Report:

Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises

Top Vendor Products for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises in 2024

• Dayforce
• Oracle
• SAP
• UKG
• Workday

Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises Vendor Product Comparisons 2024

• ADP - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Payroll: ADP has a long track record in payroll services and a global payroll presence. The vendor has integrated the HCM solution's payroll engines with its expertise in processing services across payroll, taxes and regulations. The introductions of ADP Assist to detect payroll anomalies, and ADP Data bridge, a solution for automated HR and payroll data synchronization, keep ADP as the highest-rated vendor in this research for payroll.
  • Reporting and analytics: ADP's reporting and analytics capabilities have external benchmarking for median wage, attrition and cost of operations sourced from a wide range of industries, collected by ADP DataCloud. Storyboards help users consume key insights.
  • Lower midmarket focus: ADP has a customer-friendly pricing model that allows midmarket organizations with restricted budgets to access the solution and optional ADP Marketplace components to obtain complete HCM suite coverage. Customers benefit from a strong cost-to-capability ratio compared to other options on the market.

  Cons:

  • Limited talent management: ADP's talent management modules are more focused on smaller organizations with basic needs compared to its closest competitors. For example, recruiting functionality has limited candidate workflow and candidate communications capabilities. Career planning remains a functionality gap.
  • Employee experience: ADP Workforce Now's overall employee experience ranks behind the competition. The absence of mentoring support and external benchmarking for voice of the employee (VoE) hinders the integrated experience of the suite. Additionally, its dependency on partners for critical functions, such as WorkTango for bias detection, Fringe for lifestyle benefits, and LifeCare for counseling, further detracts from the overall experience.
  • Geographic coverage: ADP Workforce Now is sold exclusively in the U.S. and Canada. Organizations with operations outside these countries can still use ADP Workforce Now as an employee system of record to support administrative processes. However, for functions such as payroll and absence management, additional ADP-owned or third-party add-ins are required to deliver compliance and necessary localization.


• Cegid - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Learning management: Learning is Cegid HR's strongest function, according to Gartner's evaluation for this research. High points include support for a wide range of learning content types, quick publication of user-generated content and robust learning path creation for different scenarios (e.g., onboarding candidates in higher management roles). Connections between learning, skills management and the talent marketplace are improving.
  • Performance management: Cegid HR's performance management functionality includes flexible modeling of objectives and key results and performance check-ins. Cegid has further improved this functionality with the addition of goal comments and capturing notes in private mode for appraisees and appraisers.
  • Succession management and career planning: Cegid HR supports skills and competency analysis to help determine suitable successors for key roles and opportunities. It also offers internal mobility as part of career planning and talent development.

  Cons:

  • Product strategy: Cegid received below-average scores for some key functions, such as talent acquisition, onboarding and employee experience, due to a lack of the latest market-driven features. Despite several acquisitions, integration remains a work in progress, even after the typical two-year timeline to realize synergies.
  • Innovation roadmap: Cegid's vision is developing, but it needs to accelerate the expansion of emerging technologies such as natural language processing, cognitive computing and generative AI (GenAI) across the suite to enhance the user experience (UX).
  • Customer experience (CX): Gartner Peer Insights evaluations of Cegid HR indicate below-average CX compared to other vendors in this research. Cegid has limited market momentum, based on our customer inquiry volume data.


• Cornerstone - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Learning: Cornerstone offers a market-leading learning platform. The user experience (UX) is elevated by Cornerstone Companion (currently in limited release), an AI-based recommendation engine. It helps administrators build collections for target roles, and assign personalized content dynamically based on skills or allotted tasks. For example, it can allocate relevant marketing collateral and strategies to managers responsible for achieving sales targets.
  • Performance management: Cornerstone enables employees to prepopulate a comprehensive range of data points, including skills and competency assessments during self-evaluation. Cornerstone also enables individuals to tie development goals to career planning and offers robust integration for recommending relevant skills and training.
  • Career planning: Cornerstone's career planning solution is integrated with its learning platform and the talent marketplace. Employees can opt for learning courses or seek better matches in internal job opportunities based on skills gaps or career development preferences.

  Cons:

  • Payroll, benefits administration and WFM: Cornerstone's HCM doesn't offer native payroll, benefits administration or WFM functionality. Prospective customers should review their requirements and assess Cornerstone's partners' ability to meet them.
  • IHRSM: Cornerstone's HCM offers workflow creation and management; however, it primarily relies on its partner ServiceNow to deliver full integrated HR service management (IHRSM) functionality.
  • Marketing execution: Cornerstone primarily focuses on marketing and selling learning and wider talent management functions. The core HR function continues to be a lower product investment priority, which inhibits traction in the cloud HCM suite market, where core HR is the functional foundation.


• Darwinbox - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Product strategy vision: Darwinbox's product development is well-rounded, and the focus spans the vendor's cloud HCM suite modules. Recent highlights include enhanced search capabilities within the portal, development of a proprietary framework to ensure accuracy in payroll operations and an AI assistant to handle scheduling and incident reporting.
  • Recruitment and onboarding: Darwinbox recruitment's advanced capabilities, such as AI-driven job description writing, an AI assistant to support the candidate experience, and campaign creation via email or texting for recruiters place it close to the market leaders. The onboarding functionality offers buddy recommendations and sends timely nudges to candidates for task completion.
  • Applied AI and innovation roadmap: Darwinbox continues to embed AI in practical use cases that yield greater value for customers (e.g., sentiment analysis in performance feedback, survey data analysis in employee engagement and resolving bias in candidate screening).

  Cons:

  • Learning: Darwinbox offers a learning management system and learning experience platform through its partner network. This limits the vendor's ability to determine its learning product roadmap and cedes ownership of business direction in this area to its partners.
  • Global reach: Darwinbox has a limited physical presence, with offices in fewer regions and fewer distribution partners and integrators than other Challengers and Leaders in this Magic Quadrant. However, the company continues to grow its global network beyond Asia/Pacific.
  • Experience in the U.K. and the U.S.: Darwinbox is still developing its presence in the North American and European markets. While the vendor has a mapped-out strategy, prospective customers in these regions with complex regulatory demands should review their requirements and Darwinbox's roadmap for meeting them.


• Dayforce - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • WFM: Dayforce has added progressive enhancements, such as a shift marketplace, a real-time workforce insight tool to notify unplanned schedule changes, and retail-specific store manager reports. Also, Dayforce Co-Pilot pushes in-the-moment surveys.
  • Payroll and benefits administration: Dayforce continues to actively invest and innovate its payroll and benefits capabilities. Notable enhancements include ease of paycard integration in the mobile application and adding Dayforce Co-Pilot to answer employee queries related to pay. The Benefits Intelligence interactive dashboard helps organizations decide on benefits plans and simplifies benefits enrollment for employees.
  • Compensation: Dayforce's robust compensation module incorporates pay equity dashboards, parallel runs of multiple compensation cycles and peer comparison for comparative ratios. AI-driven flight risk indicators in compensation give Dayforce an above-average rating for this functionality among the vendors evaluated.

  Cons:

  • IHRSM and employee experience: Dayforce introduced its Co-Pilot, Experience Hub and HR Service Delivery to enhance the employee experience by answering queries, facilitating workflows and curating employee resource groups. However, the lack of recommendations to managers based on the voice of the employee results and the absence of external benchmarking for employee engagement place Dayforce behind the leaders in this category.
  • Learning: Dayforce Learning received updates in the form of enabling creation of a role-based content playlist and assigning the same to target roles. But, the functionality continues to lag behind competitor HCM suite offerings. Following the vendor's recent acquisition of eloomi, prospective customers should review the Dayforce roadmap to anticipate forthcoming enhancements.
  • Succession planning: Dayforce is narrowing functional gaps in talent management, with progress in career planning since the last iteration. However, it remains early in maturity for advanced needs like succession planning. To close the gap, Dayforce needs features such as AI-recommended successors and nomination processes for new pool members.


• Infor - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Frontline worker experience in WFM: Infor demonstrates market-leading WFM capabilities required for frontline workers. Specific support includes quick reminders to managers on real-time changes to the shifts, notifying affected employees through text messages following a change. Geofencing capabilities prohibit self-clock-in/out to the precision of detecting parking lots or even a wrong floor.
  • Vertical strategy: Infor is the highest-performing vendor in this evaluation for vertical strategy. It is heavily focused on the healthcare sector and also supports industry requirements for the retail, pharmaceutical manufacturing and public sectors. Infor's strategy to leverage its alliance network of over 2,000 global partners, 1,200 resellers and 300 regional alliances has expanded industry coverage beyond the vendor's historical focus on healthcare.
  • IHRSM: Infor's HR service management capability extends to the level of granular support for employee grievance cases, providing legally defensible templates.

  Cons:

  • Employee experience: Relative to its peers, Infor lacks sentiment analysis, external benchmarking for VoE findings or employee resource group curation.
  • Reporting and analytics: Infor provides relatively limited capabilities for workforce analytics and administrator dashboards. It includes a set of predefined templates for key performance indicators (KPIs) and standard HR metrics, but the absence of AI-driven insights or actionable highlights may place Infor behind some of its HCM suite competitors.
  • Product maturity: Infor HCM has a focused product development strategy, concentrating on industry-specific HR administration and WFM-driven use cases. Other modules are at varying stages of maturity, which may affect growth opportunities in verticals where deeper talent management capabilities are important.


• Oracle - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Prehire talent management: Oracle received the highest ratings in this research for both recruitment and onboarding. The candidate experience applies AI to drive dynamic tagging of candidates, create automated talent pools and drive messaging campaigns. The solution suggests jobs to candidates based on their browsing data and provides immediate feedback on their fit. Onboarding is supported by Oracle Journeys, which can track activities across the HCM suite or external sites.
  • Product maturity and innovation: Oracle received the highest ratings in innovation among all vendors. The vendor is often ahead of the curve in investments in analytics, skills, frontline manager experience and managerial burnout indications. Oracle Analytics uses natural language to turn analytics into text or create audio summaries of insights.
  • Applied AI vision: Oracle continues to invest in embedding GenAI across the suite. The flexibility in incorporating a bring-your-own GenAI model in the architecture positions Oracle ahead of the competition in its approach to leading innovation with AI.

  Cons:

  • Payroll legislative support: Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM's payroll provides localization and legislative support for 12 countries. An additional 48 countries are supported through Oracle Payroll Core, which offers localization via partners. In the latter scenario, customers must manage legislative support and updates directly or through an Oracle partner. Prospective customers should evaluate the viability of these partners to ensure consistent service.
  • Workforce scheduling: Oracle continues to enhance the workforce scheduling function and shorten the gap with other Leaders. However, it needs to prove its commitment to enhanced breadth and depth with greater adoption across complex industry verticals.
  • Hybrid cloud customers: Oracle has a large customer base in public sector organizations, especially in MENA, that have deployed a hybrid cloud. Those organizations should carefully map business requirements to Oracle's capabilities and seek change management support from the vendor to minimize disruption while migrating to Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM.


• SAP - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Geographic coverage: SAP SuccessFactors is localized for core HR in 104 countries, and SAP actively monitors compliance changes via a network of HR and legal experts. Its SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll solution also has the most localizations (51) of vendors featured in this research.
  • Alliances and sales strategy: The SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite has a network of over 350 independent software vendors that deliver enhanced value to the overall product proposition and often develop custom applications through the SAP Business Technology Platform. SAP has over 1,500 partners that advise and service customers around the world.
  • Talent management: SAP SuccessFactors has developed its talent management modules further and, for the most part, achieved incremental gains in its evaluation for recruitment, performance, career planning and succession. Joule is available across talent management to provide text analysis and augmented writing suggestions.

  Cons:

  • Customer transition from on-premises: SAP on-premises customers find it difficult to arrive at a decision on the way forward, with diverse paths that include SAP S/4HANA for HCM on-premises, SAP Private Cloud Edition, RISE commercial packages or stand-alone migration to SAP SuccessFactors. On-premises customers should carefully evaluate and review SAP's long-term plan with each option available.
  • Employee experience: The solution's preconfigured ExTech Journeys are behind in capabilities compared to its closest competitors. A lack of employee resource group curation and dependency on partners for employee well-being means SAP lags behind some Leaders in overall employee experience.
  • Adoption of innovative components: While the introduction of a GenAI co-pilot responds to market demand, SAP may struggle to achieve adoption and impact for some of its innovations in the short to medium term. This is due to its diverse customer base, which includes a significant component of public sector organizations among a wide range of industries.


• UKG - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • WFM: UKG scored highest among vendors in this research for its WFM functionality. Advancements such as the "Uber incentive" integration, which helps managers fill hard-to-cover shifts, and a disciplined view for managers to monitor late-arriving employees demonstrate UKG's ongoing investment in enhancing the comprehensive frontline worker experience.
  • IHRSM: Gartner found UKG Pro to be the highest-performing product for the IHRSM function among the suites. UKG People Assist presents a wide library of documents and templates to support critical employee relations cases and offer guided help to shared services administrators.
  • Vertical strategy: UKG has a tailored product development and sales strategy for a broad range of industries, including banking, communications, IT services, education, government, healthcare, insurance, retail, transportation and manufacturing. Alliance strategy and partner integrators further support this vertical expertise.

  Cons:

  • CX and perception: Since the last iteration of this research, customer satisfaction has declined, according to both Gartner client interactions and Gartner Peer Insights. UKG also executed a management shift and headcount reduction in 2024. While the decision was driven by the need for a strategic review of the UKG business to respond to HCM market changes, it has affected services and support in the short term.
  • Geographic coverage: UKG Pro's native payroll is only available in the U.S. and Canada. To leverage UKG Pro as a global system of record, customers would need to engage with UKG partners in other regions. UKG One View, a multicountry payroll extension platform that was launched following UKG's acquisition of Immedis, may alleviate this problem in the future, but it currently lacks sufficient adoption.
  • Talent management maturity: Although rated as above average and showing improvement from last year, the talent management modules are behind the maturity curve compared to other Leaders. Dependency on partners like Cronofy, Eightfold and Lightcast puts UKG behind other Leaders that have mostly built these capabilities out natively.


• Workday - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • CX: Gartner found Workday to be the best-performing vendor for this capability. Differentiating features include extensive customer community outreach, a comprehensive library of on-demand videos and proactive multistakeholder workshops. Workday has set up customer advisory boards and industry councils in all targeted regions. Gartner Peer Insights indicate a strong rating in the current year, with over 96% willing to recommend the solution.
  • Technology: Gartner ranks the Workday technology stack — which is based on Workday Extend, Workday Studio (for configurability) and Workday Integration Cloud — very highly. Apart from the applications of GenAI targeted to end users and HR experts, Workday has its Developer Copilot, which guides citizen developers. Developer Copilot is embedded into Workday's app builder and provides text-to-code generation capabilities. Additionally, it provides curated content to upskill its users.
  • Analytics: Gartner also rates Workday's reporting and analytics functionality — which is based on more than 1,000 standard reports and 75 preconfigured dashboards — very highly. Workday Prism Analytics can merge external or business operations statistics (e.g., sales performance) with HR data. Workday leverages AI to capture critical HR trends and present them in customized reports and discovery boards.

  Cons:

  • Total operating cost and value: To attain the highest value from Workday, organizations need to purchase some advanced capabilities beyond the core subscription, which affects the overall TCO. Additionally, customers find Workday's practice of bundling multiple applications challenging when it comes to analyzing pricing for individual functionalities.
  • Payroll localization development: Workday currently offers payroll localization in five countries (U.S., Canada, U.K., France and Australia), which is behind the number of localizations offered by several competitors. Workday is expanding its global payroll footprint through an increasing network of certified partners.
  • Adoption spread in industries: Workday's largest customer base remains North American service-based industries. The vendor's new partner strategy is beginning to take form, with recent initiatives and product capabilities aimed at specific verticals. However, Workday must demonstrate the successful execution of these strategies through increased adoption in more complex, product-based industries.


• Yonyou - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Payroll localization: Yonyou has payroll localizations for regions known for difficult data residency statutes and unscheduled legislation changes — Singapore, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Greater China (China, Hong Kong and Taiwan). Support for optical character recognition to fluently convert documents for payroll considerations is a differentiator in Southeast Asia.
  • WFM: Yonyou's WFM module supports a broad range of functionalities, including centralized multicountry rule controls, use of color codes to denote preferred employee timings or overbooking in shift settings, and warning notifications detecting employee fatigue. Additional rule-based options to enforce compliance and a dynamic work calendar provide support for frequent labor legislation changes common in Asia/Pacific.
  • Subscription tiers and pricing: Yonyou has a volume-based pricing model, and its unit subscription cost is below the global average. These considerations are important for Asia/Pacific organizations that often operate with more constrained resources and need to do more with less.

  Cons:

  • Product strategy: Yonyou primarily concentrates on serving organizations based in China, which is reflected in the solution's focus on HR administration. YonBIP would find it difficult to support organizations seeking deeper talent management and employee experience functionalities.
  • Brand awareness: Yonyou has a good presence in Greater China, but its presence in other markets is still minor and presents scope for improvement. It is focusing on market expansion in the Middle East and emerging Asia/Pacific territories.
  • Innovation roadmap: Future investments focus on AI capabilities generating automation. However, when compared to other vendors in the space, the vendor may show limited differentiating functionality.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises, 23-Oct-2024, ID G00804489

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