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
Kudos®
Score 8.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Kudos® is an employee engagement and recognition platform, that harnesses peer-to-peer recognition, casual rewards, values reinforcement, and open communication to help organizations boost employee engagement, reduce turnover, improve culture, and drive productivity and performance.
N/A
Pricing
Gusto
Kudos®
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
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Gusto
Kudos®
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
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.
Kudos® pricing is based on the number of users and the length of the contract.
Gusto is a great fit for small teams and startups that want a simple, reliable way to run payroll, manage tax filings, and give CPAs access without constant micromanagement. It’s especially useful for founders who need something that “just works.” The human support has been excellent—especially when forwarding confusing IRS mail. That said, it’s a bit less intuitive when it comes to benefits and compliance for fully remote companies. For example, labor law poster distribution isn’t streamlined for digital teams, and setting up benefits felt more complex than it needed to be. Still, I’d recommend Gusto to any startup looking to get payroll right from day one.
Kudos is especially useful and helpful during project deployment where team members can be awarded kudos and appreciation and motivation for their team efforts in meeting milestones and targets. In some instances, the reward types or gifts may seem irrelevant to some departments in certain regions or my company' operations in other parts of the African continent.
Gusto really kills it on the simplicity. The app and website are very clear and straightforward.
Gusto also does a great job at being easy to navigate, visually pleasing, and logically posed.
Gusto communicates very clearly and provides just the right amount of communication.
Gusto makes the onboarding process very easy. I recently started at a new company and the process of filling out the necessary documents, filling out forms, and getting my benefit information input was soooooo easy!
One of the most useful aspects of this tool is that it allows you to save the profile of each of the employees individually and to be able to track their activities and give them the recognition they deserve.
Another useful feature of "kudos is that the system allows you to assign badges to each profile based on their job performance.
I also really like that the platform has a dedicated portal for employees. In which they can see their badges, recognitions and awards obtained for their efforts.
Adding in previous time manually could be more accessible.
Notifications for when employees manually change hours.
We should allow 1099 users to use the mobile app instead of restricting them to the website, especially since they can just log into the full website on their mobile device.
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.
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.
I used to work at a company called Sparc that developed its own in-house platform called Teamphoria. It was great software that coupled a lot of the same features as workday but also with a recognition system. Essentially it allocated certain types of recognition levels per month, 1 platinum, 5 gold, 20 silvers, where each was worth a drawing ticket. At the end of the month, someone would be drawn from that pool based on their received recognition and then receive a gift card. However, some abused this system and devalued its purpose and inflated the meaning behind it. Kudos seems to do a good job by having a direct point/monetization system which isn't up for random chance. This can help even incentivize employees to go above and beyond, getting them to work harder since they are receiving recognition for it.
For me, it is hard to quantify payroll software as having an ROI. It does save quite a bit of time per pay period, so perhaps we could assign a theoretical number to an employee taking that time. I'd say, at the least, it saves 30-60 minutes a pay period compared to a more difficult-to-use payroll software.
