Payroll & HR Software · reliability comparison
QuickBooks Payroll vs Square Payroll: which is more reliable? (2026)
QuickBooks Payroll is more reliable than Square Payroll, scoring 92.4 vs 53.3 out of 100. Over the last 90 days QuickBooks Payroll reported 3 incidents and Square Payroll reported 12, with effective uptime of 99.94% and 98.93% respectively. QuickBooks Payroll resolves incidents faster on average (1h 14m).
Data updated Nov 1, 2026 · How we score
VS
| Metric | QuickBooks Payroll | Square Payroll |
|---|---|---|
| Reliability score | 92.4 | 53.3 |
| Rank (payroll & HR platforms) | #2 | #9 |
| Uptime (90 days) | 99.94% | 98.93% |
| Incidents (90 days) | 3 | 12 |
| Partial / major outages | 2 | 0 |
| Avg time to resolve | 1h 14m | 12h 49m |
| Outages we detected | 0 | 0 |
| Transparency score | 100/100 | 100/100 |
Where QuickBooks Payroll and Square Payroll differ
- Square Payroll reported 4× as many incidents as QuickBooks Payroll over the last 90 days (12 vs 3).
- QuickBooks Payroll had 2 partial or major outages, compared with 0 for Square Payroll.
- QuickBooks Payroll fixes problems faster: 1h 14m on average, against 12h 49m for Square Payroll (10.5× quicker).
- QuickBooks Payroll's longest outage on record lasted 5h 1m (Feb 24, 2026); Square Payroll's lasted 17h 43m (Apr 30, 2026).
90-day uptime
QuickBooks Payroll
Square Payroll
- No incidents
- Degraded
- Partial outage
- Major outage
- No data
Recent QuickBooks Payroll incidents
- InformationalSep 16, 2026 · resolved in 5h 32m
Duplicate transactions affecting some Payroll and Payments customers
Affected: United States, United States
- Partial outageSep 2, 2026 · resolved in 4m
Some users may encounter issues when trying to Login to QuickBooks Online
Affected: United States, EMEA, Canada
- Partial outageAug 19, 2026 · resolved in 2h 23m
Quickbooks Online Latency Issueofficial update ↗
Affected: United States, EMEA, Canada
Recent Square Payroll incidents
- Degraded performanceSep 27, 2026 · resolved in 4h 25m
- Degraded performanceSep 24, 2026 · resolved in 12m
- Degraded performanceSep 21, 2026 · resolved in 2d 4h
- Degraded performanceSep 18, 2026 · resolved in 3h 54m
- Degraded performanceSep 18, 2026 · resolved in 15h 7m
- Degraded performanceSep 16, 2026 · resolved in 34m
Other payroll & HR platforms to consider
- Personio · #1 · 99.95% uptime
- Patriot Payroll · #3 · 99.93% uptime
- Justworks · #4 · 99.95% uptime
- Remote · #5 · 100% uptime