ADP vs. Paychex: Payroll Software Showdown (2023)

When reviewing the best payroll software, our researchers found that ADP is a better payroll solution than Paychex thanks to its customizability, scalability, and detailed analytics. Plus, ADP offers labor law compliance alerts and supports international payments, while Paychex has neither feature.

Still, Paychex remains a great solution, with high customizability in its own right. It even beats ADP in one important criterion: Paychex has 24/7 live chat and email support, while APD has live chat during working hours but provides no email support at all.

Both services offer unbeatable data security encryption, helpful live training courses, and open APIs to help you design your own custom integrations.

This guide to ADP vs. Paychex will give you a top-down comparison of both solutions, from core features to add-ons and pricing. If you're in the market for the best deal on the best payroll software, we can do even better: Our in-house experts have created this payroll quiz to match you up with payroll software that's right for you.

In this guide:

• ADP vs. Paychex: Head to Head
• ADP vs. Paychex Cost Comparison
• Best for Scalability: ADP
• Best for Control Over Your Payroll: Paychex
• Best for Customer Support: Paychex
• Best for Expert Assistance: ADP
• Best for Data Security: Tie
• How Do ADP and Paychex Compare to Other Payroll Software?
• Verdict: Which Accounting Software Is Better?
• ADP vs. Paychex: FAQs

Note: All Tech.co insights are backed up by our own unique, in-depth, and independent research that is formulated by our team of experts, who weigh criteria including data security, expert assistance, and scalability.

ADP vs. Paychex: Head to Head

ADP and Paychex are not interchangeable. Here are the key points that our research team highlighted when specifically comparing the two:

• ADP Payroll is slightly more customizable and scalable than Paychex, since ADP offers international payroll services while Paychex does not. Both services offer tools like HR software, applicant tracking, and benefits management.
• ADP Payroll is much better for expert assistance tools than Paychex, in part because Paychex lacks labor law compliance alerts, while ADP has them (albeit for an extra charge).
• ADP and Paychex are both unbeatable for data security, as they both have user permissions, encryption, ISO 27001 certification, and a zero-breaches track record within the recent past.
• Paychex has better customer support than APD, since it offers 24/7 live chat and email support, while APD has neither.
• APD Payroll is slightly better than Paychex for analytics, since APD lets you generate reports comparing upcoming payrolls against previous ones, while Paychex does not.

It's worth noting again that ADP and Paychex are among the best payroll services on the market. They share many great features and core functions: They'll both keep your data incredibly secure, they both offer excellent customization tools, they both make it simple to view pay information for all employees, they both offer comprehensive tax education resources, and they both come with an open API that makes it easy to craft custom integrations.

ADP vs. Paychex Cost Comparison

Both ADP and Paychex do not make the majority of their plan prices public, which makes them difficult to compare. Both of them have 12-month contract minimums, and neither have a money-back guarantee, although ADP does come with a three-month free trial while Paychex does not offer a free trial.

ADP has three different ranges of plans: Four plans for small businesses (1 – 49 employees), three more plans for large ones (50 – 999 employees), and one plan for micro businesses. We'll be looking at the four small business ADP plans for this comparison, along with the three plans that Paychex offers.

Basic (lower-budget tier) plans compared

The lowest-tier ADP plan is called Essential and is available for a custom quote, while the cheapest Paychex plan is called Essentials and costs $39 per month, plus $5 per employee (this is the only plan between the two brands that has public pricing).

Both plans come with payroll processing, direct deposit, tax filing, and new hire onboarding. ADP Essential boasts some unique perks, including multi-company management, background checks, and Google Ads management, while Paychex Essentials offers a library of HR documents and a garnishment service.

Standard (mid-tier) plans compared

ADP has two mid-tier plans, Enhanced and Complete, while Paychex has one plan, Select.

ADP Enhanced is the most popular ADP plan: It has everything that's available on ADP Essential, but adds check security, state unemployment insurance support, labor cost tracking, and a ZipRecruiter integration. ADP Complete has everything offered on Enhanced, plus a handful of HR tools including salary benchmarks, HR tracking, HR forms, HR toolkits, and a wizard for creating your own employee handbook.

Paychex Select has everything available on the Paychex Essentials plan, but doesn't offer additional features beyond an employee learning management system, a tool which neither ADP Enhanced nor Complete offers.

Advanced (higher-tier) plans compared

ADP's most expensive plan is HR Pro, while Paychex's is called Pro. HR Pro has everything that's offered on ADP Complete, plus marketing tools, legal assistance, and even more HR tools including enhanced helpdesk support, applicant tracking, a learning management system, and sexual harassment prevention training.

Meanwhile, Paychex Pro comes with everything the Select plan does, plus pre-employment screening, an employee handbook builder, state unemployment insurance support, workers' comp, and general ledger integrations.

Looking for more detail? Visit our ADP Pricing Guide or our Paychex Pricing Guide for complete breakdowns.

ADP vs. Paychex: Do they have free plans?

Neither APD nor Paychex has a permanent free plan. APD does offer a generous three-month free trial, while Paychex does not provide a free trial at all.

They may be cost-free, but free plans aren't everything: When your business is handling the sensitive data needed to operate a payroll, you'll be better off paying to get the best service your budget allows. That said, a free option might serve you adequately in the short-term. Visit our guide to the best free payroll software to learn more about the potential options.

Best for Scalability: ADP

Our research team found ADP offers slightly better scalability than Paychex, awarding it a 5/5 score in this criterion compared to Paychex's 4.8/5 score. This is largely because ADP offers international payroll as an add-on: You can opt for “ADP GlobalView Payroll” if you have 500 or more employees, or “ADP Celergo,” which supports up to 1,000 employees per country.

Both platforms offer many helpful resources for fast-growing companies: They have a Human Resource information system, an applicant tracking system, benefits management, and learning management. As long as your company doesn't expect to ever expand outside of the country it operates in, ADP and Paychex remain evenly matched for scalability.

Best for Control Over Your Payroll: Paychex

Paychex offers better payroll features than ADP, but only by a hair. Paychex gives you one extra advantage: the ability to create a changes report to contrast the differences between an upcoming payroll and a previous one, while ADP does not offer this tool.

Once again, both services boast many features you might need: Paychex and ADP both have a payroll register to centralize employee data, individual employee reports for deep dives, tax reports, user-specific dashboards, and customizable reports.

Paychex and ADP are evenly matched when it comes to the employee experience. Both platforms let your employees log into a website and a mobile app in order to view their own payslips, and both platforms support a clock-in process that lets employees track their work hours through a mobile app.

Best for Customer Support Options: Paychex

Paychex offers much better customer service support than ADP, since Paychex offers email support — an easier and more accessible option for many — while ADP does not, and Paychex has a 24/7 live support channel, while ADP's live chat hours only last from 7:30 am to 10:00 pm, ET, on weekdays.

However, ADP does offer 24/7 phone support, like Paychex, and both platforms also include an online knowledge base, which is home to the resources you'll need to address all the most common issues. Both also offer useful training courses, both live and pre-recorded.

Best for Expert Assistance: ADP

ADP has better payroll assistance tools than Paychex, as ADP offers labor law compliance alerts through an add-on called ADP SmartCompliance, while Paychex does not have these alerts at all. However, both services can file state and federal taxes on your behalf, and both offer free tax education resources to help you fill in any knowledge gaps.

Both services also boast many tools for customizing your business's payroll. ADP and Paychex both support automatic sick pay, holiday calculations, salary deductions, time-tracking, multiple pay rates for a single employee (such as overtime), off-cycle payments, automatic payroll runs, and the ability to pay non-employees. Both services will deliver digital deposits within 24 hours of payroll being processed.

Best for Data Security: Tie

Online security is essential for payroll software, which must deliver employee paychecks regularly and consistently while keeping private any sensitive data, such as bank account details.

ADP and Paychex both passed our security tests with flying colors. First, they both offer role-based user permissions, which means that different payroll software users can be given differing levels of access. This keeps all data visible only on a need-to-know basis, reducing the chances of an accidental or malicious leak.

In addition, both ADP and Paychex use data centers located in the US, rely on Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption when sending data over the internet, have ISO 27001 certification, and haven't suffered any data breaches within the past two years.

How Do ADP and Paychex Compare to Other Payroll Software?

Our researchers found Rippling to be the best payroll software on the market today, but ADP and Paychex ranked as the second- and third-best options, respectively. ADP still offers slightly better features than Rippling does, but Rippling's customer support options gave it the boost it needed to win overall. Read our guide to the top ADP Payroll competitors for more comparisons to Rippling and others.

Our Research and Testing: How Did We Score ADP and Paychex Against Other Payroll Software?

Tech.co's research and testing team created a rubric of five different evaluation criteria in order to compare all the top payroll software options against each other. These are: Features for controlling payroll, employee experience functions, data security, scalability, and customer support. Then, our team spent hundreds of hours investigating each key payroll feature relevant to these five categories.

By ranking each provider on a scale of one to five for each criteria and then averaging them all out into a single five-point score, our researchers were able to compare all providers point-by-point as well as rank them overall. ADP Payroll and Paychex ranked second and third (after Rippling), making them both very attractive options.

ADP vs. Paychex Payroll: FAQs