Gusto vs. Sage HR

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

For smaller companies, Sage HR is a user friendly system that allows you to streamline HR processes all under one roof and a time efficient manner. The other software it is able to integrate with is also a bonus allowing processes to be simplified. Ultimately, we really enjoyed using it to allow our team members to engage with it but also to make engaging with our team members simpler on the HR team and requests always recorded.

Incentivized

• 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

• Time off policies are clear and transparent.
• The review process functionality was extremely easy to use.
• Support is outstanding . If you ever run into an issue they are always available to help.
• Onboarding document control is really easy to manage and stays consistent with a growing company.

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

• Some features available in other HR products have not been available in Cake in the past (Performance, ATS), however, these are being rolled out now.
• The user experience for the Admin interface is not completely intuitive.
• Overall look and feel could be updated one day.

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.

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

payroll process is good Sage HR - web version gives good demographic data uploading to Super portal is good uploading to ATO portal is good giving various reports to Managers is good

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

Customer support is amazing. There are times I post a question and I don't get back to support. They will always follow-up with an email to make sure our questions are answered. I even had a call with Julianna who was wonderful and very personable. You definitely get a level us service that exceeds most companies. Keep up the good work CakeHR.

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

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

I searched for plenty of HR applications. Some wanted a ridiculous amount of money but didn't have many features. One wanted us to move our payroll over to them which wasn't an option. As a smaller to mid-sized company 50-200 employees, we have a central accounting dept that we wanted to keep most of our processes with. CakeHR delivered with all the needs plus more. I know there are some features we are not using because they don't fit our needs at this time but I am aware of them. Finding a web-based application that solved all of our needs and more was a homerun for us. All the others I searched were always missing or wanted us to pay substantially more for a key component we needed.

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

• Saved me lots of admin time with employee self service.
• I can run this system by myself for over 100 employees so no need to hire extra staff to manage.
• Easy performance management allows the business to review and appraise employees and make everything more efficient (cost and time).

Incentivized