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 well-suited for small businesses looking for a one-stop platform for payroll, tax-related tasks, and onboarding. It has many automated features that make tasks related to running a business/running an S-Corp simpler. I have not tried any other similar platforms, so I am unsure how it compares, but the pricing Gusto offers feels reasonable compared to other providers.

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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

Wonderful overall usability – especially for the new business owner. The user interface is clean and intuitive, so it's easy to find what you're looking for. They also have great explanation pages ingrained into the process, so if you get stuck knowing what to do next, there's a link right there to walk you through the process!

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

• 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