Gusto is an excellent payroll and human resources (HR) platform with features aimed at small and midsize businesses. However, it lacks features for other functionalities like talent acquisition, analytics, and employee relations, which can negatively affect organizations with more complex HR needs.
If that’s you, consider some of my favorite Gusto alternatives below:
What are the top Gusto alternatives?
| Starting price | Free trial? | ||
| Zoho People | $1.25 per user per month | 30-day | |
| ADP Workforce Now | Contact sales | No | |
| UKG Ready | $18.75 PEPM | No | |
| Rippling | $8 PEPM | No | |
| Paycor | $99 per month plus $6 PEPM | Yes (Contact Paycor for eligibility) |
Zoho People: Better at talent acquisition
Zoho People is a cloud-based HR solution that helps HR professionals manage tasks in every aspect. From recruitment to onboarding, leave and attendance tracking, and exit procedures, Zoho People can help streamline these tasks. Apart from being scalable, Zoho People also integrates with other software solutions within the Zoho ecosystem.
However, it is important to stress that Zoho People gets its recruiting capabilities by integrating with Zoho Recruit. To take advantage of Zoho’s talent acquisition features, you need to get both Zoho People and Zoho Recruit.
Zoho People, when integrated with Zoho Recruit, stands out when it comes to talent acquisition because of its features meant to simplify the recruitment process, as opposed to Gusto, which is primarily focused on providing payroll. Zoho Recruit’s applicant tracking system, a feature that automates recruitment by tracking and managing job applications, can sort, filter, and rank candidates according to their qualifications. It also automates various recruitment tasks, like interview invitations and candidate feedback requests.
Learn more about Zoho People →
ADP Workforce Now: Better scalability
ADP Workforce Now is an all-in-one human resource management system that caters to medium and large-sized organizations. Like Gusto, it helps HR professionals process payroll, benefits, time, and labor management. ADP Workforce Now integrates with 485 platforms to streamline employee tracking, data analysis, and strategic planning processes.
ADP Workforce Now suits growing companies because of its scalability and features for managing global workforce, advanced analytics and reporting. It also helps management and the HR team ensure that everything in the workplace complies with labor laws.
ADP provides detailed insights with its ADP DataCloud. This feature can provide labor costs, employee turnover, compliance, and performance metrics analytics. These advanced reporting capabilities allow companies to make informed decisions and benchmark against industry standards. This level of detail and predictive analytics distinguishes ADP from Gusto, which focuses on basic reporting.
Learn more about ADP Workforce Now →
Payroll management
ADP Workforce Now simplifies payroll operations with its automated system that ensures accuracy, compliance, and efficiency. It calculates employees’ pay based on work hours and incorporates deductions such as taxes and benefits contributions. This key feature will reduce the risk of errors that occur with manual calculations. While Gusto is significantly easier to use than ADP, its simplicity limits customization options, which makes it less suited for handling complex payroll and tax requirements.
Core HR features
ADP Workforce Now offers features that support core HR activities For example, it has a centralized employee database that holds employee records and documents. This makes it easy for managers and HR teams to access employee information quickly.
In addition, ADP Workforce Now includes a self-service portal where employees and managers can log in and manage their HR-related tasks, such as updating personal information, requesting time off, and accessing company policies.
ADP Workforce Now has three plans: Select, Plus, and Premium. However, you need to contact ADP to get pricing details.
- Quote based on the number of employees, subscription tier, and add-ons needed.
- Additional expenses for HR services, like recruiting and onboarding, LMS, and compliance management.
- Its scalability makes it suitable for medium to large businesses anticipating growth or having varying HR demands.
- More extensive range of HR functionalities than Gusto.
- It has global compliance features that are ideal for multinational companies.
UKG Ready: Better in analytics
UKG Ready is noted for its flexibility in meeting the HR needs of different industries. Similar to ADP Workforce Now, UKG Ready also offers a comprehensive set of solutions such as payroll, talent management, and time and attendance. While users have reported some issues integrating UKG Ready, it was recognized for its customizable interface that benefits employees and managers.
UKG Ready surpasses Gusto with its advanced analytics features, which provide detailed reports on labor costs, compliance, and productivity. Its reporting capabilities also identify workforce trends, which helps with employee scheduling and decision-making. Managers and HR professionals can also create custom reports for their industry needs.
Rippling: Better in global payroll
Rippling is an all-in-one HRMS for organizations that need IT and app management in addition to HR functions like payroll, benefits administration, and time-tracking.
One of Rippling’s key advantages over Gusto is its international payroll feature. It helps you to manage payroll across multiple countries’ diverse currencies, tax systems, and labor laws. This functionality is a game-changer for companies with a global workforce, simplifying complex payroll processes.
Employer of record services
Rippling’s Employer of Record (EOR) helps organizations grow their workforce in countries where they don’t have a legal entity. It eliminates the need to set up local entities, making it a better choice over Gusto because it simplifies the expansion process by managing overseas payroll, taxes, and compliance without the overhead of establishing and maintaining multiple international legal entities.
Payroll management.
Rippling payroll management has a suite of features that not only streamlines payroll calculation but also ensures compliance, as well as timely and convenient payment to employees. With Rippling’s automated payroll, you can accurately calculate your employee’s pay, taxes, and benefits. This automated payroll processing reduces manual errors.
Rippling also supports multi-country payroll. It accommodates different currencies, tax systems, and payroll regulations. It also promotes transparency with this self-service portal, where employers and employees can access pay stubs, tax documents, and payroll history.
Rippling helps save time by simultaneously processing payroll for contractors and employees during a single payroll run. In contrast, Gusto typically requires separate payroll runs for contractors and employees, which makes Rippling a more efficient choice for businesses managing diverse types of workers.
Customers must purchase Rippling Unity first, which starts at $8 per employee per month. And then get Rippling’s U.S. and Global Full-Service Payroll as an add-on feature.
- It’s an all-in-one platform that offers payroll, benefits administration, and IT management.
- Rippling minimizes manual workload and boosts accuracy with its automated payroll feature.
Paycor: Better employee relations
Similar to Gusto, Paycor is an HR solution that will benefit startups in businesses to medium-sized companies because it has tools for payroll management, performance evaluations, and employee development integrated into a single platform that scales with business growth. Paycor is a human capital management (HCM) system with a comprehensive set of features like payroll management, time and attendance, onboarding, and benefits administration. On top of these, Paycor is also noted for its strength in performance management.
When it comes to employee relations, Paycor stands out over Gusto with its customizable review templates, OKR-based goal setting, and continuous feedback mechanisms. These tools foster active engagement and development and are more effective for managing employee performance than Gusto’s simpler setup.
Performance management tools
Paycor includes tools useful to HR professionals in evaluating and improving employee performance. This feature encourages a culture of being receptive to feedback and development and aligns individual goals with the company objectives. While Paycor enables goal setting and tracking, using objectives and key results (OKRs) to foster priority alignment across the company, Gusto provides basic performance review tools, primarily focused on streamlined feedback and simple evaluations. Paycor also simplifies performance reviews with its customizable templates and scoring system.
Learning management system
Regarding LMS, Paycor stands out over Gusto because it allows administrators to create and customize training modules. In contrast, Gusto does not offer a native learning management system. There is also a library of pre-built courses that cover a wide range of basic lessons, such as workplace safety and soft skills. This learning management system feature also tracks employees’ progress in the training.
Paycor’s pricing structure offers specific plans for small businesses and mid-market companies. Overall, Paycor’s approach is to provide scalable, customizable solutions that grow with your business needs.
- Basic plan starts at $99 per month plus $6 per employee per month.
- It helps in succession planning by identifying and developing internal candidates for critical leadership positions.
- Strong performance management tools to encourage employee development through career growth and cross-company goal setting.
What are Gusto’s limitations?
Gusto is an excellent choice for payroll processing, especially for small and midsize organizations. However, you might want to consider looking for alternatives if:
Choosing the right Gusto alternative
Gusto’s strength lies in its user-friendly payroll and implementation. Still, if you find it lacking in areas like talent acquisition, reports and analytics, employee relations, or specific integrations, you might want to explore alternatives and consider one of these options:
Explore our HR Software Guide for a complete list of solutions to fit your needs.
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