SumTotal vs PDS Vista

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Our analysts compared SumTotal vs PDS Vista 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

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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PDS Vista is an integrated human capital management (HCM) system for streamlining HR functions, including hiring, onboarding, human resources, benefits, payroll and time and attendance tracking. It automates core processes, empowering organizations to minimize the time allocated to routine HCM and payroll tasks.

Highly customizable, it lets users tailor it to their needs. It also records crucial business strategy and decision-making data, giving employees and managers self-service access to payroll and workforce management features. Companies can opt for on-site or cloud deployment, ensuring flexibility during implementation.
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Windows
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Chromebook
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Android
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Mobile
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On-Premise
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
Email
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24/7 Live Support

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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  • Track KPIs: Drill into data and export it to a spreadsheet with a single click. Access over 100 pre-built tools, visualize data via comprehensive analytics and review insights through various charts and graphs, like scatter, line, column and pie charts.
  • Comply With ACA Regulations: Handle responsibilities related to ACA seamlessly. Use a comprehensive tracking tool to monitor the 30-hour mandate, ensure compliance with ACA requirements for health care plans, determine employee eligibility with automated tools and generate critical documents like 1095-Cs. 
  • Develop Reports: Simplify requesting business-centric data with the intuitive EasyAsk query tool, enabling users to select questions from a drop-down list. Enhance data generation with public or private lists of predefined questions. Choose which fields to include with a tool that supports synonyms (e.g., department or division) via a well-articulated dictionary. Access reports in multiple formats such as Excel, HTML and Word.
  • Reduce Manual Work: Automate approval processes with a workflow engine, streamline employee transactions like time-off requests, define conditions for multi-step operations and enable data filtering while maintaining transaction histories for auditing.. 
  • Go Mobile: Enhance workplace flexibility by providing remote access and editing capabilities to employees anywhere through the HRMS mobile app. Employees can view paycheck details, request time off and update data from their mobile devices. Equip managers to find employee contact info and approve job openings, vacation requests and raises.
  • Meet Compliance Regulations: Stay compliant with U.S. and Canadian laws via various reports and analytics, including OSHA, EEO, HIPAA, FMLA, IRCA, ADA, Vets-4212, AERS and ROE.
  • Support a Connected Business: Integrate with other systems for better business functioning. Configure data extracts using SQL (Structured Query Language) and effectively interface with any system. Retain absolute control over data, using various tools to process information automatically.
  • Maintain a Secure Environment: Control the information workforces see via robust security templates based on designated authorization and roles. 
  • Get Help When Needed: Product users consistently commend the support. Users can access support staff and educational resources like product videos and demos. Online tracking, technical assistance, user group membership and emergency support also ensure clients receive the assistance they need when they need it. 
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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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  • Human Resources: Boost employee management with onboarding, learning, safety and performance tools. Develop engagement, career planning and risk management programs. Create a historical data snapshot at any given point with the Point-in-Time builder tool.
  • Recruiting: Provide a wide range of recruiting functionalities by leveraging hiring tools. Track and capture recruitment data to maintain crucial applicant information. Enable HR teams to quickly analyze costs, manage applications, foster relationships with candidates and handle less paperwork overall.
  • Onboarding: Streamline onboarding by digitizing essential documents and providing access to a digital to-do list, a FAQ section and company content with simple configurations. Fast-track document signing through Adobe Sign or DocuSign enables new hires to electronically sign required HR, benefit and payroll forms before their first day, saving time and paper.
  • Workflow: Oversee staff transaction approvals with approval process automation and digital forms. Track transaction activities, reroute essential activities and information to participants and automate notifications. 
  • Reporting: Combine pre-formatted, parameter-driven HR data into a single report. Automate reports scheduling and create historical and metrics data to give managers an understanding of accepted company procedures. 
  • Analytics: Make smart strategic decisions and evaluate business data leveraging data. Seamlessly turn this data into valuable insights for better decision-making via the Vista Analytics component. 
  • Benefits Administration: Support various procedures and policies surrounding benefits administration. Offer a host of plans and coverage levels to the workforce. Take payroll deductions and premiums into account to automatically determine eligibility with the benefits administration tool. 
  • Payroll Management: Complete all payroll activities with various tools like time collection, tax maintenance service, auto-pay, reporting and a general ledger. Enable advanced functionalities, including retroactive pay, historical tracking and electronic documents and checks. Track and take action on data with an intuitive dashboard. 
  • Time and Attendance: Streamline attendance monitoring capabilities like time entry, reporting, payroll integration and multiple time collection methods. Gain advanced time tracking attributes with the cloud-based Vista Time tool. Offer geofencing and geolocation, a drag-and-drop schedule, message alerts, dashboards for employees and managers and accrued time forecasting. 
  • Self-Service Portal: Support HR activities and tasks with a range of company-wide and individual tools delivered through a comprehensive portal.
    • Provide a company directory, calendar events and company news.
    • Employees and managers can access information required to request, review and approve things like vacation or time entry.
    • Enable employees to manage their career goals and apply for internal job openings.
    • Includes a self-service tool to guide employees through benefits election and enrollment.
    • Effortlessly add links and relevant icons to content and implement manager self-service features in a protected manner, such as time approval, org charts and dashboards. 
  • Career Portal: Create a branded individualized career portal. Include filters, categories for ranking applicants, automation, and employee requisition attributes. Facilitate the entire application process for candidates with the job center tool and allow them to complete applications anytime from any location, leveraging a mobile interface. Supports multiple languages for enhanced self-service.
  • Mobile App: Leverage a mobile app on Android and Apple devices to remotely access MyVista, including the mobile-optimized Vista Onboarding and Vista Recruiting Career Center. 
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Product Ranking

#23

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HR Management Software

#65

among all
HR Management Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

SumTotal
PDS Vista
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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 69 75 84 98 69 84 83 64 91 78 78 93 48 62 45 0 25 50 75 100
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Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

SumTotal
PDS Vista
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Availability And Scalability Deployment Options Integrations And Extensibility Mobile Platform Security 100 100 57 87 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 67 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.

84%
of users recommend this product

PDS Vista has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 84% when considering 67 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

3.2 (39)
4.3 (22)
2.7 (7)
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4.5 (16)
4.0 (56)
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2.9 (30)
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Awards

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SelectHub research analysts have evaluated PDS Vista and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Deployment Options, Professional Services and Maintenance and User Support.

Deployment Options Award
Professional Services and Maintenance Award
User Support Award

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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Comprehensive Suite: PDS Vista offers a wide range of modules, covering everything from core HR functions like payroll and benefits administration to talent management, recruiting, and learning management. This comprehensive suite eliminates the need for multiple, disparate systems, streamlining HR processes and data management.
Customizable and Scalable: The system's flexibility allows organizations to tailor it to their specific needs and industry regulations. Whether it's adding custom fields, workflows, or reports, PDS Vista adapts to evolving requirements and growth, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes.
User-Friendly Interface: PDS Vista is known for its intuitive interface, which reduces the learning curve for HR professionals and employees alike. The system's ease of use promotes user adoption and engagement, leading to more efficient HR operations.
Reporting and Analytics: Robust reporting tools provide HR teams with valuable insights into workforce data, enabling data-driven decision-making. From standard reports to ad-hoc queries and dashboards, PDS Vista empowers HR to analyze trends, identify areas for improvement, and measure the impact of HR initiatives.
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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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Clunky Interface: Navigating PDS Vista can feel cumbersome and outdated, often requiring multiple clicks to accomplish simple tasks. The interface appears visually dated, which may deter users accustomed to modern software design.
Reporting Limitations: Generating custom reports or extracting specific data sets can be challenging due to the system's rigid structure. Users often find themselves exporting data to external programs for further analysis, creating an extra step in the workflow.
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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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PDS Vista appears to be most suitable for mid-sized to large companies with complex organizational structures and a high volume of employees. The software's ability to handle intricate HR processes, such as onboarding, benefits administration, and payroll, makes it a valuable tool for organizations with diverse needs. Additionally, PDS Vista's scalability ensures that it can grow alongside a company, accommodating increasing demands as the workforce expands. Smaller businesses with simpler HR requirements might find the software's extensive features to be overwhelming and may prefer a more streamlined solution. One of the key strengths of PDS Vista is its comprehensive suite of features. Users appreciate the software's ability to manage various HR functions, from recruitment and onboarding to performance management and employee development. This all-in-one approach eliminates the need for multiple HR systems, streamlining processes and reducing administrative burdens. For instance, the performance management module allows managers to set goals, track progress, and provide feedback, fostering a culture of continuous improvement. However, some users have noted that the extensive features can lead to a steeper learning curve, requiring dedicated training and support to fully utilize the software's capabilities. When compared to competitors like Workday and SAP SuccessFactors, PDS Vista stands out for its robust reporting and analytics capabilities. Users can generate custom reports to gain insights into workforce trends, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions. The software's ability to track key HR metrics, such as employee turnover and engagement levels, enables organizations to proactively address potential issues and optimize their HR strategies. While Workday and SAP SuccessFactors also offer reporting features, PDS Vista's user-friendly interface and customizable dashboards make it easier for HR professionals to access and interpret data.

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