FinancialForce HCM (Discontinued) vs. Gusto

FinancialForce HCM gives HR admins the full Hire to Retire experience while also meeting the needs of the worker/end user. Additionally, the application is well suited for talent management, shift scheduling, electronic benefits transmissions and connecting to payroll providers. Integration of HCM with other FinancialForce offerings, such as PSA and Accounting, completes the connection of front to back office.

Incentivized

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

• It's customizable for every department.
• The "back-end" is easy to use. You do not always need to contact support to tweak items.
• Once a process flow is created, it is VERY user-friendly.
• We can integrate other platforms such as Formstack into FF.

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

• Dashboards need updating
• Difficult to customise reports
• Salesforce is not always as quick to respond with service issues as they could be

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.

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

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

From a pricing perspective, FinancialForce HCM is very competitive in both licensing and implementation costs. Ultimately having an application that was native to Salesforce drove our final decision. While we were hoping to find an application that included the ability to process payroll internally we settled on the process of linking to a 3rd party vendor. The other options were either too pricey or lacked some of the key functionality we required.

Incentivized

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

• It improved self service capabilities - saving significant HR time.

Incentivized

• 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