Gusto vs. Wise

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

Transferwise it is great for transferring money across countries (never for transfers within the same country) and when the countries in question use different currencies. It is very quick, especially if the amount is not big. For larger amounts, it would take longer so it would be good only if you are not time-constraint.

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

• Quick - because funds are transferred domestically, even when going international, you don't have to wait long.
• Easy - the printout of what information I needed to give the sending bank was complete and easy to understand.
• Affordable - the fees on both ends were minimal.

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

• TransferWise (at the time of this review) does not allow one to transfer money to all kinds of business accounts. This can be a limitation for people who want to use it as a way to pay directly for goods and services.
• Sometimes it has problems with some credit cards. But the most popular types are accepted without problems.
• TransferWise accepts fewer currencies than other services. But it seems like this is a temporary problem, and the company is making efforts to support transferences to all of the currencies.

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.

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

We haven't really had to engage with TransferWise support. The platform is simple and easy to use.

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

Apple Pay has high fees and hidden charges, not easy to use and it does not really support enterprises. It is also not regulated by MAS so we don't feel safe using it. Transferwise account was easy to set up (within minutes), the admin fee is low and the pricing is very transparent (no hidden fee). Lastly, we needed a platform which is safe to use and we are happy to know that Transferwise is regulated by the MAS of Singapore.

Incentivized

• 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

• We can save around 5% on our transfer fees
• The online account management is easier than going into banks personally
• There's no negative impact...