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
Time Doctor
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Time Doctor offers in-depth productivity analytics, giving business owners insight on how to improve performance and scale. Going beyond tracking and monitoring, Time Doctor’s suite of tools put data-driven improvement front and center, helping to ensure that teams of all sizes are actively working on the right things while also offering actionable insights to maximize performance and efficiency. Time Doctor tracks the collective hours a team puts in. But it also provides a…
$7
per month per user
Pricing
Gusto
Time Doctor
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
Basic
$7
per month per user
Basic
$7
per month per user
Standard
$14
per month
Standard
$14
per month per user
Premium
$20
per month
Premium
$20
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Gusto
Time Doctor
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
$9.99 per user
Additional Details
Gusto offers three pricing plans for payroll, benefits, and HR.
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.
Time Doctor is well suited for certain businesses where some or many of the employees are now working remotely due to the pandemic and post-pandemic times. It is a good way for the employer to keep track of activity and (more or less) keep people honest. For businesses and employees where there are a lot of site visits, travel, etc., Time Doctor is a little impractical since it requires the employee to manually enter in whatever time was spent on tasks performed away from the computer. If an employer is hoping to track that activity, they still need to rely on the employees' honor systems to enter in times and tasks.
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.
One thing I would love to see is integration with my cell phone. Time Doctor already has an app, but I want it to automatically capture the time I spend on my phone with clients. For now I have to manually enter in this time and must note when the call started and when it ended.
Integration into Wave apps where I generate my invoices. I'd like to be able to select a project from Time Doctor in my invoice and have it automatically populate the time I spent on it and the dates I worked on the project rather than manually finding and entering this information.
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!
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.
The support was terrible! They never responded in sufficient time and their assistance was always super vague. I never felt like they had an actual solution to my concerns. They were nice, but I don't feel like they were trained in their own system. It felt like I was talking to a wall.
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 still use Rescue Time for different reasons. I review my stats once a week by email. I think it's a totally different product. My egg timer keeps me more on task, but it doesn't record my times
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.
For a small amount each month I believe I get a huge return on investment in form of traceability of my hours spent. The major factor that made me choose Time Doctor was the price and the value. I don't think I would still be interested if it was more expensive.
