Gusto vs. TriNet HR Plus

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 think as a small business owner, this system gives peace of mind. When I'm onboarding an employee I can automatically integrate the process with Gmail and Quickbooks. I feel like they are always doing work in the background and I don't have to keep checking up on them or verifying the work that's been done

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

• Simple platform for running payroll. It is easy to adjust pay, see deductions, reimburse employees, manage bonuses, etc. It takes literally 5 minutes or less to run payroll - which is huge.
• Zenefits has a great system for getting new employees on boarded with the employee handbook, financial stuff, legal employment verification, and more. Makes it so that I can be a little more hand-off during that process.
• Zenefits does a great job of reminding me if there are things coming up like benefits renewal, or legally mandated updates to renewing our employee handbook, new tax laws, etc. - so that I don't feel like there are important things slipping through the cracks.

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 is a little bit tricky - they always get back, but isn't the most intuitive support as you have to go through a list of preset options for what you are wanting to contact them about
• No support for 9/80 schedule (every other Friday off)

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.

It's a great, easy to use platform that allows all staff to easily engage at the appropriate level of engagement for their needs. It has saved us countless hours for how we track our staff and our ability to easily pull reports. I highly recommend this platform to anyone

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's extremely user friendly and customer service is super helpful. The app needed help a while back but it has greatly improved. There were issues with files being cut off, and when I was onboarded, it actually cut my offer letter off hiding important information. Since then, it's been fixed so they are continually improving.

We have not experienced any application errors or unplanned outages in the two years I have been using this app. Sometimes there is a lag in the time keeping/ confirming your location, however, it quickly resolves itself within seconds and more often than not is an internet connection error

Incentivized

This app always loads extremely quickly and in a reasonable time frame. Like I said, when we do experience lags from this app, it is more often than not an internet connection error

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

Zenefits support staff and employees are great at what they do. They are friendly and extremely helpful. Questions and concerns submitted are always responded to in a timely manner. The explanations are thoughtful and quickly resolve the issues. If a solution can not be ready fixed they will work diligently until it’s resolved in full

Incentivized

Can't really say just because I would not know.

Incentivized

It went through successfully.

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

Unfortunately I do not have any insights on the implementation of Zenefits as I was not employed with this company when Zenefits was introduced. Based on how effortless it is to use Zenefits, I wouldn't image there would be many issues with the implementation of Zenefits

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 QuickBooks Online Payroll from 2014 to 2019 and transitioned to Zenefits Payroll at the beginning of 2020 when Zenefits Payroll shortly after Zenefits Payroll became available in all 50 states. We made the transition to provide our employees with one powerful app to view their paystubs, request time off, view their benefits information, manage their pre-tax spending accounts, and look up contact information of their fellow team members

It is very easy to use and does not require the end user to go to multiple sites to obtain many facets of HR/ Payroll information that the app offers

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

• Lost time. I spent more time trying to fix problems than doing many of these tasks manually the year before.
• Lost money. Given the product was a headache, I wasted the onboarding fee, the subscription fee, and am now paying delinquent fees to tax authorities.
• Stress. I've got a company to lead, dealing with payroll issues every month does not help.