Gusto offers payroll, benefits and compliance capabilities. Gusto is scaled for small to mid-sized businesses, and emphasizes an easy to use interface.
$496
per month
Square Payroll
Score 6.1 out of 10
N/A
Square Payroll is a payroll solution for hourly employees, from Square headquartered in San Francisco, California.
$0
per month
Pricing
Gusto
Square Payroll
Editions & Modules
Simple: A streamlined set of automatic payroll features and benefits integrations
$49/month + $6/mo per person
per month
Plus: Comprehensive payroll, benefits, and HR tools for employers building a great place to work
$80/month + $12/mo per person
per month
Premium: Scalable payroll and benefits, expert HR, and dedicated support for the complex needs of growing teams
$180/month + $22/mo per person
per month
Free
$0
per month
Plus
$29
per month
Premium
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Gusto
Square Payroll
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Gusto offers three pricing plans for payroll, benefits, and HR.
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Gusto
Square Payroll
Features
Gusto
Square Payroll
Payroll Management
Comparison of Payroll Management features of Product A and Product B
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.
I would say that Square Payroll is perfect for companies that don't exceed 100 employees. The multistate payroll system allows for us to be able to handle business with ease when we go do work in Mississippi or Arkansas. The multiple payout options are great for our particular business. We might deal with a multimillion dollar contract one day and a $120 order the next.
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.
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.
[In my experience] they can cancel your service at any time, without warning or explanation. When they do this your funds are held by them for up to 90 days, at which time they are presumably accruing interest on your money. This could take a small business under very quickly and there is nothing you can do about it.
[I believe] getting verified is complex and not customer friendly. Until you are verified you can't talk to payroll customer service, which is paradoxical. Even getting a hold of account services for this purpose is tricky and exceedingly time-consuming, plus they can not answer most questions directly.
[I feel] they don't communicate well, closed my account with no notice whatsoever. The only notification I had about the need to verify my account was one easily lost email. Not having responded to this email fast enough created months of stress and difficulty in the setup process, only to find in the end I would need to start from scratch to attempt to sign up again.
[In my experience] if they close your account you can never reopen it. You have to start a new account from scratch.
[In my experience] they can hold your money and not deposit funds if your account is "under review". This can happen without explanation. No customer service is directly available for this. I was told I had to wait for them to call me.
[I believe] they are either lying, or the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing to such an extent that they give a great deal of misinformation.
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.
It could use a mobile-friendly interface. Other than that it's a simple layout and non-cluttered which allows you to get done what you need to get done. No unnecessary dodads or distractions.
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.
I think they have quick and helpful customer service reps, however, I give them a 9 because I have had to wait on hold for long periods of time before.
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
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.
We have tested the QuickBooks Online platform. Before using Square, we tried QuickBooks, but the experience we had was not to our liking. QuickBooks Online is a much more complicated platform to use, the interface is much larger and has complexity in the configuration of the collection of hours of work of the employees. In addition, QuickBooks technical support does not respond in time to users' doubts, on several occasions we had several doubts about the operation of the platform and the response was too late and inconsistent. We decided to use Square Payroll because it offered us a much more accessible UI, a simpler but more precise interface for what we needed in our company, to be able to make payroll payments and make detailed reports on the workers.
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.
