PayScale Payfactors vs. SumTotal Talent Development

With their multiple compensation databases and the ability to quickly navigate and explore market matches, I can trust that the data is accurate and up-to-date and that I can confidently stand behind my recommendations after doing my in-the-box Payfactors work. PayScale is a company that continues to grow and develop by leaps and bounds , so getting onboard with them now is still essentially the ground floor of something incredible.

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

• Real-time market data for the most up-to-date pay bands and ranges
• Robust internal organizational tools to manage multiple projects and collections of roles
• Quick Price tool can get a comprehensive compensation pick for a role within seconds.
• Internal help documents, message board communities, and live help agents are there if you need them

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

• I am not seeing an easy way to produce or export compensation summaries for multiple roles at once. I have to pull up multiple at once.
• The ERD and HRMA reports are in totally different formats and they don't have the same parameters to fine-tune matches.
• To be honest, I look forward to exploring more built-in features in 2024. It is a great program!

Incentivized

• 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

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

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

I continue to use both CompAnalyst and Payfactors simultaneously and they both have many pros and few cons. PayScale seems to have more advanced capabilities and has more robust user-provided tweaking and cutting-edge features. The access to multiple databases is also a major benefit. While the look and feel of Payfactors seems more "21st century" than CompAnalyst, I have to say that CompAnalyst has some very intuitive features, like the ability to select many matches, add them to a list, and then export the lot of them in a single Excel file, that I do enjoy and that I don't believe Payfactors can match. That would be one drawback, however this doesn't really affect the end results, which are incredible, it just changes the path to get there a little bit.

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

• Increased capacity to provide accurate and robust compensation analyses
• Ability to compare and contrast compensation schema between Payfactors and other databases.
• Access to an enormous database of help documents and lux pdfs regarding pay philosophies, compensation concepts, market developments, etc. Educational resources are phenomenal.

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