SuccessFactors vs Workday HCM

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Our analysts compared SuccessFactors vs Workday HCM based on data from our 400+ point analysis of HR Management Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Workday HCM Software Tool

Product Basics

SuccessFactors HR by SAP is a comprehensive human capital management (HCM) solution designed for businesses of all sizes across various industries.

This cloud-based software is ideal for organizations looking to streamline basic HR functions while also driving strategic initiatives and planning. Users appreciate its advanced features for recruitment management, onboarding, time off tracking, time off planning, and goal structure flexibility, which enhance employee engagement and streamline HR processes.

In contrast, some users find the overall user interface to be outdated and clunky on certain pages. Additionally, the software’s extensive capabilities can make it complex to learn and require a time investment to fully understand and leverage its sophisticated features.

Regardless of your industry, finding and hiring the right talent quickly is a major challenge. SuccessFactors HR tackles this with advanced recruitment tools that streamline the hiring process, from job requisition to candidate selection.

SuccessFactors ranks in our list of the top five overall HR products and the top ten for applicant tracking, benefits management, compensation management, document management, onboarding, self service, learning management, performance management and more.

It uses AI and machine learning to enhance candidate matching and speed up recruitment, making it easier to find and onboard top talent.

Flexible goal structures and comprehensive onboarding solutions boost employee engagement and retention. These features help set clear performance objectives, track progress, and create a more engaging onboarding experience, contributing to a positive workplace culture and better retention.

SuccessFactors HR simplifies time off management with its accessible tracking and planning features, allowing employees to easily request and manage leave.

Benefits scenario modeling is available with workarounds, compared to some competitors like UKG Pro and Oracle HCM Cloud that don’t currently support it. As a leader in document management, it earns our highest score for tax document automatic generation, access controls and document sharing.

SuccessFactors HR pricing varies based on organization size, the specific modules required and the level of customization needed. SAP typically provides customized pricing based on the organization's needs and the scale of implementation.

For an accurate quote, businesses should contact SAP or an authorized SAP partner to discuss their specific requirements and receive a tailored pricing proposal.

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Workday HCM is a SaaS solution that unifies all aspects of managing the employee lifecycle in a single HRMS. The suite of modules allows organizations to operate globally, run payroll, administer benefits, manage talent and facilitate learning, among other things.

While designed for medium and large enterprises, the platform can support the needs of smaller businesses as well. A business process framework provides control for all internal processes. The software is also equipped with audit tools and built-in security capabilities, and it offers mobile apps for flexible access.
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$42/Employee, Monthly
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Product Assistance

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Live Online
Videos
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Product Insights

  • Provide a Digital Boardroom: Consolidate data from various sources to get a complete view across departments. Tools for what-if scenarios and ad hoc analysis drive better decisions and shape your business strategy.
  • Close Skills Gaps: Help employees pick up the skills they need to advance and cover any weak points in your company with continuous learning. This capability helps close the skills gap and sets your organization up for success.
  • Operate Globally: Check eligibility, control data according to GDPR, handle work permits and visas, and comply with local labor laws.
  • Enhance Your Employee Experience: Enjoy access to real-time data on overtime, accruals and employee pay info. Employees can also contact the HR department via tickets, phone, email or chat.
  • Integrate HR: Get a one-stop platform for all your core HR needs through Employee Central. It seamlessly connects with other modules, giving you a smooth and consistent HR experience.
  • Work Anywhere: Say hello to HR on the go with mobile options for several of the suite modules. View pay stubs, access training resources, complete timesheets and request time off.
  • Get Feedback: Let your HR team generate and distribute surveys to analyze employee engagement in real time. According to our data, SuccessFactors fully supports 360-degree feedback and feedback reports.
  • Add HR Extensions: Make managing a global workforce easier with the Kronos time management app. It helps boost employee engagement and keeps time management clear and straightforward. It integrates with background screening software, learning management systems and data integration platforms.
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  • Deep Data Insights: Equipped with reporting and analytics tools, Workday HCM provides a complete view of critical KPIs to inform better decisions. It allows you to become familiar with your workforce, promote employee growth, foster diversity and prepare for the future. Workday’s Prism Analytics and Data-as-a-Service applications provide graphs, charts, benchmarking reports and more. 
  • Fast, Enhanced Recruiting: You can streamline and speed up the recruiting process with collaboration tools, task reminders and calendar syncing. A referral leaderboard encourages employees to refer other qualified candidates. 
  • Easy Expense Reporting: Mobile receipt scanning and approval workflows simplify the expensing process for employees and managers. You can also set spending controls and give employees the ability to start reports. With data analytics tools, you can spot trends and gain insight into expenses throughout your company. 
  • Efficient Absence Management: This feature uses a smart calendar for managing time off. It also provides tracking for different types of absences and the ability to analyze carryover. 
  • Simplified Time Management: Time tracking and approval is available on any device, and alerts surface items that need attention. The system automates rules and calculations to cut down on manual tasks and the risk of errors. 
  • Improved Hiring Decisions: Dashboards present all your talent acquisition data in one place for easy viewing, and machine learning suggests areas of improvement. You can also compare your company to peers via benchmarking and use compensation comparisons to create effective offers. 
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  • Joule: Use a virtual assistant to guide employees through the feedback process with easy-to-follow steps and prompts. Joule lets employees update their info right away (like location and working hours) without bouncing around multiple screens. It also streamlines promotion requests by guiding managers through the process and setting effective dates.
  • Automatic Tax Document Generation: Generate essential tax documents automatically, reducing administrative workload and ensuring compliance with tax regulations.
  • Payroll: Simplify payroll with automated pay calculations while ensuring compliance with both local and international rules to function globally. Plus, the self-service option lets employees easily access their information.
  • Time and Attendance Management: Automate time-consuming tasks like calculating hours worked and managing absences to make scheduling more efficient.
  • Recruiting and Onboarding: Create profiles, apply for jobs and track applications through a career portal. Employees can share openings and earn rewards for referrals. Recruiters can manage interviews based on candidate availability and location and provide a personalized onboarding experience.
  • Learning and Development: Use the earning management system (LMS) for all your learning needs, from succession planning to career development. It handles assessments, offline courses, training schedules, and tracking employee progress and course completion.
  • Performance and Compensation: Track employee performance to find top talent while providing feedback to help your team set and achieve goals. Reward employees with compensation programs and keep your numbers in line with budget modeling.
  • Workforce Planning: Modeling and analysis features provide insight into financials and scenario-based outcomes. Allocate resources effectively with budget planning, anticipate staffing requirements with workforce forecasting and reduce schedule conflicts with alerts.
  • Personalized Recommendations: The benefits plan recommendation tool offers a personalized ranking of benefits plans, providing employees with tailored recommendations to better meet their specific needs.
  • HR Analytics: Understand your company's data with insights on performance, turnover, diversity and more. Benchmark against peers and analyze HR data in detail. Use dashboards and reports to identify issues and spot trends.
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  • Payroll: Workday HCM offers payroll capabilities for the U.S., U.K., France and Canada. All transactions compile in the payroll module. It includes a calculation engine, which enables running reports and calculations for groups and individuals at any time. A compliance dashboard shows information about upcoming changes as well as the areas of greatest impact within your organization. 
  • Benefits Administration: The software supports a variety of plans, such as health, flex, wellness and retirement. Tools such as the ACA dashboard ensure proper coverage as well as aid managing forms and regulatory changes. The system supports integration with hundreds of providers. 
  • Talent Management: This feature includes onboarding and career and development planning components. New hires can access messages, videos and more from a single dashboard, and there’s also support for international and internal transfers. Pulse surveys and a skills cloud provide insight into your workforce. Additionally, you can set goals, perform reviews, manage succession plans, aid employee career development and pinpoint retention risks. 
  • Learning Management System: Equipped with LMS capabilities, this module helps your organization deliver and track a variety of training materials. Elements include scoring, quizzes, learning campaigns, video, learning paths and more. You can also offer courses to external groups. For extended training, the Workday Content Cloud grants access to third-party content directly from Workday HCM. 
  • Compensation Management: With this feature, you can build customized compensation packages for global use by choosing from over a dozen compensation plan types. It supports international currencies and allowance plans based on local limits. The toolset includes a grid worksheet, events coordination for things like new hires and promotions, pay-range segments, tracking of pay equity, configurable statements, and unified data from other Workday HCM modules such as payroll and benefits. 
  • Workforce Planning: The Workday Adaptive Insights Business Planning Cloud provides tools to create models, compare what-if scenarios and build hiring strategies. It also facilitates collaboration along with evaluation of metrics like costs and workforce breakdown. The platform provides review and approval workflows and integrates data from other organizational systems. 
  • Global Compliance: The solution’s flexibility enables you to configure the pre-built frameworks based on your company’s needs. It contains support for 240 countries, 1,500+ reports, 170 absence plans, geographic controls such as privacy preferences and date formats, and over 3,000 localized data fields. You can automatically translate into over 30 languages, receive free legal support across 58 jurisdictions and control all aspects of the setup. 
  • Workday Marketplace: You can extend the capabilities of Workday HCM by connecting it with third-party integrations for case management, hiring, training and other processes. Partner solutions include LinkedIn Learning, Salesforce Worker and Salesforce Chatter, Saba, HireRight Background Check, and Humanity Employee Shift Scheduling. 
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Product Ranking

#5

among all
HR Management Software

#1

among all
HR Management Software

Find out who the leaders are

Analyst Rating Summary

79
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95
86
73
62
82
96
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Availability and Scalability
Document Management
Platform Security
Applicant Tracking and Recruiting
Succession Management
Availability and Scalability
Platform Security
Employee Self Service
Compensation Management
Employee Onboarding and Administration

Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

SuccessFactors
Workday HCM
+ Add Product + Add Product
Applicant Tracking And Recruiting Benefits Management Compensation Management Document Management Employee Engagement Employee Onboarding And Administration Employee Self Service Learning Management Payroll Management Performance Management Platform Capabilities Reporting And Dashboard Succession Management Time And Attendance Management Workforce Management 95 73 82 100 28 86 87 84 73 87 88 92 95 76 63 86 62 96 70 72 92 98 63 81 55 81 92 83 79 50 0 25 50 75 100
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64%
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Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

SuccessFactors
Workday HCM
+ Add Product + Add Product
Availability And Scalability Deployment Options Integrations And Extensibility Mobile Platform Security 100 50 64 100 100 50 73 100 0 25 50 75 100
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Analyst Ratings for Vendor Qualification Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 2892 reviews
Great User Sentiment 3039 reviews
82%
of users recommend this product

SuccessFactors has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 82% when considering 2892 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

86%
of users recommend this product

Workday HCM has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 86% when considering 3039 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

4.7 (21)
4.8 (14)
3.9 (665)
4.0 (1144)
4.0 (275)
n/a
n/a
4.4 (836)
4.4 (793)
4.8 (605)
4.0 (1138)
4.1 (440)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated SuccessFactors and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Document Management.

Document Management Award

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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Support Quality: The support team is highly regarded for its responsiveness and customer service. It’s praised for being helpful and treating customers well, although there can be occasional wait times for resolution.
One-Stop-Shop for HR: Most users appreciate the system's ability to integrate various HR functions into a single platform, which can streamline processes and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO).
Goal Setting Flexibility: The learning module is seen as robust and flexible, making it easy to set and manage goals. Users can select from a library of goals or add their own, which facilitates effective goal setting and tracking.
Recruitment Management: According to most users, the recruitment module eases the entire process, including job postings, candidate selection, resume evaluation, interview scheduling and offer management. The applicant tracking and AI-assisted screening features were noted for improving time to hire.
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Intuitive: 95% of users who mentioned ease of use observed that the software has an intuitive interface, making it easy to navigate and find information, even for novice users.
Multiple Functionality: 90% of users who mentioned functionality state that Workday HCM acts as a one-stop shop for many HR tasks.
Payroll and Benefits: All reviewers who mentioned payroll had a positive experience, with the ability to track hours, collect tax forms, log pay stubs and more.
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Getting Started: Many find SAP SuccessFactors complex, especially for new users. The system is described as intricate and sophisticated, leading to a steep initial learning curve.
Reporting Woes: Users find the reporting options pretty restricted, with not much room to customize dashboards and reports. This lack of flexibility makes it tough to tailor reports to fit specific needs.
User Experience and Interface: The user interface (UI) has received mixed feedback. Some users feel it's outdated and clunky, with hiccups like confusing time-off calculations and cumbersome goal-setting processes.
Updates: While the support team is effective at troubleshooting integration issues, some users have experienced release-related breakdowns. On the flip side, other users noted recent updates have improved the UI, making it easier to navigate with new icons and better drill-downs.
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Slow: Of reviewers who mention user interface, 5% noted some processes are slow, causing the system to show errors.
Requires Training: For first-time users, there’s a bit of a learning curve to get started, requiring training.
Clunky Mobile App: 85% of reviewers who mentioned the app noted that it has issues quite often and doesn’t include schedules, forcing users to use a separate app.
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SuccessFactors provides full integration with all HR modules and can connect to other SAP solutions, such as finance to materials. With extensive customization, integration and analytics, it can be of great use for planning, developing and implementing HR strategies.According to our analysts, SAP SuccessFactors scores a 79, leading in applicant tracking and recruiting, document management, and succession management.It includes AI-assisted screening, LinkedIn applicant prospecting, automated tax documents, succession planning, offline course access and employee lifecycle tracking, helping HR cover core tasks today and plan for the future.It’s gotten praise for its strong support team, which is responsive and customer-focused, although users sometimes experience delays in resolving issues. The platform excels as a comprehensive HR solution, integrating various functions into a single system that streamlines processes and reduces costs.While there's a learning curve for most, the majority found it worth the work to centralize all things HR, especially with its AI capabilities. Recent updates have improved the UI design, though some users indicate growing pains with release-related glitches and complex integrations.SAP SuccessFactors pricing starts at $10 per user per month with a free trial.SuccessFactors makes recruitment easier with tools for job postings, tracking candidates, evaluating resumes and managing interviews. Its AI-assisted screening matches candidates to job requirements more efficiently.The onboarding module speeds up the process for new hires by automating paperwork, setting up training and ensuring a smoother transition into the company. Overall, SuccessFactors helps identify and nurture internal talent for future leadership roles, creating a smooth succession plan and minimizing the impact of turnover.

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Workday HCM is suitable for businesses of all sizes. It is a simple and easy-to-use product with multiple functions that contain all HR data in one place. Payroll and benefits are easy to view and verify. Some improvements are required in the mobile app and system speed. Otherwise, its payroll, timesheet tool, ease of use and unified structure can bring a lot of benefits.

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Screenshots

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