Deel completely outclasses QuickBooks Online when it comes to handling global payroll, HR, and compliance. Deel is built from the ground up for international hiring, letting you pay employees and contractors in over 150 countries, auto-generating invoices, and keeping you fully compliant with local labor laws and taxes. It also takes care of onboarding, contracts, and even helps with things like background checks and equipment for new hires. If your team is hiring or managing people across borders, Deel just handles everything without the usual headaches.

QuickBooks Online, on the other hand, only really covers US payroll as an afterthought. The payroll and HR features in QBO are clunky, limited, and described as something you'll want to ditch as soon as you can. It's not designed for international compliance or payments, and even for US payroll, the experience is frustrating and time-consuming.

So if you need serious payroll and HR, especially across multiple countries, Deel is the obvious pick. Only stick with QBO if you're a US-only business and even then, it's not the tool you want for payroll or HR.

Deel Editor's Verdict

What is Deel?

If there was ever a company with the clearest value prop we've ever seen, it's Deel. With the future of work being remote, Deel is solving very real administrative problems for thousands of companies.

Deel helps with hiring by simplifying global tax compliance, payroll management, and HR in over 150+ countries. It's one of the only companies that handles international hiring, payroll, and HR well.

Deel is an all-in-one platform that helps companies streamline the complexities of hiring and paying employees globally. It helps HR manage contracts, labor law and tax compliance, invoicing, and payments. Many well known companies use Deel, including Zapier, Motion, Intercom, and even Reddit (to mention just a few).

Why Use Deel?

Hiring internationally is super complex and Deel can help your team expand your workforce with less administrative overhead.

Compliance Management: Deel helps businesses maintain legal compliance by updating its system with the latest local labor laws and tax regulations for each country it operates in.
Streamlined International Payouts: Global payroll for employees and contractors is possible straight from Deel as it supports over 150 currencies. This allows you to pay team members in their preferred currency without the complexities for foreign exchange.
Mitigate Risk of Double Taxation: Deel helps companies comply with local laws and regulations when it comes to taxes.
Time Saving: Deel auto-generates invoices and allows HR teams to automatically schedule recurring payments, while also integrating with accounting software like Quickbooks Online, Xero, and NetSuite. There are huge time-saving opportunities when it comes to using Deel.

Deel Key Features

Pre-Candidate

Deel provides average salary insights for different roles in each country, so it can help you create an offer or at least shows you how you offer compares to the local salaries.

Candidate

Once a candidate accepts their offer, Deel helps streamline all the onboarding and admin. Deel provides options for local contracts, and helps you collect any compliance documents required. Deel can also help with doing background checks, providing stock options, employee equipment, and general onboarding (e.g. email access).

Employee

Deel manages contractor invoices, employee benefits, and payslips. It also handles general HR workflows like time off, promotions, bonuses.

QuickBooks Online Editor's Verdict

What is Quickbooks Online?

We find that teams based in the US tend to use QuickBooks Online, and businesses outside of the US tend to lean more toward Xero.

This is important because it means that the features QBO is building is more focused on things like US Sales Tax laws, while Xero may have more accounting features helpful outside of the US especially.

Also, accountants inside of the US are often more proficient with QBO as compared to Xero (although they should be familiar with both).

P.S. We highly recommend QBO over QuickBooks Desktop because of their robust API—you're not going to be integrating QuickBooks Desktop easily with anything.

Key Features

Accounting

QBO helps companies manage core financial tasks like invoicing, expense tracking, bank reconciliation, financial reporting, and tax preparation.

Payroll & Benefits

This is one of those areas that it makes sense that they cover, but you can tell it was an add-on versus being their core service. Payroll is boring, and hey, QBO does the job, it's just not a straightforward user-experience, and let's just say we used it for 4 years before switching to Gusto, and there's not a single bone in my body that misses QBO for payroll. It was also incredibly painful closing it down with them, reporting to all the Department of Labor agencies, and everything. Save yourself the time and skip out on QBO for Payroll.

Time Tracking

If you compare QuickBooks Online to any of the best time tracking software on the market, you'll see just how wildly barebones, slow, and underwhelming it is. Even just the process of logging into QBO feels like you're pushing a boulder uphill, now you need to do it any time you track software? No thanks, I'll pass.

They designed it more to be for people who just need to submit their time one-per-day or once-per-week, they are building to check a box, not to be leading the time tracking space.