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Paylocity vs SAP SuccessFactors comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Paylocity
Ranking in Talent Management
43rd
Ranking in Cloud HCM
30th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Benefits Administration (31st)
SAP SuccessFactors
Ranking in Talent Management
1st
Ranking in Cloud HCM
2nd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Talent Acquisition (2nd), Global Payroll (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Cloud HCM category, the mindshare of Paylocity is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP SuccessFactors is 8.7%, down from 19.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud HCM Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAP SuccessFactors8.7%
Paylocity0.9%
Other90.4%
Cloud HCM
 

Featured Reviews

RP
HR Specialist with 201-500 employees
Has a comprehensive and intuitive knowledge base, and time saving payroll administration features
Paylocity is not great at communicating customer support related issues such as account manager changes. They claim to provide concierge level of support, but it has not been great. Some of the Paylocity systems are limited. For example, I can't create custom offer letters. I can create generic offer letters with a logo, but I can't edit them or create sections. It does not read like a MS Word document and needs to be more robust. At present, I can't send attachments, add hyperlinks to videos, or embed questions in videos. Also, the number of notifications regarding benefits needs to be increased so that new employees get reminders more than once.
SS
Assistant Manager at Kashiv Biosciences
HR has gained clear analytics for attrition, goals, and appraisals and manages talent efficiently
SAP SuccessFactors has a low error rate. We had many ad hoc reports that we needed to generate, and it was very easy to do so in SAP SuccessFactors. We also created many in-house reports according to our specific requirements with the help of this tool, which was a really big game changer for us. We did not depend on advanced Excel in those cases. We generated a lot of detailed reports whenever we needed them during emergency cases or board meetings. A lot of usefulness and time were saved in those cases. I will also mention that we conducted a comparative study for some recruitment cases. We had a recruitment model where we were looking for a very niche profile. Since the job profile was really different and rare, we had to depend on analytics to understand and shortlist from a large pool of candidates that we already had in our database. Analytics was really helpful in this situation.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"My favorite feature is payroll administration, which has been awesome. You can import as many batches as you want to and run them synchronously or asynchronously. Since I work in a finance company with commissions, bonuses, and distribution, it's great to be able to do that. I can upload multiple things. Also, I can upload different sets of commission lists into the same payroll batch and upload the time card imports and overtime imports if I want to and separate them. I can create multiple batches around an individual or one one set of audit backing, and then I can approve them or leave them open. The way that Paylocity has set up their payroll system is really good and saves us a lot of time. It's very specific and helpful."
"We can design a quick and dirty solution or very complex services, we can manage small enterprise projects (in our experience 150 users) as the big organization (in our experience 40000 users), all with the same solution, and this is a big saving of time, costs, and team usage optimization."
"They have succeeded in sustaining a powerful system supporting their philosophy."
"As for the product itself, I like its flexibility and configurability."
"The main reason for switching into SAP SuccessFactors was for its brand, ease-of-use, predefined solution per business scenario, and agility."
"From a general perspective, I think that it's very satisfactory to have a full solution that can cover everything in Human Resources Management."
"It has a global database, and it is globally accessible with the integration with the management."
"This solution provides up with an easy way to on/off-board staff, as well as actioning internal transfers."
"Workday was evaluated with SuccessFactors, but Workday was not able to accommodate some of our customizations, so the company decided to go with SuccessFactors, which gives you more configuration options."
 

Cons

"Some of the Paylocity systems are limited. For example, I can't create custom offer letters. I can create generic offer letters with a logo, but I can't edit them or create sections. It does not read like a MS Word document and needs to be more robust."
"User-friendliness is a major concern for me, which affects my overall experience."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"There are some limiting aspects to this product."
"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."
"Integration between HCM modules can be extended to incorporate all data."
"The price could be lower."
"Configuration transportation functionality is not available in SuccessFactor."
"Some of the screens aren't that user-friendly, older employees especially have a hard time with it. They have some problems with it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It could be cheaper."
"I don't want to comment on the license cost, to be honest. It could be about $1,000 approximately per customer. However, it's very flexible in terms of the licensing costs depending on the volume and depending on the deal of installation."
"Probably, it is one of the priciest products, and is very costly to put up and maintain but because it is a good solution end to end, people take it."
"For SAP, the product is pricey, both CAPEX and the OPEX. It's something that could be improved."
"The pricing for SuccessFactors is ridiculously high, and there are costs in addition to the license fee for some features."
"We have a yearly license. There are no additional costs."
"It is not cheap, but it is reasonable."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
23%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Comms Service Provider
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise70
 

Questions from the Community

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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...
How easy is to maintain Workday, Oracle Cloud, and SuccessFactors?
I implemented Workday in 2024 and without having previous Workday experience, it was very challenging. I spent most of 2025 putting out fires and cleaning up the business processes that came with l...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
SuccessFactors
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

POLYWOOD, University Clinical Healthcare, New England Authentic Eats, Revere Plastics, Stonewall Kitchen, Circuit Transit, Powerhouse Retail, Mountainside Fitness, Crafton Tull, Noble House Hotels & Resorts, Gurley Leep Automotive, Taco Johns
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 Workday, SAP, Deel and others in Cloud HCM. Updated: August 2026.
908,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.