SumTotal vs Workday HCM

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Our analysts compared SumTotal 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.

SumTotal Software Tool
Workday HCM Software Tool

Product Basics

SumTotal is a cloud-based HR Management software catering to mid-sized to large organizations. It packs a comprehensive suite of features covering talent acquisition, learning & development, workforce management, and performance management. Users praise its robust reporting & analytics, rich learning library, and mobile-friendly accessibility. However, the extensive customization options and powerful tools come with a steeper learning curve for administrators. Additionally, SumTotal's potential for high integration costs and higher price point compared to basic solutions make it less suitable for smaller companies. While some users struggle with complex content creation tools and limited instructor-led options, SumTotal shines in its ability to scale and adapt to dynamic needs, making it a strong contender for organizations seeking a feature-rich, customizable HR management platform, especially those with substantial training requirements and a dispersed workforce.

Pros
  • Comprehensive learning library
  • Robust reporting & analytics
  • Scalable for large organizations
  • Mobile-friendly learning
  • Customizable user experience
Cons
  • Steep learning curve for admins
  • Limited instructor-led options
  • Complex content creation tools
  • Potentially high integration costs
  • Pricey for smaller companies
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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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$5/User, Monthly
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$42/Employee, Monthly
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Mobile
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Mobile

Product Assistance

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Documentation
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Videos
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Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
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Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
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Product Insights

  • Employee Retention: Provide tools for employee development, management and learning practices that encourage employee retention. 
  • Enhanced Productivity: Talent managers can continuously onboarding to speed up overall productivity. 
  • Organizational Stability: Learning-centered employee development builds an agile workforce that is adaptable to changing business environments. 
  • Learning Ecosystem: Invest in research and development on the latest learning trends, which managers can leverage to enhance employees' learning experience. 
  • Talent Engagement: Engage top talent while moving through the recruitment process, understand the workforce, identify the best talent and build a seamless experience for candidates as well as hiring teams. 
  • Enhanced Candidate Experience: Offer smartphone-optimized sites with intelligent and automated interview tools, candidate matching, and an easy-to-use mobile app interface. Keep applicants informed about upcoming interview details via a user dashboard. 
  • Accelerated Time-to-Performance: Seamless onboarding training helps new hires get up to speed quickly. Provide unique company policies and work culture for them to become familiar with the company. 
  • Smooth Role Switch: Access onboarding plans for new roles that include defined goals, new teams and KPI’s that ensure a more seamless transition to new responsibilities. 
  • Robust Manager and Admin Capabilities: Managers and administrators can easily view, schedule, filter, mark up and share reports from a mobile dashboard. Leverage reporting tools, advanced reports and dashboards at a single click. 
  • Informed Compensation Plans: Create smart, data-driven compensation plans according to preset or custom parameters. Real-time performance insights and budget modeling make compensation informed, fair and cost-effective. 
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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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  • Talent Development: Provides combined functionality of talent onboarding, talent management and learning management solutions to cater to talent development requirements. 
  • Talent Acquisition: Helps create a streamlined hiring cycle, hire the right talent, engage fresh recruits and drive productivity from day one. 
  • Learning Management:  
    •  Helps provide a customized, personalized and engaging learning experience tailored to the skill and competency of individuals rather than the whole team. 
    •  Ease of access on all devices, along with an offline mode, ensures seamless and consistent access to content and courses. 
  • Talent Management: Personalized and intuitive tools help employees pursue career growth and development. Capabilities include performance management, 360-degree feedback, succession planning and compensation management. 
  • Performance Management: Provides comprehensive feedback and tools that make feedback actionable, constructive and insightful. Measures workforce productivity, progress and priorities in real time. 
  • Succession Planning: Enables talent managers to identify and assess skill gaps, build agile talent pools, and align employee success with business goals and objectives. 
  • Compensation Management: Simplifies and streamline compensation plans, and helps build competitive packages to attract and retain top recruits. Workflow automation and compensation management tools aid compliance with complex global policies. 
  • Workforce Management: Bundled payroll, benefits and expense management minimize time, cost and efforts while maximizing accuracy. Features include automated scheduling, time and attendance, absence management, and compliance. 
  • Applicant Tracking System: Includes real-time alerts and notifications for offer approvals, a unique dashboard and reports widgets, customizable requisitions, and a consolidated requisition workspace. 
  • Mobility: Provides access to tools and reporting capabilities at all times and from any location. The dashboard can be operated using a tablet, desktop, mobile app or a phone browser. 
  • Growth Edition: Caters to the needs of fast-growing small and medium-sized businesses. Includes webinars, instructor-led training, approvals, and additional learning resources that users can access and configure anytime. 
  • Extended Enterprise: Helps build a brand image, accelerate growth and drive new sources of potential revenue. Facilitates an enriched and optimized learning experience for distributors, partners and customers. 
  • Gamified and Collaborative Learning: Helps: 
    •  Assess and accelerate learning with gamification capabilities that include leaderboards, points, levels and badges. 
    •  Enhance employee engagement by identifying and rewarding the right learning behaviors. 
    •  Enrich the knowledge of new hires with collaborative learning, up-to-date content, feedback and social ratings. 
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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

#23

among all
HR Management Software

#1

among all
HR Management Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

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77
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86
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62
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96
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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

SumTotal
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 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

SumTotal
Workday HCM
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Availability And Scalability Deployment Options Integrations And Extensibility Mobile Platform Security 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

Fair User Sentiment 132 reviews
Great User Sentiment 3039 reviews
69%
of users recommend this product

SumTotal has a 'fair' User Satisfaction Rating of 69% when considering 132 user reviews from 4 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.

n/a
4.8 (14)
3.2 (39)
4.0 (1144)
2.7 (7)
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4.4 (836)
4.0 (56)
4.8 (605)
2.9 (30)
4.1 (440)

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Robust Tools: All reviews on this feature suggest that SumTotal provides a robust set of talent development and management, payroll, and workforce management solutions.
Effective Tracking: According to 80% of reviews on tracking, the software optimizes talent management by tracking development and career growth.
Self-Service: Managers and employees can access and complete training courses at their convenience, according to all reviews on self-service.
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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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Outdated Course Content: About 70% of reviews on course content reported that some modules aren’t frequently updated, resulting in an outdated learning experience.
Non-Intuitive Functions: Most features and functions aren’t intuitive, making it difficult to navigate, according to all reviews on this aspect.
Access to Reports: Accessing and pulling reports is extremely tedious and slow, according to 100% of reviews on reporting.
Customer Service: All reviews on customer support suggest that customer service is very slow and unresponsive.
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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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SumTotal users paint a mixed picture, praising its robust functionality and mobile accessibility while critiquing its clunky interface and steep learning curve. Many laud its comprehensive suite, encompassing everything from onboarding to performance management, finding it a one-stop shop for HR needs. One user gushes, "It's like having a whole HR department in the cloud!" However, ease of use seems to be a major sticking point. Comments like "The interface feels outdated and unintuitive" and "Learning curve is a mountain, not a hill" pop up frequently. This is often contrasted with praise for competitors like Workday, lauded for its sleek design and user-friendliness. One user sums it up: "SumTotal has the depth, Workday has the polish." Mobile accessibility shines as a bright spot, with users appreciating the ability to manage tasks on the go. This stands out compared to some competitors, making SumTotal a good fit for companies with a mobile workforce. Ultimately, SumTotal seems to be a powerful tool for organizations willing to invest the time and effort in mastering its complexities. As one user puts it, "It's not perfect, but it's incredibly versatile. If you can handle the initial climb, the view from the top is pretty good."

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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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