We performed a comparison between BambooHR and Workday based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, BambooHR came out ahead of Workday, as our reviewers found Workday more difficult to deploy, more expensive, and requiring improvement in its user interface as well as service and support.
"The product is user-friendly."
"We use this solution for our end to end HR needs from onboarding and hiring to learning."
"The performance goals and personal features of every employee with the dashboard is most valuable."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The scalability of BambooHR is good."
"The solution's technical support is super responsive and helpful. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten."
"There is a lot to like about it. I really enjoy the business process framework. It's something that's really seamless. It allows you to have people within the flow. They get assigned a task to complete something to approve, etc. That's a really good piece of functionality that Workday offers. Their out-of-the-box reporting framework is also really powerful in terms of what it provides. These would be two things that I would highlight."
"There is a lot of scope for customization with this solution"
"It stores everything for the employee. It has also been able to store the information that we use for our payroll demand."
"The platform itself is very robust and I generally like the reporting and analytics capability."
"It is fairly easy to set up"
"In terms of customization, while it may not be fully customizable, you can configure the features based on the foundation that Workday offers. This allows you to take the basic features and tailor them to the specific needs of your company or business. It provides a lot of configuration flexibility."
"The solution was very good at reconfiguration and customization of their software. It helped us to meet federal regulations."
"This product is leaps and bounds above the competition. Part of the reason is that it is built with modern technology. It has no legacy coding in it at all."
"In the BambooHR performance management annual evaluations we have some limits to the questions. We can only add four extra questions, and they already have three basic questions, this is not easy for us. We would like to have more flexibility with the questions."
"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."
"The color palettes could be changed to make the solution a little more attractive and easier to use."
"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."
"I would like to be able to export some documents into PDFs a little easier. Right now, only HR can update the training record and as you scale your company, managing the system can be manual and time consuming."
"The UI needs improvement because it needs to be more user-friendly."
"BambooHR needs to have more flexibility around performance management."
"It would be useful to have the possibility to assign a task to the different users within the software."
"This solution could be improved by providing user-level access to customization capabilities. Users currently rely on more technical teams to customize reports, for example."
"We would like to see improvement in the mobile app variant of this solution. The time sheet entry and approval, and the geo-tagging features all need to have their functionality updated, in order to be comparable with other products on the market."
"The implementation could have gone a little smoother."
"I would be happy if it was faster. Currently, when I try to navigate within the solution itself, it is a bit slow in terms of the page load time. When I click on something, it usually takes time to load. When you click on different icons or areas on the website, it is slow. Even when you navigate between different models, it is a bit slow. I would like to see a bit faster performance and a better user experience."
"The solution can be improved by speeding up the load time when pulling up information."
"It's possible that the way things are integrated could be improved"
"There could be a web-based application for making payments to the employees."
"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."
BambooHR is ranked 6th in Cloud HCM with 31 reviews while Workday is ranked 2nd in Cloud HCM with 51 reviews. BambooHR is rated 8.2, while Workday is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of BambooHR writes "HRIS software used for a company of 300 employees that offers employee tracking, data insights and automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Workday writes "The solution's interface is clean, organized, and easy to use ". BambooHR is most compared with SAP SuccessFactors, HiBob, SunFish DataOn Philippines Inc., DarwinBox and Netsuite SuitePeople, whereas Workday is most compared with SAP SuccessFactors, SAP HCM, Oracle HCM Cloud, PeopleSoft and UKG. See our BambooHR vs. Workday report.
See our list of best Cloud HCM vendors, best Benefits Administration vendors, and best Talent Management vendors.
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