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
Saba Cloud (legacy)
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Saba Cloud was a talent management suite that included performance management, succession planning, learning management, planning, and recruiting.
N/A
Pricing
Gusto
Saba Cloud (legacy)
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
Saba Cloud (legacy)
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.
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.
Our organization uses Saba Cloud primarily to manage all types of learning systems or staff training empirically. In addition, it provides us with a quick test-based follow-up to the trainees. We use Saba Cloud to train our clientele in a professional manner with respect to our worldwide online service. With this tool we are able to enhance the customer experience with the organization. Similarly, our organization uses Saba Cloud to monitor the performance and effectiveness of our employees and customers after having access to all the information provided by the application to subsequently make learning and development reports.
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!
Skills Management - Saba has allowed us to set specific expectations for employees based upon their role, and this has clarified the skill requirements for employees.
Goal Management - With Saba, managers can easily create goals aligned up to senior leadership, and then work with their direct reports to create supporting goals.
Learning Management - Using Saba's built-in Smart Lists, assigning compliance training is a simple process that used to be a challenge in our former LMS.
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.
Typically customers that acquire a Saba solution rarely move away. There are reasons and "legends" behind this. The investment is significant. Time and money are required to make the engine go smoothly. But once it runs at full capacity, it doesn't stop! Professional Services are extremely competent and able to close implementation gaps quickly.
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.
As someone who creates classes and is also a learning administrator in the system, I have run into some issues with the system's capabilities for my needs. I am not a fan of having to use Adobe Captivate to download a PowerPoint presentation into the system, as my training sessions are much more than a glorified PowerPoint. Our organization has yet to turn on Saba Meetings, which may help with these limitations.
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.
For the times that we have used the support provided by Saba, it has been a very pleasurable experience for our department. Part of our package with Saba includes a specified number of hours of "training" time with Saba. During these meetings, we have shared our desires of the product and the support personnel have either shown us how to accomplish our task or they have taken our requests to their developers to look at future enhancements. Overall, very pleased with the support.
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.
We had extensive reviews with a plan of what we needed and must have out of the system, including custom learning paths and tracking inside our HRIS system to grant permissions and positions based on completed learning certifications and courses. We weighed each option and chose based on the one that met the most of the must-haves.
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.
This may seem small but with 90% of our workforce not at our main facility just the fact that since July 1, 2021, we have had over 18,956 compliance-related training completed by our staff. Do the math the ROI is wonderful.
