Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

BambooHR vs UKG vs Workday comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 July 2025, in the Cloud HCM category, the mindshare of BambooHR is 3.1%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of UKG is 5.5%, up from 5.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Workday is 18.3%, up from 18.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud HCM
 

Featured Reviews

Ram-Mohan - PeerSpot reviewer
Pre-built adapters simplify CI/CD processes but monitoring improvements are needed
If Bamboo can provide a dashboard with tool health, such as whether the master or instance has the required space, it would be beneficial. Sometimes, when I trigger a build, it ends with no space on the agent machine where the agents are installed. If Bamboo can create an internal monitoring mechanism and display the tool's health status on the landing page or homepage, it would help end users and DevOps Engineers like me.
Talia Jean Paul - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Sarvesh Kumar Jha - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to use and provides great flexibility and security
Implementing the solution is generally not easy because it depends on our client's landscape. In the last one and a half years, Workday has started a new implementation approach called launch implementation. This approach allows you, as a client organization, to implement Workday in a shorter amount of time, given that you fulfill certain criteria. It depends on the number of subsidiaries and employees you have and their compensation structure. If it's not too complex, Workday provides its clients with this new approach called launch, where they can quickly onboard with the Workday without many complex requirements. The general implementation for Fortune 500 companies is always complex.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product is user-friendly."
"The HR metrics that this solution provides has been most useful. We also really like the fact that employees have the ability to be self sufficient and manage their own information."
"The performance goals and personal features of every employee with the dashboard is most valuable."
"It's very user-friendly and easy to train someone new. It was easy to implement and get someone onboarded on the system."
"This is a scalable solution. We have not experienced any issues."
"Leave management is the most valuable as they all started with leave management and then progressed to performance management. Of course, employee profiles are central to everything. It is also very easy to use. Customers get on board with it very quickly. One of the selling points for BambooHR is that they have a very wide partner network. There are lots of other partners that have integrations with BambooHR. They have an open API. This is one of the things that is driving its growth because lots of people and companies are literally just building integrations of BambooHR to ride the wave. If you have an integration with BambooHR, you get sales. People are more likely to choose your product because they've already chosen BambooHR. That's how it is happening. It is a cloud deployment, so there is only one version. They do the updates every month, and because of this, you are encouraged to send them feedback all the time. You never know. Your feature may be included in the next release."
"Bamboo has a vast number of pre-built adapters which can be used as plug and play components."
"BambooHR is accessible to users who aren't good with technology. If you don't have an IT background, you can easily find information about any employee."
"Overall, I would rate UKG nine out of ten."
"The pay policies and approvals are valuable features."
"I like UKG's integration."
"The fact that I can see the whole HR information in a single point is valuable. There is a unified view of everything, which is good. Previously, we had many different systems for each part of the information. Now, it is all centralized. It is very good."
"The solution's UI is good. Also, it is very easy to use."
"It is much easier to use and the customer service is better than our previous solution."
"UKG allows us to customize our home screen so that we can easily monitor important items on a daily basis."
"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."
"Workday's best features are planning and finance."
"It is easy to use and straightforward."
"I like its UI and UX. When we were using Oracle or SAP, the UI/UX wasn't very user-friendly for the employees."
"It stores everything for the employee. It has also been able to store the information that we use for our payroll demand."
"There is a lot of scope for customization with this solution"
"I would say that we have definitely seen a return on investment."
"It saves a lot of time for onboarding processes."
"We use Workday for all our employee-related information. It is a central hub where we can access pay slips, tax-related information, tax automation, and tax rules. Additionally, it manages employee hiring processes and other HR functions. It's a one-stop solution where employees can find everything about their profile, work experience, and associated technologies."
 

Cons

"If Bamboo can provide a dashboard with tool health, such as whether the master or instance has the required space, it would be beneficial."
"If Bamboo can create an internal monitoring mechanism and display the tool's health status on the landing page or homepage, it would help end users and DevOps Engineers like me."
"BambooHR needs to have more flexibility around performance management."
"The color palettes could be changed to make the solution a little more attractive and easier to use."
"The performance could be improved. When you save some documents, it takes longer to store them in BambooHR's systems than it used to. Something needs to be upgraded or fixed in the code. Alow, we provide services to other companies, so Bamboo isn't able to help us in many areas because of the way we work."
"It would be good to include more options for approvals and workflows. They are deliberately not the most sophisticated version of anything that they do, but it is like 80/20. They hit the vast majority of all the needs, but I have started to run up against the limits of their functionality. It has forced me to start paying attention to the marketplace or sending feedback to BambooHR. Clients are still happy though. Timesheets is a new area in which they're slowly expanding. It is currently very limited, but it meets the needs of standard nine-to-five salary employees who just want to be able to key in their time, have it approved, and then pushed off to payroll. It does not have any of the bells and whistles that an hourly employee or hourly worker might need. That is one area that is currently limited, but they have integrations with some of the best companies that do that."
"BambooHR could be improved by managing leave in a way that transfers remaining days at the end of the annual year to the following year."
"If you are dealing with two or more businesses under one company name, it is not possible to transfer employees between companies if they have a separate bamboo set up."
"Since UKG is a SaaS software, other parts of the application or add-on solutions are not the best in class or very configurable."
"UKG could be a little more flexible in some areas."
"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."
"I would like the capability to use UKG as a single platform without the need to alternate between systems."
"The tool needs improvement on the configuration side."
"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."
"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 solution could use better reporting with standard reports. We use the Cognos platform in BI for a lot of our reporting. However, they need to have more robust standard reporting available to their user base."
"The user interface could be modernized somehow."
"They could provide a web chatbot feature in the dashboard for Workday."
"The product must include payroll features."
"The expenses and reimbursements module could be improved. Creating expense reports is time consuming and inefficient compared to other expense solutions."
"Workday would be improved with more API connectors."
"For time management, it does not have a calendar generator. For example, if you want to have a shift calendar for an entire year, you need to push the entire year's calendar into the system instead of being able to generate it using a time management pattern."
"My only suggestion might be to include a brief description of any new fields we introduce, making it easier for people to use them. Perhaps this is something they can consider implementing."
"The solution has some features missing when you put them in the test studio or Confluence Studio. I would like the tool’s coding to be easier to understand and automated. Most of the coding these days is automated. Any query given can pull the answer directly which can make the solution easier to understand."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It was definitely cheaper than some of the larger systems."
"We pay a monthly subscription to use the solution. The subscript model is based on how many employees we have active."
"Price-wise, the solution is in the middle compared to other tools offering similar functionalities."
"I rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."
"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."
"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."
"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 pricing depends on the number of licenses we buy."
"The platform is not affordable but also not the most expensive."
"It's very, very expensive."
"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."
"Workday is moderately priced - I'd rate its pricing three out of five."
"The pricing is good from an HR perspective, although management gets upset after spending $500,000 a year, every year."
"The pricing for this solution is fairly high. It is not affordable for small and mid-sized companies."
"It has an annual subscription rate, but I'm not sure how it will work."
"The solution is flexible in terms of pricing."
"Its price is pretty high. It is more expensive than what is offered by other competitors in the market."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud HCM solutions are best for your needs.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
27%
Educational Organization
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
8%
Educational Organization
61%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Computer Software Company
4%
Healthcare Company
3%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Educational Organization
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What advice do you have for others considering BambooHR?
Organizations of all sizes, especially those that are experiencing rapid growth, want to have a way to effectively ma...
What do you like most about BambooHR?
The tool's most valuable features are the recruitment module, performance module, and document storage.
What needs improvement with BambooHR?
If Bamboo can provide a dashboard with tool health, such as whether the master or instance has the required space, it...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
UKG Pro, UKG Dimensons, UKG Ready
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Stance, SoundCloud, Reddit, Shopify, 99designs, Stitcher, Disqus, Beans & Brews, Stacy and Witbeck, Vino Farms, MokiMobility, SecurityMetrics
Tesla, Marriott, Yamaha, Aramark, Feeding America, Samsung, Sony Music, Dave & Buster's, Revlon
AAA, Allied Global, Avago Technologies Limited, Aviva, Cardinal Health, CareFusion, Chiquita Brands International, Equifax, Flextronics, HP, Life Time Fitness, McKee Foods, MGM Resorts International, Sanofi, ServiceSource International, Symantec, TripAdvisor, Yahoo!
Find out what your peers are saying about Workday, SAP, Oracle and others in Cloud HCM. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.