collect feedback.

   • It comes with discussion boards, which allow new employees to ask questions, track progress, fill out surveys, and report blockers. However, users have discovered that they have less control over survey questions, which limits personalization of these surveys.

   • While the tool offers integrations with HR systems and third-party tools, users have reported bugs in the Slack integration. Moreover, there are no localization features, such as multi-lingual support.

   Best-suited for: Small and medium-sized businesses, but not ideal for businesses with unique onboarding needs, complex compliance requirements, and advanced payroll integrations.

   Point solutions

6. Talmundo

   

   Talmundo is a dedicated HR onboarding software that helps HR teams and managers automate their onboarding workflows.

   It allows you to create and automate onboarding processes with features like roadmaps, to-do lists, scheduled training sessions, and feedback forms, providing a consistent onboarding experience to new employees.

   Key features:

   • It uses integrated feedback loops and interactive content to drive employee engagement and enhance their productivity.

   • It provides a dashboard that helps view employees’ onboarding progress and completion rates based on different geographically located offices, etc. However, it doesn’t track detailed engagement metrics, offer no localization or multi-lingual features, and users report that the reporting feature can be more advanced.

   • While it integrates with other HR systems, like SAP, Workday, and SuccessFactors, many users report issues with integrations and that it doesn’t work best.

   Best-suited for: Small and Medium-sized businesses (SMBs)

7. Workbright

   

   Workbright is another cloud-based, dedicated employee onboarding software that aims to accelerate hiring and onboarding to ensure high speed, security, and accuracy.

   It’s best known for its mobile-friendly interface and optimization, which makes it easier for managers to send hiring forms via SMS and text message reminders and track task deadlines right from their phones.

   Key features:

   • It facilitates employee verification with a fully remote, indemnified I-9 form verification, allowing employees and new hires to complete and send this form from their mobile devices.

   • It offers security with MFA, SOC 2 Type II verification, 24/7 data monitoring, restricted vendor access, and multi-site data backups.

   • While it offers flexible integration options with native and Open AI integrations, few users reported difficulties and complexities in integrating the tool with other existing HR systems.

   • While Workbright simplifies onboarding with remote and mobile-friendly features, it lacks advanced personalization features and advanced analytics and reporting.

   Best-suited for: SMBs, startups, and remote teams that need cost-efficient and simple onboarding software. Might not be ideal for enterprises needing deep HRMS integration, localized compliance, Arabic-first support, or high customization.

   Local solutions

8. Artify360

   

   Artify360 provides an employee onboarding module specifically for Bahrain, a Middle East country. It optimizes onboarding processes, from orientation to task scheduling and is also available for other Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and UAE.

   It makes a simple user interface, making it ideal for non-technical users and startup Middle Eastern businesses. It facilitates personnel management by allowing you to create and upgrade an employee’s profile with the necessary information.

   Besides, you can also schedule shifts and use the onboarding checklist feature to efficiently implement the onboarding process without worrying about missing deadlines or delayed onboarding for your new hires.

   Key features:

   • It centralizes all employee information, including bank account details, documents like employee contracts, and other onboarding material, enabling easy access and management.

   • It enables digital documentation to avoid manual paperwork and minimize errors.

   • While it provides structured and automated onboarding steps for a consistent experience, it comes with a few integration limitations with other and existing HR systems.

   Best-suited for: Small to mid-sized businesses; however, not suitable for businesses requiring extensive integrations.

9. ZenHR

   

   ZenHR offers customizable onboarding templates with their onboarding and offboarding modules, catering to different job positions, functions, roles, and branches.

   It’s specifically designed to meet the needs of Middle Eastern businesses, and it has an intuitive design and user-friendly interface.

   Key features:

   • It provides an HR dashboard that allows managers and professionals to assign employees tasks and track their progress.

   • It provides an Employee Self Service (ESS) portal, allowing new employees to complete the necessary steps, including documentation, view or edit personal information, access company policies, submit time-off requests, and familiarize themselves with the company structure and processes.

   • The onboarding module also makes it easier to set up user roles, giving users flexibility in access and visibility—for example, choosing whether to hide or show financial data.

   • While the web application has the necessary onboarding features, the mobile app requires improvement in certain areas. It also lacks advanced analytics and reporting features that facilitate streamlined decisions.

   Best-suited for: Small to mid-sized companies with customizable onboarding requirements. However, large, complex multinational corporations or businesses requiring advanced analytics and reporting may face limitations.

10. Bayzat

    

    Bayzat provides an integrated onboarding and offboarding solution, unlike other tools discussed that focus solely on employee onboarding.

    To ensure both new hires and HR managers stay on top of the onboarding process, Bayzat’s onboarding process comes with centralized task management that facilitates assigning tasks and tracking progress with real-time notifications. HR managers can assign tasks like completing compliance training, submitting visa processing, or setting up the IT setup.

    Besides, managers need not worry about missing assigning tasks as it automates onboarding workflows. For instance, the moment a new hire is added to the system, the module automatically notifies an announcement to welcome the new employee, schedule a welcome meeting, and collect the required documents—aligning all stakeholders and ensuring no tasks are missed, leading to quicker and seamless onboarding.

    Key features:

    • It integrates its onboarding module with other Bayzat modules, including payroll, HR, and benefits, to ensure efficiency, reduce errors, and speed up processes across the teams.

    • Its ready-to-use workflows and policies ensure labor law compliance, covering mandatory compliance regulations related to leave, payroll, attendance, and more. However, users have reported limited customization options, especially when it comes to data fields and tailoring workflows.

    • Its Employee Self-Service portal allows new hires to complete forms, edit personal details, upload documents, and track task progress without HR intervention, enabling high engagement and efficiency.

    • While it offers integration with internal payroll systems, many users report that it does not directly integrate with accounting software, forcing them to rely on custom solutions or manual data transfers.

    Best-suited for: Mid-sized or large companies in the UAE and Middle East; however, it might not be a budget-friendly option for startups and smaller companies with limited financial resources or businesses needing high customization options or flexible reporting capabilities.

Factors To Consider When Looking For the Best Employee Onboarding Software

An ideal employee HR onboarding software should, of course, be intuitive, easy to use, compliant, have simple automation features, be easy to adopt, and be secure. However, different businesses have different needs, especially when you’re specifically looking for a tool for your business or company in the Middle East.

In such cases, here are the common yet critical considerations you must focus on when looking for onboarding software:

• E-signatures and digital documents for seamless and electrical document signing of forms, contracts, and other legal documents, eliminating redundant paperwork processes.

• Customizable checklists to tailor and customize onboarding workflows for different roles, regions, and departments to have a clear record of all the tasks different individuals need to complete.

• Cultural integration and sensitivity with multilingual capabilities and features that align with regional customs and practices, such as communication styles, greetings, and leave/holiday considerations to cater to Middle Eastern users.

• Employee Self-Service portal that makes it easier for new hires to complete tasks and access training modules and other information independently—reducing managerial involvement and enhancing overall engagement.

• Automated workflows with customized criteria and automated triggers and reminders to eliminate manual and repetitive tasks and enhance overall efficiency.

• Integration capabilities to ensure seamless integration with existing HR and payroll systems and third-party tools, like communication and accounting software, to avoid data duplication and ensure efficient onboarding.

• Compliance with local labor laws and regulations of specific Middle Eastern countries, such as the UAE, Qatar, or Saudi Arabia. Look for specific leave policies, contract requirements, and benefits for each country per requirement.

• Reporting and analytics to gain detailed insights into the onboarding process to identify potential issues and areas of improvement and make actionable and data-driven changes.

• Employee feedback mechanisms with built-in feedback loops to gain honest feedback and insights from new employees that help improve the onboarding process and drive customer satisfaction.

• Employee engagement features, such as engaging welcome videos, interactive training sessions, knowledge tests, and gamification features, help new hires engage and integrate with their roles faster.

• Mobile accessibility facilitates accessing and editing information for new hires with their mobile devices, especially in the Middle East, which has the maximum mobile penetration rate.

While these features are of the utmost importance, it’s also crucial to focus on your business’s specific needs and requirements when choosing onboarding software. For instance, you need to ask yourself:

• What are the existing onboarding challenges I am trying to solve? Is it assigning and approving tasks, compliance challenges, strengthening local customer support, or inefficiency across the process?

• What is my budget? Which onboarding software can give me the best and specific features I need with a realistic price range?

• Do I need specific software integrations to integrate existing learning management, training management, HR, and payroll systems, or will the new system replace all existing systems?

Evaluating these factors and specific questions will help you choose the most suitable and the best HR onboarding software for your business.

Future Employee Onboarding Trends in the Middle East

Due to technological advancements and shifting and diverse workplace cultures, the Middle East HR and onboarding landscape is constantly evolving. Here are the top trends in employee onboarding that you must look out for in 2025.

• Increasing focus on upskilling Learning & Development: One of the top workforce priorities for organizations in the Middle East is enhancing their workforce capabilities through upskilling and continuous learning and development. Integrating L&D into employee onboarding is the top evolving trend that helps support continuous learning through features like task shadowing, internal mentorship matches, and interactive training modules.

• Gamification in onboarding: Organizations in the Middle East are 37% more likely to incorporate gamification into their onboarding processes. Including game-leading elements, such as badges, points, levels, and rewards, in the onboarding process makes it even more interactive and leads to healthy competition—making it another potential trend in employee onboarding in the Middle East.

• Enhancing employee experience and well-being: Another top onboarding trend in the Middle East is streamlining the onboarding process and focusing on employee well-being. Companies are looking to add features, such as pulse check-in prompts and running regular feedback loops, to monitor employees' mental health and understand their expectations, delivering better experiences.

• Inclusion of remote or hybrid work models: The global and dynamic workforce in the Middle East demands flexibility in working in a remote or hybrid work setting, including a remote onboarding process. Statistics suggest that virtual onboarding models have increased by 37% in hybrid workplaces to enhance employee engagement and improve team culture, communication, and cohesion, irrespective of their physical location.

Hence, investing in employee onboarding software that also focuses on and prioritizes these future employee onboarding trends is crucial when choosing the right solution for your business.

Conclusion

A poor onboarding experience causes 33% of new hires to quit within the first 90 days of employment. Hence, offering quality, seamless, hassle-free, and automated employee onboarding is key to enhancing employee experience and improving operational efficiency and productivity.

By evaluating your business needs with the tips shared and comparing them with the tools mentioned above, you can choose an ideal employee onboarding software for your company.

If you’re looking for a feature-packed employee onboarding software that offers high personalization, customizable workflows, multilingual support, seamless integration, and, most importantly, local compliance while ensuring employee experience—Darwinbox is the right choice. It streamlines employee onboarding with its digital onboarding solution that’ll help you bring down candidate drop-out rates and improve retention in your business.

Schedule a demo today to get hands-on experience with customized onboarding solutions for your organization.