Compare / Workday, Inc.
Rutba vs Workday
The enterprise HCM standard. A different weight class in both directions — more capability than we have, and more cost and implementation than most of our buyers want.
Checked 1 September 2026Workday HCM ↗
What Workday is
An enterprise human capital management platform covering the full employee lifecycle, global payroll and compliance, workforce planning and analytics, with financial management alongside it, deployed through a formal implementation programme.
Who it genuinely suits
- Large enterprises with thousands of employees across many countries
- Organisations with genuine workforce-planning and global compliance requirements
- Companies with the budget and the programme team for a multi-quarter implementation
Where they win
What Workday does better than us.
Every comparison page on this site has this section and none of them is empty. If it were, you would be right to discount the rest of the page.
Global compliance and scale we do not approach
Multi-country payroll and statutory compliance, at a scale of tens of thousands of employees. That is not a gap we are working on; it is a different product.
Workforce planning and analytics
Headcount modelling, skills analysis and the reporting an enterprise HR function is measured on. We have none of it.
An ecosystem of practitioners
You can hire people with Workday on their CV, and consultancies who implement it for a living.
Where we win
What Rutba does that this does not.
Argued from how the products are built rather than from a feature list, because feature lists are the part of a comparison that goes stale first.
Cost and time to value, at the size we are built for
Workday is bought through an implementation programme. Rutba is bought through a checkout. For a business of two hundred people the difference is not a discount — it is whether the project happens at all.
You are not buying capability you will never use
Most of what makes Workday expensive is what makes it right for a multinational. If you are not one, you are paying for the compliance surface of a company that is.
HR and the business in the same system, not two suites
Workday Financials and Workday HCM are one vendor and two products. Rutba People and Rutba Books share the records rather than integrating.
And the one that is not a feature
Workday, Inc. will not build what you ask for. We will.
That is not a criticism of them — a vendor at their scale has to weigh your request against every other customer it touches, and schedule it behind a roadmap set a year out. Your request is a rounding error in their planning, honestly so. We are small, and the people building the product are the people you talk to: what helps everyone goes into the product at no extra charge, what is specific to you is quoted as the work it is, and when the answer is no you get the reason.
Side by side
The same six questions the hub asks of everyone.
| Question | Rutba | Workday |
|---|---|---|
| Runs the businessCRM, stock, orders, production and the ledger, from one vendor | Included | Partly |
| Runs the dayMail, files, documents, chat and meetings, included rather than licensed separately | Included | Not covered |
| One set of recordsDo the modules share the records, or integrate copies of them | Included | Partly |
| Buy it yourselfCan you subscribe and start without a partner or a sales cycle | Included | Not covered |
| Parts sold separatelyCan you take one piece without committing to the platform | Included | Not covered |
| Run it yourselfIs there a path to your own hardware | Partly | Not covered |
On price: We do not reproduce Workday, Inc.’s prices here. A list price is published and fair to quote, and it is stale within a quarter — which would make this page quietly wrong in a way you could not see. Read today’s number from them, and ours is on our pricing page in full, tier by tier.
Moving
What leaving Workday actually involves.
The question that decides this is not whether you should move but whether you can. This is the honest version, including the parts that do not come across.
- 1
Do not move if you use multi-country payroll or workforce planning. This is a downgrade in those areas and we would rather say it here than in month three.
- 2
Employee master data and org structure export cleanly; historic payroll stays where it is for the statutory retention period.
- 3
Integrations built on their integration layer do not port.
- 4
The realistic case for looking at us is a company that bought Workday for the size it expected to be rather than the size it is.
No customer has done this yet. The steps above describe the mechanism — what exports, what imports, what has to be rebuilt — rather than a migration we have run. When one has been run, this section will say whose it was.
Our actual recommendation
If Workday fits, keep it — we are not an enterprise HCM and will not be one soon. Look at us if it was sold for a larger organisation than the one you run, and the implementation is still costing you more than the licences.
If you did move
The products this comparison is about.
With their real availability labels, which apply inside a comparison exactly as they do everywhere else on this site.
Rutba People
Available nowHR, payroll & employee management software
Employee records, the org structure, attendance and leave, a shared time clock, and payroll that runs on all of it — plus a self-service portal so staff answer their own questions instead of asking HR.
- Employee records, employment history, contracts, teams and matrix reporting lines
- Attendance and leave with approval chains
- A shared time clock that gives attendance an actual source
Includes: HR · Employee Self-Service · Payroll · Time Clock · Workforce · Recruit · Talent
From $8 per employee / month
Rutba Books
Available nowAccounting & bookkeeping software
Invoicing, bills, banking and reconciliation on one side; the ledger, tax, budgets and the financial reports on the other — fed automatically by every sale, pay run and stock movement happening elsewhere in the business.
- Two apps on one ledger - the daily bookkeeping surface and the accountant’s workbench, neither hiding anything from the other
- Sales invoices, bills, receipts, supplier payments and credit notes, with per-line tax
- Bank statements read in whatever your bank emits - CAMT.053, MT940, OFX/QFX or CSV - and matched, with reconciliation that must reach zero
Includes: Books · Accounts
From $14 per user / month
Head to head
Workday against the others.
You are comparing Workday to something, and it may well not be us. These are written to the same standard as this page — sourced, dated, and naming where each product wins.
Weighing this against Workday?
Tell us what you run and how you use it. We will be specific about what would improve, what would get worse, and whether the move is worth it at all.