Comparison
Gusto is a serious product, and this page is not a scorecard. It sets out how each of the two is built, taking each side from how it is publicly positioned, and then gives you the questions worth putting to any vendor in this market, us included. Where Gusto is the better buy, it says so, and it says where Capstan is the wrong choice outright.
Start here rather than with a feature list. Most of the difference between two HR products is decided before either one ships a feature, by what business the company is in.
Gusto, as publicly positioned, September 2026
Gusto presents itself as an all-in-one people platform for small and mid-sized businesses in the United States, built around full-service payroll: it calculates pay and files federal, state and local payroll taxes for its customers, with benefits administration and HR tooling around that core. Its published plans are tiered.
Capstan, published on this site
Capstan is an HR system of record for companies that employ their own people. It holds the roster, the employment, leave, attendance, documents and the workflows around them, with the module suite included in a paid plan for the rest. It is not an employer of record, it computes no payroll, and it runs as a self-contained stack in one EU region live today, data in Frankfurt and compute in Amsterdam.
Set out in full on the product page, with the residency model on security and every figure on pricing.
One axis at a time, two published models, each stated as what it is. Nothing here says what Gusto does not do: their model is theirs to describe, and if it moves, the line about ours still holds.
Gusto, as publicly positioned, September 2026
Full-service US payroll is the published core: pay is calculated, and federal, state and local payroll taxes are filed on the customer’s behalf.
Capstan, published on this site
Capstan compiles the inputs and hands a documented export to your payroll partner, then files their computed results back onto the employee record. It holds no statutory rate, slab or formula, and files nothing with any authority. Where you need payroll run, you engage someone who runs it.
Gusto, as publicly positioned, September 2026
The published offer is built for businesses paying people in the United States.
Capstan, published on this site
Capstan carries no statutory computation anywhere, which is what lets it be the same product in every country it runs in. Country-specific content is versioned data rather than code, and your data lives in one self-contained EU region, Frankfurt for data and Amsterdam for compute.
Gusto, as publicly positioned, September 2026
Plans are tiered, and the published tiers differ in how much HR capability comes with them.
Capstan, published on this site
The complete core is on every plan, including the free one. Two things change when you pay: the twenty-employee cap lifts, and all fourteen modules become available, included at no extra charge. Nothing else in the core moves between plans.
Our answers are here in public with nothing rounded off. The slot beside each one is left open on purpose: Gusto’s answers are theirs to give, and a comparison page that fills them in has stopped being a comparison. Ask them the same six, and set what you are told beside ours.
It decides who is on the contract of employment, who answers a labour authority, and what you are actually buying: a service that takes the employment on, or a system that records it.
Capstan’s answer, in public
You do. Capstan is not an employer of record, never becomes the legal employer of anyone on your roster, and moves no payroll money. If you need a legal employer in a country where you have no entity, that is a different kind of vendor.
Gusto’s answer
Ask them, and get it in writing.
Computation and filing are where liability sits. A vendor that calculates and files is taking that on. A vendor that prepares inputs is not, and you need the second half of the arrangement in place before you rely on either.
Capstan’s answer, in public
Not Capstan, by design. It compiles joiners and leavers, pay structures, leave, attendance and adjustments into a documented export for your payroll partner, and files the computed results back onto the employee record. It holds no statutory rate, slab or formula, and files nothing with any authority.
Gusto’s answer
Ask them, and get it in writing.
Residency is a property of where the database is, not of a promise in a policy. Support access is the same question from the other end: not whether staff would look, but whether the system lets them without you switching it on.
Capstan’s answer, in public
One isolated region, the EU today: data in Frankfurt, compute in Amsterdam. It is a self-contained stack with no global control plane and no cross-region keys, so there is no runtime path out of the region. Staff hold no tenant of their own, and access exists only while you have granted a time-boxed consent, masked by default and audited on both sides.
Gusto’s answer
Ask them, and get it in writing.
This is what growing costs you. If capability moves between tiers, the upgrade you eventually buy is largely software you were already being shown.
Capstan’s answer, in public
The complete core is on every plan, including the free one, which is capped at twenty active employees. Paying lifts the cap and includes all fourteen modules at no extra charge. Every figure is on one public page, so you can total your own number without a call.
Gusto’s answer
Ask them, and get it in writing.
Export is the price of leaving. Either it is written down before you join, or it gets decided at the moment you have the least leverage you will ever have.
Capstan’s answer, in public
An owner can take a full export at any time: one archive of JSON and CSV, in open formats, with a documented manifest. Export deliberately sits outside the suspension check, so a workspace held for non-payment can still be exported. Deletion is cryptographic erasure followed by hard deletion, with a residue scan.
Gusto’s answer
Ask them, and get it in writing.
Whether software scores, ranks or screens people decides who is accountable for the judgement, and whether the person it was made about can be shown the reason.
Capstan’s answer, in public
No AI scores, ranks or screens your people, and that is architectural rather than a promise: nothing of the kind is built, and the analytics engine can only ever narrow who sees what, with small groups suppressed. There is one optional assistant a workspace can turn on. When it is on, it answers from aggregate figures a caller could already see, such as headcount by department, which it sends to our one AI sub-processor, OpenAI, listed on the sub-processor register and not used to train on the data. No per-person or sensitive record is ever sent to an outside model or used to train one.
Gusto’s answer
Ask them, and get it in writing.
If an answer of ours turns out to be wrong, it is a bug and we will fix the page. The same standard applies to anything here about Gusto: tell us and we correct it or take it down.
This is the part of the page that makes the rest of it worth reading. If one of these describes you, the honest answer is that Gusto is the better buy, and we would rather you knew it here than three months into an implementation.
The part that costs us the sale
Not a softened version of the section above. These are requirements Capstan does not meet and is not going to meet, written down so you can rule us out in a minute rather than in a quarter. If one of them is true of you, nothing else on this page matters.
You want your HR software to calculate pay and file your payroll taxes. Capstan does neither, in any country, by design.
United States benefits administration is a requirement. Capstan does not administer benefits.
You are a small US-only team and payroll is essentially the whole purchase. Capstan would be an extra system beside the one doing the work.
That is the list as we understand it today. If you hit a limit that is not on it, tell us: a disqualifier we did not know about belongs here more than anything else on the page.
If nothing on this page ruled us out, run it yourself.
