BambooHR vs Workday
March 15, 2025 | Author: Adam Levine
19★
BambooHR collects and organizes all the information you gather throughout the employee life cycle, then helps you use it to achieve great things. Whether you’re hiring, onboarding, preparing compensation, or building culture, BambooHR gives you the time and insights to focus on your most important asset—your people.
33★
Workday is a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for human resources and finance. Workday delivers human capital management, financial management, and analytics applications designed for the world’s largest organisations. Hundreds of companies, ranging from medium-sized businesses to Fortune 50 enterprises, have selected Workday.
BambooHR and Workday are both cloud-based HR systems, which means they exist in that mysterious digital realm where all human resources go to be processed, analyzed and occasionally misplaced in an Excel export. They help businesses manage employees, payroll and benefits, which, let’s be honest, are the only three things that separate an organized company from a band of overly ambitious squirrels. They also integrate with third-party applications because no software is ever truly complete without at least seventeen additional plugins. Mobile apps exist, too, because nothing says “work-life balance” like approving a vacation request from the toilet. And, of course, they both produce reports—endless, glorious reports—so that managers can gaze thoughtfully at graphs before deciding to ignore them entirely.
BambooHR, the friendlier of the two, was born in 2008 and immediately decided that small and mid-sized businesses were its people. It prides itself on being simple, efficient and devoid of unnecessary complexity, like a toaster that only toasts. There’s no grand financial management module, no deep ERP integration—just good, clean HR with a side of employee engagement tools and a vacation tracker that actually works. It’s also refreshingly affordable, which makes it a rare and treasured artifact in the world of business software, much like a subscription you can cancel without calling customer support.
Workday, on the other hand, was founded in 2005 and has been on a relentless mission to conquer the enterprise world ever since. It caters to multinational conglomerates, Fortune 500s and any company large enough to have an entire department dedicated to procurement paperwork. Unlike its simpler cousin, Workday doesn’t stop at HR—it does financial management, budgeting and a lot of things that make accountants nod solemnly. It’s bristling with AI-driven talent analytics and workforce planning tools, which means it will likely suggest that Bob in Accounting should have been a data scientist all along. Naturally, all of this comes at a price, which is best discussed while sitting down and possibly with a strong drink in hand.
See also: Top 10 HRM Software
BambooHR, the friendlier of the two, was born in 2008 and immediately decided that small and mid-sized businesses were its people. It prides itself on being simple, efficient and devoid of unnecessary complexity, like a toaster that only toasts. There’s no grand financial management module, no deep ERP integration—just good, clean HR with a side of employee engagement tools and a vacation tracker that actually works. It’s also refreshingly affordable, which makes it a rare and treasured artifact in the world of business software, much like a subscription you can cancel without calling customer support.
Workday, on the other hand, was founded in 2005 and has been on a relentless mission to conquer the enterprise world ever since. It caters to multinational conglomerates, Fortune 500s and any company large enough to have an entire department dedicated to procurement paperwork. Unlike its simpler cousin, Workday doesn’t stop at HR—it does financial management, budgeting and a lot of things that make accountants nod solemnly. It’s bristling with AI-driven talent analytics and workforce planning tools, which means it will likely suggest that Bob in Accounting should have been a data scientist all along. Naturally, all of this comes at a price, which is best discussed while sitting down and possibly with a strong drink in hand.
See also: Top 10 HRM Software