GoCo vs. Gusto

GoCo is a complete package that meets our needs for hiring onboarding and payroll processing. The platform is well suited for both hourly and salaried employees and allows for many options based on work schedules and PTO accrual. It is an intuitive platform and has increased our efficiency with payroll processing and benefits selection.

Incentivized

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

• Benefits enrollment! We've received compliments on how easy it is to enroll each year in benefits.
• New hire onboarding. All information is sent to new hires and they can seamlessly enter their information and read and sign all documents and agreements.
• For the most part, the reports are easy to configure and use.

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

• Handling exceptions for staff PTO requests for employees in their 90 day probationary period
• Ease of managing different hourly work week exceptions

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

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.

I really like GoCo. There are a few things I wish could be improved and have talked with our rep about them. They are very receptive to ideas and have made changes based on some of my suggestions.

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

GoCo has done a great job of being responsive to us in working through issues in the system.

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

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

We really wanted an HRIS that also did benefits open enrollment. GoCo was able to provide both of those in one system. And, the open enrollment process is pretty slick for employees.

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

• Productivity has gone up in the HR/Payroll department. GoCo has helped us streamline our processes, what used to take us three days to complete manually, we can now do in one day, leaving time to focus elsewhere.
• What used to take our campus administrators a day to approve time off requests (paper) it now only takes a click of a button and staff are notified immediately.
• Staff Self-service is huge as they can look up their own information quickly at anytime of the day.

• 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