UKG Pro vs Criterion HCM
Last Updated:Our analysts compared UKG Pro vs Criterion 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.
Product Basics
UKG Pro is a cloud-based suite designed to streamline global human capital management. It integrates essential features such as payroll, benefits administration, recruiting, onboarding and learning management.
UKG Pro stands out in key areas like document management, payroll management, professional services and maintenance, earning it a spot as one of our top five HR products.
UKG Pro incorporates advanced technologies like machine learning, AI, predictive analytics and business intelligence. These innovations optimize performance, automate tasks, enhance workforce understanding and foster employee retention.
Notably, its advanced scheduling feature prioritizes workforce well-being by ensuring optimal staffing levels and controlling labor costs.
Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a pivotal role in enhancing HR capabilities through schedule optimization, statistical forecasting, retention prediction, employee sentiment analysis and candidate matching.
Starting at $100 per user per month, UKG Pro offers a per-user pricing model with a free trial available upon request. It features 24/7 live support, empowering employees through self-service portals, seamless integrations with payroll and benefits systems, and analytics capabilities for data-driven decision-making.
As UKG Dimension is being sunsetted, some of its functionality is moving to the main system.
Users appreciate UKG Pro's seamless integration with leading payroll, timekeeping, and benefits systems. However, some find the software's interface unintuitive and report limitations in its reporting functionality.
Product Assistance
Product Insights
- Gain Data Visibility: Track employee and HR data across local and international levels within one unified platform.
- Advance Employee Insights: Get a deep understanding of employees through AI-driven predictions, suggested actions and sentiment analysis. This ability enhances performance, identifies concerns, facilitates effective hiring and retains top talent.
- Strengthen Data-Driven Decision Making: Utilize predictive analytics to analyze data comprehensively, optimizing decisions related to recruitment, promotions and retention.
- Save Money: Reduce turnover costs by proactively improving employee engagement and identifying risk factors.
- Add Flexibility: Provide secure access to pay information and employee details through the mobile app. The system uses touch and face ID for security, offers push notifications and syncs with the platform in real time so data is always up to date.
- Offer Better Employee Support: Save time by automating frequent internal service processes and giving employees access to help material so they can find answers on their own.
- Boost Knowledge Retention: Keep your company know-how sharp by letting employees share their expertise through learning courses and newsfeeds. This capability ensures knowledge continuity even when team members change roles or retire.
- Enhance Candidate Experience: Simplify and personalize the recruiting process, ensuring candidates have a positive interaction from the outset. Improve the likelihood of attracting and retaining top talent to reduce application abandonment rates.
- Improve Employee Onboarding: Integrate new hires seamlessly with robust onboarding technology. This personalized approach fosters early engagement and connectivity, setting the stage for long-term success and retention.
- Ensure Effective Performance Management: Enable continuous performance evaluation and coaching. By leveraging data analytics, managers can identify growth opportunities and enhance employee development, leading to more meaningful career trajectories and increased engagement.
- Reduces Errors: Increases the security, accuracy and speed of employee and staff data. These increased precisions make it easier to make smart decisions based on actionable insights.
- Saves Time and Money: Automates and streamlines HCM and talent management processes such as compensation, benefits, tracking applicants and performance management. This increased efficiency saves administrators time and sanity. By eliminating manual data entry, it improves the workflow, making it easier for employees to use the platform. Through the system, it’s possible to have more control over the cost of benefits. The platform is also scalable so users can accommodate sudden company growth.
- More Informed Management: Provides reporting, data manageable and other tools that allow leadership to make more informed decisions. From there, it’s easier to communicate with staff to ensure everyone is on the same page.
- Better Talent Lifecycle: Helps with the entire process including acquisitions, screening, setting up interviews, onboarding, performance management and succession management and more.
- Payroll: Incorporate a scalable, configurable engine for accurate, streamlined pay processing. This feature also includes:
- Role-based access to ensure data security.
- Prebuilt tax compliance, automatic tax updates every quarter and GIS-powered search to ensure accurate taxes based on employee location.
- End-of-year reporting tools, including a task checklist.
- Pay modeling calculator, enabling employees to calculate information on their own.
- Integration support for global payroll providers and TurboTax.
- Dashboards showing alerts and metrics.
- Benefits: Provide help videos and documentation to assist employees. Key components include plan recommendations and side-by-side comparisons, process automation, search filters, compliance reporting, transaction records, admin tools and connectors to hundreds of carriers.
- Workforce Scheduling: Ensure effective shift planning and workforce management with advanced scheduling capabilities previously found in UKG Dimensions.
- Workforce Planning and Optimization: Make strategic planning and resource allocation a breeze. UKG Pro now packs the workforce planning and optimization tools from UKG Dimensions.
- Time and Attendance: Optimize timekeeping and absence management with UKG Pro's enhanced time tracking and attendance features, which are now integrated from UKG Dimensions.
- Learning: Aid employee learning and development by providing:
- On-demand, mobile access to training materials in multiple languages.
- Gamification, rewards and social tools foster engagement.
- Blended learning, a drag-and-drop interface for content creation and a course marketplace with more than 3,000 courses.
- Channels for employees to capture and share knowledge with coworkers.
- Recruiting: Make talent sourcing and acquisition for recruiting teams and candidates easier and more efficient.
- Recruiters: Dashboards show candidate and opportunity status and AI scoring reveals applicants that are the best match. Multi-language, multiple job board postings and screening questions also included.
- Candidates: Applicants can submit their LinkedIn profile, receive open position suggestions based on basic information and provide an in-depth picture of themselves by sharing details like motivators and behaviors.
- Onboarding: Access a dashboard that has a timeline for tasks they need to complete, job-related videos and training material, and required forms, which they can fill out electronically. They can also create goals and connect with teammates.
- InTouch DX: Give managers and employees flexible, real-time access for time and attendance processes. This timeclock device is designed for an hourly, mobile workforce.
- Features include configuration options, real-time data, a touchscreen, native intelligence capabilities and multiple integrated readers.
- Managers can track employee information, confirm transactions and ensure schedules are followed.
- Employees can request PTO, view time cards and schedules, punch in and out, receive push notifications, and receive suggested actions based on upcoming tasks.
- BI Reporting: Display real-time data in a clear, user-friendly format, empowering managers and executives to monitor and analyze KPIs. They offer both prebuilt and customizable reports. It provides insights for:
- Human resource metrics like headcount based on local and global demographics.
- Benefit plan costs and employee participation.
- Financial information like overtime cost, pay equity and payroll totals.
- ACA filing data, including risks, deadlines and eligibility.
- Recruiting costs and sourcing data.
- Employee performance, retention estimators and 9-box assessment.
- Pay factors ranging from expenses and revenue to total compensation at the global level.
- Survey data, including participation, engagement details, historical trends and metric performance based on industry benchmarks.
- Compensation Management: Reward employees based on achievements through salary planning, customizable compensation plans, merit rules and analytics. It supports targets based on units, flat amounts or a percentage of base pay.
- Performance Management: Drive employee engagement and growth while giving managers insight into individual and team performance. Features include tracking dashboards, automated reviews, goals, achievement ratings and real-time feedback.
- Surveys: Gather employee sentiment using AI, natural language processing and machine learning. They offer a question library, templates, mobile-friendly design, custom dashboards and curated improvement suggestions.
- File Management: Organize and manage employee documents with a central repository along with role and type-based permissions. Templates automatically fill in employee details, and a compliance assist feature ensures global adherence.
- Succession Management: Develop a talent pipeline, ensuring your employees are prepared to take on new roles. There are plans for any level in the company, alongside talent evaluation, predictive analytics, reporting and personal development tools.
- Integration Hub: Support developers in enhancing the system through integrations by offering:
- A collaborative community, a developer portal and APIs.
- Sample code and instructional articles to speed up deployment.
- A marketplace of product and service partners.
- UKG Talk: Facilitate engagement and inclusivity within your organization by supporting various communication methods like:
- Company-wide announcements.
- Direct messaging.
- Team group chats.
- Employee feedback and participation through celebrations, idea collection and achievement recognition.
- Provide actionable insights by measuring communication impact and engagement metrics.
- Talent Management: Manages talent acquisition, onboarding, employee record creation and sends messages through one central database. It targets different points in the employee life cycle to aid in tracking applications, onboarding, performance management, learning management, communication, increasing engagement and more.
- Recruiting: Helps identify candidates, sort applications, screen potential hires, track interview processes and manage references, facilitate job postings and background checks. It also provides an online career portal to increase the number and variety of candidates. Through this, recruiters cut down on time and effort.
- Learning Management: Provides courses for employees and sends notifications for pass or fail status. It also manages certifications allowing managers to track progress and ensure compliance.
- Performance Management: Users can create scales to rate performance, set time periods for review, assign competencies and use standard or customized templates that allow for feedback from various different employees.
- HR: Manages attendance, benefits, compliance, communications, enrollments, payroll, and other HR tasks with one complete database. It facilitates strategic planning, streamlining workflows and other important administrative tasks. All data and important information is centralized, organized and more easily accessible.
- Data Management: Administrators have data for contacting employees, compensation, complying with the Equal Employment Opportunity, employment status, performance reviews and more. It automatically sends essential documents and reports through fax, email or online.
- Open Enrollment: Allows all staff to select and sign up for benefits. Provides email benefit letters, tracking and automatically transmits deduction to payroll systems to reduce errors.
- Self-Service for Staff: Lets employees track time, manage their PTO, get information on their payroll and more. Managers can approve PTO, write up employees and do reviews for performance. All staff can post and share information to increase collaboration and engagement.
- Mobile Capabilities: Enables workers to enter and track their time on the go. With a secure login, it tracks worker details, enters start and finish times, manages vacation and can register employee location.
- Reporting: Pulls information on emergency contacts, worker birthdays, training costs, overages, compensation planning and EEO details. The report is printable and can be customized for other needs.
- Time and Attendance: Provides scheduling, labor tracking and other attendance features for on-site or remote staff. It has one-click integration with payroll systems and provides verification for staffing with badge, biometric and PIN options.
- Payroll: Processes payment and deals with filing taxes, calculates payroll and integrates with time clocks. Administrators can print checks, download ACH files, file taxes electronically, track expense and entry information en masse into the system. In terms of taxes, it calculates local, state and federal taxes and aids in returns.
Product Ranking
#2
among all
HR Management Software
#624
among all
HR Management Software
Analyst Rating Summary
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User Sentiment Summary
4051 reviews
14 reviews
UKG Pro has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 86% when considering 4051 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.
Criterion HCM has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 89% when considering 14 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.
Awards
SelectHub research analysts have evaluated UKG Pro and concluded it deserves the award for the Best Overall HR Management Software available today and earns best-in-class honors for Document Management, Payroll Management, Succession Management and Professional Services and Maintenance.
Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews
UKG Pro is a cloud-based platform that’s designed to streamline global human capital management across all industries. It brings together key functions like payroll, benefits, recruiting, onboarding and learning management in one place.Some standout features include an advanced scheduling tool that helps balance staffing levels and control labor costs. AI is a big player here, enhancing HR tasks with things like schedule optimization, retention forecasting, sentiment analysis and candidate matching.From what I've seen through the demo, the mobile app lays everything out in a simple, direct way with menu options like time off, pay, HR help, benefits, goals, notes and learning. Under learning, there's a variety of helpful courses, including security awareness, conflict management and mindfulness training.Completing requests seems quick and straightforward. Click HR Help and find requests to ask for a shift change, PTO or travel expense.Manage assignments by viewing "To-Dos," including what's waiting for completion and what's crossed off your list already. Plan effectively with a headcount under metrics, showing who is on leave or on the clock in real time.On the subject of planning ahead, UKG Pro scores a perfect 100 under succession management, with talent matrix, talent pool and talent insight functionalities.Document management is also a top feature, earning 100 for its capabilities. It includes access controls, document search, automatic tax document generation and the creation of employee handbooks and policies.Managing performance can be challenging, especially with a large team. It's important to ensure that everyone feels valued, but time constraints can make this difficult. UKG Pro’s talent dashboard helps by highlighting top performers and potential flight risks, making it easier for you to address issues and make necessary adjustments.One thing I really liked was that there's a page for work-life balance with improvement ideas, including resisting multitasking, expanding team goals and introducing flexible work schedules. This helps employees feel valued, which ultimately fosters more productivity and job retention.Additionally, I thought it was admirable there’s a "Giving" option on the platform for creating employee giving programs and tracking donations. This is a great source for team building, increasing engagement and building a more positive work environment.Using the live chat, I selected customer support and then UKG Pro, which led me to FAQs. After hitting thumbs down to request a representative, I asked for an in-depth demo. The chatbot offered alternative solutions or the option to end the chat. When starting a new chat, the previous conversation was visible, but there was no option to start a new chat from scratch.Pricing starts at $100 per user per month with a per-user model, and you can request a free trial.
Screenshots
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