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
Sterling Check
Score 6.5 out of 10
N/A
Sterling background and identity solutions help you build a foundation of trust and safety for your employees, customers, and partners around the world. Sterling's CourtDirect technology provides direct online digital access to ~90% of US criminal search records, and SmartData technology enables Sterling to further automate across the end-to-end employment criminal background check process – from matching candidate data to determining reportability and applying any order rules.
N/A
Pricing
Gusto
Sterling Check
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
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Gusto
Sterling Check
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
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.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Gusto
Sterling Check
Features
Gusto
Sterling Check
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.
SterlingOne has had my background check in progress for nearly a month. I spoke with them 5 days ago about the issue and discovered there was a criminal record flag in Connecticut. I have never been to Connecticut. They said this can often happen if an individual has the same name, birthday, or last four digits of SSN. This is clearly a flaw in their system if someone with the same name or birthday can appear on the same background check. I feel bad for any John Smith who applies for a job with a company that uses SterlingOne, they'll never get past the screening. Not only is this a flawed system, but when I spoke with customer service about this, they guaranteed they would expedite this within 24-48 hours. It has now been 5 days and when I called back, they said they would expedite this as if I had never called in the first place. I have been through numerous background checks for work in my life, I have done live scans and had my fingerprints taken, and have been approved to work with children with special needs (which requires a very rigorous screening) and I have never experienced such a disjointed and unprofessional process.
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.
The initiation of a background check is very simple by only needing the name and email of the new candidate and submitting that as the new ticket.
Sterling communicates with the new candidate to keep the background check moving which saves us time by not needing to keep a close eye on the process of the background check.
Sterling communicates with the employer to let them know if additional charges are needed to run the background check and we can either approve or deny the charge.
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.
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.
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.
Sterling Talent is an excellent company for performing the background checks for our new hires. However, the delay in processing times can be improved.
Also, there should be automation from legacy systems to pick up the candidate details as much as possible instead of asking for more details from the candidate via email.
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.
SterlingOne is easier to use and faster in response than HireRight. HireRight is also not great for international (non-US) candidates as the employment history and especially education results take a long while.
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.
