Gusto vs. HiBob

Gusto is a great fit for small teams and startups that want a simple, reliable way to run payroll, manage tax filings, and give CPAs access without constant micromanagement. It’s especially useful for founders who need something that “just works.” The human support has been excellent—especially when forwarding confusing IRS mail.
That said, it’s a bit less intuitive when it comes to benefits and compliance for fully remote companies. For example, labor law poster distribution isn’t streamlined for digital teams, and setting up benefits felt more complex than it needed to be. Still, I’d recommend Gusto to any startup looking to get payroll right from day one.

Incentivized

The system is very well suited for the stage we are at as a company. We did a lot via Excel and old processes, but once we hit the 100-person mark, our work would have been challenging to execute without Hibob. We eliminated 3 systems by consolidating to the one Hibob system - it was almost a cost-neutral swap for us.

• Gusto makes onboarding employees and ensuring their documents are signed very easy.
• The way you can integrate things like Google Workspace makes both onboarding new employees into the apps you use a breeze, as well as when you need to offboard them.
• Managing benefits is simple, because they take care of all the heavy lifting. I just have to review the options, make a selection, and they take it from there.

Incentivized

• It is extremely flexible and can be modified to fit most of our processes.
• It's an easy UI to use and looks very nice as well.
• I like that there is options like Superpowers and Hobbies to get to know our employees more than just their work details.

Incentivized

• Adding in previous time manually could be more accessible.
• Notifications for when employees manually change hours.
• We should allow 1099 users to use the mobile app instead of restricting them to the website, especially since they can just log into the full website on their mobile device.

Incentivized

• Tasks - For something like onboarding, I wish there was a way to set up the tasks so that the person setting up the employee profile would be the only person to get the assigned tasks. It's hard to describe but for example, if there are multiple on-boarders on the team, is there a way to set up the tasks so that technically every on-boarder would be assigned to the task, but the person setting up the profile is the one that triggers the task for themselves.
• Reports - I find pulling reports a bit complicated, especially if I am asked to pull data that involves info being located in different areas of an employee profile. For example, for a couple of months, I thought it was impossible to pull a variable pay report along with the base salary (in one report rather than pull two separate reports) only to find out that you can do that via the Total Compensation report. Also when I have to pull data for headcount since a certain day, I wish you can make the settings so that data can appear after a certain day, rather than sorting it manually via Excel/Google sheets.
• Timesheet - I love the functionality of the timesheet that hibob provided, but I also wish they included an option where people can set up predicted work schedules for future dates. Currently, the timesheets are ideals for scenarios where employees time in and out of work.

Incentivized

Unless they break it, I'm never leaving. It's just too easy. Gusto is also really affordable, and for what I pay, it's worth having the historical record within the system. I like that I can go back and pull up W2's for year's past. This sort of easy access reporting, has been helpful especially when getting reports for PPP loans.

We will without a doubt be continuing to use Hibob, it is convenient, being engaged with and great value for money. A one stop shop for all things HR related to keep policies and safe financial information has been so beneficial to the business meaning less risk to GDPR breaches and somewhere for employees to refer back to in future has been invaluable

Incentivized

The overall platform and its speed of response are amazing. I would recommend this to any other business owner for ease of use and reliability. Email reminders are great if I’m super busy and have forgotten a few tasks. The price point compared to local payroll service is hands down a huge win.

Incentivized

It's a solid HRIS system, it's user friendly to employees and employers, but they've changed the user interface 2 times now in the last 2.5 years, so having to find where certain things are after the change can be tedious

Yes they are always there when we need them. Fast response time too.

Incentivized

Yes the system is fast and easy to use.

Incentivized

Gusto's customer service has really deteriorated lately and they seem to have really changed their focus. It used to be when you called you were routed to an individual who knew about payroll, benefits, reporting, etc. but now you get someone who seems to have not received the correct training. My last call about a dismissal payroll took me over an hour of my time and the person still could not help me and finally transferred me to someone else.

Incentivized

A lot of support is self-service from the users themselves, via a guide hosted on HiBob's website. I have found the guide helpful 10% of the time when I needed support. The support team is quite quick to reply, but not everyone is helpful unfortunately, and in many cases a lot of emails, messages and back and forth were needed to get to the bottom of an issue. When I pointed out that a video call would be a quicker way to tell people "this is how it's done", I was told that it's not the way they deliver support. I had to beg our account managers for a video chat with some skilled users to show me how to do certain things that (a) were nowhere to be found on the guide, and (b) the support team wasn't able to solve. Additionally, to find solutions, I was pointed to a forum where other users exchange tips on how they managed to solve problems - again, not really helpful as I would like to know this from Bob's team themselves since we're paying for the product, and I shouldn't rely on other users to tell me how they managed their way around a problem

Incentivized

It was fast and easy to learn with the trainer. Their staff was great to work with.

Incentivized

Reach out to support immediately if you are having trouble setting up Gusto. Rather than being confused and trying to figure it out yourself, it's much better to talk to someone who knows what they are doing. Save yourself time and frustration and reach out to support

Incentivized

I really enjoyed the implementation being involved in a key piece of change management int he business was really exciting

Incentivized

It's been a while since I used QuickBooks for payroll, but it doesn't even come close to it. Gusto is infinitely easier, allowing for employee time tracking, handling calculations and payments of payroll and payroll taxes, managing regulatory compliance in the background, and more. I had a lot of moments using QuickBooks Payroll where I thought, "Am I even doing this right?" — it felt like you had to have additional knowledge of HR regulations in your state to do everything correctly. Gusto has it ALL handled so you can focus your time on higher-impact tasks in your business.

Incentivized

HiBob balances functionality, usability, pricing and client control to a much greater level than other systems. Enterprise systems such as SAP and Oracle offer greater functionality but at a much greater cost. Similar offerings from BambooHR, Dayforce and Workday are lacking in their functionality, user experience, pricing or customizability. Overall, the Customer Support experience with HiBob is now, and always has been out of this world in terms of response times, helpfulness and a strong willingness to adapt to the client requirements in terms of feature implementation and roadmapping.

It is easy to use across the board for all departments in the company.

Incentivized

• I am not involved enough to know well, but I would say that Gusto has saved me about 1-2 hours in my onboarding process with my new company compared to my past experiences trying to onboard with ADP. I have also finished the process and am not frustrated like usual.

Incentivized

• Our HR Coordinator is the main administrator and is the go-to for all thing Bob. This has freed up time for me (VP) and for our HR Manager to spend time on strategy and implementation of employee experience programs. Before HiBob, our HR Manager spent approximately 20% of her time on administrative items that Bob takes care of in minutes and I would have spent around 10% of my time on Performance Management. We invest around $20k in HiBob, but it has saved us approximately $45k in time. So, an ROI of $25,000.

Incentivized