UKG Pro vs Ascentis

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Our analysts compared UKG Pro vs Ascentis based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Talent Management Systems, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

UKG Pro Software Tool
Ascentis Software Tool

Product Basics

UKG Pro is a cloud-based suite designed to streamline global human capital management. It integrates essential features such as payroll, benefits administration, recruiting, onboarding and learning management.

UKG Pro stands out in key areas like document management, payroll management, professional services and maintenance, earning it a spot as one of our top five HR products.

UKG Pro incorporates advanced technologies like machine learning, AI, predictive analytics and business intelligence. These innovations optimize performance, automate tasks, enhance workforce understanding and foster employee retention.

Notably, its advanced scheduling feature prioritizes workforce well-being by ensuring optimal staffing levels and controlling labor costs.

Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a pivotal role in enhancing HR capabilities through schedule optimization, statistical forecasting, retention prediction, employee sentiment analysis and candidate matching.

Starting at $100 per user per month, UKG Pro offers a per-user pricing model with a free trial available upon request. It features 24/7 live support, empowering employees through self-service portals, seamless integrations with payroll and benefits systems, and analytics capabilities for data-driven decision-making.

As UKG Dimension is being sunsetted, some of its functionality is moving to the main system.

Users appreciate UKG Pro's seamless integration with leading payroll, timekeeping, and benefits systems. However, some find the software's interface unintuitive and report limitations in its reporting functionality.

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Ascentis offers HCM services to companies of all industries via its cloud-based suite. Its five modules include time and attendance, payroll, HR and benefits, talent, and recruiting. Users can choose to pick individual functionalities or the entire package of services, depending upon their needs.

It facilitates process automation for several complex business processes and transactions, reduces the probability of errors, offers real-time analytics, eliminates manual work, and helps talent managers and organizations cater to their human resources and talent management requirements. It also provides ease-of-use through an interface that can be accessed anytime, anywhere on a desktop, tablet or smartphone.
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$100/User, Monthly
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$16/Employee, Monthly
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Product Assistance

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Product Insights

  • Gain Data Visibility: Track employee and HR data across local and international levels within one unified platform.
  • Advance Employee Insights: Get a deep understanding of employees through AI-driven predictions, suggested actions and sentiment analysis. This ability enhances performance, identifies concerns, facilitates effective hiring and retains top talent.
  • Strengthen Data-Driven Decision Making: Utilize predictive analytics to analyze data comprehensively, optimizing decisions related to recruitment, promotions and retention.
  • Save Money: Reduce turnover costs by proactively improving employee engagement and identifying risk factors.
  • Add Flexibility: Provide secure access to pay information and employee details through the mobile app. The system uses touch and face ID for security, offers push notifications and syncs with the platform in real time so data is always up to date.
  • Offer Better Employee Support: Save time by automating frequent internal service processes and giving employees access to help material so they can find answers on their own.
  • Boost Knowledge Retention: Keep your company know-how sharp by letting employees share their expertise through learning courses and newsfeeds. This capability ensures knowledge continuity even when team members change roles or retire.
  • Enhance Candidate Experience: Simplify and personalize the recruiting process, ensuring candidates have a positive interaction from the outset. Improve the likelihood of attracting and retaining top talent to reduce application abandonment rates.
  • Improve Employee Onboarding: Integrate new hires seamlessly with robust onboarding technology. This personalized approach fosters early engagement and connectivity, setting the stage for long-term success and retention.
  • Ensure Effective Performance Management: Enable continuous performance evaluation and coaching. By leveraging data analytics, managers can identify growth opportunities and enhance employee development, leading to more meaningful career trajectories and increased engagement.
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  • Optimized Team Performance: Gather information and feedback for each employee, from all sources. Uncover talent and top-performing employees as well as facilitate planning that results in optimized team performance. 
  • Quality Applicants:  Showcase an employer brand when seeking new employees to encourage the maximum number of quality applicants. 
  • Efficient Employee Onboarding: Eliminate duplicate data entry and leverage the cost saving benefits of switching to an online application process instead of an offline process. Cut costs, make onboarding more efficient and reliable, and gain complete access to data 24/7. 
  • Regulatory Compliance: Stay compliant with all essential employment regulations such as FMLA, FLSA, and other local and state laws that require consistency and vigilance. 
  • Real-Time Payroll Processing: Ensure accurate, efficient payroll processing and audits. Run payroll processing anytime, from any place, as many times as required. 
  • No Tax-Related Penalties: Remove the stress of incurring accidental late filing penalties by ensuring timely payroll deposits and filing. 
  • Complete Customization: Tailor the system in ways that best suit company needs, enabling maximum usage and functionality. 
  • Automated Benefits Administration: Save time and reduce manual effort by automating benefits management, administration and employee enrollment processes. 
  • Data-Driven Decisions: Compare metric goals with data insights to make data-driven decisions that lead to improved overall performance. Leverage more than 300 templates for standard reports or customize reports to suit organizational requirements. 
  • Real-Time Self Learning: Cultivate and encourage self-learning and employee development through training resources that are available in real time. 
  • Enhanced Employee Experience: Users can access upcoming schedules, select open shifts, view and request leaves, check paycheck history and statements, punch in and punch out, find co-workers, receive important notifications and alerts, and much more. 
  • On-the-Go Access for Managers: Stay on top of tasks from anywhere. Manage employee schedules, check notifications for employee requests, and approve or reject leaves and expense reports from the user-friendly mobile app. 
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  • Payroll: Incorporate a scalable, configurable engine for accurate, streamlined pay processing. This feature also includes:
    • Role-based access to ensure data security.
    • Prebuilt tax compliance, automatic tax updates every quarter and GIS-powered search to ensure accurate taxes based on employee location.
    • End-of-year reporting tools, including a task checklist.
    • Pay modeling calculator, enabling employees to calculate information on their own.
    • Integration support for global payroll providers and TurboTax.
    • Dashboards showing alerts and metrics.
  • Benefits: Provide help videos and documentation to assist employees. Key components include plan recommendations and side-by-side comparisons, process automation, search filters, compliance reporting, transaction records, admin tools and connectors to hundreds of carriers.
  • Workforce Scheduling: Ensure effective shift planning and workforce management with advanced scheduling capabilities previously found in UKG Dimensions.
  • Workforce Planning and Optimization: Make strategic planning and resource allocation a breeze. UKG Pro now packs the workforce planning and optimization tools from UKG Dimensions.
  • Time and Attendance: Optimize timekeeping and absence management with UKG Pro's enhanced time tracking and attendance features, which are now integrated from UKG Dimensions.
  • Learning: Aid employee learning and development by providing:
    • On-demand, mobile access to training materials in multiple languages.
    • Gamification, rewards and social tools foster engagement.
    • Blended learning, a drag-and-drop interface for content creation and a course marketplace with more than 3,000 courses.
    • Channels for employees to capture and share knowledge with coworkers.
  • Recruiting: Make talent sourcing and acquisition for recruiting teams and candidates easier and more efficient.
    • Recruiters: Dashboards show candidate and opportunity status and AI scoring reveals applicants that are the best match. Multi-language, multiple job board postings and screening questions also included.
    • Candidates: Applicants can submit their LinkedIn profile, receive open position suggestions based on basic information and provide an in-depth picture of themselves by sharing details like motivators and behaviors.
  • Onboarding: Access a dashboard that has a timeline for tasks they need to complete, job-related videos and training material, and required forms, which they can fill out electronically. They can also create goals and connect with teammates.
  • InTouch DX: Give managers and employees flexible, real-time access for time and attendance processes. This timeclock device is designed for an hourly, mobile workforce.
    • Features include configuration options, real-time data, a touchscreen, native intelligence capabilities and multiple integrated readers.
    • Managers can track employee information, confirm transactions and ensure schedules are followed.
    • Employees can request PTO, view time cards and schedules, punch in and out, receive push notifications, and receive suggested actions based on upcoming tasks.
  • BI Reporting: Display real-time data in a clear, user-friendly format, empowering managers and executives to monitor and analyze KPIs. They offer both prebuilt and customizable reports. It provides insights for:
    • Human resource metrics like headcount based on local and global demographics.
    • Benefit plan costs and employee participation.
    • Financial information like overtime cost, pay equity and payroll totals.
    • ACA filing data, including risks, deadlines and eligibility.
    • Recruiting costs and sourcing data.
    • Employee performance, retention estimators and 9-box assessment.
    • Pay factors ranging from expenses and revenue to total compensation at the global level.
    • Survey data, including participation, engagement details, historical trends and metric performance based on industry benchmarks.
  • Compensation Management: Reward employees based on achievements through salary planning, customizable compensation plans, merit rules and analytics. It supports targets based on units, flat amounts or a percentage of base pay.
  • Performance Management: Drive employee engagement and growth while giving managers insight into individual and team performance. Features include tracking dashboards, automated reviews, goals, achievement ratings and real-time feedback.
  • Surveys: Gather employee sentiment using AI, natural language processing and machine learning. They offer a question library, templates, mobile-friendly design, custom dashboards and curated improvement suggestions.
  • File Management: Organize and manage employee documents with a central repository along with role and type-based permissions. Templates automatically fill in employee details, and a compliance assist feature ensures global adherence.
  • Succession Management: Develop a talent pipeline, ensuring your employees are prepared to take on new roles. There are plans for any level in the company, alongside talent evaluation, predictive analytics, reporting and personal development tools.
  • Integration Hub: Support developers in enhancing the system through integrations by offering:
    • A collaborative community, a developer portal and APIs.
    • Sample code and instructional articles to speed up deployment.
    • A marketplace of product and service partners.
  • UKG Talk: Facilitate engagement and inclusivity within your organization by supporting various communication methods like:
    • Company-wide announcements.
    • Direct messaging.
    • Team group chats.
    • Employee feedback and participation through celebrations, idea collection and achievement recognition.
    • Provide actionable insights by measuring communication impact and engagement metrics.
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  • Time and Attendance: Offers several functions such as leave management, time tracking, employee scheduling, advanced scheduling, a mobile app and compliance. 
  • Employee Scheduling: Provides management automation for several key aspects like split shift intervals, leave balances, overtime, expenses and total work hours. 
  • Advanced Scheduling: Helps schedule workflows and optimize all scheduling processes end to end. Evaluates unique rules and requirements within an organization and then auto-generates schedule recommendations based on that information. 
  • Payroll: Payroll processing occurs in real time, offering maximized accuracy, compliance, control and flexibility. 
  • HR and Benefits: Provides functionalities such as benefits management, HR compliance, HR solution customization, employee self-service, reporting and more. 
  • Talent Management: Customizable and user-friendly module. Capabilities include succession planning, compensation planning, performance management, learning management, check-ins, 360-degree assessments and real-time feedback. 
  • Recruiting: Acts as a dynamic career portal, helps with social media outreach, enables efficient onboarding and improves workflow management for HR-related functions. 
  • Ascentis Mobile Application: Two types of access are available — one for employees and another for managers and supervisors. Based on their role, users can share messages, update and access information, and perform other activities, all through a smartphone or a tablet. 
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Product Ranking

#6

among all
Talent Management Systems

#19

among all
Talent Management Systems

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Analyst Rating Summary

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AI-based Capabilities
Employee Communication
Learning Management
Onboarding
Succession Planning
AI-based Capabilities
Employee Communication
Onboarding
Succession Planning
Performance Management

Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

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Ascentis
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AI-based Capabilities Compensation Management Dashboard And Reporting Employee Communication Learning Management Mobile Capabilities Onboarding Performance Management Recruitment And Applicant Tracking Succession Planning 100 30 0 100 100 0 100 92 89 98 100 0 0 100 71 0 100 99 78 100 0 25 50 75 100
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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 4051 reviews
Good User Sentiment 626 reviews
86%
of users recommend this product

UKG Pro has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 86% when considering 4051 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

77%
of users recommend this product

Ascentis has a 'good' User Satisfaction Rating of 77% when considering 626 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

4.2 (1497)
4.0 (251)
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4.2 (51)
4.2 (601)
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4.3 (531)
2.0 (1)
4.4 (1422)
3.7 (323)

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Employee Data Management: Users commend UKG Pro for its robust employee data management capabilities.
Payroll Processing: Reviewers consistently highlight UKG Pro's payroll processing feature for its efficiency, accuracy and intuitive interface.
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Customer Service: All reviews mentioning this aspect indicated that the customer support services quickly resolve all user issues.
Ease of Use: An easy-to-use interface helps new users to quickly learn and understand its versatile features, according to 85% of reviews on this element.
PTO Calculation: 90% of reviews that mention PTO noted that all employees can send PTO requests via self-service and easily calculate their PTO earned by the end of the fiscal year.
Less Data Input: 100% of reviews on integration noted that the smooth integration between payroll and HR modules allows information to flow easily between systems, without feeding data in multiple times.
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User Interface: Some users found the UI slightly outdated based on confusing design elements, unclear wording choices and inefficient grouping that collectively hinder intuitive navigation within the system.
Reporting: Some users describe UKG Pro’s reporting feature as ineffective and lacking user-friendliness.
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Inaccurate Reporting: 100% of reviews on reporting indicated that the software sometimes creates random reports or files that are outside the set criteria, and that it’s time-consuming and confusing to create new reports or look through report history.
Password Reset: Employees are unable to reset their own passwords for the employee self-service functionality, according to 60% of reviews on the element.
Implementation Process: 85% of reviewers who mention this feature indicated that Ascentis has a time-consuming implementation process, due to the numerous features it provides.
Data Entry: All reviews on data entry observed that the ATS feature sometimes has multiple data entries of the same information.
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UKG Pro is a cloud-based platform that’s designed to streamline global human capital management across all industries. It brings together key functions like payroll, benefits, recruiting, onboarding and learning management in one place.Some standout features include an advanced scheduling tool that helps balance staffing levels and control labor costs. AI is a big player here, enhancing HR tasks with things like schedule optimization, retention forecasting, sentiment analysis and candidate matching.From what I've seen through the demo, the mobile app lays everything out in a simple, direct way with menu options like time off, pay, HR help, benefits, goals, notes and learning. Under learning, there's a variety of helpful courses, including security awareness, conflict management and mindfulness training.Completing requests seems quick and straightforward. Click HR Help and find requests to ask for a shift change, PTO or travel expense.Manage assignments by viewing "To-Dos," including what's waiting for completion and what's crossed off your list already. Plan effectively with a headcount under metrics, showing who is on leave or on the clock in real time.On the subject of planning ahead, UKG Pro scores a perfect 100 under succession management, with talent matrix, talent pool and talent insight functionalities.Document management is also a top feature, earning 100 for its capabilities. It includes access controls, document search, automatic tax document generation and the creation of employee handbooks and policies.Managing performance can be challenging, especially with a large team. It's important to ensure that everyone feels valued, but time constraints can make this difficult. UKG Pro’s talent dashboard helps by highlighting top performers and potential flight risks, making it easier for you to address issues and make necessary adjustments.One thing I really liked was that there's a page for work-life balance with improvement ideas, including resisting multitasking, expanding team goals and introducing flexible work schedules. This helps employees feel valued, which ultimately fosters more productivity and job retention.Additionally, I thought it was admirable there’s a "Giving" option on the platform for creating employee giving programs and tracking donations. This is a great source for team building, increasing engagement and building a more positive work environment.Using the live chat, I selected customer support and then UKG Pro, which led me to FAQs. After hitting thumbs down to request a representative, I asked for an in-depth demo. The chatbot offered alternative solutions or the option to end the chat. When starting a new chat, the previous conversation was visible, but there was no option to start a new chat from scratch.Pricing starts at $100 per user per month with a per-user model, and you can request a free trial.

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Ascentis provides à la carte solutions for human capital and workforce management. It can be a good pick for companies that are looking for software that has an intuitive interface, seamless integration between payroll and HR, PTO, benefits calculation and responsive customer service. However, several reviews mentioned reporting is inaccurate, challenging and cumbersome. There are also issues with duplicate data, and implementation is time-consuming. It can be a good choice depending on company needs and priorities.

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