Gusto Payroll Reviews & Product Details

The ease of use is beneficial and I like the interface. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Customer service is via online chat only, as they make it nearly impossible to actually talk with someone. It also takes 30 minutes or more to be connected to a chat representative. I needed help correcting benefits withholding amounts that were out of whack, and the representative that I chatted with said it would be three weeks before they could address the issue. Any application that deals with money and employee's money should have robust customer service that can address issues quickly, not three weeks later. To date, I still do not have my payroll issue resolved. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The overall product is very easy to use and they're constantly adding new sub-products - healthcare reimbursement, 401k, etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The customer service is terrible - it often takes weeks or even months to get something resolved. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that Gusto is very simple to setup and makes payroll less scary. At first I felt very confident that payroll was being handled correctly. It handles the tax filings automatically, which has been amazing. I also like that it provides a mechanism to pay contractors. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

When it was just my business partner and I using Gusto for payroll worked very well. As we started hiring employees that is when Gusto started to show problems. One pay cycle our employees were paid 3 days late, despite receiving an email a week earlier that they would be paid on time. You had one job Gusto!

It was difficult to get in touch with support about this issue. When we finally did get in touch we were told that we had exceeded our credit limit, which caused the payroll to be delayed. This was surprising to us because we did not know that there was a credit limit or that we had exceeded it. Support did confirm that we should have received an email notification about reaching the limit, but did not. Instead we just got an email as usual that said "Your employees will get paid on time, and you won't have to do a thing!" Unfortunately the only help Gusto could provide was to raise the credit limit for the next pay cycle, pending manager approval. The person we talked to was very careful about their wording that our employees were not paid late and the payroll system was operating as normal. I cannot see how holding everyone's money for an extra 3 days without prior notice is expected behavior.

Paying contractors is a very slow process (7 days+).

Some time ago Gusto sent us a notification that they were now offering benefits like insurance. We happened to be in the market at the time for health insurance. When we started the process we could only click a button to be notified when benefits were offered. I don't know if they ever started selling benefits but we went elsewhere for that piece. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Payroll service only is fine. What Gusto is trying to do with other services is good, but they don't execute it well. Now Gusto has expanded its service offerings even though they struggle with the current services. I recommend staying away from Gusto's non-payroll services. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Benefits service is terrible, and customer service is often bad - slow and uninformed. Gusto made errors during the company on-boarding process and has been terrible during the 2017 insurance renewal period. They were tardy sending renewal recommendations, did not provided options from multiple insurance companies as requested (sent only recs from our current insurer), and provided only one week to review and analyze those recommendations. Gusto seemed overwhelmed and unprepared for the renewal period. Emails went unanswered and the "Benefits Advisor" was "unavailable" to schedule a telephone conference to discuss renewal prior to the Gusto-imposed renewal deadline. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

User friendly design, concepts, integrations Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Poor UI/UX execution, integration with deputy stopped working and support could not be reached and did not call me back in a timely manner. Suddenly deputy stopped showing up on their page of "integrations."

The main problem here is that they break things that worked perfectly fine before. Like the Deputy integration. I don't do payroll for several months out of the year so I was surprised to find when I started running it again, that deputy wouldn't export timesheets to Zen/Gusto.

Then, there are the little quirks that will waste massive amounts of your time and drive you crazy. Like when I setup certain employees originally I was able to add a "paycheck tips" field to each one. Then they made it so that you could not leave the field zero, it had to be greater than zero, which is a completely stupid requirement, but in any case, for one of my employees I made it $0.01 and then when I ran the payroll I would change it to the right amount. However, the previously setup employees did not require that. Then, now, I'm trying to add a new employee, and I am forced to do this stupid $0.01 trick and I can't edit the amount when I run payroll. I'm supposed to have FIXED paycheck tips every single time??? This is just idiotic. There is a very clear pattern of poor testing of feature additions/changes. For a payroll system software that doesn't really ned to be improved constantly it is aggravating that they keep tweaking things for no reason.

Now, I'm trying to find reports to see my tax forms and I can't find them because they've changed all the wording of things to make them sound cool or "user-friendly" or whatever they're thinking. So I click "stay compliant" which is where you can find filed forms and I don't see any state tax documents. I go to the "tax payments" box which is hidden in a very strange way at the bottom of a page unrelated to a menu at all, and I see that tax payments have been made to the state, but I can't see how they calculated them or exactly what form was filed.

If you want to waste a lot of time and pay more than a lot of other payroll vendors then go with Gusto. They are trying to be Zenefits and screwing up their core business in the process. Zenefits now has a free payroll option so conveniently it's the end of the year and I think it's time to get rid of Gusto. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.