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SAP HCM vs SAP SuccessFactors comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

SAP HCM
Ranking in Talent Management
3rd
Ranking in Cloud HCM
3rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Benefits Administration (3rd)
SAP SuccessFactors
Ranking in Talent Management
1st
Ranking in Cloud HCM
1st
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
95
Ranking in other categories
Talent Acquisition (2nd), Global Payroll (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud HCM category, the mindshare of SAP HCM is 13.1%, down from 17.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP SuccessFactors is 21.7%, down from 22.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud HCM
 

Featured Reviews

Renelia Villanueva - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient payroll processing with comprehensive attendance management
I am currently heading the payroll benefits and HRIS team here in Manila. We are using SAP HCM on-premises, and we implemented SuccessFactors focusing on Employee Central and GMPM SAP HCM has helped a lot due to the always changing government regulations pertaining to taxation, social security…
Marissa Schwan - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to deploy, stable, and scalable
SuccessFactors has a best practices model for HR across the board, but there are multiple industries. For example, the pharmaceutical, engineering, and professional services industries may have different processes based on their business requirements and operations. SAP and Workday have one approach across industries. As employee experience becomes increasingly important, the kind of employees appointed in an engineering environment, a pharmaceutical environment, and a professional service environment are very different, meaning their experience touchpoints may differ and require adjustments. SuccessFactors should consider building their best practices around critical industries to help companies become more differentiated in the markets they operate in. As a company, we have 118,000 followers on LinkedIn, and the unemployment rate in South Africa is quite high, at more than 30 percent. When we advertise a job, the number of CVs and applications we receive from people who want to work for us is overwhelming, we can get up to 600 CVs for a single vacancy. To make the process more efficient, we need to use artificial intelligence to identify the key elements of the job profile and match them to the CVs of the applicants. The pre-selection questions are helpful in reducing the number of applicants, but they don't measure the suitability of the CVs and profiles. This is something that needs to be built into the system, but it doesn't currently exist in the market. We have a good pre-selection program, but it doesn't take into account experience, qualifications, professional memberships, work experience, or critical performance indicators. We have enough information from CVs and LinkedIn profiles for the system to match the vacancy profile with the applicant's information and rank them from most suitable to least suitable.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We've found that the solution has the capability to scale."
"We have managed to consolidate our payroll for all India operations on this platform."
"It is a scalable solution. There are three administrators maintaining the solution: an HR person, a payroll person, and one backup."
"The integration provided by SAP between different modules is very good."
"The master data where most of the reports were run from was the most valuable. We were quite satisfied with this module."
"It's very suitable for large, multi-geography companies but also very suitable for medium companies with multi-geography operations."
"The payroll operations I’ve managed within this and other organizations involve substantial numbers, demonstrating that SAP HCM stable product. As for talent management, we’ve utilized consulting services and supplemented them with various in-house developments. Moreover, we are exploring innovative AI, including chatbots and AI-driven use cases."
"Technical support is excellent."
"This solution has automatic linking and reporting features. Upgrades are hassle-free because you don't need to change everything from scratch, when compared to Meta4."
"Easy to use and user-friendly."
"I hardly ever encounter any stability issues, as SAP SuccessFactors is very good and stable."
"The functionality and user friendliness are constantly improving."
"The overall functionality of the solution is very good."
"The most valuable feature of SAP SuccessFactors is analytics."
"It's a uniform user interface."
"The UX in SAP SuccessFactors is good."
 

Cons

"System usability is a challenge."
"SAP is not ready to sell the license on time and delays the progress of projects. It's better to work with a competitor like Oracle. Those that are selling the product just go through powerpoints and don't have the knowledge necessary to sell. They can't answer any questions."
"SAP HCM cannot integrate with other third-party applications. One of the drawbacks we encounter with SAP HCM, specifically in payroll management, is the limitation regarding changing payroll areas within the same month. For instance, if an employee transitions from staff to non-staff status during the month, we face difficulties because the system doesn't allow us to change the payroll."
"I'm currently working for a state-owned government company, and we need to follow some standards and regulations. We also have a strategy to be followed. Sometimes the template and the format are not available in the SAP HCM, so we have to work around this limitation. The tax also sometimes changes in my country, and we have to redo everything to change the payroll calculations, benefits, and things like that. The talent management feature can be improved. It is currently very simple in SAP HCM. SAP is also very hard to integrate. In terms of monitoring, there are no monitoring tools, but as long as we take care of the disk capacity, there is no problem."
"SAP HCM needs to be more customizable to fit unique organizational processes."
"Its reporting feature could have customization options."
"It was difficult to deploy. There were challenges regarding configurations and implementation. So, we had a lot of issues."
"It takes a long time to apply an update patch to the system."
"Analytics could use some work."
"There are some limiting aspects to this product."
"There is not much scope for enhancements, personalization, or customization with the cloud-based variant of this solution, which could be improved."
"SAP resources are at the high end and anything you want to change or any customization is expensive."
"SAP SuccessFactors could improve the integration. It is not simple to integrate and it needs to be made easier."
"The user experience could be simplified."
"Also, it would be helpful if they could improve its ability to localize the product to Nigeria."
"It is not that user-friendly. It can be made more user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The terms on which you buy licenses might change due to the way they license in a particular product."
"In my view, this product is a waste of money for SMB because there are much better products available and licensing is an issue."
"Be careful and guard against future changes in licensing."
"HCM is cheaper than SuccessFactors."
"I believe HCM is a little expensive, but I don't know the exact price because I'm involved with the sales team. However, I think the price must be reasonable because many organizations are migrating their current ERPs to SAP. It's excellent software, and the price is competitive."
"The solution is a little expensive and we are charged per user for the license. The solution can be paid monthly or annually."
"The solution is cheap."
"Licensing is pretty complex. SAP does not have a straight forward way of licensing, and it differs from client to client."
"It is not cheap, but it is reasonable."
"The licensing fees are based on the number of modules that are being used, and the number of users."
"The price of the solution is highly expensive."
"The price of the solution depends on too many factors to provide an estimate. However, the price of SAP SuccessFactors is competitive."
"Due to the way in which we purchased SuccessFactors as a module along with other SAP modules, we were able to procure it at a slightly better price than usual. I would rate their pricing 5/5 stars."
"Probably, it is one of the priciest products, and is very costly to put up and maintain but because it is a good solution end to end, people take it."
"Our costs for the solution are subsidized by our parent company, I am not aware of the exact cost because of this. However, we pay $50,000 annually. If we move to another solution it will be more expensive."
"If you go by best practices and do it right from the outset, the setup won't be a costly endeavor. In terms of setup, there is a lot of flexibility compared to three years ago."
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Answers from the Community

NC
Jan 25, 2024
Jan 25, 2024
When it comes to user experience, SuccessFactors is unquestionably superior, as it provides end users with a new experience and an advanced user interface. Additionally, the entire concept of SF is to simplify the process, giving life back to HR systems so that they can be more modern and flexible, and rely more on the heart of HR – the employee. On the other hand, while SF is technically less ...
See 2 answers
YZ
Sep 6, 2021
When it comes to user experience, SuccessFactors is unquestionably superior, as it provides end users with a new experience and an advanced user interface. Additionally, the entire concept of SF is to simplify the process, giving life back to HR systems so that they can be more modern and flexible, and rely more on the heart of HR – the employee. On the other hand, while SF is technically less complex than SAP HCM, it also has significantly less capability, particularly when it comes to integration with other SAP modules. For example, while SAP's integration between the SAP Project system and the SAP HCM process is robust, SuccessFactors' integration is limited and still in its early stages. In all circumstances, SAP SF represents the future of HR, with a highly promising road map. I believe that if SAP continues to create more features, SF will have greater functionality than SAP HCM in 5 years.
Kseniia Gravis - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 25, 2024
So are you striving to successfully deploy and utilize SAP systems to centralize data, streamline operations, gain real-time insights and achieve business efficiency? SAP applications are the backbone of every business. We also discuss the best SAP implementation process as an ideal solution for such problems: https://www.cleveroad.com/blog/why-outsource-sap/ 
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Retailer
5%
Educational Organization
48%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about SAP HCM?
SAP HCM is the one of the best ERP for an organization with a small to large scale business. It has the most efficient payroll functionality. Regards : SAP HR classes in pune
What do you like most about SAP HCM?
HCM is a very important module that each organization should want to use. It will help any organization to calculate and control the cost of their human resources.
What is better, SAP HCM or SAP SuccessFactors?
When it comes to user experience, SuccessFactors is unquestionably superior, as it provides end users with a new experience and an advanced user interface. Additionally, the entire concept of SF is...
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 customization to suit the purpose." SAP: Multiple functionalities that increase process effi...
What do you like most about SAP SuccessFactors?
The tool is easy to use for performance management. We haven't experienced any issues with SAP SuccessFactors for performance management, which is great. However, since we're still learning to use ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP SuccessFactors?
The solution is expensive. However, it increases the company's value, making the cost worthwhile in the long run.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

SAP Human Capital Management
SuccessFactors
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

City of Cape Town, ADAMA Agricultural Solutions Ltd., TransAlta Corporation, Keolis, PT XL Axiata Tbk, National Football League (NFL), Plan International, Yoh, A Day & Zimmermann Company, China Talent Group (CTG TMO), Umicore S.A., Butterfield Bank, Skrill Group Ltd.
City of Cape Town, ADAMA Agricultural Solutions Ltd., TransAlta Corporation, Keolis, PT XL Axiata Tbk, National Football League (NFL), Plan International, Yoh, A Day & Zimmermann Company, China Talent Group (CTG TMO), Umicore S.A., Butterfield Bank, Skril
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP HCM vs. SAP SuccessFactors and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
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