Gusto vs Bambee

Gusto offers straightforward monthly plans with options starting at a monthly base fee of $55, plus an additional $6  per employee per month. If you don’t have W-2 employees, you can use Gusto to pay your contractors for just $35/month plus $6/month per contractor (only in the months you pay them). There are no hidden fees, you can cancel anytime, and our base price includes setup, tax filing, multiple payroll runs, reporting, and other essentials.

Bambee’s cheapest plan starts at $99 for companies with 0 employees. The moment you hire someone, their cheapest package is $299 per month and covers just 1–4 employees. Their largest package, for companies with 50–70 employees clocks in at $1,299 per month. For larger companies, you’ll need to get a custom quote.It’s important to note that Bambee is HR-focused, and payroll isn’t included in any of their pricing plans. Instead, they offer payroll as an add-on service.

Running payroll

Both Gusto and Bambee can run your payroll in just a few clicks. Both platforms automatically calculate and file all federal, state, and local taxes every time you run payroll. Both platforms support multiple pay rates and schedules across multiple states and offer two-day direct deposit. 

But while Bambee can help guide your company when it comes to compliance and compensation law, Gusto has many of these features fully automated, such as minimum wage and breaks. 

Gusto’s payroll automation goes a step further with Payroll on Autopilot that lets you automatically pay salaried employees each month without lifting a finger.   

Employee Benefits

When it comes to benefits, Bambee falls woefully short of Gusto’s robust, custom benefits options. Bambee offers tools to help build policies and a compliance knowledge base, but they don’t provide any actual policies or coverage except through their partnership with SimplyInsured. They do have an option to manage third-party benefits from within their platform, but the functionality is lacking. 

Gusto comes loaded with more than 3,500 small group health insurance choices, free benefits administration, workers’ comp, HSAs, FSAs, commuter benefits, and even free financial planning tools for your team. If you have a benefits provider you already know and love, we’ll handle the migration so you can easily manage benefits for your team all from within the platform.

Bambee is a purebred HR management platform, and they pride themselves on providing a dedicated HR specialist for every customer. They also offer guidance on complex issues such as classifying employees and contractors and guidelines for terminating employees. Their risk management tools are impressive, and they’ll help you craft custom HR policies for your business.

Where Gusto really shines is our suite of user-friendly HR tools. Hiring, onboarding, time management, and performance management tools are all expertly designed and incredibly user-friendly. While Bambee does offer employee training, talent management, and hiring tools, they don’t offer scheduling or time and attendance and their tools are bare bones compared to Gusto.

All of Gusto’s plans come with full access to our friendly sales and customer support teams via phone, email, and chat Monday through Friday. And our FAQ and Help Center are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Companies with more than 10 employees also benefit from our dedicated onboarding support team. 

Bambee’s urgent HR line is available from 7am to 4pm PT. They also offer support via phone, email, and chat.

Gusto’s payroll platform integrates seamlessly with popular tools for accounting, time tracking, POS, and expense management—including QuickBooks, Xero, FreshBooks, Expensify, Tsheets, Sage Business Cloud. See the full list of integration partners.

Bambee’s integration approach is notably limited, with minimal public information available about third-party software integrations. Instead of emphasizing platform flexibility, the company prioritizes direct service delivery and personalized HR support as its core value proposition.