Gusto

The part of Gusto that decides this for a firm is Gusto Pro, the partner side of the product. It gives one dashboard across the client book covering onboarding, payroll runs, compliance tasks and full visibility for every member of the firm's team, plus an advisory opportunities table that flags compliance gaps, benefits openings and tax credits client by client. The program runs in four stages. Getting started brings the dashboard, training, certification and migration help. Onboarding the first client of the year unlocks free payroll and HR for the firm's own staff. Scaling adds revenue share of up to 20% with dedicated partner support and marketing resources. The top stage opens advisory tooling. Gusto's own case study material claims a 50% reduction in payroll task time and a doubling of clients on the highest tier, which is vendor-sourced and should be read as such.

The billing flexibility is the reason this sits where it does. A firm picks its arrangement per client from three options: revenue share, a partner discount where the client is billed directly at a reduced rate, or wholesale billing where the firm pays Gusto and sets its own price to the client. That third option is the one most vendors in this category will not offer, and it is what lets a firm fold payroll into a fixed monthly fee and keep the spread. ADP's referral track pays commission and nothing else. Gusto lets the firm decide whether it is a reseller or an introducer, client by client.

Underneath, Gusto is a small-business payroll product rather than a firm-operated engine, and that is the real trade-off. Each client is a separate Gusto account with its own payroll run. There is no batch pass across thirty clients the way Payroll Relief or Accounting CS Payroll work, so the effort scales close to linearly with the client count. Nor is there proper after-the-fact payroll entry for write-up clients who process elsewhere. Firms past roughly fifty payroll clients tend to feel this. Pricing is also the standard base-plus-per-person structure, which gets expensive on clients with many low-hour employees, and several useful pieces are priced separately: priority support at $30 a month plus $3 per person on the lower tiers, the broker integration at $6 per eligible employee, and a $200 annual charge for tax-advantaged benefits accounts.

Against ADP RUN for Partners, Gusto wins on transparency and on the client's experience, and loses on scale of support organization and on the breadth of ancillary products a firm can attach. Against QuickBooks Payroll it wins on partner economics, since Intuit's ProAdvisor discount does not give the firm the same wholesale option, and against OnPay or Patriot it wins on ecosystem while costing more.

Top pick is the right call and the inherited tier stands. The security posture supports it: Gusto publishes annually refreshed SOC 1 and SOC 2 reports, TLS 1.2 in transit and AES-256 at rest on AWS in US regions, two-factor authentication and a Bugcrowd bounty program. The published prices, the published three-way billing choice and the current partner tiering are the sort of evidence that is thin elsewhere in this category.