Gusto vs. TriNet

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

For the areas I outlined previously, TriNet is the perfect solution for a young company (start up) to get 1) payroll services, 2) benefits (large offering, best rates), and support when critical issues come about and you don't have an HR Dept. The rates are the best. The people I work with are why I'd keep coming back.

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

• Extensive variety of benefit program plan designs and partners. Something for everyone.
• One stop shopping for all health and wellness benefits.
• Continue to add new offerings, such as access to Salary.com at a discount and access to Carta at a discount to manage employee stock programs.
• On top of compliance by state.

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

• Expense management could be improved upon. We use a state bank for credit cards, and we were unable to link our credit card accounts directly. I have a workaround, but it means manually uploading the charges. Also, in this particular area, the support is not the best.
• Also in expense management, while it has many fields for you to enter information, some of those don't show up on the reports.

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.

This is one stop shopping perse. They provide tools for Benefits and 401k. There reports are easy to read and the support given from Trinet support is awesome. Having everything in one place is best then having multiple places for things. Why change if things are working well? All the information is all there when needed.

Incentivized

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

Being only 8 months into using the product there are still some things I need to learn, but I am sure as we start to use the product to it's full potential the usability score will go up. The expense interface is a little clunky to what we have used in the past, but the employees are happier that they can have their expenses direct deposited instead of getting an expense check.

We had an issue with application errors - took TriNet 5 months to fix it, mean while we had someone manually tracking and keeping up with many requests and questions about the application error which affected time off. When we were all registering for Benefits during open enrollment there were lots of bugs that caused issues with registering for benefits or being able to see what benefits were available

Incentivized

For the most part pages load quickly. Working for a software company we understand performance is everything, even a few seconds delay can feel like a lifetime, that being said, we ran into a few times where pages didn't load, information didn't load correctly, and an influx in users (like open enrollment) cause things to slow down

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

again tough to say. Our account manager - 10 most others - 6 Benefits - 5 HR support - 2 (the joke in my team is "why ask, he's just going to say "do this and then check with your legal dept.") If we have to do our own research why do we need you. Like I said, great for smaller companies that don't have an HR team. There is almost an attitude of "we are TriNet, this is how we do it, deal with it. You're in our platform now". Every client may have different needs and TriNet needs to be able to adapt to them. The new role of strong HR teams is business partners - TriNet struggles with this and seems to be stuck in old "tell you what to do", plan the Christmas party and buy cake once a month for birthdays. Its timer to move forward!

Incentivized

it's been awhile, but I recall them being helpful. I got through a lot of it and when I needed help, they can walk me through it over the phone. It's also pretty user friendly in general at a platform. I don't really know what else to type, but they came and helped me in person and also when there was something new, they came and talked to me. They have not done that since with the new model that I hate

Incentivized

Since this was already implemented. I have another employee briefly train me. Then Trinet rep gave me some training as needed for things that came up. For one payroll preview report I figured it could be done, but I had asked the rep to be sure. One important training was when there was an employee leaving the company.

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

not applicable as I implementation was done 5 years ago and have no recollection of the details of the process. Above it says to skip question if not involved in the process but it will not allow me to skip it as it states explanation requitred thus making this process extremely frustrating.

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

I was no involved in the decision to use TriNet as it was in place before I started my role but I have since looked at Deel but they were not able to offer the same level or variety of benefit options as TriNet so that is why we have stayed.

Incentivized

We are a small company, do we use it across departments and sites? Yes, we are all remote working, so there are as many sites as there are people. We also have our entire staff using TriNet, so every department from Accounting, Admin, HR, Development, QA, and Management are all using this. Can't say for sure how great the scalability is as we are only about 30 employees

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

• Stay within HR Compliance - when the new laws about Salary change came into effect I received an email on impacted employees and how to address.
• More involvement in employee benefits. With greater benefit selection more employees were able to find plans that suited their needs.
• The TimeClock took a little time to get used to. It is still a little frustrating at times for hourly employees to be able to track how many hours they actually have for the week/pay-period. The off the clock meals count towards "hours" and employees have to subtract that out to be able to see what they need for the rest of the week.