ADP RUN Alternatives: 10 Platforms Compared

If another founder asked me where to go after ADP RUN, my first question would be why they are leaving, because the answer decides which replacement fits. So this comparison matches ten platforms to the reasons people leave, with every price taken from each vendor's own pricing page in October 2026 and a plain note wherever a vendor publishes nothing at all.

Almost nobody shops for a payroll provider because payroll broke. RUN Powered by ADP calculates, files, and deposits payroll taxes, produces W-2 and 1099 forms, and comes from a company that has run payroll since 1949, longer than any other company on this page has existed.

The reason a small business starts looking is narrower and more specific: the invoice grew without an explanation, the one feature they need sits in a package they are not on, the person who set them up stopped answering, or a fee appeared that nobody remembered agreeing to. That matters for how you shop.

If you replace a payroll platform without naming the reason you are leaving, you tend to buy the same shape of product again and repeat the problem 18 months later. A team leaving over cost needs a different answer than a team leaving because scheduling and the time clock live somewhere else.

Why small businesses leave ADP RUN

Four reasons cover most departures: a price nobody can look up, a feature that sits one package higher, a support relationship that changes after implementation, and extra fees that only become visible on the invoice. None of them is a failure of the payroll engine, which is why the switch is usually a fit decision rather than a rescue.

The price is quoted, not published

ADP lists four RUN packages on its own product page: Essential Payroll, Enhanced Payroll, Complete Payroll and HR Plus, and HR Pro Payroll and HR. It lists no price for any of them. Every package routes to a Get Pricing form or a phone number, which means two businesses of identical size can pay materially different amounts and neither can check the other.

ADP also runs promotions for new small business clients, such as free months credited to the invoice after the first three months of processing. Promotions are normal, but they change what your first-year invoices tell you. The number worth planning around is the full monthly price once any promotion has run its course, and that number does not appear anywhere public.

Most of the alternatives below work the other way. Their published rate cards let you calculate a 25-person bill in ten seconds.

The module you need sits one package up

RUN is tiered, and the HR tools vary by package: the HR HelpDesk, the employee handbook wizard, and HR forms start at Complete Payroll and HR Plus, while applicant tracking and a learning management system sit only in HR Pro. Needing one of those capabilities moves the entire account up a tier, and the tier price is quoted rather than posted.

Time and attendance works differently: ADP sells it as an add-on to every package, and that price is quoted too. Tiers and add-ons are a reasonable way to sell software, but quoting all of them leaves a small employer guessing. You cannot tell in advance whether adding a time clock costs $20 a month or $200.

The support relationship changes after implementation

ADP includes 24/7 support across the RUN packages, which is more than several platforms here offer at any price. The recurring theme in customer reviews is not the availability of support but the difference between the attentive implementation period and the steady state that follows it.

If your reason for leaving is that nobody knows your account anymore, look at the vendors that compete on that ground: Paychex Flex and the professional employer organization (PEO) options. They sell service relationships, and of those, only Justworks publishes its rates.

The extra fees only show up on the invoice

ADP's package page says RUN needs no signed contract and that services can be terminated at any time, so the surprise is rarely the contract term. It is the extras: W-2 and 1099 forms carry an additional fee the page does not price, and payroll fees rise when you run payroll more often.

ADP's promotion terms also exclude courier and other delivery fees, including off-cycle fees for payrolls run outside your regular schedule, so those charges reach the invoice even during free months.

Before you sign up, with ADP or a replacement, get four things in writing: any minimum term, how cancellation works and how much notice it needs, the package charge, and the full fee schedule including year-end forms and off-cycle runs.

Each reason for leaving points to a different replacement. Find yours in the first column below, then read the review of the platform it names.

10 ADP RUN alternatives at a glance

Every platform below can run full-service US payroll with federal, state, and local tax filing, though for Homebase, Rippling, and the TriNet HR Platform, payroll is a module or add-on rather than the core product. The columns that separate them are whether the rate card is public, how the price is structured, and what a 25-person payroll actually costs.

Which ADP product you are actually replacing

An alternative to ADP is not one thing, because ADP is not one product. RUN is the small business payroll system, and the ten platforms above are chosen to replace it. ADP also sells Workforce Now for midsized companies, TotalSource as a PEO, and Comprehensive Services for outsourced payroll and HR administration.

Read the product name on your invoice before you shop, because it moves the shortlist. Workforce Now is a midsized HR and payroll suite, so Rippling and the TriNet HR Platform sit closer to it than the budget payroll options do. TotalSource is co-employment rather than software, and two entries here offer the same structure: Justworks with its published PEO plans, and Paychex through its HR PEO package.

How we evaluated these alternatives

Every platform here had to be something a US small business can buy and operate without a dedicated payroll administrator, and had to be a genuine replacement for RUN rather than an adjacent tool. Mid-market and enterprise systems that require an implementation project were left out.

The 10 alternatives reviewed

Each review starts with the price and, where the vendor publishes rates, what it comes to at three team sizes. Then it covers who the platform suits after RUN and where it falls short.

Gusto is a common landing spot for small employers leaving RUN, and the reason is structural rather than emotional: the price is on the website. Simple is $49 per month plus $6 per person, Plus is $80 plus $12, and Premium is $180 plus $22, all published on the Gusto pricing page. Federal, state, and local tax filing is automatic, unlimited payroll runs are included, and billing is month to month.

The variable to model before you sign is state count. Simple covers a single state, so one hire in another state moves you to Plus and roughly doubles the per-person rate, taking a 25-person payroll from $199 to $380 a month. Plus is also where multi-state payroll and built-in time tracking live, so a team that used the RUN time module should price Plus from the start rather than Simple.

OnPay answers the tier complaint by selling payroll as one plan instead of three. Payroll Essentials is $49 per month plus $6 per worker, and the payroll side is all in it: federal, state, and local tax filing, W-2 and 1099 workers, payroll in multiple states, unlimited pay runs and schedules, benefits administration, and year-end filings.

OnPay states plainly that it does not charge extra to pay workers in as many states as you need and adds no implementation or integration fees. That removes most of the line items that make a payroll invoice creep.

Read the add-on line before you assume everything is included, though. HR sits outside the base plan at $15 per month plus $2 per worker, and that is where paid time off management, onboarding workflows, org charts, and custom e-signature documents live. Compliance Resources at $10 and Live HR Support at $65 sit on top of that.

For a business leaving RUN over surprise charges rather than the headline rate, OnPay's payroll side is still the cleanest structure here. The trade-off is depth: a team that wants applicant tracking or learning modules will be buying that elsewhere.

Patriot has the lowest published full-service price in the category. Full Service Payroll is $37 per month plus $5 per worker paid, with federal, state, and local tax filing included. Basic Payroll is $17 plus $4 and leaves the deposits and returns to you, which is a real option for a single-state employer with a simple deposit schedule in a tight month, and a bad idea for everyone else.

Two add-ons are worth pricing up front, because RUN customers often already pay ADP for both: time and attendance is $6 per month plus $2 per employee, and HR software is the same. Additional state filings are $12 per month per state, so a company with people in three states pays $24 a month on top. Even loaded up, Patriot usually lands under the alternatives.

SurePayroll has the lowest base fee of any full-service option here at $29 per month, with a $7 per-worker charge that makes it a value play below roughly 15 people and an expensive one above 30. Federal and state tax filing, new hire reporting, unlimited runs, and free two-day direct deposit are included.

Multi-state payroll is a flat $9.99 per month rather than a charge per state, which beats per-state pricing for a scattered team, though SurePayroll notes a separate fee applies in areas that require local taxes. Other add-ons are priced separately too: accounting integration is $4.99 per month, and time clock integration starts at $5 per month plus $3 per employee.

Three things to know before you switch. Year-end forms are not in the subscription: SurePayroll bills W-2 and 1099-NEC filing annually at a $50 base fee plus $5 per form, so a 25-person payroll adds roughly $175 every January that the monthly figure does not show.

SurePayroll is also a Paychex company, so a business leaving one national provider is moving to a product owned by another. That matters if the reason for leaving was the vendor rather than the price.

The household plan, at $39 per month including one employee, is the strongest option here for anyone paying a nanny or caregiver, a case most business payroll platforms handle badly.

Square Payroll is $35 per month plus $6 per person paid, and it is the obvious move for a restaurant, salon, or retail shop that already takes payments through Square.

Timecards, tips, and hours come from the same system that rings up the sale, which removes the integration that usually sits between a point of sale and a pay run. For that business, Square Payroll is a better structural fit than a general payroll platform, at a price below most of them.

The contractor-only tier is the sharper deal: $6 per person per month with no base fee at all. A business that pays six contractors and no employees spends $36 a month, which is less than the base fee alone on several alternatives. If that describes you, compare it against the dedicated contractor payroll options before defaulting to a full platform.

Homebase inverts the usual arrangement. It is a scheduling and time clock product first, with payroll available as an add-on at $49 per month plus $6 per employee paid. For a business whose real problem is that shifts, breaks, and hours live in one system and pay lives in another, that is the correct shape, and it removes the integration RUN customers usually maintain between a time module and the pay run.

Price the plan underneath before you compare. Homebase plans run from a free Basic tier through Essentials at $30, Plus at $70, and All-in-One at $120 per location per month, with 20 percent off for annual billing. Basic is the one to check: it is free, but only up to 10 employees at a single location, so anyone modeling 25 or 50 people is on a paid plan by definition.

Multi-location businesses should read the per-location pricing carefully too, because two sites double the plan fee even though the payroll add-on does not change.

Rippling sells a single employee record shared by payroll, HR, and IT provisioning. Hire someone once and the same action can open payroll, order a laptop, and create their accounts, which is genuine automation rather than a feature list. It is also modular, so what you pay depends entirely on which products you switch on.

The catch is that Rippling's pricing page publishes no rate for any of it. The page is a form that asks which services you need and promises a custom quote in return, so it shows no base fee and no per-employee figure, and there is no way to model your bill before you talk to sales.

If you are leaving RUN because you are tired of quotes, Rippling is the wrong destination. If you are leaving because your HR and payroll systems do not talk to each other and you have IT overhead to consolidate, it is the strongest platform in that direction.

Paychex is the closest structural match to ADP, which cuts both ways. Its six packages, all run on Paychex Flex, are Basic, Foundations, Advanced, and Complete for payroll, plus HR Pro and HR PEO. The Paychex comparison page shows a Request Pricing button next to every one of them rather than a rate. If the reason you are leaving RUN is that you cannot look up your own price, this changes nothing.

What it does change is the relationship. Paychex competes on service depth, compliance coverage, and the ability to buy payroll, benefits, retirement, and HR support from one vendor, which is what a company that outgrew self-serve software usually wants. SurePayroll, further up this list, is also a Paychex company, so the two are alternatives to ADP but not to each other in any structural sense.

Justworks runs two products under one name, and unusually for this end of the market it publishes rates for both. The standalone Payroll plan is $50 per month plus $8 per employee and comes with HR tools and expert support, with time tracking sold alongside it as an $8 per employee add-on. The Payroll plan is ordinary software, priced ordinarily, and it sits above the budget platforms on price.

The PEO plans are the actual reason companies move here. A professional employer organization co-employs your staff, which lets a small business buy health coverage priced off a much larger risk pool. Justworks lists PEO Basic at $79 per employee per month and PEO Plus at $124, both before health premiums and workers compensation, which are pass-through costs on top. Co-employment is a structural change rather than a software swap.

The TriNet HR Platform is what Zenefits became after the acquisition, and the rename matters when you are searching, because a lot of the comparison content still circulating uses the old brand and the old rate card. TriNet has not buried the lineage either: zenefits.com now redirects to trinet.com, the platform sits under the HR Plus product line, and TriNet still labels the customer login as the HR Platform, also known as TriNet Zenefits. TriNet's 2025 annual report says it moved customers from that HR software offering to HR Plus, its services offering, during 2025, adding significant service along with a price increase.

The TriNet HR Platform is an HR-first system with benefits administration at the center and payroll available as part of the configuration. That suits a company whose pain is enrollment and records rather than the pay run itself.

The catch is the same as with Paychex. TriNet publishes no per-employee rates. Its HR Plus pricing page names service options such as Payroll Pro and People Pro and says the price is set per employee per month, depending on your number of employees and service level. Then it asks you to fill in a form.

Any per-employee figure you find on a review site is either a third-party estimate or a legacy Zenefits price, and neither predicts a current quote. Treat the TriNet HR Platform as a shortlist candidate for benefits depth, not as an escape from opaque pricing.

What each alternative costs at 10, 25, and 50 employees

The seven platforms that publish a full rate card can be modeled exactly. The table below adds each published base fee to the per-person charges at three headcounts. Once you have a RUN quote in writing, this is the benchmark to hold it against.

Two patterns are worth naming. The first is that the spread widens with headcount: at 10 employees the published options sit between $87 and $130, a range small enough that price should not decide anything. At 50 the same options run from $287 to $450, and adding Gusto Plus for multi-state coverage pushes the top to $680. The pricing model, not the feature list, produces almost all of that gap.

The second pattern is that per-person fees are often charged per worker paid rather than per person on the roster. Patriot, Square, and the Homebase payroll add-on all bill that way, which means a seasonal business genuinely pays less in a quiet month. That structure matters more than a few dollars of base fee for anyone with a variable headcount, and it is worth confirming in writing when you compare payroll pricing across quotes.

What switching payroll providers actually involves

The move takes a few hours of work and one decision about timing. A quarter boundary is much easier than a mid-quarter move, because payroll tax returns run on a quarterly cycle for Form 941 and an annual cycle for W-2s, so each complete filing period stays with one provider. January 1 is easiest of all, since the new system starts with clean year-to-date totals.

Your new provider will need authority to file and deposit on your behalf, which is done with Form 8655, Reporting Agent Authorization. The provider normally prepares it, but the signature and the responsibility are yours. Deposit schedules follow the IRS lookback rules rather than the provider: your schedule is based on the tax you reported in an earlier period, so monthly or semiweekly status carries across the move unchanged.

Do not delete anything on the way out. The FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act) requires employers to keep payroll records for at least three years, and the records that wage computations are based on, including time cards and work schedules, for two years (Department of Labor Fact Sheet 21). Access to an old payroll platform usually ends when billing does, so export your payroll records before the final invoice, not after.

How to choose your replacement

Start from the reason you are leaving rather than from the feature grid. Five questions narrow ten options down to two in about ten minutes.

One last item sits outside the payroll engine. Whichever platform you pick, the new-hire paperwork still has to be collected and kept: the I-9, the W-4, state withholding certificates, and direct deposit authorization.

A provider switch is a good moment to check that those files are complete, because that is exactly when gaps in year-end records tend to surface.

From here the plan is short. Answer the five questions, narrow the list to two platforms, get each one's full fee schedule in writing, and time the move for the start of the next quarter.

Before you choose

FirstHR is an onboarding and HR platform, not a payroll provider, so it sits beside whichever replacement you pick rather than standing in for ADP RUN. It covers the paperwork side: onboarding workflows that put the I-9 and W-4 on each new hire's first-day task list, e-signature on offer letters and acknowledgments, employee records, and document management, at a flat $98 a month for up to 10 people or $198 for 11 to 50.

Keeping that layer outside the payroll vendor means the next change of provider moves pay history and tax settings only, while offer letters, signed policies, and new hire files stay where they are.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best alternative to ADP RUN for a small business?

For most US small employers, Gusto or OnPay, because both publish a full rate card at $49 per month plus $6 per person and both file federal, state, and local payroll taxes. OnPay charges nothing extra for additional states and gates no payroll feature behind a tier. Gusto splits into Simple, Plus, and Premium, so a second state or built-in time tracking moves you up. If cost is the whole reason, Patriot is cheaper at $37 plus $5 per worker paid.

How much does ADP RUN cost per month?

ADP does not publish it. All four RUN packages route to a Get Pricing form or a phone number, so any specific figure you find elsewhere is a third-party estimate or somebody else's negotiated deal. ADP also runs new-client promotions, such as free months credited after the first quarter of processing, so first-year invoices can understate the steady-state cost. Ask for a written quote covering the package, every add-on, year-end form fees, and the price after any promotion ends.

Is Gusto cheaper than ADP RUN?

Only one of the two publishes rates, so the honest answer is that it depends on your quote. Gusto lists Simple at $49 plus $6 per person, Plus at $80 plus $12, and Premium at $180 plus $22. A 25-person team on Simple pays $199 a month and can verify that before speaking to anyone. Put your ADP quote next to $199, or next to $380 if you need multi-state payroll on Plus.

What is the cheapest alternative to ADP RUN?

Patriot Software, at $37 per month plus $5 per worker paid, which is $87 at 10 employees and $287 at 50. Its Basic plan is $17 plus $4 but does not file your taxes. For a contractor-only payroll, Square is cheaper still at $6 per person with no base fee. Watch the surcharges: Patriot bills $12 per month per additional state, and SurePayroll bills $9.99 for multi-state.

Can I switch payroll providers in the middle of the year?

Yes, though a quarter boundary is far less work. Form 941 runs quarterly and W-2s run annually, so moving at a period start keeps each complete filing with one provider. A mid-quarter move means loading year-to-date wage and tax totals into the new system and agreeing in writing who files the current quarter. Export registers, deposit history, and employee records before you cancel, since access usually ends with billing.

Does ADP RUN require a contract?

No. ADP says RUN comes without a signed contract and that you can cancel the service at any time. What its package page leaves out is the price and the full fee schedule, and W-2 and 1099 forms are billed as an extra. Before signing up with any provider, get the package charge, every add-on, year-end form fees, and the cancellation terms in writing, so the first invoice holds no surprises.

What do I lose by leaving ADP RUN?

Mostly scale and breadth: full-service tax filing backed by updates for all 50 states, 24/7 support on RUN packages, and the option to buy benefits, retirement, and workers compensation from the same vendor. You also lose your historical data unless you export it first. What you usually gain is a price you can read before you commit. If breadth is what you value, Paychex Flex is the closest like-for-like replacement and it quotes the same way ADP does.

Which ADP RUN alternative is best for hourly and shift-based teams?

Homebase or Square Payroll. Homebase is a scheduling and time clock product with payroll attached at $49 per month plus $6 per employee paid, so hours feed the pay run without a second subscription. Square Payroll is $35 plus $6 per person paid and fits a business already taking payments through Square. For food service specifically, compare both against dedicated restaurant payroll services before deciding.