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SAP SuccessFactors HCM vs Workday comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 16, 2025

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

SAP SuccessFactors HCM
Ranking in Cloud HCM
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Workday
Ranking in Cloud HCM
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
58
Ranking in other categories
Benefits Administration (1st), Talent Management (2nd), Talent Acquisition (3rd)
 

Featured Reviews

MS
Enterprise Architecht at RS Group plc
Increased onboarding efficiency and enhanced user engagement with comprehensive performance management
All features have been valuable, particularly as we are investigating whether to connect it with Talent Management. Currently, we have a solution with Degree, and we are considering moving it to SAP Talent Management. This would provide a single location to house everything, allowing all employees to use the same platform rather than two separate platforms. This also reduces integration expense and management costs. Different stakeholders benefit from various aspects of the interface and dashboards. Managers can examine their team members' skill sets. From an employee perspective, they can track their progress and match it with their objectives and goals. From an organizational perspective, we can maintain a comprehensive view when considering upskilling or other resource-related decisions. The dashboards are highly effective. The employee experience management tools have had a very positive impact on employee satisfaction and well-being within our organization.
Eslam Abo Elnaga - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior people and systems analyst at B_labs & Mylo
Has improved HR process efficiency through intuitive workflows and responsive support
There is something that could be improved in Workday, specifically in the time tracking module. While I am not working on Workday now, I was a regional HRIS working for Egypt, Malta, India, and China. I mention these countries to relate to high population countries and companies. In our company, we use assigned work schedules for our teams. Because we work with the time tracking module, we need to assign shifts. In the manufacturing industry, we might need to change shifts every day or week. Manufacturing teams are huge, approximately 50 to 200 people in one team. If this team has one leader, the leader needs to assign a work schedule for each person individually. While there is mass upload functionality where we can load shifts for all people or specific groups, we need to select multiple people and assign them to a schedule from the interface itself. I have requested this functionality many times. When extracting business processes awaiting actions report, I can select different processes in one box, hit okay, and the report comes up. However, the same functionality does not work for work schedule assigning. If implemented, it would help many people in companies with high populations and big teams.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The SAP SuccessFactors HCM tool is a fantastic platform to work with, offering end-to-end employee lifecycle coverage."
"The employee experience management tools have had a very positive impact on employee satisfaction and well-being within our organization."
"SAP SuccessFactors HCM has positively impacted my customer's environment by ensuring they are digital; we promote using DocuSign for document signing and ensuring effective onboarding, and post-implementation we provide hyper-care and digital adoption reports after six months or a year to show how much more paperless and workflow-enabled their organization has become after SAP SuccessFactors HCM implementation."
"Using SAP SuccessFactors HCM analytics and insights helps my customers in data-driven decision-making."
"The feature I appreciate the most about this solution is the integration with SAP S/4HANA system."
"It helps the users to enroll for the benefits automatically and update their life events without the involvement of HR individuals or back-office staff. It enables a person to take action on their own. It reduces the administrative burden on HR and puts the ownership on the person that is going through the life event, whether it is having a child, taking a leave of absence, or something else. There are easy ways to integrate Workday with your common benefits. At least in the USA, it can be integrated with common benefits providers such as Fidelity, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Aetna, etc. It has got a connector that is able to connect with the vendor or the third party to which you are trying to send the eligibility file. It basically allows us to automate or set up the tool, and the integration with the provider is a lot quicker than competing tools. When it comes to reporting on just eligibility and SLSA, it is a lot more user-intuitive. Depending on the purpose of what you are doing, you can grant security rights or roles, for example, you can control whether someone is a benefits administrator doing an independent audit. Workday makes it very easy to do that. It significantly simplifies the reporting process."
"The solution is extremely stable."
"The most valuable feature of Workday is the ease of use which is overall user-friendly."
"I like that it's easy to use and flexible."
"I would say that we have definitely seen a return on investment."
"We use the platform for tasks, including applying for leaves, communication, and adhering to our organization's policies through efficient goal setting and reviews."
"The platform itself is very robust and I generally like the reporting and analytics capability."
"The most helpful Workday features for our HR processes were in HCM, particularly in areas like talent, compensation, benefits, and learning."
 

Cons

"The pricing of the solution is very high concerning pricing, setup cost, and licensing of this tool."
"The main area for improvement would be implementing a better pricing model. It is expensive, and with people discussing Workday more frequently, SAP needs to compete by becoming more free-flowing and dynamic compared to traditional SAP systems."
"It is very difficult to purchase SAP SuccessFactors HCM over here for smaller or medium-sized organizations, mainly because of the price."
"The SAP SuccessFactors HCM has room for improvement in terms of product development nimbleness. Additionally, the speed of the application platform occasionally reduces, primarily due to data center related issues."
"If you want to add more features to your subscription, Workday becomes expensive."
"There is so much information floating around Workday that it becomes overwhelming to digest all of it."
"Workday does not support many Korean language features. So, it will be great if they have some development on the Korean language side – then it will be really powerful in our market."
"Workday would be improved with more API connectors."
"The navigation of Workday is good but could be better."
"We would like to see improvement in the mobile app variant of this solution. The time sheet entry and approval, and the geo-tagging features all need to have their functionality updated, in order to be comparable with other products on the market."
"Workday could improve its custom reporting for beginners."
"Setting up reports can be a bit tricky."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"I rate the product’s pricing a ten out of ten."
"The pricing is good from an HR perspective, although management gets upset after spending $500,000 a year, every year."
"I need to pay for a license. It is expensive."
"Workday is moderately priced - I'd rate its pricing three out of five."
"It is on a yearly basis."
"Workday is an expensive solution."
"The pricing for this solution is fairly high. It is not affordable for small and mid-sized companies."
"With a bigger budget, I would recommend SAP."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise42
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP SuccessFactors HCM?
The pricing of SAP SuccessFactors HCM is a bit expensive; its HCM without SuccessFactors was reasonable when it was on-site, but SuccessFactors is very expensive. On-premise HCM was good regarding ...
What needs improvement with SAP SuccessFactors HCM?
Pakistani policies need most of the customizations for SAP SuccessFactors HCM. I don't think Pakistanis should improve; our systems are not right. We should improve, not SAP. There should be some a...
What is your primary use case for SAP SuccessFactors HCM?
I researched SAP SuccessFactors HCM products on your website. I was the project manager for the implementation of SAP SuccessFactors HCM in my university. The implementation partner was Telemarks. ...
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 do you like most about Workday?
I like its UI and UX. When we were using Oracle or SAP, the UI/UX wasn't very user-friendly for the employees.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Workday?
If you go with the launch implementation approach, the solution is generally not very expensive. If you want to add more features to your subscription, Workday becomes expensive. The solution is fl...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
AAA, Allied Global, Avago Technologies Limited, Aviva, Cardinal Health, CareFusion, Chiquita Brands International, Equifax, Flextronics, HP, Life Time Fitness, McKee Foods, MGM Resorts International, Sanofi, ServiceSource International, Symantec, TripAdvisor, Yahoo!
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP SuccessFactors HCM vs. Workday and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.