ADP Workforce Now is a cloud-based HR platform for mid-sized businesses. It features customizable modules of various HR services that businesses can tailor to their specific needs, as well as regulatory monitoring and alerts to help businesses remain compliant.
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Gusto
Score 8.9 out of 10
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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
Pricing
ADP Workforce Now
Gusto
Editions & Modules
Essential
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Enhanced
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Complete
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HR Pro
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Payroll Essentials
Contact sales team
HR Plus
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Hiring Advantage
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Performance Plus
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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
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ADP Workforce Now
Gusto
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
No setup fee
Additional Details
Please contact ADP for a product demo and ask about a hands-on "test drive" of Workforce Now.
Gusto offers three pricing plans for payroll, benefits, and HR.
ADP offers a more robust catalogue of solutions, making it a true HRIS system as opposed to other solutions, such as Gusto or QuickBooks. Both are great for payroll processing and QuickBooks for enhanced accounting support, but neither is an HRIS system that allows you to …
Though definitely not as robust as ADP Workforce, these two software have been everything that we needed to make our business function. We understand that in the future we will need to be able to use more resources that ADP offers.
ADP is definitely the best option of their competitors but it is still a system that needs work to be great or to really get business from other providers. The ROI isn't visible on specific ADP modules (tech only) but maybe on comprehensive services, the comp learning module is …
Gusto is 100000% better than ADP. ADP is confusing, misleading, overly complicated, and not clear at all. Gusto just makes the whole process smooth as butter. Paycom is good, but Gusto seems much better. Paycom seems to have a lot of its own internal lingo and just doesn't make …
Gusto is much more user friendly than ADP. When I use to use ADP, I would be confused almost everytime I logged in. It had so many tabs and so many sub tabs i had no idea what i needed.
ADP did not allow me to do anything that Gusto allows me to do. All I could do was view pay stubs and time and print past records. With Gusto I am in charge of keeping track of my own time and pay so it makes me feel more like I'm in control of things.
I think ADP has better customer service. ADP also has a more streamlined and consolidated suite of functionality. With Gusto, I find that I have to go to multiple portals in order to get the information I need. For example, it's one portal to track time and elect benefits, …
Gusto has a glitch-free on-boarding process that surpasses all of the other systems that I have ever tried and used. Rippling is the only other platform that comes close to the Gusto online experience, but Rippling has its PEO/behind-the-scenes legacy system glitches, and it's …
We switched over to Gusto about a year ago and we previously used ADP for our company's payroll platform. I feel like ADP was a bit clunky and did not have a great user experience when using it to track time and view my pay. Gusto is so much easier to use and very glad we made …
well suited for folks in manufacturing or building (jobs and tasks required). Good for small and big business, ease of forming to what you want rather then getting oversold on items that you will not use. Lots of training options available
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.
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.
We are happy with the service and options offered by ADP. Although the cost is a bit high for a not-for-profit organization, it is essential that we have multi-jurisdictional support for the 20 plus states where employees work and reside. As our company is diminishing in size, we may need to look at making a change to conserve costs. At this time, that would be the only reason we would not renew our WFN contract.
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.
Lack of documentation and test environment make it extremely difficult to deploy work processes through the system. While there are a handful of things throughout the system that work well, particularly from an employee's perspective, many tasks, which would be simple for practitioner users in other systems, require these users to ask for administrator support. Additionally, the ghosts in the ADP machine cause established process (e.g. automated report delivery) to stop working with no notice and no error report.
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.
Overall, I think the functionality of the program works pretty well. Sometimes, certain browsers do not work well for the policy function of ADP, but that is the only issue thus far
Most of it is not local, which impacts barriers and customs. I do think they know a lot, but not the cohesive piece. Some naturally know more about certain things than others. The payroll section should be broken out more because payroll is a big topic with many problems, so it can be hard to get the right person who can actually help you.
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.
In-person training was pretty good - I think this significantly depends on the trainer. Our trainer was really good and showed what ADP can do - but I know that all trainers are not the same - and this truly makes such as difference. Overall, our training went pretty well.
At the time training was not as expansive as it is now. If it could go wrong it did for me so the process was difficult and lengthy. I needed to have more in person walkthroughs of things to ensure the transition was done correctly. Not sure what else I can say, we were part of the initial move to Workforce Now when it was introduced.
Either assign more than one specialist to the implementation process, or assign less clients to the implementation specialist. The process requires attention to detail and the ability to test and re-test as well as verify the information. It also requires a lot of back and forth between the client ant the implementation specialist, so they need to be readily available during the whole implementation process.
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
I also used UltiPro (way back -- it didn't even appear in dropdown). Recommend ADP Workforce Now above all others. Paycor and Paycom were both very clunky. I even helped implement Paycom and could never get it to work how the business needed it to.
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 been able to grow with ADP from just a few hundred employees to over 10,000 so it's actually very scalable for payroll usage. We do not use the benefits and onboarding offerings for most of our employees but they are built to scale easily enough for when our corporate team has over 1,000 FTE.
ADP Workforce Now handles all of our tax filing which frees up our time to do other things. They keep us compliant communicating updates on a timely basis.
Calculates payrolls accurately. Our management and employees have built a level of confidence due to the ease of pulling statements, year end documents etc.
A really nice feature is the follow up email what a change has been made to banking information. There were a couple of times the employee did not make changes to their account information. This kept their funds from getting routed into the wrong hands.
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.