TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    ETO Software (legacy)

    Score7.2 out of 10
    Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
    ETO Software is a legacy case management solution supported by Social Solutions, acquired by Bonterra, and later sold as Bonterra ETO. The application is not the company's current case management solution.N/A

    Gusto

    Score8.9 out of 10
    N/AGusto 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
    ETO Software (legacy)Gusto
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    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
    ETO Software (legacy)Gusto
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeRequiredNo setup fee
    Additional Details—Gusto offers three pricing plans for payroll, benefits, and HR.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    ETO Software (legacy)Gusto
    Considered Both Products
    Discontinued Products
    No answer on this topic
    Gusto
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    92%
    Would buy again
    563 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    93%
    Delivers good value for the price
    464 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    95%
    Happy with the feature set
    576 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    91%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    316 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    94%
    Implementation went as expected
    376 Answers
    Features
    ETO Software (legacy)Gusto
    Payroll Management
    Comparison of Payroll Management features of ETO Software (legacy) and Gusto
    Feature
    ETO Software (legacy)
    -
    Ratings
    Gusto
    9.1
    611 Ratings
    9% above category average
    Pay calculation00 Ratings9.5587 Ratings
    Support for external payroll vendors00 Ratings8.58 Ratings
    Benefit plan administration00 Ratings8.7417 Ratings
    Direct deposit files00 Ratings9.7592 Ratings
    Salary revision and increment management00 Ratings9.0462 Ratings
    Reimbursement management00 Ratings9.0196 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    ETO Software (legacy)Gusto
    Small Businesses
    Bonterra Apricot
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Patriot Payroll
    Score8.6 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Bonterra Apricot
    Score9.2 out of 10
    APS
    Score5.7 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    ADP Streamline Payroll
    Score6.1 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    ETO Software (legacy)Gusto
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.0
    (44 ratings)
    9.1
    (633 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    1.0
    (6 ratings)
    10.0
    (14 ratings)
    Usability
    1.0
    (5 ratings)
    9.4
    (457 ratings)
    Availability
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    4.0
    (5 ratings)
    4.3
    (27 ratings)
    Online Training
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    5.1
    (2 ratings)
    9.1
    (3 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    5.5
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    ETO Software (legacy)Gusto
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Discontinued Products
    ETO Social Solutions should be avoided until they start caring about the problems generated by their software. In regards specifically to the ARMS suite utilized by the entire state of California, until the ETO software learns how to speak with SOMS, and unless it can be customized by knowledgeable people who consult with front-line users. It is not appropriate to provide the state legislature with bad data. I have 6 years of experience with it and I have multiple sources of agreement from fellow users throughout the state.
    Read full review
    Gusto
    I think Gusto is well-suited for any business, big or small, to use for accounting purposes. It makes it easy to keep track of many things, such as pay stubs, benefits, paid time off, and much more. Where I could see it being less useful is maybe for enterprise businesses with way more employees.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Discontinued Products
    • ETO's customization allows for the use of so many different and unique applications.
    • The ability to build extremely customized reports also allows us to get very detail oriented results or very broad building wide stats.
    • The additional added features such as workflow, referrals, and ETO Engage are useful in their own way and add more ways to better track and record data while simplifying some end-user processes.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Gusto
    • 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
    Read full review
    Cons
    Discontinued Products
    • The user interface is not intuitive and exceptionally difficult for non-tech savvy people to learn.
    • The system is not as customizable as we were led to believe at the initial purchase.
    • The system does not interface well with other systems. Organizationally we are moving towards data integration, and we will likely replace ETO because of this limitation.
    • Considering the limitations of the system, the cost is quite high. We've seen only marginal benefits of this system over pen and paper, and the ROI is not promising.
    • The initial build process was very frustrating. We didn't understand what the developer was billing us for. Something like simple touchpoint forms was billed for more hours than it would seem to require.
    • A system like this should be both fully mobile compatible and have offline functionality.
    • We would benefit from more nuanced security settings.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Gusto
    • 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
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Discontinued Products
    Social Solutions has been great for our organization. It has allowed us to not only report on data, but to dive into it to see trends and give snapshots of the current status of our neighbors. Social Solutions has been helpful in getting us to see additional ways we can use our data and ways that it is easier for front line staff to use this tool
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Gusto
    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.
    Read full review
    Usability
    Discontinued Products
    As a technically savvy person with experience learning new database software systems I find ETO relatively straightforward now that I've been trained in it's use. However, many of our staff are less technically savvy and the learning curve for ETO can be grueling for many, who require frequent troubleshooting and support from me. Additionally, there are small quality of life improvements that would increase usability even for me - such as allowing multiple tabs to be open simultaneously or being able to use the browser's "back" and "forward" buttons.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Gusto
    Gusto is pretty user-friendly, and the website is easy to navigate overall. They also offer good, responsive customer support and have helpful articles available when needed. So far, I have not had any major issues with the platform and am overall very happy with it.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Discontinued Products
    Routine maintenance is announced with plenty of lead time, and the few times I've been unable to log in to the system properly a simple refresh was all that was required to fix.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Gusto
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    Discontinued Products
    Mostly really strong now, although I understand that for some years before switching their hosting service to AWS performance was a real issue with ETO and we had frequent problems with pages timing out or other glitches stemming from performance issues. With AWS that is mostly a thing of the past, although it is still a major issue with the reporting tool which is unable to run reports on the entire database due to performance limitations, instead requiring admins to define universes prior to running queries.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Gusto
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Discontinued Products
    We love the first tier customer support folks! They're friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable within the scope of their position. The experiences we've had with their supervisors have also been mostly good and again they seem to be doing what they can within the scope of their positions. This is what prevents me from selecting 1. Unfortunately, none of these wonderful folks can offer real solutions when things are actually broken. They verify there's a problem and send it to the black hole called "the developers". After that, we don't hear anything useful and we figure out how to live with/work around the problem ourselves. (Requests for updates typically get "still with the developer" responses.) This is highly frustrating given that most of our issues are basic system issues (functionality that worked then broke after an update by Social Solutions, servers not syncing, report universes not flattening automatically, etc.). All we want is for the system to work as designed and to be fixed in a timely fashion when it doesn't. Apparently, that's too much to ask. (And no, we don't expect it to happen instantly, programming and quality control checks obviously take time.)
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Gusto
    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
    Read full review
    Online Training
    Discontinued Products
    Really good trainer and exhaustive curriculum covered, but ETO is a complex enough system that you don't *really* know how to use it until you've been in the trenches for a few weeks. For instance, I took a Report Writing training and emerged with some fluency in the reports interface and a vague understanding of the process, but immediately encountered a legion of instance-specific idiosyncrasies that would have been totally impossible to address in a webinar training for a dozen folks from different orgs working in different instances.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Gusto
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Discontinued Products
    Hard to say, as I was not with the agency at the time. However, based on our use of the software ~5years later I can say that there were no catastrophic design choices made during implementation that have become unduly burdensome as we've scaled up.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Gusto
    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
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Discontinued Products
    When we made our decision several years ago Social Solutions had just acquired Apricot. At that time it was recommended to use ETO based off our revenue stream. However, it seems like Social Solutions has put in a lot more time and effort into Apricot over ETO and it seems more modern and user friendly. I think it is worth a second look once our contract expires
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Gusto
    While I never actually got to the point of trying out ADP, I had several conversations with an ADP representative, and it seemed that they would be able to provide the same (if not less) level of service for a significantly higher price
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Discontinued Products
    The core product scales well, and we've grown quite a bit as an agency during our use of ETO. However, there are some real pain points particularly around creating new programs and managing report universes that require extensive offline checklist resources and a full-spectrum understanding of how changing settings in one part of ETO can have downstream impact in other areas. This can introduce a "chilling" effect on proposed changes to the system, where there is strong incentive to leave things as-is to avoid unforeseen consequences.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Gusto
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Discontinued Products
    • I would say that at this point the overall ROI has been negative as we aren't getting much more out of our data by the switch we made to ETO, but the cost is much higher. I anticipate that will change as we get better at using ETO.
    • Most users that have switched to ETO in our organization prefer it to what they were using before and some are more appreciative of the value they can get from the data.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Gusto
    • Time tracking + payroll calculations me 30-60 minutes every time I run payroll.
    • Integrated workers' comp, so I didn't have to find an outside carrier and get quotes—it's all taken care of in the same platform.
    • Improved employee experience with onboarding.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    ETO Software (legacy) Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshot

    Gusto Screenshots

    Screenshot of Gusto's automated payrollScreenshot of the time-off tracking interfaceScreenshot of the source of truth for HR data