Gusto vs. QuickBooks Online vs. Workable

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

QBO is a great solution for small and midsize companies. If the goal is to record all transactions and pull reliable financial reports, QBO is a great option. QBO is also a great solution if most operations are run in a system like Ramp. It syncs well with systems like that and turns the data into something management can use to make decisions. QBO is great because so many people use it. It is easy to find training online, and many people have experience with it.

Incentivized

Workable is great at creating job posts and posting them to multiple job boards with a single click and also running paid campaigns on social media platforms to reach passive candidates as well. Workable has a friendly UI and has a very gentle learning curve. It is more appropriate for larger organizations where you need to hire thousands of people a year and need to always have a pipeline of great talent.

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

• Workflows for accounts payable invoice review are terrific.
• Bill payment allows you to pay vendors online via ACH or check without having to write a physical check, which reduces admin time.
• The cloud based login lends well to a remote or hybrid work environment for staff.
• QuickBooks Online allows you to pre-configure vendors' general ledger expense accounts. This helps with general ledger coding accuracy and consistency.
• QuickBooks Online integrates with Rippling HRIS, Coast, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, etc., which lends well to an efficient month-end closing and reduced administrative time.

Incentivized

• The platform allows us to implement a scorecard service through which it is possible to keep track of the quality of nutrition that each prospective employee could bring to the company, so that the decision to hire any of them is as profitable as possible.
• Communication with candidates is very easy to track, so that it is possible to make sure that the results proposed by each employee in the recruitment area are totally adequate. This is useful to filter possible failures that may occur on the part of the recruitment team.
• The platform works with recruitment funnels, whose structure allows us to purify the information of real utility for the company by the employees, and where we can even add databases with the information of all prospective employees that are kept in the recruitment process.
• Using Workable in conjunction with the information provided by their online technical assistants results in a huge improvement in our labor operation, as they know the best strategies to leverage our hiring management. Workable's technical support is active most of the day.
• Using Workable was no problem for our employees in the human talent development area, mostly because they, despite not having any experience with Workable, were able to adapt to the platform with incredible speed, thanks to the ease of use of Workable and the number of tools it has right out of the box.

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

• I dislike that the online bill pay option through QuickBooks is required for their invoicing.
• The auto-fill portion of the customer setup, specifically the company name, is listed, but it also auto-fills in the name portion, which is inconvenient and time-consuming to remove.

Incentivized

• The ability to schedule interviews via Workable was great, but it was unable to pull other items from your calendar, so it was easy to end up double booked for appointments if you weren't careful.
• The reporting leaves a bit to be desired, there is not a lot of customization for what I really needed reports on.

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.

It like the product 'right out of the box' and I trust Intuit will continually improve it over the years based on my experience with their desktop products. The large providers of Apps makes customizing the entire package relatively easy and seamless for a wide variety of business types.

Incentivized

It's become a part of the fabric of our hiring process and we are growing like crazy! Once we have a working platform in place the cost of the change management typically far out weighs the benefits derived from the change! It's especially hard to change a process with employees who are not key stake holders, they are alway hesitant to invest time in a new product they are only going to use once in a while. With that said if something else came along with benefits far and above workable that we would gain a clear lift in productivity and capabilities we would make the change, we've done it with other parts of our tech stack

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

Beyond being overkill for a small org's needs, QBO is constantly stealing screen real estate and attention by hammering users for account upgrades, connecting to one of their approved consultants or buying add-ons. The idea of using a simple configurable bookeeping and light accounting interface is completely missing. At the very least, we should be able to hide functions like inventory that we will never use.

Incentivized

One thing, it just works as advertised. AI integration makes the work more easier, and we will be able to process the applications more faster with the help of AI.

We have rarely had outages in the last 10 years. I can only recall 2 times in the last 10 years where we were not able to access our client files.

Incentivized

Everything process has its bugs lately with the new interface. Nothing has worked smoothly since this all began last month.

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

In my experience, most representatives keep me on the phone for hours, literally, for a single issue and then usually cannot resolve it satisfactorily. I have 10 open cases that need resolution and, in my experience, there has been NO follow-up communication on any of them.

Incentivized

I have never had to rely on Workable's support team so I cannot attest to this. I have never had to rely on Workable's support team so I cannot attest to this. I have never had to rely on Workable's support team so I cannot attest to this.I have never had to rely on Workable's support team so I cannot attest to this. I have never had to rely on Workable's support team so I cannot attest to this.

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

The person in charge of QB needs to be very accurate with record keeping and is recommended to stay on top of tasks. The biggest issue we have is reconciliation, and those issues occur only when too much time has occurred between reconciliations

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

As a freelance bookkeeper, the Desktop version of QuickBooks Online doesn't allow for ease of access from any device. Having to be on a computer with the software downloaded creates additional work to gain access to all required filings etc. Also, I personally find the linking functionality on the Online version to be much more streamlined and user friendly.

Workable was an excellent tool for our start-up. It was cost effective but very user-friendly. It wasn't a difficult sell to ensure our hiring managers would utilize the tool, and I particularly liked the inbox feature to stay organized. I rated Workable very highly, though as our company grew exponentially, we did go in a different direction.

Incentivized

As we have grown along our professional path, we have also expanded our use of QB. The scalability is easy and features seem to be waiting for you until you need them. We have increased profits by over 10x from our first year in business to the current and have yet to find a reason to look elsewhere

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

• QuickBooks has given us a useful portal by which to get an overview of our financials.
• QuickBooks has given us a relatively easy way to send out invoices quickly and efficiently.
• Due to the customization limitations on QuickBooks, we've had to get creative in third-party implementations to better represent our brand and to track financials.

Incentivized

• Workable has a had positive ROI on our workflow management, as the basic pay-as-you-go feature for a single role is incredibly affordable ($50/month) for a 2-3 month mid-to-senior level candidate search.
• The ease of use has helped us move candidates faster as well - our average time to close a role decreased by 22% after our first 6 months of using Workable.

Incentivized