15Five in San Francisco offers their employee performance management platform, which emphasizes employee engagement via pulse surveys and an emphasis on frequent feedback, fast one-on-one meeting planning, objective tracking, and other related features.
$7
per person/per month
Gusto
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Gusto offers payroll, benefits and compliance capabilities. Gusto is scaled for small to mid-sized businesses, and emphasizes an easy to use interface.
$49
per month
Pricing
15Five
Gusto
Editions & Modules
Basic
$7
per person/per month
Plus
$14
per person/per month
Performance
Custom Pricing
Simple: A streamlined set of automatic payroll features and benefits integrations
$49/month + $6/mo per person
per month
Plus: Comprehensive payroll, benefits, and HR tools for employers building a great place to work
$80/month + $12/mo per person
per month
Premium: Scalable payroll and benefits, expert HR, and dedicated support for the complex needs of growing teams
$180/month + $22/mo per person
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
15Five
Gusto
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Gusto offers three pricing plans for payroll, benefits, and HR.
We love the ability to recognize peers and align the High Fives with core values (and having it integrate with Slack creates visibility which encourages use of the feature) The Performance Review features are quite customizable and do most of what we'd like. The goal setting function is robust, however I wish that area was a bit less complicated as we'd like to be able to zoom out for company milestones, it just looks busy. In terms of managing an employee's lifecycle from hire on past their 30/60/90 day goals, that piece is customizable however I'd love it if check-ins were completely custom.
Gusto is well-suited for small businesses looking for a one-stop platform for payroll, tax-related tasks, and onboarding. It has many automated features that make tasks related to running a business/running an S-Corp simpler. I have not tried any other similar platforms, so I am unsure how it compares, but the pricing Gusto offers feels reasonable compared to other providers.
I think 15Five dashboards can be quite clunky and difficult to use
I think their One-on-one management feature makes it difficult to track action items or search histories across time or multiple employees--a simple Google Doc is much more effective or Notion if you want even more functionality
In my opinion, 15Five's customer service is among the worst I have experienced from a software company. They will nickel and dime you and use hidden fine print to wring as much money as they can from you.
Gusto upsold us labor law posters, but I later found them available for free online. Since we’re a fully remote team, I had to manually download and distribute them digitally. It would be much more efficient if Gusto offered free, auto-distributed digital posters tailored to remote compliance.
Benefits setup is unintuitive for startups
While our rep was helpful, navigating the benefits system felt complex and not tailored to early-stage companies. More guided flows or simplified options for small, remote startups would be a big help.
Limited dashboard customization for remote workflows
As a fully online company, we’d benefit from dashboard options that highlight relevant tools for remote operations—like compliance tracking, digital communications, or onboarding checklists.
This program is the absolute best I've ever used in 30 years with organizations. Not only do I enjoy being a user and "filling it out" every week- but I would personally buy it if available for goal tracking in my personal life I love it that much!
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 platform is too easy for use, you will find by hand all the main tools and the interface put in front of you what you need without enter to define or open complex options to add things.
No, you just need to open a new report and start to type things, the system automatically will start to add fields or show the desired options based on your current context.
Wonderful overall usability – especially for the new business owner. The user interface is clean and intuitive, so it's easy to find what you're looking for. They also have great explanation pages ingrained into the process, so if you get stuck knowing what to do next, there's a link right there to walk you through the process!
15Five support is quick and helpful. We work with other vendors in the people management space and performance tracking/management who offshore their support or force us into long queues to chat for support and it just doesn't support our needs very well. 15Five is responsive and speedy. We constantly evaluate our vendors for their support and have switched vendors in the past in other areas because of limited support capabilities
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.
Very helpful webinar training. They answer questions, the slides are all very helpful, and they send you the presentation once the webinar is complete so that you can share with your team.
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
Visually 15Five blows Yammer out of the water! Yammer was easy to use as well, but it felt very difficult to get on to and was not single sign-on when we were using it. 15Five allows for easy login with single sing on feature and has less "clicks" to get to where I need to be on the program. I also love the app way more than Yammer!
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.
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.
