Gusto vs. Bamboo for small business payroll: My opinion on which is better
- Claire Baker
- Mar 14
- 5 min read
Would you rather stare at a waving panda or a marching pig as you wonder if your career is over?
For my small business clients (who aren’t considering a PEO), the decision often comes down to Bamboo or Gusto.
Both Bamboo and Gusto have clean, easy-to-understand user interfaces with cute graphics that really do make dry and stressful processes less intimidating and occasionally “delightful.”
Having worked extensively in both, I’m Team Gusto. But I don’t think Bamboo is an irresponsible decision either.
🤖 Product
🐷 Gusto is a much more solid product. There are plenty of limitations (especially when your business is the exception to a rule), but Gusto is generally successful in making payroll simple enough that a non-specialist can manage it easily.
🎍Bamboo works, mostly. But they’ve made a bunch of weird product decisions that invite errors. Changes that take two steps in Gusto might take four or five steps in Bamboo and require moving between several screens.
More steps = more opportunities to miss something. Bad things happen when there’s an error in your HRIS or payroll.
I once spelled someone’s name wrong when entering them into Bamboo. As soon as I sent out the onboarding packet, someone pointed it out. Super embarrassing! I immediately went in to change it.
Except when I went to the profile to fix the typo, it wouldn't let me save. The SSN was a required field, and I couldn't "save" until it was filled. Which meant that the new hire would see my dumb error.
I reached out to Support for an emergency override. They were very nice as they explained that I could either delete the profile and start again (which would require a bunch of embarrassing emails to the new hire explaining why he was getting so many emails and some of the links weren't working) or take 10 steps to remove him from payroll (where the blocker was coming from), fix the typo, wait for him to enter his SSN, and then remember how to do all 10 steps in reverse to make sure he was paid properly.
It was an accident waiting to happen.
Yes, I messed up. But people are flawed. Mistakes happen. In my opinion, good software makes it easy to get things back on track without risk of further error.
💵 Payroll
🐷 Gusto has always been good at payroll. As they expand to support more edge cases, it’s getting a little harder to use*, but pretty much any boob can look at the various payroll and tax screens and figure out what they say.
When something needs your attention, Gusto is good at alerting you and giving you guidance on what to do next. I often look at Gusto’s help docs, even when I’m working in another platform.
(* Which I think is why their partner program is moving away from HR providers and toward accountants and managed payroll services)
🎍Bamboo’s payroll feature is the result of an acquisition, and it shows. For a while the payroll screens looked like something out of the late 90s. It was jarring to move back and forth between the Ninja Panda and something that had the look and feel of Windows 95.
I once saw a 1099 contractor who was being paid as an employee. Taxes withheld, benefits deducted, and everything. When he was hired, there was a brief period where they thought about converting his role to a W2, but they decided against it. His profile was switched from W2 to 1099 before the contract was even finalized, but somehow his info got pushed to payroll anyway.
Finance ran payroll, so they didn't even have access to his HRIS profile to detect the problem.
HR never looked at payroll, so they figured Finance was paying him as a contractor.
Nobody caught it until he got a W2 in January instead of a 1099. Tax filings had to be amended, money returned, and 1099-Cs issued. It was a mess.
How do you even build a product that could let this happen?
❤️🩹 Benefits
🐷 Gusto’s benefits team is a hot mess. Always has been, always will be. But if you already have a broker to help you navigate insurance, Gusto’s ben admin feature is great.
I never recommend using Gusto as your broker after setting up your first plan. They’ll get you signed up and then they’ll never talk to you again.
But if you already have a broker to help you navigate insurance, Gusto’s ben admin feature is great. Simple, clean, and easy for even the most tech-unsavvy broker to use.
I've had this happen at two different companies:
I reach out 4 or 5 months in advance of renewal, letting Gusto know we want to consider new plans and asking to talk to a broker. They say someone will follow up. No one follows up. I reach out every 2 weeks for months trying to get someone's attention and asking for quotes. Nothing.
Then, a month before renewal, I get an automated email announcing our open enrollment starts next week. Support tells me I should have said something sooner and now it's too late. I go into full freak-out mode. I finally reach someone on the broker team, but the whole renewal is rushed and an unmitigated disaster.
Go ahead. Ask me why I got my own damned insurance license.
🎍Bamboo’s ben admin tool is relatively new. Transparently, I haven’t used it yet.
🤝 Support
🐷 Gusto’s support used to be amazing. I literally wrote to a friend at Gusto asking if I could be connected to the person who designed their Customer Support org to learn from them. Then they outsourced it and everything went to hell. The slow decline of Gusto support is my biggest disappointment in the platform.
Their US support team and the fine folks who serve as dedicated reps are still best-in-class, but it’s hard to reach them or you have to pay dearly for the privilege.
🎍Bamboo’s support team is consistently excellent. They’re knowledgeable, patient, kind, and genuinely want to help. Let me take this opportunity to apologize for every time I’ve been grumpy when they told me something I didn’t want to hear.
📈 Growth
🐷 You will outgrow Gusto at about 50-100 employees. They know that, and they’re very classy about letting you go.
Employees will be able to see their old records forever, and Gusto won’t hold anything against your admins for moving on. I can still see my pay stubs from a company I worked at in 2019.
🎍People tend to stay with Bamboo long after the size and complexity of their orgs has outgrown the platform. Probably because it’s inexpensive (if you don’t factor in all of the extra services you pay for because Bamboo doesn’t support them) and it sorta works.
People tend to stay with Bamboo long after the size and complexity of their orgs has outgrown the platform. The panda will wave nicely as you go, but once you’re gone, so is your data.
If you're a small business looking to set up payroll for the first time, or if you're growing to the point where you need some help, we'd love to give you a hand. We can help you implement and manage Gusto or Bamboo.
Our clients also get a discount on Gusto. We don't get any money out of the deal. We just like working with them and want to help our clients save money.
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