SumTotal vs Workday Talent Management

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Our analysts compared SumTotal vs Workday Talent Management based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Talent Management Systems, 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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Workday is an HCM and talent management solution. It has a wide range of capabilities including accounting, auditing, finance, HR and workforce management and serves mainly medium and large enterprise clients. Users have access to tools that help with analyzing data, creating equitable hiring practices, hiring, skill-building, performance reviews, recruiting, succession planning and more. It also supports an e-learning element to build competency development right into the preexisting workflow. Overall, it serves around 7,700 customers globally, including acquisitions.
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$5/User, Monthly
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$99/User, Monthly
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Product Assistance

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Live Online
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Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
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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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  • Better Career Building: Employees experience greater investment from employers and get the chance to seek out opportunities. This includes mentorships, extra projects, and strengthening connections to ensure each worker is living their best life.
  • More Complete Workforce: Ensures there are no gaps in competencies or long lapses during turnover or vacancies created by promotion. The strong recruiting tools make it easy to screen, seek out, interview, hire and onboard candidates. Comprehensive skill analysis shows where the company needs more specialized talent.
  • Increased Collaboration: Provides an open line of communication for workers with a feedback tool and regular check-ins. This lets users improve and get into the habit of thinking critically and helping their peers.
  • Saves Time and Money: Eliminates multiple integration fixes by combining compensation, learning, recruiting, talent management and workforce management. It allows staff to align personal goals with business-wide and gives them visibility into where their strengths and weaknesses lie.
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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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  • Talent Management and Skill Development: Grants a greater understanding of skill gaps and development to aid in recruiting and staffing. Helps elucidate and aid in talent management with calibration, candidate profiles, continuous feedback, embedded reporting, goal management, professional developments, reviews, surveys, and more. In addition to examining external candidates, it provides a breakdown in competencies to understand how to best utilize current staff.
  • Recruiting and Talent Acquisition: Manages the employee life cycle from start to finish. It has tools for job creation, recruiting and onboarding to guide employees through the entire process. The platform provides communication for the hiring team, high-volume efficiency, proactive talent sourcing, management for interviews, security and compliance and a space where users can see job openings and applicants. Furthermore, it builds a staffing pipeline and automates workflow to make the process much easier. A recruiting hub allows people to see candidates, assessment, tasks and referral candidates. Overall, it helps create an efficient hiring process for the whole company.
  • Integrations: Integrates with Google, Microsoft Teams, Outlook and Slack.
  • Professional Development: Provides professional reviews and development. Managers can make decisions based on skill sets. Employees can ensure their personal goals are aligned with broader company objectives. Some of its elements include career planning, goal management, internal mobility, performance enhancement and visibility with talent.
  • Customization: Comes with multiple personalization options for teams that have special needs or a more complex workflow.
  • E-Learning: Learners get access to rich, interactive content to help with competency development and engagement within the flow of a day’s work. Content is curated for individuals and personalized for better engagement. It’s within the program, so users don’t have to navigate a complicated system to access it. Leaders can create learning campaigns to fill skill-gaps and encourage career development and see how it impacts training. It also lets users create course catalogs and learning plans, store content and stream content.
  • Assessments: Hosts interactive video with multiple-choice questions and text answers to users so they can remember what they’re learning. It comes with accessibility elements by transcribing videos, in-video search and more.
  • Diversity: Enables policies to ensure equity across demographics and aims to make everyone feel welcome in the workplace. It measures hiring and promotions and assigns scores on an index so leadership can have a frank analysis of how diversity plays into the organization and where they can improve. Users can also create opportunities to increase equity, develop a more varied background of leaders, put plans into action, measure the effectiveness, remove bias from hiring and create a company culture that appreciates the unique strengths of people from all walks of life.
  • Reporting and Analytics: Centralizes all data including benchmarks, budgets, finance and workforce calculations, planning data, legacy app analysis, third-party app information, plans and more. Teams can examine and pull reports with the Discovery Boards feature and use augmented analytics to get at answering the tough questions. The platform helps with this analysis with features such as graph processing, machine learning and pattern detection.
  • Other Services: In addition to talent management, the solution also offers accounting, auditing, automation for professional services, cash and asset management, enterprise planning, enterprise planning, spending management, payroll, product extensions and workforce management.
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Product Ranking

#62

among all
Talent Management Systems

#2

among all
Talent Management Systems

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Employee Communication
Learning Management
Onboarding
Performance Management
Succession Planning
AI-based Capabilities
Learning Management
Onboarding
Performance Management
Platform Capabilities

Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

SumTotal
Workday Talent Management
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AI-based Capabilities Compensation Management Dashboard And Reporting Employee Communication Learning Management Mobile Capabilities Onboarding Performance Management Recruitment And Applicant Tracking Succession Planning 93 40 0 100 100 0 100 100 96 100 100 70 0 75 100 0 100 100 94 100 0 25 50 75 100
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User Sentiment Summary

Fair User Sentiment 132 reviews
Great User Sentiment 2053 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.

83%
of users recommend this product

Workday Talent Management has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 83% when considering 2053 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

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4.8 (14)
3.2 (39)
4.0 (1032)
2.7 (7)
4.4 (671)
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2.9 (30)
4.1 (329)

Awards

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SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Workday Talent Management and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Platform Capabilities.

Platform Capabilities 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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Customer Service: Over 90% of users who mentioned the support said the customer service was friendly, efficient and exceedingly helpful.
Good Functionality: Users were happy with the features in over 90% of reviews that mentioned them.
PTO/Leave Management: More than 90% of all users who discussed the leave management aspect were pleased with the feature.
Price: Reviewers felt that it was appropriately priced in over 80% of the reviews that mentioned it.
Integration: Over 80% of users who discussed integration felt it had excellent interoperability.
Recruiting: Users who discussed the recruiting features were satisfied in over 70% of reviews that covered it.
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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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Difficult Learning Curve: Just under 90% of all users who mentioned the implementation process said that it took too long to learn and they wanted more training.
Not Intuitive: More than 50% of users who discussed the useability said it was hard to navigate and has confusing design elements.
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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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Workday is a talent management, HCM and workday management app. Reviewers loved the friendly customer service and felt the PTO feature worked well when it came to leave management. Reviewers also felt they got good value for their money in the majority of reviews that talked about price. Integrations were praised as being functional. That included the API, compliance service and third-party apps in general. Last, users especially like the recruiting tools that helped with acclimating new hires, candidate selection and gave insight into the organizational structure. Reviewers had the biggest issues with its ease of use. While there was a significant minority who felt that it worked just fine, others struggled with the design and navigation. Several said it was, “clunky.” In particular, users had issues with the way it handled permissions and access. They described it as a difficult process to see all the information they needed. The other big issue was the learning curve. Many described it as over-complicated and said it updated too frequently. They felt it was difficult to learn. Workday is a good option for medium to large enterprises. It may be too complicated and expensive for small business owners. It’s especially helpful in recruiting and employee data management for companies that need greater functionality.

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