Introduction

Gusto Embedded Payroll (GEP) is built to be flexible. Whether launching quickly or creating a fully custom experience, you can choose the integration option that fits your product, resources, and timeline. We offer a range of options—from direct API integrations to fully hosted flows.

With every method, you can mix and match how you build based on your needs.

API

This option gives you maximum flexibility to define how data is collected, displayed, and processed. You can handle business logic by interacting directly with Gusto’s REST APIs.

Choose this approach if you want to maximize control over user experience and workflows. It’s ideal for teams with engineering bandwidth and a need to create a deeply integrated, brand-consistent payroll experience.

Pros:

• Highly customizable UX and logic
• Complete control over how and when payroll actions happen
• Enables advanced integrations across your platform

Cons:

• Requires the most development effort
• You’ll be responsible for surfacing the validations and error handling that are built into the API

Considerations

Use Gusto’s API client libraries to simplify direct API calls in your backend services.

This is great for teams that prefer working in a specific programming language and want to reduce the boilerplate code needed for authentication, pagination, and error handling.

There are a small number of functions not available via API that require the use of our flows. Additionally there are some functions, such as external payrolls and state tax setup, that we highly recommend using Flows to support due to the complexity of building custom via API.

React SDK

Use Gusto’s official React components to build payroll workflows quickly in your app.

This is a great option for React-based frontends that want to save time by using prebuilt components for common workflows like onboarding, payroll runs, and pay schedule management.

Pros:

• Prebuilt UI components designed for best practices
• Saves frontend engineering time
• Keeps you aligned with Gusto’s compliance and flow logic

Cons:

• Customization is limited to supported props and styling
• Not suitable for non-React apps

Flows (pre-built UI)

Gusto Flows are ready-to-use UI components, built on Gusto Embedded’s API. Flows are designed to quickly integrate essential payroll functionalities into your application without extensive engineering effort.

Hosted flows are perfect for fast launches or MVPs. They let you offer payroll functionality without building or maintaining a UI. You control when and where flows appear—Gusto handles the rest.

Pros:

• Fastest time to market
• Requires minimal code
• Gusto handles validation, compliance, and UX

Cons:

• Branding and layout are not fully customizable
• Limited to predefined workflows

Hybrid build

Combine methods based on your needs. While all the build methods are flexible, with this approach you might consider all build types as options throughout your build process, selecting the build type for a given feature or stage of your development.

For example, you could start with hosted Flows to launch quickly, then incrementally replace them with the React SDK or custom API-driven screens as your product evolves.

Pros:

• Mixes prebuilt and custom workflows for a smoother path to scale
• Balances speed, flexibility, and engineering effort

Cons:

• Requires coordination across different integration methods
• May involve managing multiple systems and UIs