Gusto vs. Netchex

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 LOVE THE EASE OF THE TIMECLOCK AND PULLING INTO PAYROLL. PREVIOUSLY I HAD TIME CLOCK ON MY DMS AND PAYROLL THROUGH PAYCHEX. IT DIDNT INTEGRATE SO I HAD TO KEY IN EVERY SINGLE TIMESHEET....THIS IS SO MUCH EASIER. ONLY THING I DONT LIKE IS ONCE YOU START PAYROLL IF SOMEONE TIME HAS TO BE FIXED YOU HAVE TO DELETE AND START OVER. THE ONLY PROBLEM I HAVE HAD WHICH IS NOT A BIG PROBLEM.

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

• My Netchex Service Team is very responsive and friendly. They are willing and able to spend the amount of time needed on one call to troubleshoot most problems or answer questions.
• Their recent updates to the employee dashboard have been well-received by our seasonal team. Employees are able to quickly find what they are looking for which has minimized the amount of requests that my team receives regarding questions on pay or updating personal information.
• Online W-2 forms have been a game-changer for us since moving to Netchex. Our staff tend to move around a lot and most do not get the mailed copy of their W-2. The electronic consent has saved me hours and hours of time.

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

• Support needs to be available more times than just normal business hours.
• Tax support is basically non-existent. This seems that it should be TOP NOTCH.
• Some of the functionality of the Netchex program could be tweaked. It is not a keyboard friendly program at all. Must mouse your way through. When the program times out, it takes 2 to 3 screens before it really logs you out.
• When submitting from Netchex to Dealertrack, it would be nice to show the payroll # or payroll date that has been submitted. Currently once you hit submit, the screen reverts back to the last successful payroll submit. This process is just a bit confusing, especially for new users.

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.

Easy to work with.

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

Very user friendly and great interface.

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 first line CE team is phenomenal. They are helpful, friendly, and knowledgeable. We have had less luck with the responsiveness of the tax department. However, their response time has improved drastically over the past year.

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

Implementation took some time but was pretty much error free.

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

Netchex is much more user-friendly and much more of a robust payroll system. Netchex also takes care of everything regarding employees and their entire time with the company, but GP is much more limited.

• 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

• Associates can easily access their data and make changes to things like their address and direct deposit, saving manager time to focus on more critical tasks within the organization
• NetRecruitier has one site that can be posted to multiple job boards with one applicant tracking system
• Electronic Onboarding allows us to get information out to the new employee so we can start with expectations on their first day and they know what to expect.