BambooHR is an cloud-based human resources solution that provides onboarding, payroll, and benefits management. It also offers automated time-off management and employee self-service.
$250
per month (minimum price for 25 employees or fewer)
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
BambooHR®
Gusto
Editions & Modules
Core
$10
per month per user
Pro
Contact Sales
per month
Elite
Contact Sales
per month
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
BambooHR®
Gusto
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Gusto offers three pricing plans for payroll, benefits, and HR.
Gusto has an applicant tracking system that we considered using. However, the tool was to simple and did not offer enough customization with application question types, pipeline, and automated emails.
In my experience, I prefer overall reporting and functionality of Rippling, Gusto, and Ease. It is on par with Employee Navigator and Paycom (due to more user friendly design) Prefer to Worklio, Paylocity, and ADP Workforce.
We chose BambooHR® as we generally found their UI and flow of key capabilities to be more straight forward, easy to understand and better designed. Compared to Zoho People we found BambooHR® to offer a more established and well rounded set of features that would suit us not …
Verified User
Executive
Chose BambooHR®
Not as well as any of them. I am not a QBO Payroll fan either but they are better than BambooHR®.
When reviewing which HRIS to go with, BambooHR came out on top for a few reasons. One was the cost compared to others and what you get for that cost. It saved the company money versus what we had, including Lever, ADP, Calamari, etc., and condensed it into one system. Next, the …
Payroll is on par, however, the benefits management is not even close. BambooHR and TriNet both offered better benefit plans and over the course of years, never caused my teams to be uninsured for any period of time. BambooHR and TriNet support teams have always communicated …
ADP is cumbersome, complex, and hard as ever to find anything on the site. The ADP program is focused on Payroll only and does not offer the all-in-one feature that Gusto does. Gusto gives ease of use and practicality, while other programs, such as ADP that boast this, but end …
In terms of GUI, Gusto is well-made. It's much prettier than APS and Bamboo. Bamboo and APS both have a lot more capability and, thus, are a little more complicated to use. Bamboo does not have a built-in payroll, though they do have a partner. We ultimately ended up going with …
I felt that the customer reviews and feedback for Gusto spoke volumes, and the Gusto interface was straightforward and simple to use. The value of the tier-based subscription model is great too. I found that other HR software plans were more expensive and more cluttered, less …
It works very well for submitting PTO requests and identifying information around personnel matters. I love being able to quickly see how long someone has worked for the company or whether there are upcoming birthdays so I can send a personal note. There are analytics and charts around organizational segmentation that are less valuable for a smaller company like ours.
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.
Recruiting- communications are easy for both the internal team and candidates
Onboarding- the onboarding tasks are great. I love being able to attach documents as well as delay sending out tasks
Communication- the employee community is a great tool to keep our communications clean and organized. I love that we now have insight as to who has viewed the comms
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!
I feel like BambooHR is rolling out a lot of updates all at one time, which is awesome, but I could see somebody who's maybe not as tech savvy, feeling like it's a lot of information at one time. I think the support area of the website has thorough walkthroughs, but sometimes the search functions don't really take you to exactly what you're asking about.
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.
There's nothing wrong with this platform. I would recommend it to any business starting with more than 10 employees. I will continue to use the program for as long as I need to, hoping they continue being tremendous and finding other ways to incorporate more technology.
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 clear and well appointed with prompts on where to go for each category of information it holds. The user has limited access based on a need to know/job related basis. It has a clear help option with the ability to chat, email or read documentation on how to do something.
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.
Yes, there is a huge team in the back of the online platform or it looks like it because I have never been left without an answer when I have a question or waiting from a response on my chat .... There must be a huge team, this is so great and I always seem to have someone that is very knowledgeable too. So many times in the past I had to leave with customer service that would connect you with someone else because of the expertise, here everyone seems to be some kind of an expert in the HR function.
I love BambooHR. Reports are easy to run and download and it usually covers any types of requests I get from the management team. You get excel or .csv downloads/reports and it is fast and simple, not too crowded so it is easy to read through. We don't integrate the tool yet but again, soon we will. we just did not had the time to utilize it yet but that's the plan.
I have used their support team over a dozen times. They have chat agents available throughout the day. They have support ticket submissions. They have their own resources website with different programs to learn BambooHR®. They also have onboarding support.
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.
Overall this training was great and our implementation specialist was wonderful and very helpful. We felt really prepared once our training was completed, But we could get additional help immediately even when we were live. The continuation Support heros after implementation are wonderful and you can always get a LIVE person each time you call into their office.
We implemented bambooHR in Fall, 2023 then implemented Payroll 1/1/24. A vital piece of information was not known or missed in that we are exempt from State Unemployment Tax and have a Reimbursement Set-up, so bambooHR did not send Payroll Reports to the State. Those reports need to be sent regardless if we are exempt or not.
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
At my previous employer, I evaluated over 20 HRIS platforms before choosing and implementing BambooHR® (in 2019). I love it! The continuous improvements are promising and I actually feel like product feedback is reviewed and, at times, implemented. With BambooHR®, it truly comes down to what you are looking for. If I was solely doing performance management and career ladders, BambooHR® probably wouldn't be a fit. However, it does an overall great job at most things, and is a good quality product.
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.
Since my organization has dropped with employees, I always find ways to reduce costs. I thought there would be a cheaper option, but I was glad that my package included a lot for the price, and downgrading would cost more. The rep could have let me downgraded and taken me to a higher package. I am thankful that didn't happen.
There is so much you can do with this platform, it is incredible and so welcoming. We don't utilize it 100% yet just because we are growing and the HR team has not been able to concentrate on other areas offered to us but but we will soon. Which is also why we got the product, specifically because what BambooHR can do to help us meet our growing business needs.
Time Savings: Automating onboarding, payroll, and employee record management has cut HR admin time by up to 30%, allowing teams to focus on strategic initiatives instead of paperwork.
Improved Onboarding: Streamlined workflows have cut onboarding time by nearly 50%, ensuring new hires are productive faster, reducing turnover risk in the critical first months.
- Enhanced Informational Clarity: Centralized employee data means fewer errors and faster access to essential information, reducing compliance risks and increasing accuracy in reporting.
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.
