Real-Time Salary Benchmarks That Replace Outdated Surveys

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Ravio: Real-Time Compensation Data for Growing Companies Tired of Guesswork

The Challenge

For HR leaders at companies between 100 and 500 employees, compensation decisions often feel like educated guesses. Traditional salary surveys arrive months after the data was collected, cost thousands per country, and still leave teams wondering if their offers will land or if they're quietly losing talent to better-paying competitors.

The problem compounds quickly at this company stage. You're hiring across multiple roles and sometimes multiple countries, formalizing pay structures that previously lived in spreadsheets, and fielding questions from employees who can see market rates on Glassdoor even if you can't. According to startup consultancy Figures, most companies rely on benchmarking data that's 12 to 18 months old by the time they use it. In a market where tech salaries can shift meaningfully within a quarter, that lag creates real risk: rejected offers, regrettable attrition, and pay inequities that surface only after they've done damage.

How Ravio Approaches It

Ravio takes a fundamentally different approach to compensation benchmarking. Rather than conducting periodic surveys, the London-based platform crowdsources live salary, equity, and benefits data from over 1,200 participating companies. When you connect your HRIS, your anonymized data feeds the benchmark pool, and you get access to continuously updated market rates filtered by company size, funding stage, location, and industry.

The practical difference shows up in daily decisions. Instead of referencing a PDF from last year's Radford survey, an HR leader can pull current median salaries for a senior product manager in Berlin at Series B companies with 200 to 500 employees. The platform covers more than 100 roles across 46 countries, with particularly deep data in European tech markets where Ravio has concentrated its early customer base.

Beyond raw benchmarking, Ravio has built out tools for managing compensation internally. The salary bands module lets teams create and maintain pay ranges, visualize where each employee falls within their band, and run scenario planning for merit cycles. A pay equity analysis feature surfaces gender pay gaps and other disparities by comparing employees in similar roles, a capability that's becoming essential as EU pay transparency regulations take effect. The platform integrates with more than 30 HR systems including Workday, BambooHR, Personio, and HiBob, which means data stays current without manual exports.

What distinguishes Ravio from both legacy survey providers and newer competitors is the combination of real-time data with workflow tools. You're not just getting benchmarks to reference; you're getting a system to act on them. The company handles role mapping during implementation, matching your internal job titles to their standardized framework, which removes one of the more tedious barriers to actually using compensation data consistently.

Who It's Built For

Ravio's sweet spot is venture-backed companies between 50 and 1,000 employees, particularly those in tech, fintech, biotech, and other knowledge-work industries where talent competition runs hot. The platform makes most sense once you've outgrown ad-hoc pay decisions but aren't yet large enough to justify a dedicated compensation team or custom enterprise surveys.

Signs you might be ready include expanding into new markets and needing multi-location pay strategies, preparing for your first structured compensation review cycle, fielding questions from employees or candidates about how pay was determined, or working to close pay gaps before they become compliance issues. Companies like Bolt, Mollie, and Wise use Ravio to manage compensation across geographies, while earlier-stage firms like HERO Software and Sastrify have used it to build transparent pay structures from the ground up.

What Customers Are Saying

User reviews on G2 give Ravio a 4.7 out of 5 rating, with particular praise for ease of use and customer support. One reviewer called it "finally a user-friendly benchmarking tool" and noted how it streamlined salary updates. Another described it as "the first compensation benchmarking platform that I actually enjoy using." The responsive customer success team comes up repeatedly, with users highlighting quick replies and willingness to improve the platform based on feedback.

Jodi Slomp, VP of People at fintech unicorn Mollie, put it directly: "Access to Ravio's live market data means no more headaches from delayed data sets. Ravio offers real-time data, making it the easiest and most user-friendly benchmarking tool we use." At HERO Software, the People and Culture team reported they could "immediately see a few outliers" and identify pay equity issues as soon as they uploaded their data. The common thread is speed to value: companies get actionable insights within days of implementation rather than months.

Getting Started

Ravio uses a freemium model. The core benchmarking tool is free for companies that contribute their anonymized compensation data, which helps Ravio build its dataset while giving smaller companies a reason to try the platform. Advanced features like salary band management, pay equity analysis, and full company-wide benchmarking require a paid subscription. Pricing scales with company size and selected modules. Ravio indicates that a 500-employee company would pay around £5,000 per year, roughly £10 per employee annually.

Implementation is straightforward. Most companies connect their HRIS, work with Ravio's team on role mapping, and are operational within a few weeks. There's no separate implementation fee; onboarding support is included. For companies with more than 100 employees, Ravio offers a 30-day free trial of the full platform to test data coverage and feature fit before committing.

Key Takeaway

For mid-market HR teams tired of making compensation decisions with stale data and scattered spreadsheets, Ravio offers a credible alternative: live benchmarks, integrated tools, and a user experience that doesn't require a compensation specialist to navigate. It's particularly strong for European companies or those hiring across multiple countries, where its dataset runs deepest. If you're approaching a compensation review cycle or building pay structures for the first time, it's worth a look.

Learn more at ravio.com