Top 9 Workday HCM Alternatives & Competitors

Human capital management (HCM) is the process of recruiting, training, managing, and retaining skilled employees, a necessity for any business that wants to grow. Workday HCM is one of the best HCM systems for scaling businesses, as it offers employee performance tools such as coaching, workforce management, and reporting, plus benefits administration, payroll, and HR compliance features.

The top Workday HCM alternatives provide tools for recruiting, onboarding, and training new employees, as well as time and attendance, payroll, benefits administration, and reporting features that allow you to analyze employee and company performance. 

The nine best Workday alternatives are:

• BambooHR: Best Overall
• monday.com: Best for Project Management
• ADP Workforce Now: Best for Benefits Administration
• OnPay: Best for Small Businesses
• Greenhouse: Best Applicant Tracking System
• Sogolytics: Best for Employee Surveys
• Freshteam: Best for Recruitment
• Sage HR: Best for Scheduling
• Rippling: Best for Payroll

Workday HCM vs. Alternatives Comparison Table

9 Best Workday HCM Alternatives

The best competitors of Workday HCM offer services that can grow alongside your company, including recruitment, onboarding, employee benefits, payroll processing, and analytics. Businesses looking for Workday alternatives need to look no further than our roundup of the nine best Workday HCM alternatives to choose the HCM system that fits their needs. 

BambooHR: Best Overall

Benefits

BambooHR is the best overall Workday competitor, as it offers everything a growing business needs, including:

• Reporting
• Onboarding
• Offboarding
• Time-off management
• Payroll
• Benefits administration
• Performance management
• Time-tracking tools

pros

• The website features comparison information with similar software
• Volume discounts are available as your team grows
• Integrates with 150+ apps

cons

• No transparent pricing
• Payroll and benefits administration are only available for US-based employees

Prices and Plans

BambooHR offers a 7-day free trial, after which you must call sales to get pricing for either of its two plans. BambooHR charges per employee per month for companies with over 20 employees, or a flat monthly fee for businesses with 20 employees or less. Nonprofits can receive a 15% discount. 

Essentials: This plan includes employee records, reporting, time-off management, a mobile app, an employee portal, and email support.

Advantage: This plan includes everything in the Essentials plan, plus onboarding, an applicant tracking system, employee surveys, customizable reports, phone and chat support, and open API (the ability to integrate with other apps). 

Add-ons

Payroll: Includes direct deposit and federal and state tax filing.

Benefits Administration: Supports medical, dental, vision, retirement, life, and disability insurance, as well as Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs).

Performance Management: Includes employee self-assessments and manager feedback, individual goal creation, and performance reports.

Time Tracking: Includes mobile and desktop time clock, project tracking, and timesheets.

monday.com: Best for Project Management

Benefits

monday.com is the best Workday HCM alternative for project management, as it utilizes boards as areas for organizing projects and clients, and enables you to create dashboards to analyze the information contained within the boards. You can automate repetitive tasks by creating customized settings for each of your boards, track time, and integrate with productivity and business apps to streamline your HCM processes. 

pros

• Information viewing options include table, Gantt chart, cards, timeline, calendar, or Kanban views
• Ability to choose integrations based on their compatibility with specific monday.com features
• HIPAA compliance and IP restrictions are available with the Enterprise plan

cons

• Jargon (column-types, boards, seats, etc.) can compound the learning curve

Prices and Plans

monday.com offers a 14-day free trial, after which you can use the Free plan or the paid plans are discounted by 18% when billed annually. Students, nonprofits, and educational organizations may also be eligible to receive a discount.

Free: This plan covers up to two seats and three boards, as well as unlimited document creation and mobile app access. 

Basic: This plan contains everything in the Free plan, plus unlimited seats, the ability to create and track unlimited information about customers or projects, 5GB of storage, and a dashboard for one board. The Basic plan starts at $24/month when billed annually. 

Standard: This plan includes everything in the Basic plan and offers timeline, Gantt, and calendar views, automations, integrations, and a dashboard for five boards, and starts at $30/month when billed annually. 

Pro: The Pro plan includes everything in the Standard plan, plus private boards, time tracking, and a dashboard for ten boards, and starts at $48/month.

Enterprise: This custom-priced plan is for businesses with over 40 users, and includes 250k automation and integration actions per month, advanced security, reporting, onboarding, and customer support, and a dashboard for 50 boards.

ADP Workforce Now: Best for Benefits Administration

Benefits

ADP Workforce Now offers similar features to Workday HCM, including payroll, reporting, and onboarding services, and is a strong choice for businesses that need assistance with benefits administration. ADP Workforce Now provides:

• Mobile enrollment for employee benefits
• A library of benefit reports
• A dashboard for managing open enrollment
• Dependent and beneficiary tracking
• Optional direct connections to carriers

pros

• Automatically reports new hires to state agencies
• Files federal, state, and local taxes for you
• Cost- and time-to-hire reports help simplify the recruitment and hiring process

cons

• No transparent pricing

Prices and Plans

Prices for all plans are available upon request. 

Select: This plan includes payroll and HR features.

Plus: The Plus plan includes everything in the Select plan, plus automation and streamlined benefits administration.

Premium: This plan includes everything in the Plus plan, plus automated time tracking. 

OnPay: Best for Small Businesses

Benefits

OnPay is the best comprehensive Workday HCM alternative for small businesses, as it provides payroll and HR features including:

• Benefits administration
• Onboarding
• Custom reporting

Its online monthly fee calculator makes it easy for business owners to determine how much pricing is based on their number of employees, and OnPay only bills for active workers each month. 

pros

• Unlimited pay runs 
• Automated tax filings and payments
• Employee self-onboarding tools 

cons

• It can take a few days to make the switch from your old payroll provider to OnPay

Prices and Plans

OnPay is $40/month plus $6 per person.

Greenhouse: Best Applicant Tracking System

Benefits

Greenhouse’s applicant tracking system enables you to find the right talent, measure and improve your hiring process, and integrate new hires efficiently. With Greenhouse, you get access to thousands of job listings with customized recommendations based on your historical preference and industry performance. Once you’ve found prospective hires, Greenhouse helps you nurture, hire, and train new employees with its candidate relationship monitoring, personalized welcome experience, and new hire goal-setting tools. 

pros

• 400+ integrations
• Suitable for all business sizes
• Can use Greenhouse Recruiting in six languages to hire global talent

cons

• The website doesn’t clearly explain all of its features

Prices and Plans

Prices depend on your specific hiring needs. 

Recruiting Plans

Essential: This plan includes recruitment tools and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance.

Advanced: The Advanced plan includes everything in the Essential plan, plus scalable workflows and custom reports. 

Expert: This plan includes everything in the Advanced plan, plus enhanced security and data configuration.

Welcome and Onboarding Plans

Welcome: The Welcome plan includes Greenhouse Recruiting integration, reporting, and onboarding emails, feedback, and automated task management. 

Onboarding: This plan includes everything in the Welcome plan, plus new hire signatures and integrations with BambooHR, ADP, and Namely software. 

Sogolytics: Best for Employee Surveys

Benefits

Once you’ve spent time and money recruiting and onboarding new hires, it’s essential that you retain talent. Employee surveys are effective tools for helping you learn about and enhance the employee experience so that your staff sticks around long-term. Sogolytics offers survey tools and an employee experience management platform that enable you to design, distribute, and analyze employee surveys that ask employees the right questions to keep your workforce engaged and improve retention.

pros

• Multilingual surveys
• Mandatory questions option
• The piping option allows you to personalize surveys by using employee’s answers to customize future questions

cons

• Guaranteed anonymity for survey participants only available with the higher-tier plans
• No downgrade option

Prices and Plans

Sogolytics offers a free 10-day trial and free and paid plans. Annual subscriptions are discounted. 

Basic: This plan is free and allows unlimited surveys and 100 email invitations and responses per survey (200 email invitations and responses in total). 

Plus: The Plus plan includes everything in the Basic plan, plus customization options and the ability to export data to Excel, and starts at $25/month. 

Pro: This plan includes everything in the Plus plan, plus more question types, control of appearance, and more data export options, and starts at $66/month.

Premium: The Premium plan contains everything in the Pro plan, plus advanced reporting, anonymous surveys, and trend analysis, and starts at $99/month. 

Enterprise Feedback: This custom-priced plan includes everything in the Premium plan, plus salesforce integration, API, multiple users, advanced security, and more. 

Freshteam: Best for Recruitment

Benefits

Freshteam is a solid product for businesses that need scalable HR software. It provides the following features:

• An applicant tracking system
• Time off management
• Onboarding
• A mobile app
• Integrations
• HR reports
• Recruitment offerings

Freshteam’s recruitment solutions enable employees (and vendors!) to apply for open positions via your social media sites, company careers page, emails, employee referrals, and external job boards. Freshteam also allows you to retain applicant information in a talent pool so that you can access resumes for future use.

pros

• Automated recruitment tasks
• Online onboarding 
• Automatic time-off tracking

cons

• Not currently available for new customers

Prices and Plans

Freshteam is currently only available to existing customers. New customers can contact [email protected] to learn about other options. 

Sage HR: Best for Scheduling

Benefits

Sage HR is one of the best Workday competitor products for shift scheduling. It offers the ability to create and edit schedules, and shifts are available for employees to view online or on the mobile app. Sage HR also includes expense tracking, leave management, timesheets, and performance management modules, which can be purchased as needed.

pros

• Ability to track expenses via the mobile app with the receipt capture feature
• The Recruitment module allows you to create job ads, manage applicants, and schedule interviews
• Employees can log time on their timesheets online from anywhere

cons

• No transparent pricing

Prices and Plans

Sage HR offers a 30-day free trial, after which you can choose which modules you need and only pay for what you use. Sage HR’s modules include:

• Core HR and Leave Management
• Performance
• Shift Scheduling
• Timesheets
• Expenses
• Recruitment

Rippling: Best for Payroll

Benefits

Rippling is one of the best competitors to Workday for payroll needs. It provides both US and global payroll services, including 90-second payroll, automatic tax filing, and labor law compliance. Rippling offers a full suite of HR products, including:

• Time and attendance tracking
• Recruitment
• Benefits administration
• Employee training
• Professional employer organization (PEO) services

pros

• Time and attendance tracking
• The mobile app allows employees to view paystubs and request time off
• Automatic enrollment of new hires in company benefits

cons

• Must book a 1:1 meeting for customized pricing

Prices and Plans

Rippling offers customized plans that start at $8/month per user. 

How we evaluated Workday HCM Alternatives

We looked at companies similar to Workday that offer adaptable features that can scale with your business. We chose Workday HCM alternatives that offer talent and productivity management tools, and HR essentials, including benefits administration, payroll, and reporting features. Finally, we analyzed Workday customer reviews to find what people like and what they think can be improved about the software, and chose options that fill those gaps.