Gusto vs. UKG Pro

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

I would say, well, I don't want to focus on less appropriate. I want to be well suited. I really feel like if the transparency with our count rep and then just diving in onto how to problem solve and how to troubleshoot, I think that's most important with that.

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

• UKG has an amazing support team to reach out to if assistance is needed
• All add-ons of UKG Pro integrate seamlessly making it a powerful software program
• UKG Pro is very configurable to meet the specific needs of companies
• It is easy to use and navigate
• The mobile app is loved by all employees and provides on-demand access
• The Ultimate Community is amazing!! On-demand information on all products and how they are used. Connect with other companies that use UKG Pro and learn from each other.
• The Learning Centre is also amazing!! Learning right at your fingertips anytime, anywhere.

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

• Offer a fully integrated reporting solution that pulls from all modules versus a separate analytics tool in each module.
• Ability to use the ideas UKG Pro presents without being forced into specific modules. Ex Provide a Learning space where ANY learning platform the customer chooses plugs in, a Recruiting/Onboarding Space where ANY platform will plug in, EE Engagement, Performance, ... then the data connects to the data points within the architecture. With this model, anyone would be able to use the Career Designer versus limited to only those who have the perfect combination of products. This is just an example. Many times the products are created by UKG Pro that are amazing, then comes the "You must have A, B, C, D modules to use it" which excludes many customers and limits UKG Pro's selling potential.
• At my last organization, we had what was formerly referred to as a "Global" account rep. This person had very limited amount of clients, we met on every case. They delegated our cases immediately in products outside of core to the same team member from that product. Our response time was usually less than one day. It was the best customer service I have had in 10 years as a client. Why is this model not looked at for everyone versus 3 different reps. This one person handled everything except sales. IT was beautiful. We met weekly. We never had cases go beyond a few days unless a JIRA was in play. Customer Service matters so much where many companies sell similar technology.
• Org Chart - Executives would like the ability to stage movement and budget to see what the org would look like in a reorg planning. There is no ability to move, rearrange, export to different applications like PowerPoint.

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 only reason that I give a 9 rather than a 10 is because, while I am an influencer in the decision making process, the final decision to renew vendor relationships is by committee. If the final decision is up to me, Independent Bank would be a partner with Ultimate Software for the rest of my career.

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

It gets the job done, but not with a few deep sighs. Once you know where stuff lives, it's manageable, but the first learning curve is steep, some menus feel buried. However, it's consistent, reliable and doesn't crash on me, which counts for a lot. With a little UI glow up it could push into a 9 zone.

Incentivized

Our up time has been 100% in the 2 and half years as I recall. We have had between 5 to 10 situations where Ultimate proactively advised us that there were global system issues and provide us with updates status until the issue has been resolved. I do not recall any internal incidents from our employees about an inability to access the system of UltiPro

Incentivized

Normally UKG Pro loads quickly. We had been having major issues with reports running in a timely manner but recently they broke out our virtual server to another instance where is wasn't sharing resources and that seems to have helped reporting run more efficiently.

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

The quality of UKG Support is related directly to the UKG rep. who handles the issue. In some cases you get someone who really is good at supporting the product and others may not have as much experience and it shows

Incentivized

I've been to a few in-person (hands on) training sessions and it is very similar to the online classes. You have the same reference material to look back on after the training. So regardless of in person training or online you really get the same thing.

Incentivized

Most of the online training was very generic (to be expected) but we had specific requirements for configuration that could have been better addressed with more individual sessions earlier on from our project team. However, we did finally begin booking training sessions with our implementation team which were recorded, and so provided additional information for how to correctly configure and test the system.

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

UltiPro made it very easy to implement. I implemented UltiPro on my own (as we were short-handed), in addition to my other duties, and was able to stay on track with our original implementation timeline. The process is laid out in a very detailed method. This was by far the most thorough and easiest implementation that I have been through

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

We used ADP WFN prior to switching to UKG. We interviewed three different payroll companies to see what our options were. UKG stood out and aligned with our company values. The sales team was very helpful and asked questions about what we were currently doing and how they could assist with simplifying things. I personally had a side meeting with them to see if there were options for a process that we manually process and if UKG could actually eliminate the process. We came to the conclusion that we weren't able to get it 100%, but we could pull 80% of what we needed from UKG, and then we would only need to manipulate 20% of the information. It was also determined from that meeting that we wouldn't need to pay extra to have a special report built. The customer service is what we were sold on. The other companies that we looked at didn't give us the confidence that their customer service would be any better than what we previously had.

Incentivized

The UltiPro HRMS platform offers Flexibility & Accessibility. We are able to add a component company to our existing profile with ease. UltiPro provides a step-by-step guide to component company implementation. The process was flawless! the HRMS homepage is customizable. We place a large amount of data on our HRMS homepage for employees to view and print, regardless of their location, as long as they have internet access. The Human Resources Department no longer prints and distribute Employee Handbooks, Policies & Procedures, and Group Health SPDs, as this information is available on HRMS.

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

• My company acquired another company, and with a UKG partner, we were able to bring them online in UKG within two months of the acquisition date.
• When COVID sent us remote, we could configure custom fields to track vaccination status.
• The C-suite can get custom reports done in minutes, or ours, where our previous HRIS would have taken days to accomplish, as data would have had to have been exported to Excel and then manipulated inside Excel.
• UKG has allowed to go virtual paper free as both a candidate and employee.

Incentivized