ADP Workforce Now vs UKG vs Workday comparison

Read 125 UKG reviews

4,075 Views
2,567 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Read 57 Workday reviews

8,989 Views
6,202 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

ADP Workforce Now

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between ADP Workforce Now, UKG, and Workday based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about SAP, Workday, Oracle and others in Cloud HCM.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud HCM Report (Updated: October 2025).

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud HCM category, the mindshare of ADP Workforce Now is 1.6%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of UKG is 5.7%, up from 5.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Workday is 17.0%, down from 17.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud HCM Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Workday	17.0%
UKG	5.7%
ADP Workforce Now	1.6%
Other	75.7%

Cloud HCM

Featured Reviews

Vineeth John

Director, People & Culture at a agriculture with 201-500 employees

Custom reporting tool with field grabber, easy modules for recruitment and provides numerous options for integration

The complexity is the key challenge with a tool like ADP because it has all the bells and whistles and all the key features you can possibly think of. If it isn't there, there's always a third-party vendor you can integrate that way. But the only issue is that because it's complex, there needs to be some sort of system, at least on the back end, for the admins to understand what leads to what. We expect AI to improve multiple things with HR processes. The most obvious and common one would be the self-service function for employees, like a chatbot to help with FAQs. We are also building an AI tool that can possibly help managers make better talent management decisions. This tool will pull from the performance management tool, the talent profile, and the reports that we generally have to score employees across all different dimensions.

Read full review

Talia Jean Paul

Global HR UKG Specialist at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees

Affordable but needs to improve its stability

Our company is testing the UKG Ready Mobile App, but there are some glitches. I feel that in the system when you log on to Kronos, UKG Dimensions, and UKG Workforce Central, we have different modules in different versions. With regards to the newer version, I feel the older version, which was UKG Workforce Central, was more user-friendly for the end user as opposed to the newer version, which looks a bit more complicated. When training someone who wants implementations to be done, it would be easier if you could hover above certain things, and it shows you or tells you exactly what it is. There are certain SAP modules that can be audible. If you click on it if someone is being a bit slow with regards to training, the tool will tell you what needs to be done and what needs not to be done by you, but for us, it is fine because we are in the back end with configuration and the administrators. I am talking about the need for improvements in the tool for the benefit of the end users. The explanation on UKG's community consists of training manuals and some of the other stuff that we use, and we send to our supervisors at the site. With the tool in place, catching onto white-collared employees is quicker. The tool is not quick to catch onto certain blue-collared employees in the plant or supervisors who are actually working with machinery and stuff because they are not as computer-centric as white-collared employees. If I could scan the tool across the globe with our site supervisors, there are a few loopholes in the tool. There are some issues with the tool's stability. For me, I would like someone who is building the system in the back end to know if a front-end user can manipulate the system. I am not going to rate the tool's scalability to be high. I would rate the tool's scalability to be at a mediocre level or at something like 50 percent, so there is a lot of room for improvement.

Read full review

Eslam Abo Elnaga

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The way that ADP helped us improve our organization is by making the payroll process clean and efficient because if you make a mistake there, you're in big trouble."

"The platform is on a private cloud that is fully secure with no way for hacker penetration."

"The most valuable feature to me is performance management because we just started using that."

"The most valuable features are the reporting and benefits piece."

"It is a scalable solution."

"In my day-to-day work, attendance tracking would be most important. That's because I have a really diverse group of employees, and I have a subset of younger folks who are struggling with their attendance. So, that's the thing that I'm most involved with currently."

"The most interesting feature for me on ADP is the custom reporting tool. It's got something called a field grabber, which makes it so much easier to generate your own custom reports simply by pulling tabs from any feature."

"We use the tool for various functions, including payroll, HR, recruiting, onboarding, and workforce management. We've implemented all these modules across all the clients I've worked with."

"UKG allows us to customize our home screen so that we can easily monitor important items on a daily basis."

"The solution's UI is good. Also, it is very easy to use."

"The employee self-service feature is most valuable. This is the restaurant industry, and they have a mobile app that allows employees to go in and manage their data. So, employees can manage direct deposit accounts, emergency contacts, and other things in the app. That's definitely the biggest benefit."

"The tool improved employee onboarding efficiency, especially in healthcare, where timely onboarding is crucial. This change directly impacted retention rates positively. It was a massive project that involved various teams working together. It took about a year to revamp the entire process and ensure compliance. However, once implemented, it improved employee satisfaction by saving them two whole days in the onboarding process."

"It enables us to manage the system ourselves. We don't need an additional team to do a lot of maintenance and add the things that we want."

"The pay policies and approvals are valuable features."

"The solution's employee experience is pretty good."

More UKG pros

"I found the analysis features to be very useful for our company. I also found the modules installed to be aligned with our company's KPIs. These were the two features that stood out."

"It's actually a cloud-native solution and based on the community for development. It is a very good open architecture and able to interconnect with other systems. And it is very stable and very fast in terms of response."

"Workday is highly intuitive from a customer experience perspective. It was effortless for us to understand what to do even though we didn't have any related training. It was easy to use without guidance."

"The reporting feature is quite easy for a layman to use, and the look and feel of the application is good. Its security is robust. You will never find a use case that cannot be covered."

"First time users, understanding accessibility and consolidated data is fairly easy. The solution improves productivity for users and reduces the need to switch between different tools."

"It is a one-stop solution for everything. You can look for information about other employees or you can track your information. There is a directory, so you can search for other employees. You can also see and track your personal details and salary details on the employee profile page."

"It's a fully consolidated system. All the transactions and configuration are co-located in one fully in-memory system, so there is no need to go to different data sources (multiple DBs) to pull data; it’s all in one place."

"The interface of Workday is superior; it is easy and clear, everything is organized effectively, and I enjoy using Workday extensively."

More Workday pros

Cons

"I would like to see the payroll side improved and there are a few kinks that need to be worked out."

"When I'm not working with the implementation team and I'm just talking to customer service or something, they're just not a lot of help. They don't understand how it works. They'll tell you to do something that I know would affect something else. So, it's less about the software and more about just training their folks to a higher level."

"The complexity is the key challenge with a tool like ADP ."

"The ease of developing and creating reports could definitely use some improvement."

"Its benefits portal could be user-friendly."

"The report functionality is not as good as competitive products."

"The solution could improve by simplifying it even more core reports, such as more sample reports, more generic reports that you can edit and improve on yourself."

"Certainly, the time and attendance and the payroll integration need a lot of work. They are disjointed pieces, and they don't work smoothly together. That's the main drawback."

"The platform's features need enhancement while being used as a recruiting tool."

"Reporting is always a hurdle for any user just because it is so extensive. They provide a lot of out-of-the-box reports, but it is something that you always need to work on because you need more advanced writing of reports."

"The system is slow sometimes."

"UKG has complex clock-in and clock-out features. It changes things too often, and it feels like the tool is constantly changing things without testing before implementing changes in production. Additionally, it doesn't communicate these changes very well."

"I would like the capability to use UKG as a single platform without the need to alternate between systems."

"I would like to see more functionality in the next release to be able to get hours and dollars per calendar month rather than just by payroll in the Business Intelligence reports."

More UKG cons

"There could be a web-based application for making payments to the employees."

"There is a lot of complexity in the configuration of this solution."

"Workday could improve by adding other features, such as messaging to candidates and other recruiting capabilities that other new-age solutions have."

"They don't offer any backend database access. This is one limitation that I found in this product. Workday hasn't opened up about what kind of database they are into, which can make it easy for the technical team to emulate issues. It would be good if they can offer backend access to the technical team. It would be helpful if they can also provide a Troubleshooting Guide that we can use to troubleshoot issues. When we have an issue, there are very limited resources to refer to."

"It has missing functionalities. Specific countries, like Germany, didn't have the option to do payroll. Now we need to look for another product for HR."

"Workday does have a community site where people can go on and off for suggestions. They call them Brainstorms, and you can vote them up. That is something that they do well, but oftentimes, they seem to be racing to deliver something based on what a competitor is delivering. For example, if they hear SAP has this new functionality and learning that's going to be coming out, they prioritize there, which makes sense, but unfortunately, some of these Brainstorms may get neglected where the product might not be improved as quickly or as needed for the customers. You might be waiting for a year or two to get a feature that you'd like released. They should pay more attention to customer feedback and ensure that customer feedback is an essential part of their product roadmap."

"They could improve the product areas such as enhancing the interview scheduling module to support more flexible online assessments within the platform."

"The product must include payroll features."

More Workday cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive and everyone complains about the price."

"I know some of what we're currently paying. Most customers would say it's too high, but I don't have a comparison to know that."

"The pricing is expensive and I would say it is below average for the value it provides based on the high cost."

"I give the pricing a seven out of ten."

"The solution is expensive."

"It is expensive."

"UKG's pricing and licensing model involves ongoing expenses based on the number of employees paid. The initial implementation cost is low when UKG implements it directly. However, when partners handle the implementation, it becomes more expensive since partners don't receive the monthly recurring fees."

"The pricing depends on the number of licenses we buy."

"If you're going for the full suite, it can be fairly pricey."

"While I am unsure of the licensing cost itself, the total cost of implementation and licensing for a company with over 5000 employees would be around 6,00,000. So, there are additional costs beyond licensing."

"The platform is not affordable but also not the most expensive."

"I wasn't involved in the pricing part. I'm a user, and I believe it is based on the user count. One thing that is nice about Ultimate is that you can learn how to use the system without additional fees. The learning aspect is the life of a product, and the training was a huge reason why we went with Ultimate. We did have some integration costs. They were a part of the implementation because of the integrations to other systems that we included in our implementation."

"Its price is pretty high. It is more expensive than what is offered by other competitors in the market."

"Workday is moderately priced - I'd rate its pricing three out of five."

"I need to pay for a license. It is expensive."

"The solution is flexible in terms of pricing."

"It's very, very expensive."

"The pricing for this solution is fairly high. It is not affordable for small and mid-sized companies."

"You have the license fee per module, and then you have a kind of annual training fee, which is a kind of add-on. I wouldn't say it is exhaustive; it is minor. Licensing is pretty transparent for most of the part."

"I rate the product’s pricing a ten out of ten."

More Workday pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	4

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	48
Midsize Enterprise	43
Large Enterprise	48

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	41

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ADP Workforce Now?

The licensing is on the pricer side, given that there aren't a lot of other tools out there that are applicable, we j...

What needs improvement with ADP Workforce Now?

The complexity is the key challenge with a tool like ADP because it has all the bells and whistles and all the key fe...

What advice do you have for others considering ADP Workforce Now?

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. It's got a lot of features. The reason I'm not giving it a fu...

What needs improvement with UKG?

UKG needs more publicity. It is a productive ERP ( /categories/erp ) application, but many people in the IT market ar...

What is your primary use case for UKG?

I worked for a healthcare organization and a university. Most organizations use UKG ( /products/ukg-reviews ) to trac...

What advice do you have for others considering UKG?

Publicity is very important for any software. If people aren't aware of UKG, despite its productivity, they won't use...

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 customizatio...

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 m...

ADP GlobalView Payroll vs ADP Workforce Now

Comparisons

Compared 12% of the time

PeopleSoft vs ADP Workforce Now

Compared 11% of the time

SAP SuccessFactors vs ADP Workforce Now

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle HCM Cloud vs ADP Workforce Now

Compared 7% of the time

ADP TotalSource vs ADP Workforce Now

Compared 7% of the time

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SAP SuccessFactors vs UKG

Compared 14% of the time

SAP HCM vs UKG

Compared 9% of the time

Dayforce HCM vs UKG

Compared 9% of the time

PeopleSoft vs UKG

Compared 5% of the time

Atlas vs UKG

Compared 3% of the time

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SAP SuccessFactors vs Workday

Compared 26% of the time

Oracle HCM Cloud vs Workday

Compared 11% of the time

SAP HCM vs Workday

Compared 8% of the time

Dayforce HCM vs Workday

Compared 5% of the time

Oracle Taleo vs Workday

Compared 1% of the time

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Product Reports

ADP Workforce Now

Download ADP Workforce Now product report

Download UKG product report

Download Workday product report

Also Known As

No data available

UKG Pro, UKG Dimensons, UKG Ready

No data available

Overview

ADP Workforce Now is a web-based, complete HR suite that integrates the essential payroll and human resource management procedures into a single database-driven platform. This safe and simple solution gives you everything you need to maximize your workforce and communicate with your staff.

ADP Workforce Now is designed specifically for your company's needs. As a result, the menus and menu selections you see will differ depending on your function and the services your firm uses. As a portal administrator, you customize the site and control what employees can view and do. You can design your site's theme, set approval and notification processes, and manage security groups.

ADP Workforce Now includes these useful capabilities:

Payroll computation and tax filing
Performance regulation
Compensation handling
Talent acquisition
Time and labor logistics
Benefits governance
Analytics
Total management of human resources

ADP Workforce Now Features

ADP Workforce Now has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Single dashboard, single database: Manage your whole workforce from a single dashboard, which is powered by a single database, ensuring that the relevant data is always available when you need it.
- Get a complete HR suite that includes payroll, time, HR, talent, and benefits all in one place.
- Enter data once and it will function across all workflows
- With proactive error detection and can't-miss alerts, you can cut down on mistakes.
- Protect your business with enterprise-grade data security privacy procedures and extensive compliance experience.

Powerful analytics and reporting: With a single database that connects your entire firm, you can access all of your data in one location.
- Create better reports in less time, without ever leaving the page you're on.
- Make use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to help you make confident decisions based on personalized information.

Robust management of HR: Spend less time on paperwork and more time on managing and improving your employees.
- Workflows can be customized, and documents can be stored online.
- Self-service functionalities enable employees and supervisors to be more productive and collaborative.
Customized service and implementation: ADP Workforce Now offers community and chat support and a dedicated implementation team.

In-house implementation by a team of professionals who understand how to optimize the solution for your industry.
For all your questions, ADP Workforce Now offers quick response support, training, and in-product resources.
Client-service specialists with years of experience offer deep knowledge and skills to assist, secure, and support your business.
Flexible service choices can assist your company in navigating strategic and tactical changes, as well as continual system optimization.

ADP

At UKG, our purpose is people — real people with real challenges, and a simple request. Help me keep my employees productive, connected, and happy. So that’s what we did.

We’ve created an unmatched suite of HR and workforce management solutions, backed by our people who care about yours. Our solutions deliver global workforce experiences that truly reflect the connection between life and work today. That means insights are deeper. Work is easier. And interactions are more meaningful.

Workday is a cloud-based software solution that specializes in developing applications for capital and finance management applications. The system is built to work in global workforces and is adaptable. The global system ensures that users are up to date and can manage internal career-related information, and everyday business problems like timesheets, payrolls, and time off.

“A Pioneer in Software-as-a-Service”

Workday Human Capital Management tool is designed to simplify and streamline your work. It leverages machine learning to adapt capital management to a changing environment.

The Workday model is based on delivering a single system that uses a single source of data and a single security model to deliver a unique user experience. The system is user-friendly and ensures that employees and management can use it from any and all devices. Workday HCM integrates into a central system that includes financial management, payroll, recruiting, learning, and planning. Managers and employees can provide feedback to one another, too.

Workday’s features include:

Flexible framework that lets you organize your staff according to different criteria. You can group employees by function, hierarchy, or department.
Personalized career guidance: Knowledge management and career guidance that can be easily customized for each staff member and also done at scale.
Augmented reporting and analytics: Configure, change, update, and publish reports, scorecards, and dashboards. The system centralizes the transactional and analytical data so you can act on the data from anywhere.
Compensation tools: Compensatio, payroll, and time tracking are automated and simplified.
Workforce planning allows you to uncover and address talent gaps and get visibility of your staff.
Mobile-first ensign approach: Users can access all resources from any device, and they are always in sync.
Machine learning capabilities enable personalized enterprise experiences and faster business processes.

Workday smart platform consists of the following modules:

Human resource management
Business process management
Reporting and analytics
Benefits administration
Compensation management
Talent management
Survey framework
Employee and management self-service

Reviews from Real Users

Many organizations choose Workday because it provides an all-in-one modular solution for human capital and finance management. Our users say they like the ease of use for time-off requests, career and development segments, and overall HR management. The records and reporting capabilities are another popular feature.

"The solution was very good at reconfiguration and customization of their software. It helped us to meet federal regulations," said one user. Another said that the best feature is the optimization of the work day experience with a unified platform that can be applied across different business units. “You will never find a use case that cannot be covered," said a third.