ADP Streamline Payroll vs. Gusto

For any business looking for a solid and reliable payroll system [ADP Streamline Payroll] is perfect. It is a little expensive but you certainly get what you pay for. It is easy to implement for your business and to get your employees set up. Gathers all of the needed tax documents and payroll stubs easily and makes them accessible.

Incentivized

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

• They actually make the payments to the tax agencies for you, you don't have to manually do that yourself.
• It does all the calculations of how much to withhold and pay for taxes for everyone.
• It has certain reports and saves the employee tax information for everyone within the platform.

Incentivized

• Gusto really kills it on the simplicity. The app and website are very clear and straightforward.
• Gusto also does a great job at being easy to navigate, visually pleasing, and logically posed.
• Gusto communicates very clearly and provides just the right amount of communication.
• Gusto makes the onboarding process very easy. I recently started at a new company and the process of filling out the necessary documents, filling out forms, and getting my benefit information input was soooooo easy!

Incentivized

• Happens rarely, but sometimes Customer Service has to look up an answer. I would prefer they simply upgrade my call to someone who knows the answer.
• If you are going through a huge company change, let them know ahead of time so you can get a timeline of when changes should and can be done. Implementation of a new company takes considerable time.
• Offer more LIVE webinars to get more interaction. Listening to webinars, not so exciting and you can't ask questions while you are listening.

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

Without knowing what the competitors offer I can only give a limited opinion.

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.

So far, ADP Streamline Payroll has provided me accurate computation of my compensation. And never had any problems with it.

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

I give this a 9 rating because the customer support is great. I have had issues that needed to be solved very quickly and they are always so eager to help. They can give you a solution to your problem and if they try everything and still can't, they will connect you with someone that can or will.

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

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

ADP Streamline Payroll has a great stack for employers looking to provide all of the basic payroll benefits to employees. I think ADP excels with its UX/UI, which is typically a problem for this industry. It's fairly easy to set up and use, compared to other systems. Try it out!

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

• ADP Streamline was just a function to us so I can't really say it had a positive or negative effect on our business objectives. We went with Streamline because we already were with ADP. We didn't really shop.
• Because of the great rep we had we were able to get a more positive response from our German staff to their pay. Before I came on board there were a lot of payroll errors which had an effect on staff morale. With help from the rep we were able to improve our accuracy and pay people correctly.

Incentivized

• For me, it is hard to quantify payroll software as having an ROI. It does save quite a bit of time per pay period, so perhaps we could assign a theoretical number to an employee taking that time. I'd say, at the least, it saves 30-60 minutes a pay period compared to a more difficult-to-use payroll software.

Incentivized