Gusto vs. UZIO

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

Finding a reliable payroll service in cannabis has been difficult. I've used a number of payroll options throughout the past few years and the biggest problem encountered is that all previous payroll services evolve away from cannabis clients. UZIO was a great choice for us from the beginning of our search

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

• Manages benefit enrollment for new hires, status changes, and open enrollment.
• Houses documents, where we can store company policies and employee-specific documents.
• Offers reporting for payroll, billing, etc.

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

• We have a shift that crosses midnight and the system resets OT calculation when it becomes a new day, but in CA OT is calculated on hours worked and doesn’t split a shift at midnight for OT purposes. So far they have been unable to address this as it's not an issue in other states.
• Holiday Pay has been an issue because of our policy - too many changing variables to create a process. Unfortunately, you cannot adjust holiday pay on the employee's timesheet. That would be the simplest solution but so far that hasn't happened.
• Non-US Citizen beneficiary. This is not an option when electing benefits. Not a big deal unless you have employees with families abroad. We had one and we created a work around.
• Everything has to be downloaded. You cannot click on an employee's pay stub (for example) and view it within UZIO. It must be downloaded to your computer. Not a big deal - just takes more time and more files to delete on your computer.

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

Has some blips that have been stated throughout this review that can be fixed, I do not want to fully repeat myself however a more intuitive interface, interface that does not lag, and then glitches with service would be ideal. That's about all I can say on the matter, pertaining to what I have access to in my org.

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

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

Compared to QuickBooks Online (QBO), UZIO has been a game changer. QBO refused to process our payroll due to our industry (cannabis), and even their accounting platform often takes ages to load. UZIO, on the other hand, runs quickly, has had no significant downtime from bugs or maintenance, and is far more affordable. The interface is clean, intuitive, and easy for both our HR staff and employees to use.

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

• UZIO has had a positive impact on the time it takes to onboard/offboard or complete payroll.
• UZIO is much more affordable that some of the other HRIS systems.
• The only negative is that they do not have a performance mgmt system.

Incentivized