Who Is Qarrot?
Founded in 2012 by Aaron Gliksman, Qarrot is a Montreal-based company that develops employee recognition and engagement software for North American SMBs. While looking for relevant integrations for their own clients, the Qarrot team started using BambooHR — a tool built for exactly the type of organizations they serve. But what seemed logical on paper quickly showed its limits in the reality of a bilingual Canadian business.
The Problem: Paying More for Less
On the surface, BambooHR checked the boxes. The platform is popular, well-known in the SMB market, and the Qarrot team hadn’t done a deep comparison of alternatives before committing to it.
But the costs started adding up fast.
The monthly bill hovered around $300 USD — nearly 40% more expensive in Canadian dollars, depending on exchange rate fluctuations. On top of that, a minimum seat count exceeded the team’s actual headcount. The result: Qarrot was paying for capacity it wasn’t using, on a platform it was barely tapping at 10% of its capabilities.
“There was also pressure from the financial side of the business. We were paying for something that no longer fit us.”
The Operational Blind Spot: Manual Payroll
Beyond cost, it was the day-to-day HR operations that were causing friction.
Qarrot uses Employer D (Desjardins) as its payroll provider, a choice rooted in a long-standing relationship of trust between the company’s business partner and the institution. But BambooHR offered no native integration with Desjardins. Every two weeks, the payroll process involved manually exporting data: vacation days, sick leave, overtime. Everything had to be reconciled by hand.
That friction meant more than two hours of extra work per payroll cycle — not counting the manual distribution of pay stubs by email or Slack.
It’s the kind of invisible burden that never shows up in sales demos, but accumulates week after week.
The Tipping Point: Law 25
The final straw came from the legal side.
When the full obligations of Law 25 came into effect, Aaron and his team started asking questions that BambooHR couldn’t easily answer: Where is our employee data hosted? Who has access to it? What does the American CLOUD Act actually mean for us?
Add to that a linguistic reality: Qarrot is a bilingual team based in Montreal. BambooHR offered no French support. That was a blind spot that was hard to ignore.
The Transition to Folks
The switch to Folks HR directly addressed each identified pain point.
CAD billing eliminated exposure to exchange rate fluctuations. Per-seat pricing now matches the team’s actual size. Employee data is hosted in Canada, by a Canadian company not subject to US jurisdiction — which immediately resolves the CLOUD Act question.
Folks’ bilingual interface lets the whole team work in the language of their choice, in compliance with Law 96 requirements, and client support is available in English and French.
On the operational side, leave request management is now significantly simplified. And the next step is already in the works: benefiting from the native integration with Employer D, which will finally eliminate the manual payroll exports.
“Give Folks a chance. Better value, full onboarding, and reasonable pricing!”
What Qarrot’s Story Reveals
Qarrot isn’t an exceptional case. It’s the portrait of dozens of Canadian SMBs that adopted an American HR tool by default — because it was what the market offered, because it seemed to fit their needs, and because the hidden costs never appear in sales presentations.
The difference between “available in Canada” and “built for Canada” isn’t a marketing nuance. It’s measured in hours of manual work, exchange rate fees, compliance risks, and features that should have been included from the start.
Do you recognize your experience in Qarrot’s story?
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