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
Homebase
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
Homebase in San Francisco offers restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and retailers their employee scheduling and time tracking tools with scheduling optimization and team messaging for coordinating shifts; service includes a free time tracking app.
$14
per month
Pricing
Gusto
Homebase
Editions & Modules
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
Essentials
$14
per month
Plus
$35
per month
All-in-one
$70
per month
Basic
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Gusto
Homebase
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Gusto offers three pricing plans for payroll, benefits, and HR.
Homebase is extremely crude and the only thing I find useful is their scheduling tool. I wish Gusto would take a note about this one facet of their business from them. Paycom is extremely comprehensive and offers lots of tools that I have no use for. As a result, their software …
Verified User
Employee
Chose Gusto
Homebase wasn't as user-friendly, and requesting time off was a pain.
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.
Homebase is a very cost-effective program that does a good job tracking employee hours as well as what employees are working on. It is extremely easy to use and has a lot of self-service features, which give employees information at their fingertips. Homebase integrates well with our payroll provider.
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.
The messaging features in Homebase are not consistent across the platform. In the app you can mass message everyone, however using the website you cannot, at least not at the price point that we are using.
The roles for employees and how to navigate them can be confusing especially when trying to schedule one employee in two different departments.
The separation of departments is a bit rigid and makes it difficult for universal employees to be scheduled easily.
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.
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!
Homebase is very easy to use. Not a lot of training or direction is needed to get it going. Easy feature to track employee hours. Able to use centrally located tablets for employees to clock in and out. A very cost-effective system that also saves time when processing payroll. Employees love its features.
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.
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
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.
Homebase is simpler to use. Easier to navigate and is much cheaper than other alternatives! We had trouble when I worked as they were harder to reach our ROI. Deputy was too expensive and it was the reason we decided on Homebase! Employees also find it easy to use on their end!
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.
Homebase has made the day to day management of employees easier, freeing up time for management to work on other things that help secure customer satisfaction.
It has also made payroll easier since it's implementation and allowed for fewer mistakes than the previous manual method, leading to less monetary mistakes and happier employees.
Homebase has made monitoring hours and overtime, as well as completion of internship and volunteer hours, much easier to monitor, leading to less confusion and more satisfied volunteers, interns, and payroll managers
