QuickBooks Payroll Alternatives: 9 Platforms Compared
Nine QuickBooks Payroll alternatives compared on published price, tax filing, and fit, with what the published ones cost at 10, 25, and 50 employees.
Almost nobody leaves QuickBooks Payroll because it calculates taxes wrong. When owners tell me they are moving, the reason is duller and more arithmetic than that. This page compares nine payroll platforms a US small business can realistically move to, matched to the situation each one suits, so you can pick the one that fixes your own reason for leaving.
QuickBooks files in every state, it posts straight to the books if your accounting already lives in the same account, and for a company running one office and a dozen salaried people it does the job with very little ceremony. What usually pushes owners out is the per-employee line.
The base subscription is the part Intuit discounts, and the per-employee charge is the part that grows, so a company that hired all year gets a bill shaped by a number the signup page treats as a footnote. Other times the trigger is the discovery that time tracking sits one tier up, or that local tax filing does too.
Every price here was read off the vendor's own pages in October 2026. Three of the nine put no rate on their pricing pages: ADP RUN and Paychex Flex read Quote in the tables, and the Rippling rows use the starting price from Rippling's small-business page.
Why employers leave QuickBooks Payroll
Four reasons account for most departures: the per-employee fee, a capability that turned out to live one tier up, paying people across a state line, and support. Only the last is really about the product. The other three are about the shape of the pricing meeting the shape of your company.
| The reason | What it looks like | Where to look instead |
|---|---|---|
| The per-employee fee | 50 people on the entry plan is $400 a month | Patriot, Square Payroll, Homebase |
| Time tracking is a tier up | Hourly staff need clock-in, the entry plan has none | Square Payroll, Homebase, Gusto Plus |
| Local taxes are a tier up | Intuit tells entry-plan users to file those by hand | OnPay, Patriot, Gusto |
| A second state | Every provider prices this differently | OnPay, SurePayroll, Gusto Plus |
| Support | A tax notice arrives and nobody owns the answer | Paychex Flex, ADP RUN, Gusto Premium |
| You outgrew the setup | Multi-entity, multi-state, benefits, and audits | ADP RUN, Paychex Flex, Rippling |
The pricing math that starts most switches
QuickBooks publishes prices for all three plans, which the quote-only vendors on this list do not, so the arithmetic is easy to run. The entry plan is $50 a month plus $7 per employee. Premium is $88 plus $13. Elite is $134 plus $17. The base fee barely matters once you have people.
| Plan | Monthly base | Per employee | 10 employees | 25 employees | 50 employees |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Workforce Payroll | $50 | $7.00 | $120 | $225 | $400 |
| Workforce Premium | $88 | $13.00 | $218 | $413 | $738 |
| Workforce Elite | $134 | $17.00 | $304 | $559 | $984 |
Read the 50-employee column and the model does what per-employee models do. The base fee is 12.5 percent of the bill on the entry plan at that size and less than 14 percent on Elite. Everything else is headcount. That is why a company that grew from 12 people to 40 sees a bill it does not recognize even though nothing about the product changed.
The other half of the math is the promotional structure. The offer running in October 2026 is 50 percent off for three months, and you can see exactly what it covers on the plan page: the entry plan drops from $50 to $25 a month while the line beside it still reads $7 per employee per month.
The per-employee line is billed in full from day one, so a 20-person business pays $140 a month in per-employee charges no matter what the base fee is doing. The introductory number on the signup page is not the number to budget against.
What is in the plan and what sits one tier up
This is the second thing worth checking against your own shortlist. Two capabilities most small employers assume are included sit in the upper two plans, and the discount covers the part of the bill that does not scale rather than the part that does.
| Item | Where it sits | What that means for the bill |
|---|---|---|
| Federal and state filing | Every tier | Payroll tax filing and payments on all three plans |
| Time tracking | Premium and Elite | The entry Workforce Payroll plan does not include it |
| Local tax filing | Premium and Elite | Intuit tells entry-plan users to file local taxes manually |
| Setup help | Premium and Elite | Elite sets payroll up for you, Premium reviews your setup |
| The current promotion | Base subscription only | 50 percent off for three months takes $50 to $25 a month |
| Per-employee fees | Not discounted | The $7 per employee is unchanged during the promotion |
None of this is hidden. QuickBooks is more transparent than the quote-only end of this market, and publishing three plans with per-employee rates is genuinely useful. It just changes the comparison. A business with hourly staff is comparing Workforce Premium at $88 plus $13 against platforms where time tracking and payroll arrive in the same base product.
Support and contract terms
Support is the hardest thing to compare honestly, because every payroll vendor has furious customers and delighted ones, often in the same week. What you can compare is structure. QuickBooks bills month to month with no term commitment, which means leaving is a cancellation rather than a negotiation.
The trade-off is that self-serve products answer questions with articles. If your recurring problem is a state agency notice that nobody at your company knows how to answer, the platforms worth quoting are the ones that sell service rather than software, and you will pay for the difference.
9 QuickBooks Payroll alternatives at a glance
The table below puts QuickBooks in the first row as the baseline you are comparing against, then the nine alternatives on published price, pricing model, and what each one costs for a team of 25.
| Platform | Leave For This Reason | Published Price | Pricing Model | Publishes Rates | Cost at 25 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| QuickBooks Payroll | The baseline you are leaving | $50 + $7/employee | Base + PEPM | $225 | |
| Gusto | Payroll plus real HR tooling | $49 + $6/person | Base + PEPM | $199 | |
| OnPay | One payroll plan, no tiers | $49 + $6/worker | Base + PEPM | $199 | |
| Patriot Software | The bill is the whole problem | $37 + $5/worker | Base + PEPM | $162 | |
| SurePayroll | A very small or household payroll | $29 + $7/worker | Base + PEPM | $204 | |
| Square Payroll | Hourly staff already on Square | $35 + $6/person | Base + PEPM | $185 | |
| Homebase | Scheduling matters more than HR | $49 + $6 add-on | Add-on + per location | $223 | |
| ADP RUN | Compliance depth as you scale | Quote | Quote | Quote | |
| Paychex Flex | You want a person to call | Quote | Quote | Quote | |
| Rippling | Payroll wired to HR and IT | From $40 + $8/user | Base + PEPM | From $240 |
How we evaluated these alternatives
Every platform here is one a US small business could buy and run without an implementation team. We excluded products whose pricing we could not confirm on the vendor site as a starting rate or an explicit refusal to publish, because a comparison built on third-party guesses is worse than no comparison at all.
The 9 alternatives reviewed
Gusto is the default move for a salaried team, and it undercuts the entry QuickBooks plan at every headcount. The Simple plan is $49 a month plus $6 per person and covers full-service payroll with automatic federal, state, and local tax filing, unlimited runs, employee self-service, and basic time off. At 25 employees that is $199 against $225.
The catch is that Simple covers one state. Gusto describes it as single-state payroll, so one hire across a state line moves you to Plus at $80 plus $12 per person, which doubles the per-person rate and turns a $199 bill into $380 at 25 people. If a remote hire is even plausible within a year, price the Plus column before you sign.
The top Gusto plan, Premium, is published too, at $180 plus $22 per person, and adds a dedicated service advisor, access to certified HR experts, and payroll migration.
OnPay sells one payroll plan, called Payroll Essentials, at $49 a month plus $6 per worker. There is no Premium or Elite tier, and no payroll capability to discover one tier up six months after you signed: federal, state, and local filing, payroll in as many states as you need, unlimited pay runs, benefits administration, and onboarding are all in the base plan.
The pitch is structural rather than flashy. If the specific thing that annoyed you about QuickBooks was finding out that a payroll capability sat in a higher plan, OnPay removes that failure mode. Account setup and data migration are free too, with no implementation or integration fees, which matters more than it sounds when you are moving mid-year with year-to-date wages to load.
The $49 plan is not quite everything, though. HR is a separate add-on at $15 a month plus $2 per worker, with compliance resources at $10 and live HR support at $65 on top of that. Time tracking is another add-on, at $15 a month plus $4 per worker. What you also give up is polish, since the interface is functional rather than beautiful.
From five workers up, Patriot has the lowest published full-service price in this comparison. Full Service is $37 a month plus $5 per worker paid and covers federal, state, and local tax filing. At 50 employees it costs $287 against $400 for the entry QuickBooks plan, and that $113 a month gap is $1,356 a year for a product doing the same core job.
Two details shape the real number. Each additional state Patriot files in costs $12 a month on Full Service, so a multi-state team pays a per-state surcharge here that OnPay does not charge at all. Time and attendance and HR are separate add-ons at $6 a month plus $2 per employee each.
Patriot also sells a cheaper Basic plan at $17 plus $4 that is not a full-service product: you file the deposits and returns yourself, which for most employers means monthly or semiweekly federal deposits done by hand.
SurePayroll has the lowest full-service base fee here at $29 a month, which makes it the cheapest published full-service option in this comparison for the very smallest payrolls, up to about three workers. It also prices household and nanny payroll separately, starting at $39 a month including one employee.
Paychex owns SurePayroll and sells it under the SurePayroll by Paychex brand, but as a self-serve product, so you buy from a large provider without the sales process that usually comes with one.
The per-worker rate is where it turns. At $7 it is the steepest of the low-base plans here. SurePayroll draws level with Patriot at four workers, with Square Payroll at six, and with Gusto and OnPay at twenty, and costs more than each of them above those points. That is why the $204 figure at 25 people sits above all four.
Two more SurePayroll line items belong in the model: multi-state payroll adds $9.99 a month, and year-end W-2 and 1099-NEC forms are billed annually at a $50 base plus $5 per form. SurePayroll also lists a No Tax Filing plan on its nonprofit page, at $20 a month plus $4 per employee, for owners who want the calculation and the pay run but intend to handle the deposits themselves.
Square Payroll is $35 a month plus $6 per person paid, which makes it cheaper than the entry QuickBooks plan at every headcount and cheaper than Gusto and OnPay too. Unlimited monthly runs and off-cycle payments are included at no extra charge, and the contractor-only version has no base fee at all: $6 per person paid, nothing else.
The reason to pick it is the same reason people picked QuickBooks in the first place, pointed at a different stack. If your restaurant or shop already takes payments through Square, hours recorded at the point of sale feed the pay run without a second system in between. If you do not use Square for anything else, the argument thins out to price, which is still a decent argument but not a decisive one.
Homebase inverts the structure. Plans are priced per location rather than per person, and payroll is the add-on rather than the product: $49 a month plus $6 per employee paid, on any plan including the free one. The free Basic plan covers a single location and up to 10 employees with scheduling and a time clock.
It belongs on this list because of what the entry QuickBooks plan leaves out. Time tracking sits in Workforce Premium and Elite, so a shift-based business either pays $88 a month plus $13 per person or runs a separate system. In Homebase, the schedule comes first and the pay run is built from it. What you give up is HR depth: employee records and reporting are thin next to a proper platform, and multi-site businesses pay per location.
ADP sells compliance depth. Every RUN package calculates, files, deposits, and reconciles your payroll taxes, and ADP says that if it makes a tax filing error, it pays the resulting fines or penalties. For a company crossing into several states or dealing with garnishments and unemployment claims, that depth is the entire pitch, and it is a different kind of value than a lower per-employee rate.
The cost is transparency. ADP publishes no pricing for RUN at any of its four packages and routes every visitor to a quote or a demo, so you cannot compare it against a published rate without talking to sales first. If the visible price is what told you to leave QuickBooks, know that you give up that visibility here. ADP does advertise three months of free payroll for new small business customers.
Paychex sells what ADP sells, a service relationship rather than a software subscription, and like ADP it publishes no rate: every package card reads Request Pricing. The four payroll packages are Basic, Foundations, Advanced, and Complete, and support climbs with them, from online chat on Basic to phone and email from Foundations and a payroll specialist on Complete.
Automatic payroll tax filing runs through the Taxpay service, and the argument for buying Paychex at all is having a person to call when a state agency sends something you do not understand. Read any quote as the price of that service rather than a saving, because this is a move from software you administer to a provider who administers it.
HR Pro and the professional employer organization (PEO) option sit above the four payroll packages and are quoted the same way. The useful wrinkle for a small employer is that Paychex owns SurePayroll, so a Paychex self-serve product is available at a published $29 plus $7 if the service relationship is not what you are buying.
Dwight SchruteSales3 people
Darryl PhilbinWarehouse1 person
Kelly KapoorCustomer Service1 person
Rippling puts payroll, HR, benefits, and device management on one employee record. Onboard someone once and the system can create their accounts, ship and configure a laptop, and set up payroll from a single action. For a company hiring several people a quarter with laptops and app licenses involved, that removes coordination work no payroll product touches.
What you cannot do is price it from the pricing page. That page is a quote request form asking for work email, full name, company name, headcount band, and country, and it carries no dollar figure anywhere.
Rippling's small-business page gives a starting price instead: $8 per user per month plus a $40 monthly base fee, which its FAQ ties to payroll. The Rippling blog lists $8 per employee per month for the core HRIS (human resources information system) platform, and $8 per employee per month for domestic payroll billed annually, or $10 billed monthly, so a configured quote can run higher.
What the pricing page does state is the shape of the bill: each product is bought separately alongside the core platform, which is required rather than optional, and most products are billed per employee per month while some add a monthly base fee.
For a small single-state payroll with no IT complexity, Rippling means paying for orchestration you do not have enough moving parts to need. For a mid-size company running payroll in four states with a device fleet, the calculation flips.
What each alternative costs at 10, 25, and 50 employees
This is the table the category rarely publishes, because a base fee and a per-employee fee only become a real number once you pick a headcount. It is also the only view that answers the question you actually have, which is not what a switch saves today but what it saves at the size you are heading toward.
| Platform | 10 employees | 25 employees | 50 employees | What the number covers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Patriot Full Service | $87 | $162 | $287 | Federal, state, and local filing; $12 per extra state |
| Square Payroll | $95 | $185 | $335 | Unlimited runs and off-cycle payments included |
| SurePayroll | $99 | $204 | $379 | Tax filing included; multi-state adds $9.99 a month |
| Gusto Simple | $109 | $199 | $349 | Single-state payroll and tax filing |
| OnPay Payroll Essentials | $109 | $199 | $349 | Base plan with multi-state filing included |
| QuickBooks Workforce Payroll | $120 | $225 | $400 | Entry tier, no time tracking, local taxes manual |
| Rippling | $120 | $240 | $440 | Starting price on Rippling’s small-business page; added products raise it |
| Homebase Essentials plus payroll | $133 | $223 | $373 | Scheduling and time clock plus the payroll add-on |
| QuickBooks Workforce Premium | $218 | $413 | $738 | Adds time tracking to the entry plan |
| ADP RUN | Quote | Quote | Quote | No rate published at any tier |
| Paychex Flex | Quote | Quote | Quote | Every package card reads Request Pricing |
Two patterns matter. First, at 10 employees the six alternatives with full published plans run $87 to $133 against $120 on the entry QuickBooks plan, a gap too small to justify a migration on its own. The same six run $287 to $379 at 50 people against $400 for the entry QuickBooks plan and $738 for Premium, so the case for moving gets stronger with every hire rather than weaker.
Second, the cheapest row is not always the cheapest answer. Patriot at $287 for 50 people charges $12 a month for a second state and sells time and attendance as an add-on at $6 a month plus $2 per employee.
Add both Patriot extras and that same payroll is $405 a month, which is more than Square Payroll at $335, where timecards flow in from the Square point of sale and a second state costs nothing extra. Model your own payroll pricing with the add-ons you will genuinely buy rather than the base plan alone.
What switching payroll providers actually involves
The migration itself is smaller than people fear and the timing is more important than they expect. Payroll reports on a quarterly cycle through Form 941 and on a calendar year through the W-2, so the cutover date decides how much reconciliation work you inherit.
| When you switch | What it costs you | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| January 1 | Nothing to carry over; a clean year of wage data | The easiest possible move |
| Start of Q2, Q3, or Q4 | Load year-to-date wages and withholding into the new system | Straightforward and common |
| Mid-quarter | Split quarter reporting plus year-to-date loading | Possible, but check who files the 941 |
| Mid-December | Year-end forms in flight at both providers | Avoid unless something is broken |
Four things belong on the checklist regardless of timing. Confirm your federal deposit schedule in the new system, because the IRS assigns monthly or semiweekly status from a lookback period, and more than $50,000 of employment taxes reported in that period makes you a semiweekly depositor. Agree in writing which provider files the quarter you are moving in. Re-register any state accounts the new provider needs power of attorney for. And export your records before you cancel.
That last one has a legal floor. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, employers must preserve payroll records for at least three years and the records on which wage computations are based for two. A closed payroll account is a poor place to keep them, so pull the full history rather than the last two quarters, and store it somewhere your payroll compliance obligations survive a vendor change.
How to choose a QuickBooks Payroll alternative
Choose by the reason you are leaving first and by price second, and judge price on the setup you will actually run rather than the base plan. Work through these five questions in order.
One frame helps when you weigh these products: most of what separates them is pricing model and service model rather than whether the tax math is right. Once you know whether you want self-serve software or a provider you can call, run your own headcount and states through the cost table before you book a demo or start a migration.
Before you choose
FirstHR is an onboarding and HR platform, not a payroll provider, so it sits alongside your new payroll tool rather than replacing QuickBooks. It handles the people side around each pay run: onboarding workflows with the I-9 and W-4 on every new hire's first-day 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 hiring paperwork in a separate HR system means the next payroll change does not have to move it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the best alternatives to QuickBooks Payroll?
It depends on the reason for leaving. Gusto at $49 plus $6 per person and OnPay at the same rate are the standard replacements for a salaried team. Patriot Software at $37 plus $5 is the cheapest full-service option once you pass four workers. Square Payroll at $35 plus $6 and Homebase at $49 plus $6 per employee fit hourly teams. Paychex Flex and ADP RUN, which both quote every price, are the moves for compliance depth or a service relationship.
Why do businesses leave QuickBooks Payroll?
Usually the bill, not the software. The per-employee fee is the part the promotions do not touch. Time tracking sits one tier up, in Workforce Premium and Elite, and so does local tax filing, which leaves entry-plan employers filing local returns by hand. A second state adds a monthly fee on the two lower plans. Support is the one reason about the product itself, and the hardest to compare before you buy.
How much does QuickBooks Payroll cost?
Workforce Payroll is $50 a month plus $7 per employee, Workforce Premium is $88 plus $13, and Workforce Elite is $134 plus $17. At 25 employees that is $225, $413, and $559 respectively. Billing is month to month with no annual contract. The promotion takes 50 percent off the base subscription for three months and does not touch the per-employee charge.
Is there a cheaper alternative to QuickBooks Payroll?
Yes. Patriot Full Service is $162 a month for 25 employees, Square Payroll is $185, Gusto Simple and OnPay are both $199, and SurePayroll is $204, against $225 for the entry QuickBooks plan. The gaps widen with headcount: at 50 people Patriot is $287 against $400. Compare the configuration you will actually run, since add-ons close some of those gaps.
Do I have to leave QuickBooks accounting if I leave QuickBooks Payroll?
No. They are separate subscriptions and canceling one does not affect the other. What changes is how pay runs reach your general ledger, so confirm how the new provider posts wages, employer taxes, and liabilities to your chart of accounts, and have your bookkeeper review a sample payroll record before the first live run.
Which QuickBooks Payroll alternative is best for hourly employees?
Homebase or Square Payroll. The entry QuickBooks plan has no time tracking, so a shift-based business either upgrades to Workforce Premium at $88 plus $13 or runs a second system. Homebase prices per location with a free plan for one location and up to 10 employees, and Square Payroll pulls hours straight from the point of sale for businesses already on Square.
Which payroll providers charge extra for a second state?
Patriot charges $12 a month for each additional state it files in on Full Service. SurePayroll adds $9.99 a month. OnPay includes as many states as you need. Gusto adds no per-state payroll fee but puts multi-state payroll in Plus at $80 plus $12 per person, a larger step than any per-state fee. QuickBooks charges $12 a month per extra state on its two lower plans.
When is the best time to switch payroll providers?
The first day of a quarter, and January 1 above all, because federal reporting runs quarterly on Form 941 and wage reporting runs on the calendar year. A mid-quarter move is workable if you load year-to-date wages correctly and agree in writing which provider files the quarter. Confirm your deposit schedule in the new system either way.
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