Cisive Exchange vs. Gusto

I think Gusto is perfect for new business owners and small businesses. It's got a great setup to help walk you through all the initial steps to setup employees and payroll, and phrases things in a very clear way for people who aren't familiar with the process. It may not work as well for large, well-established companies, but I wouldn't know!

Incentivized

• New employee/contractor onboarding - all the documents are stored and easily accessible (the same goes for off-boarding).
• A one-click option for syncing hours worked with payroll.
• The option to run payroll on auto-pilot.
• Ensuring I'm tax compliant with the states we have employees in.
• Always having digital records of payroll runs.

Incentivized

• Digital compliance tools for remote teams
• 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.

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.

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

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

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

• 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.

Incentivized