How we research payroll software — without the fake lab coats.
We don’t claim to have run payroll for 500 fake employees. Here’s what we actually do:
- Compare published pricing. We pull every plan’s base price, per-employee and per-contractor charges, year-end filing fees, and add-on costs straight from vendor pricing pages — then note what changed and when.
- Read the feature docs. We go through support articles, tax-filing guides, and feature lists line by line to verify what’s actually included versus what’s marketing gloss.
- Analyze verified user reviews. We read hundreds of reviews on G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius, weighting recent, detailed, verified reviews over one-line rants and obvious plants.
- Score against a consistent rubric. Every provider gets judged on the same criteria: price transparency, payroll accuracy and tax filing, ease of use, integrations, support quality, and value for specific business types.
- Publish a verdict. Every comparison ends with a clear recommendation — who should pick which provider, and which ones to skip. No ties, no “it depends” cop-outs.
What we don’t do: We don’t accept payment for rankings. We don’t trash vendors unfairly. And we don’t pretend we tested something we didn’t — when we haven’t verified a claim hands-on, we say so.
A note on affiliate links: Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you sign up through one, the vendor pays us a commission at no extra cost to you. Commissions never influence our rankings or verdicts. Our credibility is the entire business — we’re not selling it for a payout.