Gusto review September 2024: Features, pricing, and more

Overall, Gusto review sites show favorable ratings. Many users like its intuitive interface, affordable pricing, and robust feature set, although its customer service receives mixed reviews and some users experience inconvenient direct-deposit delays. 

The platform also offers features for a wide range of business types and industries. For example, it offers an employer of record (EOR) service for global businesses looking to hire a global workforce without building entities in each country. It also offers a contractor-only plan for small businesses with a handful of contractors. It further provides catered feature sets for healthcare, restaurants, construction, and SMBs.

Gusto

Transparent pricing?	Yes, starting at $40 per month
Free trial:	No
24/7 customer support?	No; limited hours

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at Gusto

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Affordable for small business budgets
• Global hiring features and plans
• Features help users manage payroll, HR and benefits administration, and business compliance
• Employee time tracking tools
• Contract worker payments

Cons

• Add-ons cost more
• No professional employer organization (PEO) services
• No free plan
• Not the most affordable on the market
• No time-tracking in first-tier plan

Who is Gusto good for?

Gusto is a great option for SMBs that are looking for a solution to meet their needs as they grow. It fits this use case based on the plans it offers. Its first-tier plan is affordable for many small businesses at $40 per month, plus $6 per month, per employee. This plan includes single-state payroll management tools. As companies expand, they can opt for plans that accommodate their expansion activities, such as the midtier plan that includes multistate payroll management and even the company’s EOR services which aid companies in hiring globally. Gusto would also be a good fit for companies that rely on hourly labor, such as restaurants, grocery stores, cafes, and other businesses within the hospitality and retail spaces. These businesses can benefit specifically from the platform’s time tracking feature that tracks employees’ work hours and syncs those reports with payroll for efficient and accurate payroll runs. This feature is also a great option for project-based businesses, such as marketing firms, because time worked can be tagged based on the project. 

Who shouldn’t use Zoho Voice?

Gusto would not be the best fit for companies needing: 

• A free startup payroll software plan
• A full-featured plan for one affordable flat rate
• A free trial to test the project against company needs
• 24/7 customer support

For example, startups often have to put in endless hours to ensure the company learns to thrive. They also must maintain strict budgets. For those companies, Gusto may be a bit expensive. It doesn’t offer a free plan or even a free trial for most tiers, and companies must upgrade to relatively expensive plans for basic features they may need. Tools such as employee time tracking and the ability to pay employees in multiple states (often applicable to remote team development) are restricted to higher tiers, for example.

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Gusto Payroll plan & pricing overview

Gusto offers four plans ranging from $35 to $80 per month and up, plus $6 to $12 per person, per month. For most small businesses, the Simple plan offers most of the features they’d need, including single-state full payroll services, an employee self-service portal, reporting, and employee health insurance. Its subsequent plans offer features that make running payroll easier, including employee work-hour time tracking, automations for running payroll, and completing payroll tax filings and employee time-off requests.  

Best Gusto plan for small businesses: Plus

While the Simple plan offers many tools a small business needs to run payroll, the Plus plan is a great fit for many established small businesses. While it is $80 per month, plus $12 per person, it adds tools to the Simple plan feature set that can save time and labor costs. These additional features include: 

• The ability to track employee time automatically with a time kiosk
• Workforce costing and reporting to ensure your budget stays within required limits
• Project tracking to ensure labor efficiency and so fewer wasted funds
• Expenses and reimbursement management tools to ensure employee expense claims are accurate and automatically managed

Other services Gusto offers 

Other features Gusto offers include hiring and onboarding, employee benefits, advanced reporting and team management tools as well as add-ons like tax-advanced and financial benefits:

• Hiring and onboarding: This feature set is included in the Simple, Plus, and Premium plans. It offers state new hire reporting, employee self-reporting tools, templates and checklists, background checks, and document storage, plus advanced features in higher-tiered plans, such as an applicant tracking system.
• Insights and reporting: Gusto’s Basic plan offers several features in this category, including payroll and time-off reporting and the ability to create custom reports. Higher-tiered plans also offer workforce cost reports and anonymous employee surveys. 
• Team management tools: In this category, the Simple plan offers remote team management tools, e-cards, employee celebration tools, and custom admin permissions. The Plus and Premium plans also offer an organizational chart, an employee directory, and performance reviews. 
• Add-ons: You can add a number of tool packages to your selected plan. Its payroll and HR tools add-on, for example, offers international contractor payments, state tax registrations, and R&D tax credits. Other add-ons include advanced health benefits packages, financial benefits, and tax advantage benefits.  

The Gusto platform and customer support

Gusto offers different levels of support depending on the plan you choose. Here’s a breakdown of what’s included in each:

• The Simple plan offers what Gusto calls “full support” with an online help center and call, email, and chat support between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Mountain time Monday through Friday. 
• Gusto’s Plus plan offers an add-on you can purchase for $8 per person, per month, that offers live unlimited certified HR expert access, local law guidance, and employee relation advising. 
• The Premium plan offers a dedicated customer support success manager and includes priority support.

User experience (UX)

In our testing, we found the software to be very intuitive to use, even for small businesses with little software experience. To sign up for Gusto, you must complete a multistep questionnaire with basic information about your company, including your company name, number of employees, contact information, industry, and federal tax identification number (TIN). 

Once you’ve opened an account, you are taken to a dashboard that gives you all the tools you need to set up the software to meet your business needs. Buttons and calls to action (CTAs), such as “set up payroll” and “add team members,” give you quick access to guided setup processes that can be completed by filling out simple forms. 

For example, to add a team member, you must click the “Let’s do it” link on the “add team member” dashboard tile. From there, you’ll be guided through a simple four-step form where you’re asked questions like the employee’s name, role, type (hourly or salaried, for example), pay rate, and manager information. You can then review the information before adding the employee.

During this process, you’ll also be given the option to send a customized email to the added employee to join Gusto. In doing so, you give employees tools to handle their own information, including filling out onboarding forms.

Other processes are similar, with buttons and guided forms that make for an intuitive setup and UX for Gusto customers. 

Website Navigation

Gusto’s website navigation is as intuitive as its UX. Unlike many competitors, it offers superior transparency. For example, while many competitors require a call to their sales team to learn pricing details, along Gusto’s header menu is a “pricing” link that takes you to a full listing of each plan’s pricing, all features included in each plan, and all add-on options. 

In addition, it offers at-your-fingertips information about all Gusto products under its “Products” header menu tab. Each product listing further offers a short description so you can gauge if the product page will offer the information you need before you click. This means less time wasted clicking around to find information.

In addition, its “solutions” header menu tab offers links to solutions for different business use cases. For example, it offers a sub-menu item for small or one-employee businesses to learn how the product can meet their needs. It also offers links to solution-information pages by industry, such as pages that show how Gusto can serve real estate, healthcare, or manufacturing businesses.  

Is Gusto secure?

Gusto offers several measures to ensure your company’s data is secure when using the platform and updates them constantly to the strictest measures to ensure full compliance with security laws and regulations. Here are the security features Gusto has in place:

• It hosts client data on Amazon Web Services (AWS) which employs over 300 security services to keep stored data safe. In addition, it backs up and encrypts that data daily.
• At rest data is encrypted using AES-256. 
• Data in transit is encrypted via TLS 1.2.
• The platform also ensures all team members use strong passwords based on Gusto’s security requirements. 
• Gusto offers alerts when the platform is logged into using a new internet protocol (IP) address to ensure the company can take measures to prevent fraud and secure data as necessary.
• The company requires security training for all of its employees regularly. 
• Gusto maintains a dedicated security team to respond to security breaches quickly and expertly. 
• It updates a SOC 2 Type II report annually which is accessible to customers at any time. This report offers an audit of Gusto’s security controls and systems, covering the company’s data security, confidentiality, processing, and privacy to demonstrate and ensure data safeguarding. 
• The platform follows Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements to safeguard client’s protected health information (PHI).  

Colorado-based Gusto has taken its security measures so seriously that when Colorado passed new laws requiring more data security measures for businesses that serve Colorado citizens, Gusto already had the new security measures in place and did not have to scramble to implement them in a timely fashion like many neighboring businesses. 

In response to the update requirements, Gusto representative Rick Chen said, “As a general rule, we tool processes toward the most strict requirements to fully comply with all relevant laws and regulations.”

Gusto user reviews

On G2, Gusto earns a 4.5 out of 5 star rating with more than 2,000 user reviews. Users commonly say that the platform is intuitive to use and affordable. They love that they can customize the platform to their budgets via add-ons in addition to customizing platform features to their needs. However, some say that Gusto’s customer support and payroll deposits experience inconvenient delays. 

On Trustpilot, users gave Gusto a 2.5 out of 5 star rating with more than 2,000 reviews. However, keep in mind that many reviews sprinkled throughout this platform’s Gusto listing are for other brands that share the same name, and some of those irrelevant reviews were quite negative, bringing down Gusto’s overall star rating. 

Reviewers of the Gusto software said that it has a robust feature set and is easy to use. However, they offered mixed reviews of Gusto’s customer service, with some saying its representatives were responsive and knowledgeable and others stating they received poor support with many response delays. 

Compare Gusto alternatives

Gusto	OnPay	Justworks
Base monthly cost	Base monthly cost	Base monthly cost
$40	$40	$50
Fee per employee	Fee per employee	Fee per employee
$6 to $12	$6	$8 to $109
Free trial length	Free trial length	Free trial length
N/A	One month	No
Learn more	Learn more	Learn more
View offer at Gusto	View offer at OnPay	View offer at Justworks

Gusto vs. OnPay

Gusto and OnPay offer different strengths for different business use cases. For larger businesses that need dedicated support, global hiring, automations, such as time tracking, and access to certified HR experts for running payroll and managing a workforce, Gusto is likely the better choice. These features help mid-sized to large companies manage the complexities that inevitably come with larger workforces and more complex operations.  

OnPay, in contrast, is best for companies looking for an all-in-one payroll and HR software for an affordable flat monthly price. While you must pay between $75 to $180 per month for Gusto plans that include features, such as multistate payroll, an HR resource center, and contractor payments, these features come included in OnPay’s $40 per month plus $6 per person, per month, all-inclusive flat-rate plan. 

Gusto vs. Justworks

Justworks and Gusto both offer domestic and global payroll management tools and services. Both offer EOR services, meaning you can hire employees in over 100 international markets without setting up an entity in those markets. 

Uniquely, Justworks offers PEO service. A PEO offers hands-on guidance on managing payroll, HR functions, and benefits administration. It also offers benefits packages usually only available to large businesses at small-business-affordable pricing. A PEO is a good option for SMBs that can’t pay for robust EOR services but do need assistance with HR and payroll tasks and want to offer high-quality employee benefits for an affordable cost.

Is Gusto right for you?

Gusto is a great fit for SMBs looking for a payroll, benefits management, and HR solution that will grow with their companies. While it doesn’t offer a free plan or trial, its starting price is affordable for most established small businesses and it offers plans and tools for companies that want to hire within one state, across multiple states, or globally.

However, Gusto is not a great fit for many startup companies that put in time seven days a week to nurture the business and would need weekend support, a feature Gusto doesn’t offer. It is also not a great fit for this use case because it doesn’t offer a free trial or a free plan and companies must upgrade to pricey plans for basic tools some startups may need, such as employee time tracking tools. 

Frequently asked questions