Gusto built for US small business payroll
Matt Drozdzynski, CEO and co-founder of Plane, on global payroll post-COVID
This reveals that Gusto is still built first for US small business payroll, not for running a mixed workforce across countries. Gusto works best when a company mainly needs W2 payroll, benefits, and basic contractor payments in the US. Once a startup wants one system for US employees, international contractors, local agreements, and employer of record hiring, the product gap opens up and companies start comparing it to Plane, Deel, and Rippling instead.
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The core product design follows the customer base. Gusto serves SMB payroll in the US, and its historical strength has been ease of setup for that use case. Plane describes its own opening as combining Gusto style simplicity with Deel style global coverage for startups whose teams are partly in the US and partly abroad.
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Global functionality is not one feature, it is a stack. It includes local contractor agreements, tax form collection like W8 and W9 workflows, worker portals, local currency payouts, and employer of record for full time hires abroad. Global payroll vendors grew by turning these messy manual steps into software, while domestic payroll vendors added them later.
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The competitive split is now clearer. Deel pushed from international contractor payments into EOR, global payroll, and then US payroll, reaching about $1.3B annualized revenue in 2025. Rippling built a broader HR, IT, and payroll suite and had reached about $570M annualized revenue by February 2025. Gusto, at about $600M revenue in 2023, remains larger than Plane but more centered on domestic SMB workflows.
The market is moving toward one system for every worker type, but the winners will arrive from different starting points. Gusto is likely to keep extending outward from domestic payroll, while global first platforms keep moving inward toward the US core. That means the next battleground is not who can add one more country, but who can make domestic and international payroll feel like the same simple workflow.