Roundup
Seven providers, compared on the things that decide whether payroll is a five-minute task or a monthly headache: real price, tax filing, ease of use and support. There is no single winner for everyone — there is a right answer for each kind of business, and we name it for each.
We score every provider the same way: price (25%), tax filing and compliance (25%), ease of use (20%), support (15%) and features (15%). The full rubric is on our methodology page. All prices below are published list prices — the number you would actually pay without negotiating — re-checked monthly and stamped at the top of this page.
One clarification before the picks: every provider here sells payroll a small business can buy on its own — no bundles required, no parent product you must own first (though two of the seven make the most sense if you already use their sibling products, and we say so where that's true). Two providers, Rippling and ADP RUN, do not publish prices at all. We include them because readers ask about them constantly, and we mark their pricing as custom rather than guessing at a number.
Best for most small teams
$49/mo + $6 per person
Simple plan, priced per month + per person
Best for 1–10 employees, tight budget
$17/mo + $4 per person
Basic plan; Full Service adds tax filing
Best for farms, nonprofits & restaurants
$49/mo + $6 per person
Single plan, all features included
| Provider | Base price | Per person | Tax filing | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gusto · #1 overall | $49/mo | $6/mo | ✓ Included on every plan | Most small teams |
| Patriot Software | $17/mo | $4/mo | With the Full Service plan ($37 base) | Tight budgets, 1–10 employees |
| OnPay | $49/mo | $6/mo | ✓ Included, single plan | Farms, nonprofits, simplicity |
| Rippling | Custom pricing | Custom pricing | With the payroll module | Scaling companies, HR + IT unified |
| Square Payroll | $35/mo | $6/mo | ✓ Included | Businesses already on Square POS |
| QuickBooks Payroll | $50/mo | $6.50/mo | ✓ Included | Businesses already on QuickBooks |
| ADP RUN | Custom pricing | Custom pricing | ✓ Included | Maximum compliance hand-holding |
Rippling's core platform starts around $8/user/mo with payroll priced as an add-on module; ADP RUN is sold through its sales team, so neither publishes a payroll list price. Prices checked October 2026.
Base prices mislead because per-person fees do the real damage. Here is the actual monthly bill for the five providers with published pricing, at three common team sizes:
| Provider | 5 people | 10 people | 25 people |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gusto (Simple) | $79/mo | $109/mo | $199/mo |
| Patriot (Full Service) | $57/mo | $77/mo | $137/mo |
| OnPay | $79/mo | $109/mo | $199/mo |
| Square Payroll | $65/mo | $95/mo | $185/mo |
| QuickBooks Payroll | $82.50/mo | $115/mo | $212.50/mo |
Calculated from the published base + per-person prices above, checked October 2026. Patriot's Basic plan (you file taxes yourself) is cheaper still — $37, $57 and $117/mo at the same sizes — for the reasons covered in our Patriot review, we price the Full Service plan here, since tax filing is the point of the product.
Price: $49/mo + $6 per person (Simple plan). Best for: most small teams that want payroll to simply be handled.
Strength: the most approachable product in the category, with full-service tax filing on every plan and benefits, time tracking and hiring tools in the same account. Weakness: the price has risen several times in recent years, and support quality is the complaint that surfaces again and again in user reviews. If you want the detailed case, read our Gusto vs Rippling comparison. It is also the safest recommendation we make to a reader who tells us nothing about their business — the default answer when no special circumstance points somewhere else.
Price: $17/mo + $4 per person (Basic); $37/mo + $4 per person (Full Service, which adds tax filing). Best for: teams of 1–10 watching every dollar.
Strength: nothing else with this feature set costs this little, and its US-based support has a genuinely good reputation. Weakness: the interface is dated, and the integration list is shorter than Gusto's. Our full Patriot review works through the per-employee math. Note that the savings grow with your team: at 25 people, Patriot Full Service runs $137/mo against Gusto's $199/mo — a difference of $744 a year.
Price: $49/mo + $6 per person — one plan, everything included. Best for: farms, nonprofits, restaurants, and anyone allergic to pricing tiers.
Strength: a single plan with no upsell maze, plus genuinely unusual range — it handles agricultural Form 943 filings and nonprofit payroll that bigger rivals treat as edge cases, and migration from your old provider is free. Weakness: a smaller app ecosystem than Gusto's, and fewer payroll-speed options on the base setup. For a farm crew of 10, the bill is $109/mo with the agricultural filing handled — the scenario where OnPay's specialisation quietly beats rivals that treat farm payroll as an afterthought.
Price: custom pricing; the core platform starts around $8/user/mo and payroll is an add-on module. Best for: companies past roughly 50 people, or any business that wants HR, IT and payroll in one system.
Strength: unification — one employee record drives payroll, benefits, app access and laptop provisioning, which no payroll-first rival can match. Weakness: quote-based pricing and platform complexity are overkill at small scale, and per-module costs stack up. The full analysis is in Gusto vs Rippling. Readers sometimes ask why a product with no public price makes the list at all: because past a certain size, the question stops being "what does payroll cost" and becomes "what does running this company cost" — and Rippling is the only entry here that answers the second question.
Price: $35/mo + $6 per person. Best for: shops, cafés and retailers already running on Square point-of-sale.
Strength: if your sales, tips and hours already live in Square, payroll sits naturally on top of the same data instead of in a separate system you have to reconcile. Weakness: the value case collapses if you are not a Square business — as a standalone payroll product for everyone else, the top three above are stronger picks. For a Square shop of 10, the bill is $95/mo, and the real saving is reconciliation time rather than the sticker price.
Price: from $50/mo + $6.50 per person. Best for: businesses whose accounting already runs on QuickBooks.
Strength: payroll and books in one ledger — no syncing between systems, and your accountant is almost certainly already fluent in it. Weakness: like Square, the logic depends on the ecosystem; if you are not on QuickBooks for accounting, there is little reason to start here for payroll alone. At 10 people the bill starts at $115/mo — the highest published starting point on this list — which only makes sense when the QuickBooks connection is doing real work for you.
Price: custom pricing, sold through ADP's sales team. Best for: owners who want the most compliance guidance available and are comfortable with a traditional vendor relationship.
Strength: the deepest compliance hand-holding on this list, from the largest name in payroll — helpful if your situation involves multiple states or tricky classifications. Weakness: the sales-driven process itself: no published price, a quote before you can compare, and a sales relationship some small businesses find heavier than the product requires. Because pricing is quoted, two similar businesses can end up paying noticeably different amounts — if you go this route, get the full quote in writing before comparing it against the published prices above.
Three patterns catch small businesses out across this whole category, and none of them appear in headline prices. First, per-person creep: your bill rises with every hire, automatically, so a service that looks cheap at 6 people deserves a fresh look at 16 — run the table above at next year's headcount, not today's. Second, tier walls: across the category, some tools sit in higher-priced plans rather than the entry plan, so confirm that the specific features you are counting on live in the plan you are actually buying, not the one in the brochure. Third, teaser pricing: introductory discounts are common in this market, and they expire. Our scores deliberately ignore them — ask any provider what the bill becomes when the promotion ends, and compare that number instead.
And one question that separates honest pricing from the other kind: "What will I pay in month thirteen, at my current headcount, with nothing added?" Every provider on this page with published pricing can answer it from their website. The two that cannot are not necessarily worse products — but you should walk into a quote process knowing the answer has to come from a salesperson.
One last comparison worth making before you buy anything: the software against your current arrangement. If an accountant or bookkeeper handles your payroll today, put their actual monthly cost next to the figures in the table above — for many small teams the subscription is the smaller number by a wide margin, and the filing responsibility moves with it. If you currently do payroll yourself, the comparison is your time and your penalty exposure against the same figures. Payroll software is not automatically the right answer for a one-person business with no employees — but the moment you hire, the arithmetic in this roundup is the arithmetic that applies.
Whichever you shortlist, run the real monthly math with your own headcount before committing: base price plus per-person price, at your team size, is the only number that matters. We re-check every price on this page monthly — if a provider has raised prices since the stamp at the top, tell us and we will correct it.