Gusto vs. HealthStream Learning Management System

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

HealthStream is a wonderful tool for assigning assessments and evaluating knowledge. The assessments have a large pool of questions to pull from. The exams are timed and will generate a test report at the end of the exam so the clinical team can see what tests were passed and failed. These are helpful in ensuring we know what the nurse needs extra education on. HealthStream would be less suited for education items that would need to be validated in person...skills such as CPR.

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

• Meeting healthcare regulatory education needs - comes with a regulatory library focused on those needs (The Joint Commission and OSHA)
• Elective Course Options - dozens of course libaries available for purchase to meeting contining education needs of nurses and clinical employees
• Class Registraion - Does a really nice job of handling thousands of class registrations for massive education roll outs
• Course Building - with additional resources you can purchase rights to author your own courses.

• 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

• From an administrative point of a view they use an "and" relationship in their database and they need to move to and and/or relationship. So a nurse can work in the ED and hold a second job in the medical/peds. Right now HealthStream doesn't find that nurse and it takes a lot of work to find that 2nd job code on the administrative side. HealthStream should be able to pick that up.
• It is lacking a 2nd supervisor field to pick up the 2nd job codes that are created which links up to issue number one. Once you find the 2nd job code you can't link it to 2nd supervisor.
• The HLC/competency center needs alot more programming work. It's a newer program for HealthStream and missing alot needed requests. It needs checklist functionality or some special editable fields and an ability to change rater on the assignments to help the educators.

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 would most definitely choose to renew our contract as HealthStream is a great tool that meets the needs of the organization when it comes to delivering and tracking training. Prior to rolling out HealthStream, most of the tracking would be done manually through Excel, and classes would all have to be done in person. HealthStream really optimizes everyone's time, and makes everything more efficient.

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

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

I only used HealthStream for a short time, but it wasn’t overly user-friendly or pretty. There were some quirks that I didn’t like, like the quiz builder or uploading lists. Whenever you assigned a group it was difficult to tell and confirm that the assignment went out. Overall I like other systems better.

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

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

In the past, I've used both BlackBoard and IntraLearn to manage health care eLearning. Intralearn, in particular, is a great in-house solution - although it does require full customization by the administrator as there is no canned content or content library resource. IntraLearn is integrated with Sharepoint, so that is a plus for any organization where Sharepoint is used for their web presence.

• 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

• More efficiency. Easy way to implement training to a larger group of people.
• Helps to orientate new hires to our organization quicker.
• Consistency with training messages. We can communicate a method that can be easily adopted and implement across the organization.