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
OnPay
Score 9.8 out of 10
N/A
OnPay's payroll and HR is designed for people who want to spend more time running their business, and less on back-office tasks. The application aims to enable users to: • Run payroll • Automate taxes • Let employees do more themselves • Simplify HR processes • Offer benefits in any state OnPay is $49 plus $6 per person each month. The monthly fee includes integrations with QuickBooks, Xero, and time-tracking software, as well as all quarterly and year-end…
N/A
Pricing
Gusto
OnPay
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
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Gusto
OnPay
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
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.
First month free, then $49 + $6 per employee each month.
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'd say if you had someone who wasn't educated on how Payroll should be setup and function OnPay is less ideal. But even then you've got things so well setup and cost efficient, they could afford to put some focus on training. In my mind I imagine OnPay is the best solution for small to mid, even early large, company Payroll processing. We're a small company so I'm unaware of the options provided to streamline importing of large group payrolls, but that might be an area where the interface could provide challenges.
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.
I would like to enter some payroll information in advance of the current payroll runs
Adding and changing administrators was a bit cumbersome and took several days
It works fine for a small number of people being paid if they can be seen on one screen but it might be cumbersome with more than about 10 people. Probably needs a better or different procedure with more people.
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 have used OnPay for a few years now and we do continue to renew our annual use of OnPay. We are only a small organization and although OnPay provides a lot of additional services that larger organizations might ind useful, OnPay still meets our limited requirements of running bi-weekly payroll and submitting our quarterly state and federal tax documents, and at a price that we still find affordable.
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.
OnPay is very easy to use. The computer interface is setup very well. You can quickly add people, enter your Payroll, print reports, etc. If your Payroll doesn't change from pay period to pay period (example, salaried employees) it takes mere seconds to enter in your Payroll.
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've only had to call a couple of times, and each time the customer service rep is extremely thorough and helpful. I've never had the experience, like I do with some other companies, of feeling stressed or irritated with the reps. They are competent, educated, and easily walk me through the system
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.
OnPay is tremendously less expensive and technically superior to Quickbooks in my opinion. OnPay is less expensive and offered the ease of managing a restaurant payroll that was better in my opinion than When I Work. My experience when evaluating all of the payroll products that I felt the company could afford was that OnPay had a superior staff of professionals who knew their product and could explain how to use it most clearly.
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.