Paycor vs Workday HCM

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Our analysts compared Paycor 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

Best for: Employee engagement and document management

Ranked at number two on our best HR software list, Paycor is a comprehensive, cloud-based HR system designed for businesses of all sizes that serve industries like healthcare, manufacturing, retail and technology.

It supports key HR functions, including talent management, benefits administration, payroll processing and compliance, catering to teams ranging from a single employee to over 1,000.

Paycor is a SelectHub award winner in employee onboarding and administration, self-service and performance management. It’s also in our top ten for applicant tracking and recruiting, benefits management, compensation management, and succession management.

The platform’s mission is to empower leaders with easy-to-access resources and personalized experiences featuring customizable homepages and learning paths. Managers can gain valuable insights to evaluate performance, track wins and identify areas for improvement.

Struggling with employee retention? Paycor helps by providing data on recognition frequency, promotion rates, pay adjustments and completed one-on-ones.

For recruiters, Paycor offers tools to enhance job postings and streamline the hiring process, utilizing AI for smart candidate sourcing. Key features include performance management, applicant tracking, recruiting, benefits management, compensation management, employee engagement, onboarding and employee self-service.

84% of users give it two thumbs up, noting its straightforward performance, payroll and scheduling management. In contrast, some have encountered complex reporting issues and occasional bugs following updates.

Pricing starts at $99 per user per month, with a free trial available.

To view other popular Paycor solutions, visit our Paycor company page.

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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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$99/user, monthly
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$42/Employee, Monthly
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Product Assistance

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Product Insights

  • Centralize HR: Complete all core HR tasks through one unified platform, eliminating multiple logins on different systems. Track and consolidate data so HR managers can generate comprehensive reports that summarize HR practices. Interview management, document access control, AI-based benefits advisor, budget allocation, compensation grid, automated tax filing, mobile scheduling, charts and visualizations are all fully supported for every aspect of HR.
  • Improve Document Management: Add flexibility with Paycor’s document management function, which is rated 100 in our analysis. This system includes fully supported features such as a document repository, document search and sharing capabilities. Digital signatures and a range of compliance documents further enhance the process, particularly during onboarding.
  • Boost Employee Engagement: Gauge employee engagement with pulse surveys that earn our highest rating. They measure engagement and job satisfaction, while self-paced learning fosters career development. Additionally, Paycor provides easy access to employee information, including pay, time tracking and time-off requests.
  • Streamline Data Entry: Upload applicant information and automatically import data, modifications and relevant fields to eliminate duplicate entries.
  • Strengthen Applicant Tracking and Recruiting: Manage all job candidates, their statuses and priority job listings efficiently. Assign specific hiring processes to each job record and use AI to generate job descriptions. Rated 86 out of 100, this function also streamlines the post-interview process by automatically saving feedback with user-friendly scoring.
  • Save Time: Automate workflows, reminders and notifications to reduce tedious, time-intensive manual tasks. Let employees focus on the critical, ROI-enhancing tasks.
  • Facilitate Onboarding and Administration: Establish timelines and provide training resources tailored to business needs. Paycor offers status calls, project scopes and demos for comprehensive support throughout onboarding, earning a 96 for this module.
  • Tailor Experiences: Customize homepages and their features for efficiency and comfort.
  • Enhance Visibility: Put important information at the forefront with homepage-based trends and alerts.
  • Get Tax Assistance: Monitor tax registrations and get tax recommendations, including notifications on employee location changes.
  • Empower Managers: Sharpen soft skills, including coaching, optimizing and retaining employees. Paycor’s core leadership model focuses on helping employees set goals, get feedback, stay motivated and celebrate successes.
  • Provide Leader Insights: Give managers insight into who's clocked in and who's nearing overtime, snapshots of employee records, time-off requests, upcoming birthdays, and anniversaries.
  • Plan for the Future: Keep employees and managers informed on individual progress and areas for improvement with assessments and role profiles. Help managers plan by finding talent gaps and risks via dashboards and insights. New to succession management? Paycor has a succession planning template for beginners.
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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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  • Leader Insights: Just like report cards, give new managers a detailed look at their successes and areas for growth. Managers view the number of completed 1-on-1s, pay rate changes and recognition, supporting employee development and engagement.
  • Benefits Management: Centralize employee information and empower employees to self-enroll in benefits plans through the system. Gain high-level insights into maximizing employee benefits packages with analytics.
  • Compensation Management: Ensure workers are getting paid the correct amount based on experience, skillset, education, certifications, job title and performance (great for reducing turnover and boosting morale).
  • Career Development: Let everyone know when there’s an opportunity for advancement, develop goals that align with larger business objectives and reward high performers.
  • Learning Management and Development: Search for courses, take notes, provide feedback and access various learning tools from any internet-connected device.
  • Payroll Management: Enable easy access to pay stubs, history and tax forms without admin intervention. Ensure accurate payroll processing, calculations and deductions. Automate payroll calculations, tax withholdings and direct deposits, reducing manual entry errors.
  • Time and Attendance: Monitor employee hours and forecast labor costs using historical data. Clock in and out from Paycor's app. Manage time-off requests and resolve time clock errors.
  • Scheduling: Ensure peak productivity with real-time analytics. Manage leaves and sick days, ensuring there are enough people to get the job done when unexpected call-outs occur.
  • Reporting and Analytics: Combine HR, payroll and time data into a single report. Track, store and compile data to provide managers with insights into business practices.
  • Smart Sourcing: Use Paycor's AI smart sourcing to analyze job descriptions, focusing on key factors like responsibilities and experience to find the best candidates. Run targeted campaigns to attract and engage potential hires, speeding up your talent search.
  • Job Posting Assistance: Paycor has customizable templates and AI to take skills recruiters type in and turn them into job descriptions. The platform connects to various job sites, including Facebook and LinkedIn, letting managers see which employees share job postings.
  • Compliance: Paycor offers comprehensive compliance solutions, from application tracking and EEO/OFCCP compliance reporting to simplifying ACA requirements with detailed reports and employee eligibility tracking. They also have online resources on compliance updates and changes to state laws.
  • Performance Management: Ensure regular 1-on-1s, track goals and collect feedback. Use job assessments, role profiles, templates and role-based reviews.
  • Learning Management: Get self-paced tailored training and coaching. Employees and managers can take bite-size learning courses on key topics like compliance.
  • Pulse Surveys: Turn employee feedback into actionable improvements. Empower staff to share their experiences and identify needed changes to mitigate turnover.
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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

#33

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#1

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Availability and Scalability
Document Management
Employee Engagement
Platform Security
Performance 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

Paycor
Workday HCM
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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 86 89 86 100 100 96 92 92 90 99 59 92 98 86 47 86 62 96 70 72 92 98 63 81 55 81 92 83 79 50 0 25 50 75 100
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Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

Paycor
Workday HCM
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Availability And Scalability Deployment Options Integrations And Extensibility Mobile Platform Security 100 50 76 100 100 50 73 100 0 25 50 75 100
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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 4226 reviews
Great User Sentiment 3039 reviews
85%
of users recommend this product

Paycor has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 85% when considering 4226 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.

4.3 (14)
4.8 (14)
4.1 (758)
4.0 (1144)
4.4 (2846)
4.4 (836)
4.5 (11)
4.8 (605)
3.7 (597)
4.1 (440)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Paycor and concluded it deserves the award for the Best Overall HR Management Software available today and earns best-in-class honors for Document Management, Employee Engagement, Employee Onboarding and Administration and Performance Management.

Analysts' Pick Award
Document Management Award
Employee Engagement Award
Employee Onboarding and Administration Award
Performance Management Award

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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Time Tracking: 86% of users like Paycor's time tracking feature for its simplicity and accessibility.
Payroll: 88% of users found payroll processing convenient and reliable, particularly when processing bi-weekly payroll.
Ease of Use and Navigation: 77% of users appreciate Paycor's intuitive platform, noting that it’s easy to use and navigate, which simplifies daily HR tasks.
Integration and Customization: The platform's ability to integrate various features and customize settings to meet specific needs is frequently highlighted as a strength.
Training Opportunities: Paycor offers a variety of training options, including online webinars, recorded sessions and certification courses, which users find beneficial.
Employee Recognition and Communication Tools: Features that support employee recognition and communication are well-regarded. Users find these tools effective in engaging and managing their workforce.
Onboarding: The onboarding feature is praised for its effectiveness in streamlining the new employee integration process.
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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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Login Frustrations: Users note that the login process can be inconvenient as it adds an extra step to accessing information.
Customer Service: Some recent reviews cite difficulties with the support process, specifically over the phone with wait times.
Timecard Issue: A recent review notes experiencing a glitch with timecard integration, which impacted payroll processing.
Reporting: Users find the reporting features cumbersome and inconsistent. The complexity of reports and the lack of simplicity in generating them are notable pain points.
Integration With Third-Party Platforms: There are some minor issues with integrating Paycor with third-party platforms, such as benefits systems, which can lead to excessive delays and unresolved problems.
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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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Paycor is a popular HR management software designed for both in-office and remote teams, as well as HR managers aiming to improve performance management. Suitable for small, medium, and large businesses across the United States, Paycor supports teams of 50 to 500 employees and can scale to accommodate organizations with up to 2,500 members.Key features include personalized coaching, Smart Source recruiting, online learning and leader insights. Financial managers benefit from Paycor’s analytics tool, which helps with compensation planning, pay equity monitoring and trend analysis. The software also integrates with general ledger data and offers self-service options for employees to access pay stubs, history and tax forms.Jumping on a live chat, I found Paycor's the most personable experience compared to competitors. I selected “just browsing” and received prompts for webinars, compliance checks, product info, and pricing. The only downside was there wasn't an option to start a new chat and the previous conversation kept reappearing even after refreshing.The mobile app provides employees with easy access to their wages, flexible pay options and paycheck details from anywhere. They can view deductions and adjust federal and state tax withholdings directly through the app.Users appreciate Paycor for its intuitive navigation, self-service features and employee recognition tools. However, some have experienced extended wait times for customer support and challenges with implementation, which sometimes require additional support team intervention.Pricing for Paycor begins at $99 per user per month. A free trial is available for prospective users to evaluate the platform before committing.I found Paycor’s platform pretty straightforward after trying it out, specifically when it came to managing compliance and employee details. I appreciate how the system highlights potential compliance issues and provides clickable warnings for detailed insights. For example, if there's a tax registration issue, I can quickly see specifics like the tax authority, client ID, and tax code, as well as the exact problem, such as a missing tax ID. The platform then guides me to a resolution page where I can easily add the necessary tax ID to fix the issue.When it comes to managing employees, I found the “Manage People” section intuitive. I can filter employees by department, location, title, or status, including options like 3rd-party payable, Active, FMLA, Laid off, or on paid leave. To perform tasks such as assigning a new responsibility, I simply check the box next to the employee’s name. If an employee needs a specific form or document, checking their name is all it takes.The homepage is handy for checking time-related information at a glance. I can see scheduled absences, approaching overtime, and current clock-in or break statuses without needing to dig through multiple screens.For new hires, I can view their name, hire date, email and onboarding progress in one place. Clicking on their name provides access to important details for updates, such as tax information, compensation, and work schedule adjustments.Sharing documents is simple with the “Bulk Actions” feature. I can select and send documents like the employee handbook, PTO policy, or exit interview questions by setting a date and clicking “share form(s).” I can also track the status of these documents in the Forms & Documents Tracking Center.I like the drag-and-drop menu options for customizing my homepage. Managing my tasks is made easier with the “My Task” option, and viewing my available PTO balance and requesting time off are just a few clicks away. I can specify the dates and whether it’s a full or partial day leave, add any necessary notes for my supervisor, and submit the request easily.Accessing and downloading my pay stubs and tax documents directly from the platform is convenient, and setting up direct deposit is straightforward. I can even split my paycheck between two accounts if needed, with one as the primary. Plus, I can check how many days are left until my next paycheck right from the homepage.I'm a fan of the Recognition Center because it lets me view positive comments from colleagues and leave recognition for others.Overall, Paycor’s platform has simplified many of my HR tasks and made the process more efficient.

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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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