PayScale Insight Lab vs. SumTotal Talent Development

If you have a large employee base and you are trying to remain competitive from a compensation perspective, this tool is well suited to help you accomplish this goal. If you are not a comp expert, they have experts on hand that can help you through projects or just answer basic questions.

Incentivized

I personally, am not a fan of SumTotal. I have worked on several different HRIS and Payroll systems which outweigh all aspects of SumTotal (Lawson Interface Desktop, Ceridian Dayforce, ADP Enterprise, and Ultimate Software's UltiPro). As antiquated as Lawson felt, it had more functionality than SumTotal. Of course, all others I worked on were for the most part cloud based and had modern functionality to go with it.

Incentivized

• PayScale has been great for our organization for benchmarking market salaries and wages for our positions.
• The service was great as well, in that we were able to send our job descriptions over to have our jobs matched with the market.
• The market reports have been extremely helpful and are easy to understand, and being able to see a breakdown between total cash, base salary, and bonus has been great.

Incentivized

• SumTotal has a very user friendly design, making it easy for non-programmers to configure their LMS interface, customize various environments for different groups, and to integrate numerous external web applications through iFraming, such as social media or news feeds. I was able to configure a custom environment for several different clients, making it feel like their own LMS, such as a custom color scheme and logos, custom widgets (which are section of any page), news feeds, training messages, and custom learning plans.

Incentivized

• Pre-recorded webinars on product updates would be great. I know they offer webinars, but many times they do not work into my schedule so I miss them. If they had a section on the site for training on product updates or new features that I could view on my own time I think would help me utilize the tool even better.
• The ability to add-in or take away elements in the EE comp report. Some things are just not relevant to a company. I know a new release recently came out on the EE comp report and I am not a fluent with it as I once was (this is where the pre-recorded webinar or a learning byte would be helpful), but previously there were 3 versions of the EE comp report you could use. If I could add-in or drop-out sections to customize it to my company it would be nice.

• JasperSoft Reporting - it is difficult to use and manage.
• Exams could be more robust. Offering alternate types of questions.
• Too many clicks on the administrator side. Adding new activities is not intuitive, you need to click through each section to determine what needs to be entered where. Would be better if it was guided for new activities, just prompting for 'required' fields.

Incentivized

I have transitioned from a position who supported the product to a position where I use the product. I continue to be impressed with the robustness of the product and how efficient it is. It is a user friendly software that can be used to navigate and accomplish tasks to meet organizational requirements.

Incentivized

It is user-friendly and easy to learn.

Incentivized

I do not find SumTotal to be intuitive. I feel we need to adjust our needs to meet the functionality available in the tool.

Incentivized

Never had any issues with customer support as they are very responsive. The system is very reliable, therefore, we rarely interact with their customer support.

Incentivized

We have our own IT support to assist in SumTotal issues, however, we have had to log in cases directly. Support is mediocre at best.

Incentivized

First of all, PayScale was by far the easiest tool to navigate and provided us with appropriate data. We had been working with Mercer for all of our compensation studies so the partnership with Mercer was attractive to us as well. I felt like I didn't get the best customer service with the other two products when we were in the decision stage. There was some pressure tactics that I didn't appreciate, and some unprofessionalism that seemed like red flags to me when discussing entering into a long-term contract. Not only was PayScale the best user interface for us, but they had our best interests in mind and were very professional to work with.

Incentivized

SumTotal Talent Development is a very competitive product. In my opinion SumTotal Talent Development is better than Freshteams, Darwinbox, but not as good as Skillate, SAP SuccessFactors. SAP SuccessFactors is enterprise grade and used only by large organizations and has too many modules and hence a tough learning curve. While SumTotal Talent Development has a small learning curve.

Incentivized

• We wanted to ensure that we were able to support our compensation strategy and decisions with verifiable and trusted market data, and Payscale Insight has allowed us to do that. Now, compensation conversations with employees are more effective and transparent, enhancing our engagement and retention.
• Additionally, we have been able to better train our managers to understand our compensation philosophy and how we can leverage it to improve performance and set effective goals for our employees.
• Payscale Insight has become our main source for compensation data, eliminating the significant time investment it would previously take to bring it all together, review and make a decision.

Incentivized

• Clean front-end user interface for easier course catalog management.
• Reporting has been more difficult than previous LMS.
• Audience building has more variables making it more difficult to manage.
• Slower overall client turnaround due to admin side interface.

Incentivized