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ADP Workforce Now vs SAP SuccessFactors comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 3, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

ADP Workforce Now
Ranking in Talent Management
13th
Ranking in Cloud HCM
12th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Benefits Administration (10th), HR Analytics Software (5th)
SAP SuccessFactors
Ranking in Talent Management
1st
Ranking in Cloud HCM
1st
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
Talent Acquisition (2nd), Global Payroll (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud HCM category, the mindshare of ADP Workforce Now is 1.1%, down from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP SuccessFactors is 21.7%, down from 22.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud HCM
 

Featured Reviews

Vineeth John - PeerSpot reviewer
Custom reporting tool with field grabber, easy modules for recruitment and provides numerous options for integration
The complexity is the key challenge with a tool like ADP because it has all the bells and whistles and all the key features you can possibly think of. If it isn't there, there's always a third-party vendor you can integrate that way. But the only issue is that because it's complex, there needs to be some sort of system, at least on the back end, for the admins to understand what leads to what. We expect AI to improve multiple things with HR processes. The most obvious and common one would be the self-service function for employees, like a chatbot to help with FAQs. We are also building an AI tool that can possibly help managers make better talent management decisions. This tool will pull from the performance management tool, the talent profile, and the reports that we generally have to score employees across all different dimensions.
Marissa Schwan - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to deploy, stable, and scalable
SuccessFactors has a best practices model for HR across the board, but there are multiple industries. For example, the pharmaceutical, engineering, and professional services industries may have different processes based on their business requirements and operations. SAP and Workday have one approach across industries. As employee experience becomes increasingly important, the kind of employees appointed in an engineering environment, a pharmaceutical environment, and a professional service environment are very different, meaning their experience touchpoints may differ and require adjustments. SuccessFactors should consider building their best practices around critical industries to help companies become more differentiated in the markets they operate in. As a company, we have 118,000 followers on LinkedIn, and the unemployment rate in South Africa is quite high, at more than 30 percent. When we advertise a job, the number of CVs and applications we receive from people who want to work for us is overwhelming, we can get up to 600 CVs for a single vacancy. To make the process more efficient, we need to use artificial intelligence to identify the key elements of the job profile and match them to the CVs of the applicants. The pre-selection questions are helpful in reducing the number of applicants, but they don't measure the suitability of the CVs and profiles. This is something that needs to be built into the system, but it doesn't currently exist in the market. We have a good pre-selection program, but it doesn't take into account experience, qualifications, professional memberships, work experience, or critical performance indicators. We have enough information from CVs and LinkedIn profiles for the system to match the vacancy profile with the applicant's information and rank them from most suitable to least suitable.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The platform is on a private cloud that is fully secure with no way for hacker penetration."
"The way that ADP helped us improve our organization is by making the payroll process clean and efficient because if you make a mistake there, you're in big trouble."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The most interesting feature for me on ADP is the custom reporting tool. It's got something called a field grabber, which makes it so much easier to generate your own custom reports simply by pulling tabs from any feature."
"In my day-to-day work, attendance tracking would be most important. That's because I have a really diverse group of employees, and I have a subset of younger folks who are struggling with their attendance. So, that's the thing that I'm most involved with currently."
"The most valuable features are the reporting and benefits piece."
"The most valuable feature to me is performance management because we just started using that."
"Overall, it's excellent performance management."
"HR and managers can use the onboarding tool to help new employees prepare for their first day on the job, which can help them acclimate to the company culture and reduce anxiety."
"It's a uniform user interface."
"It has a global database, and it is globally accessible. By using this solution, we have moved away from paper, which is a big step for us."
"This solution provides up with an easy way to on/off-board staff, as well as actioning internal transfers."
"The overall functionality of the solution is very good."
"The self-service part is most valuable. Employees and managers can do a lot of things on their own, and they are not dependent on the HR organization."
"The tool's most valuable feature is its integration capabilities with on-premise ERPs and other systems."
 

Cons

"The report functionality is not as good as competitive products."
"The ease of developing and creating reports could definitely use some improvement."
"Its benefits portal could be user-friendly."
"I would like to see the payroll side improved and there are a few kinks that need to be worked out."
"The complexity is the key challenge with a tool like ADP ."
"When I'm not working with the implementation team and I'm just talking to customer service or something, they're just not a lot of help. They don't understand how it works. They'll tell you to do something that I know would affect something else. So, it's less about the software and more about just training their folks to a higher level."
"Overall, the documentation could be improved, and I think the learning management module needs to include more capabilities when it comes to matching an organization's particular learning approach."
"Integration between Employee Central and Compensation in SAP SuccessFactors is one area of the solution that has room for improvement."
"To explain one feature that I would like to see in SuccessFactors, I must describe a similar feature as seen in Oracle. In Oracle, there's a feature called Workforce Prediction, and with this feature, we can predict some of the behaviors of any employee. For example, the software can attempt to predict whether the employee might resign in future, or perhaps if they will start to perform better. This is something that is missing in SuccessFactors."
"I find that the website sometimes has problems loading, but I'm unsure if it's an issue with SuccessFactors. After the login, there are some connection issues. We get some errors telling us that it cannot connect to the host."
"The data management part can be improved in terms of how you can manage data from the HR admin's or HR team's perspective. It has some limitations in the reporting part in terms of how you can update the data and fetch the data. SAP HCM comparatively has a lot of capabilities in terms of backup loads, data management, data changes, etc. You can do these things easily, which is not the case with SAP SuccessFactors. Data management should be simplified in SAP SuccessFactors in terms of accessing the data, reporting, and then manipulating the data."
"One area of improvement is the time taken to configure changes, such as taxation rules, which can take several months."
"They should work on a faster way of locating a proper documentation."
"The SAP SuccessFactors integration with old versions can improve. We are using an older finance module but we are having migration issues."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive and everyone complains about the price."
"I give the pricing a seven out of ten."
"The pricing is expensive and I would say it is below average for the value it provides based on the high cost."
"The solution is expensive."
"I know some of what we're currently paying. Most customers would say it's too high, but I don't have a comparison to know that."
"It is expensive."
"The price of the solution depends on too many factors to provide an estimate. However, the price of SAP SuccessFactors is competitive."
"Due to the way in which we purchased SuccessFactors as a module along with other SAP modules, we were able to procure it at a slightly better price than usual. I would rate their pricing 5/5 stars."
"It is not cheap, but it is reasonable."
"I have raised change requests for some modules within SuccessFactors. For example, when you're using Recruiting Management, there's a feature called Interview Central you can use to reach the candidates you're interviewing. I wanted to add a writing assessment when I select the competency on that platform. It varies from consultant to consultant, depending on what module they use."
"We don't utilize even half of the licenses because not everyone uses them. With SAP SuccessFactors, though, we're now conducting all our performance evaluations within the system, so I suppose we're making better use of those licenses. As for SAP for employee services and internal benefits processing, we do have licenses for those but don't utilize them."
"It could be cheaper."
"The solution is on the expensive side but is definitely worth the money."
"For SAP, the product is pricey, both CAPEX and the OPEX. It's something that could be improved."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Educational Organization
50%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ADP Workforce Now?
The licensing is on the pricer side, given that there aren't a lot of other tools out there that are applicable, we just decided to go ahead with ADP anyway. I would definitely recommend ADP to oth...
What needs improvement with ADP Workforce Now?
The complexity is the key challenge with a tool like ADP because it has all the bells and whistles and all the key features you can possibly think of. If it isn't there, there's always a third-part...
What are the biggest differences between Workday, Oracle Cloud and SAP SuccessFactors?
Differences between Workday, Oracle Cloud,w and SAP SuccessFactors:w Oracle: "simple interface and deep customization to suit the purpose." SAP: Multiple functionalities that increase process effi...
What is better, SAP HCM or SAP SuccessFactors?
When it comes to user experience, SuccessFactors is unquestionably superior, as it provides end users with a new experience and an advanced user interface. Additionally, the entire concept of SF is...
What do you like most about SAP SuccessFactors?
The tool is easy to use for performance management. We haven't experienced any issues with SAP SuccessFactors for performance management, which is great. However, since we're still learning to use ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SuccessFactors
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Lawrence and Schiller, The Children's Center, The Kansas City Royals
City of Cape Town, ADAMA Agricultural Solutions Ltd., TransAlta Corporation, Keolis, PT XL Axiata Tbk, National Football League (NFL), Plan International, Yoh, A Day & Zimmermann Company, China Talent Group (CTG TMO), Umicore S.A., Butterfield Bank, Skril
Find out what your peers are saying about ADP Workforce Now vs. SAP SuccessFactors and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
845,960 professionals have used our research since 2012.