Rippling vs. Gusto: The 2025 definitive comparison for HR and Payroll

Powered by G2 - data as of 10/2025

Core HR

Overview: Rippling vs. Gusto

Choosing the right HR and payroll platform is a critical decision that impacts compliance, onboarding, and the overall efficiency of your company. Two of the leading providers in this space are Rippling and Gusto. While both offer solutions to manage your workforce, they have distinct philosophies and architectures that cater to different business needs.

Rippling was built as a modern, unified platform for HR, payroll, and IT. Its system was designed to handle a company's entire workforce, both domestic and international, on a single, integrated system. This unified architecture aims to streamline data management and provide a consistent user experience. Rippling is an ideal solution for any organization, especially those seeking a single, integrated system to manage their entire workforce.

Gusto was built with a primary focus on small businesses. Its intuitive interface and core offerings are often well-suited for businesses at an early stage. However, as companies grow, expand to new states, or require more complex benefits plans, they may find that Gusto's tools and level of sophistication feel limited. This can lead to a time-consuming transition to a new system, resulting in disruptions to their growing business.

Let's take a closer look at how these two platforms compare across key criteria.

Key features

Rippling

• Unified platform for managing HR, payroll, IT, and finance, with connected employee data across all systems.

• Built-in compliance framework designed to meet U.S. tax, labor, and benefits requirements.

• Real-time, customizable reporting with detailed, data-driven insights from a centralized employee graph

• Over 650 pre-built integrations with commonly used business tools.

• Customer support delivered by in-house teams, with publicly available service metrics

• Scalable infrastructure that supports both domestic and international workforces, including expanding global payroll coverage.

Gusto

• Payroll management that handles calculations, automatic tax filing, and multi-state compliance

• Benefits administration for health, dental, vision, and retirement plans within one platform.

• Time tracking and PTO tools that let employees record hours, request time off, and sync directly with payroll

• HR and onboarding features, including digital offer letters, e-signatures, and centralized employee records

• Employee self-service and reporting with access to pay stubs, tax forms, and clear workforce analytics

Pros and cons

Rippling

Pros:

• Unified platform for your entire workforce, saving time and money

• Natively connected products built in-house for superior functionality

• Compliance-first approach to prevent issues before they arise

• Infinitely customizable reporting and powerful automation

• Excellent customer support that is fully in-house and available 24/5

Cons:

• With so much depth and flexibility, Rippling can seem complex at first, but the dedicated support team makes it easy to learn quickly

• Advanced workflow automations may require support for initial set-up, but they're easy to implement and will save time long-term 

Gusto

Pros:

• The platform is well-rated for its simple, intuitive design that guides both admins and employees through the process

• Self-service setup: Businesses can sign up and set up payroll online without needing a dedicated sales or support representative

• Gusto Wallet allows employees without a bank account to manage their pay and request early payments

• Gusto support is accessible to the public, not just paying customers

• The platform makes it simple to add employees in other states, although additional fees may apply

Cons:

• The platform is simple but can lack the robustness needed for growing companies; for example, the org chart is basic and not customizable

• The talent management system is very basic, and most customers tend to integrate with third-party tools for these needs

• The product suite is focused on HR and payroll, and lacks native support for IT and spend management

• Some users have reported long wait times and poor follow-up from support, with issues often not being resolved in a timely manner

• While seemingly transparent, the pricing can become unpredictable due to a need for upgrades to higher-tier plans for features like multi-state payroll or third-party broker integrations, which can also come with additional fees

Pricing

Rippling

Rippling's pricing is transparent, starting at $8 per employee, per month for its core platform. This price point is highly competitive and reflects the significant value of having a single, unified system for your entire workforce. Rippling's streamlined approach to setup and management reduces a company's total cost of ownership (TCO) from day one by eliminating the need for costly third-party consultants or professional service fees for configuration. This allows businesses to get up and running quickly and efficiently without unexpected expenses.

Gusto

Gusto's pricing, while appearing straightforward, can become complex as businesses grow. For instance, single-state payroll is limited to the basic plan, and companies must upgrade to a higher-tier plan for multi-state payroll. Many of Gusto's key features and add-ons are only available on more expensive plans, limiting a customer's ability to purchase them modularly. This can force businesses to pay for features they don't need in order to get the ones they do. Additionally, there can be unpredictable costs, such as paying extra for W-2s at the end of the year or potential pricing changes for certain features, which can be frustrating for businesses trying to budget.

Summary: While both platforms have a per-employee monthly fee, Rippling's transparent and inclusive pricing, combined with a unified and highly automated platform, provides greater cost predictability and a lower total cost of ownership. In contrast, Gusto's tiered and somewhat rigid pricing model can lead to unpredictable costs and a higher total cost of ownership as a business scales and its needs become more complex.

Automation

Rippling’s automation is founded on what the company calls the “Ripple Effect” principle — the idea that a single update made anywhere in the system seamlessly cascades across every connected module. When an employee’s information changes, that update automatically propagates through all relevant parts of the platform, including payroll, benefits, time tracking, device management, and IT permissions. This ensures that all data stays synchronized and eliminates the need for repetitive, manual adjustments that often lead to errors or inconsistencies.

At the core of this capability is Rippling’s unified backend architecture, which serves as a single source of truth for all employee data. This architecture powers the platform’s Workflow Studio, a robust tool that enables users to build and customize complex automations without requiring any coding knowledge. Through this system, companies can design end-to-end workflows that handle multi-step processes automatically. For instance, when a new hire joins the company, the system can trigger a sequence of actions such as provisioning their laptop, granting software access, enrolling them in benefits, and even scheduling an introductory meeting with their manager — all without human intervention.

This deep interconnectedness across systems and departments results in a truly integrated employee management experience. By automating administrative tasks and ensuring real-time data consistency, Rippling not only saves organizations time and resources but also minimizes compliance risks. Ultimately, this "Ripple Effect" creates a smooth, unified flow of information that enhances operational efficiency and provides a seamless employee lifecycle from onboarding to offboarding.

Gusto

Gusto’s approach to automation is simpler and more limited in scope, focusing on basic, linear workflows. While the platform offers some automated features, they do not provide the deep, cross-functional integration found in Rippling's unified architecture. Reviewers note a lack of flexibility to automatically trigger multi-step workflows beyond basic payroll automation, such as routing approvals or complex onboarding sequences.

The platform’s synchronization across modules can also be weak, with benefits, time off, and payroll sometimes requiring manual reconciliation to correct discrepancies. Additionally, when edits are needed, users have reported a need to manually "wipe the payroll clean" and re-run jobs. Gusto’s automation also has gaps in areas like time tracking and labor classification, with complex timesheet rules or shift splits not always being handled well. This can lead to delays or latency in automated updates, as the system may lag in reflecting real-time clock-in or attendance changes.

Ultimately, Gusto’s automation capabilities are best suited for smaller, less complex organizations that do not require deep, cross-functional automation. While it can handle fundamental HR tasks, its lack of advanced customization and interconnectedness can create administrative busywork as a company grows. In contrast, Rippling’s comprehensive automation is designed for scale, ensuring that a business's operational efficiency grows with it.

Summary: While both platforms offer some level of automation, Rippling's unified "Ripple Effect" provides a superior and more comprehensive solution. Gusto's automations are more basic and limited in scope, making them less effective for complex or multi-step processes and requiring administrators to handle more manual work. Rippling's integrated platform offers a more streamlined and automated experience, ultimately saving significant time and reducing the risk of errors.

Support and user experience

Rippling

Rippling's customer support organization is designed around the company’s core mission: creating a world without busy work by eliminating repetitive, manual tasks that slow businesses down. When customers encounter challenges that disrupt that promise, the support team serves as the first line of defense — helping them get back on track and avoid similar issues in the future. The team also partners closely with internal product groups to identify areas for improvement and enhance the overall customer experience.

Rippling’s approach to support is guided by three core principles: Solve the whole problem, Be the expert, and Build trust through transparency. Support specialists work to understand the question behind the question, anticipate customer needs, and clearly explain the reasoning behind each solution. They respond with confidence and precision, grounded in deep expertise across the Rippling platform. Transparency and empathy are central to every interaction; customers are treated as collaborators, with open communication and fact-based guidance.

Rippling operates a specialist support model, connecting customers directly with product experts for faster resolution. While the team cannot make changes directly to customer accounts, they provide detailed instructions and guidance to administrators. Support is available Monday through Friday, 9 AM–5 PM local time and maintains industry-leading service levels, including a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score above 90% and an average live chat response time of approximately 30 seconds.

Gusto

Gusto’s customer support system can be a point of frustration for some users. The platform allows employees to input their own tax information during onboarding, which can lead to mistakes that Gusto's support does not always fix quickly. Reviewers and customer calls indicate that the support center can be overwhelmed with requests, and some complaints may be lost due to poor internal management.

Customers have reported a lack of consistency in support, noting that they may be connected with a random agent or have to wait for a long time on the phone for an issue that may not be resolved. This can lead to a less efficient and more manual support journey for users. Gusto offers a basic level of support to all users, but priority support is an additional paid add-on, which can add to the total cost.

Summary: Rippling's support stands out due to its radical transparency and proven track record of high satisfaction and rapid response times. Its integrated specialist model ensures customers are connected with experts who can see the whole picture. Gusto's support, while providing multiple channels, can be inconsistent and may not handle complex or time-sensitive issues efficiently, particularly when they involve tax errors or system bugs.

Reporting and analytics

Rippling

Rippling's reporting tools are built on a single, unified data platform, making your data accessible, organized, and secure. Any user can point and click their way to insightful reports that fuel better business decisions. Because all data is centralized, you always have real-time access without the need for manual exports or messy spreadsheet joins. This single source of truth connects data from across HR, IT, and Finance, unlocking powerful capabilities.

Rippling's intuitive interface allows you to level up your insights with dynamic visuals, including bubble charts, line graphs, and scatter plots — with no separate business intelligence licenses required. You can also utilize powerful tools like pivot tables to summarize large amounts of data and formula fields to automatically calculate values. Furthermore, Rippling’s robust permissions ensure that every employee is automatically assigned the appropriate level of access based on their role, keeping your data secure. This integrated approach empowers you to easily analyze, automate, and orchestrate insights across your entire organization.

Gusto

Gusto provides a suite of basic reports for its core functionalities, including payroll, benefits, and tax data. While it allows for some customization by using custom columns, groupings, and filters, its reporting capabilities are not as comprehensive as more advanced platforms. For instance, Gusto may not be able to create a single, custom report that shows payroll by team and location alongside expense data, as this information is not always natively connected.

The platform's focus on simplicity means that its reporting can be limited. Users may find it difficult to create complex, cross-module reports or perform advanced analytics. As a result, companies may need to rely on manual exports to Excel and other tools to get a complete picture of their workforce data. While the platform is effective for basic reporting, it lacks the advanced features and deep data integration needed for more complex business analysis.

Summary: Rippling's unified data architecture provides a fundamentally superior reporting experience, offering easy access to connected data and powerful, intuitive tools like pivot tables and dynamic visuals. In contrast, Gusto's reporting is effective for basic needs but can lack the customization and cross-module functionality required for growing organizations. This can lead to a less efficient and comprehensive reporting process as business needs become more complex.

Legal coverage and compliance

Rippling

Rippling's platform is built with a compliance-first philosophy, using a proprietary employee graph to monitor compliance at the individual data field level and flag precise issues like "Employee X has Break Policy Y in violation of Gov Policy Z," providing actionable solutions before they escalate.

This proactive approach helps prevent costly audits, tax notices, or wage disputes while ensuring every process, including terminations, aligns with local laws. Building on this foundation, Rippling 360 introduces Compliance 360, which continuously monitors for potential infractions such as minimum wage violations, state sick leave compliance issues, and payment of wages errors. Detected issues are automatically surfaced in a user's 360 dashboard, allowing businesses to take corrective action directly within the platform.

With many countries and U.S. states enforcing stricter penalties — and some, like California, increasing fines for employers who knowingly violate labor laws — Rippling helps customers stay compliant and avoid risk through real-time insights and guided remediation. Rippling uniquely combines automation, visibility, and expert guidance, giving organizations a comprehensive and dynamic compliance management solution that not only ensures compliance but helps them stay confidently ahead of evolving regulations.

Gusto

Gusto has built-in compliance features for ACA, COBRA, HIPAA, and ERISA, and it assists with automated tax filings and new hire reporting. The platform also offers resources to help small businesses navigate regulatory challenges and provides alerts for new regulations or changes, particularly in states like California and New York. Gusto aims to help businesses stay on top of deadlines and manage government filings.

However, Gusto's compliance capabilities are more basic and may not provide the same level of granular automation for complex labor laws. For instance, while Gusto provides information and guidance for workers' compensation, it does not fully automate the process. Furthermore, some compliance features may be available as add-ons or require a higher-tier plan, which can increase a company’s overall cost. While Gusto's focus is on simplifying compliance for small businesses, it may lack the advanced, employee-level tracking needed to prevent nuanced violations proactively.

Summary: Rippling's compliance-first platform provides granular, actionable alerts and is supported by a single, integrated data source, ensuring you stay compliant with complex and nuanced labor laws. Gusto’s compliance features are useful for basic needs and general awareness but may lack the real-time, automated employee-level tracking that Rippling provides for both domestic and global workforces, and some features may come at an additional cost.

Payroll and benefits management

Rippling

Rippling offers one of the most advanced and efficient payroll and benefits management systems available, designed to help companies run payroll in as little as 90 seconds with complete accuracy and compliance. Unlike traditional tools that require manual data entry and coordination across HR, finance, and IT, Rippling’s payroll is directly tied to the unified employee record, meaning every piece of employee data — from hours worked to benefit deductions — is automatically synced in real time. This ensures total data integrity and eliminates the need for manual reconciliation between systems. Payroll processing includes calculating earnings, withholding and remitting federal, state, and local taxes, and issuing payments via direct deposit or check. Businesses can run unlimited pay runs, perform off-cycle payments at no additional cost, and use side-by-side comparisons to review changes across periods. The platform also enables adjustments to past compensation, multi-state payroll management, and automatic tax filing to ensure every employee is paid correctly and on time.

Rippling’s Workflow Studio eliminates repetitive administrative tasks with custom alerts and approval flows that can be triggered by any event, such as a promotion or a change in compensation. The platform also features dynamic general ledger mapping that seamlessly syncs payroll and expense data directly to accounting systems like QuickBooks, Xero, and NetSuite. On the benefits side, Rippling’s Ben Admin connects benefits management directly to payroll, automating enrollments, deductions, COBRA administration, and mid-year qualifying life event changes. Whether companies bring their own broker or use Rippling Insurance Services, the system supports large and small groups alike, giving employees and admins an intuitive way to manage health plans, W-2s, and pay stubs online or via Rippling’s dedicated mobile app. Together, these capabilities make Rippling a truly integrated, flexible, and scalable payroll and benefits solution for growing organizations.

Gusto

Gusto’s payroll and benefits management is built with simplicity in mind, but it comes with limitations that can pose challenges for growing businesses. Gusto’s benefits administration has limited customization, as users have reported difficulty or an inability to configure nonstandard benefit structures or custom plans. This can be a significant drawback for companies with complex needs. Furthermore, users have noted that the synchronization between benefits and payroll modules can be weak, sometimes requiring manual reconciliation to correct discrepancies.

The platform's payroll capabilities can also present challenges with multi-state operations and tax handling. Reviewers have mentioned that onboarding in a new state can be cumbersome or costly, and there have been reports of inconsistencies in tax handling and employee classifications. When problems arise with payroll or benefits, users have cited a lack of responsiveness from support, which can be frustrating and lead to delays in resolution. Gusto’s simple, user-friendly interface is ideal for small businesses, but as a company scales and its needs become more complex, the platform may lack the flexibility and robustness required to handle advanced payroll and benefits administration.

Summary: Rippling's in-house, unified payroll and benefits platform provides a fundamentally more powerful and automated solution, capable of handling complex and growing organizations. Gusto’s payroll and benefits are functional for basic needs, but they can lack the customization, seamless data synchronization, and robust support required for a more complex or scaling business, potentially leading to increased manual work and administrative burden.

Breadth of product suite

Rippling

Rippling's product suite is distinguished by its all-in-one approach, consolidating HR, IT, and Finance into a single, unified platform. This allows companies to manage their entire workforce and business operations seamlessly from a single source of truth. Beyond standard HR functions like payroll, benefits, and time tracking, Rippling offers a full spend management suite, which includes corporate cards, expense management, bill pay, and travel. It also provides comprehensive IT coverage, featuring identity and access management, mobile device management (MDM), and automated app provisioning. All of these capabilities are built on a single, integrated platform, ensuring that a single change, such as a new hire's role, automatically updates their access to apps, their corporate card spending limits, and their reporting hierarchy. This robust, interconnected system is designed to eliminate fragmented workflows and reduce the need for multiple, disconnected point solutions.

Gusto

Gusto's product suite is more narrowly focused on core HR and payroll functions. While it offers a simple and intuitive experience for payroll, benefits, and basic HR, it lacks native support for other critical business areas. The core HR platform is simple but not robust; for example, you cannot customize the org chart. The platform also has limited functionality for talent management, with many customers opting to integrate with third-party tools. Gusto also provides no in-house IT support for identity access management or app provisioning.

While Gusto has expanded into finance via third-party partnerships, it lacks a comprehensive, native spend management suite. For example, its expense management is basic and doesn't allow contractors to use it. Bill pay is a new partnership-based offering, and Gusto offers no corporate cards. For global solutions, such as EOR, global payroll, and global contractor management, Gusto must depend on third-party partners. This means that a business using Gusto will need to keep a software stack of multiple, disconnected tools to achieve the same level of functionality.

Summary: Rippling's product suite offers a single, unified platform that natively integrates HR, IT, and Finance, providing a more comprehensive and seamlessly connected solution. Gusto focuses on HR and payroll, but achieving the same level of product coverage requires purchasing and managing separate software for IT, Finance, and global operations, leading to a more disjointed system and a higher administrative burden.

Powered by G2 data as of 10/2025

Thousands of verified users on G2 rate Rippling higher than Gusto

Rippling outscores Gusto on both Trustpilot and Capterra

Bottom line

Rippling provides a unified platform for managing your entire domestic and international workforce, offering a single source of truth for all employee data. Its in-house, integrated products are built with a compliance-first approach, enabling a high degree of automation and infinitely customizable reporting. This platform is designed to be a modern, powerful, and scalable solution that reduces administrative overhead and costs. Rippling's architecture is built for a single source of truth, making it the clear choice for organizations seeking a single, integrated system with the power and compliance expertise needed to scale their entire workforce globally.

In contrast, Gusto's product suite is focused on HR and payroll, but achieving the same level of product coverage requires purchasing and managing separate software for IT, Finance, and global operations, which leads to a more disjointed system and a higher administrative burden. Gusto's reporting is effective for basic needs but can lack the customization and cross-module functionality required for growing organizations. Its payroll and benefits are functional for basic needs, but they can lack the customization, seamless data synchronization, and robust support required for a more complex or scaling business.

Choose Rippling if you need a single, integrated platform that provides the power, functionality, and compliance expertise to scale your entire workforce.

Book a demo. See it in action.

FAQs