# Gusto Review: Pricing, Features, Alternatives Gusto: Small-business payroll with a partner program that lets firms choose how they bill. Pricing from On request, SOC 2 yes, and how it compares to the alternatives, for US accounting and bookkeeping firms. Source: https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/payroll/gusto/ --- [Accounting Tools](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/) · [Payroll & PEO](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/payroll/) # Gusto Top Pick · Gusto Small-business payroll with a partner program that lets firms choose how they bill [Visit Gusto](https://gusto.com/) [All 19 payroll & peo tools](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/payroll/) Best for Firms of 2-50 building a payroll or CAS line who want to price payroll themselves Starting price On request (Simple, Plus and Premium tiers; the contractor-only plan is published at $35/mo plus $6 per person) SOC 2 Yes Multi-factor auth Yes Integrates with QuickBooks Online, Xero The read ## What Gusto does 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. Capabilities ## What you get Gusto Pro dashboard covering client onboarding, payroll runs and compliance tasks for the whole book Three billing models per client: revenue share, client-billed partner discount, or firm-billed wholesale Advisory opportunities table surfacing compliance gaps, benefits and tax credits across clients Automatic federal, state and local payroll tax filing, including multi-state Benefits administration with health insurance broker integration at $6 per eligible employee per month Free payroll and HR for the firm's own staff once the first client is onboarded Pricing, security, integrations ## What it costs and what it connects to The vendor does not publish a price for Gusto; it is quoted per firm, usually on firm size or entity count. Gusto holds a SOC 2 report, multi-factor authentication is available. Gusto connects to QuickBooks Online and Xero. Supporting more than one ledger matters for firms whose clients are split across them. [Vendor pricing page](https://gusto.com/product/pricing) · [Vendor security page](https://gusto.com/security) Our rating ## Why we rate Gusto a Top Pick Gusto is one of 5 tools we rate a Top Pick among the 19 payroll & peo products in this directory. What we would shortlist first in this category: proven with real firms, actively developed, and priced and integrated in a way that suits a US accounting or bookkeeping practice. [How these ratings are decided](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/methodology/). Alternatives ## Gusto alternatives ### [ADP RUN for Partners](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/payroll/adp-run-for-partners/) Partner edition of RUN, where the firm processes client payroll instead of referring it Strong Option ### [OnPay](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/payroll/onpay/) Flat-rate full-service payroll with a partner program that lets the firm bill and keep a share Top Pick ### [Patriot Payroll](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/payroll/patriot-payroll/) Low-cost US payroll sold to firms at a volume discount they bill on at their own rate Strong Option ### [QuickBooks Payroll Premium](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/payroll/quickbooks-payroll-premium/) Middle payroll tier for QuickBooks Online clients, adding time tracking and same-day deposit Strong Option ### [Justworks Payroll](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/payroll/justworks-payroll/) Standalone payroll from Justworks, priced flat and sold without the co-employment contract Strong Option ### [Rippling](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/payroll/rippling/) Employee system of record with payroll, benefits, IT and spend built on the same record Top Pick [Compare all 19 payroll & peo tools](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/payroll/) Sources ## Where these facts came from Researched from public sources. Pricing and security claims change without notice, so check the vendor before you buy. Last reviewed September 8, 2026. ### [Gusto Pro partner program for accountants](https://gusto.com/partners/accountants) Retrieved 2026-09-08 ### [Gusto pricing](https://gusto.com/product/pricing) Retrieved 2026-09-08 ### [Gusto security](https://gusto.com/security) Retrieved 2026-09-08 Keep browsing ## Other categories [Practice Management (49)](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/practice-management/)[General Ledger & Bookkeeping (26)](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/general-ledger/)[Tax Workflow & Document Automation (26)](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/tax-workflow/)[Tax Preparation (18)](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/tax-preparation/)[Tax Planning & Advisory (13)](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/tax-planning/)[Tax Research (13)](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/tax-research/)[Month-End Close Automation (11)](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/close-automation/)[Proposals & Engagement Letters (9)](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/proposals-engagement/)[Spreadsheet Reporting & Ledger Sync (6)](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/spreadsheet-reporting/)[Tax Resolution & IRS Representation (6)](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/tax-resolution/)[AI Meeting Assistants (5)](https://node8.ai/accounting-tools/meeting-assistants/) ## Got the stack, still doing the work by hand? 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