With most of the vendors listed on this roundup, pricing is on a per-user-per-month basis. Some of them will have an additional monthly base rate, and the majority of them will offer custom pricing based on your business’s needs. Some of them also offer independently priced add-ons, which is great for small businesses who want to pay only for the features they’ll actually use. 

Now if you’d like to get a rough idea of what you can expect to budget based on your organization’s size, we’ve put together the following estimates taken from our own experience and conversations with our HR expert council:

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In order to build a list of requirements and use it effectively to evaluate vendors, it will help to know which are the key HRMS software features and how these can support your goals. 

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the key difference between an HRMS and HCM software and an HRIS is that an HRMS also includes payroll, budgeting, and time and labor management. Let’s look at each of these in more detail: 

• Payroll: An HRMS is great for paying your employees in the same platform where all their other HR processes are handled. A regular payroll solution has features like automated deposits, pay slip generation, and calculation for vacation days, sick days, overtime, etc. Some of the vendors we mentioned here can help you pay people in several parts of the world, not just the U.S., but you can also look at our global payroll roundup if that’s important to you. 
• Budgeting: Some of these systems also let you create and approve budgets for the entire Human Resources department. These can cover expenditures, adjust forecasts, and plan for future costs. Some of these may also provide a cost analysis overview, reporting, and integrations with some of the main accounting software. ‍
• Time and labor management: This concept encompasses everything related with managing time for a workforce. A module with this name should support all types of time entry for employees, let you create time cards, calculate overtime, keep track of absences, and of course, integrate all this with the payroll system.

As you start demoing various HRMS software solutions, it’s important to prepare and attend these meetings with some questions already in mind. These inquiries should aim to answer whether the solution in question will indeed address the main use cases and core needs you’re looking for.

Of course, the most concerning of these questions shouldn’t be saved for the demo at all, but rather handled prior through an email thread, for instance, so you won’t waste time on a demo if X or Y solution turns out to be incompatible with your core needs. 

Further, the demo should also help check certain boxes that your internal stakeholders care about, such as integrations, security, data management, self-service portals, features, etc. 

You should write down a list of those questions, share it with your team, and maybe have stakeholders add to it as well. While that list will be unique, here are some common questions when demoing an HRMS that should help get you started: 

• What integrations are key for us? Does it integrate with ATS, payroll, or any other systems you might have that impact workforce management?
• Does this solution have single sign-on (SSO) capabilities?
• Are there multiple authorization levels for different types of users?
• Is there a maximum number of employees it will support across the workforce?
• What types of reporting capabilities does it have?
• Does it include features to help HR communicate with employees (i.e. mass emails, filtering messages by criteria)?
• What kind of tasks can we automate or streamline with this tool? How many hours can we expect to save doing so? 
• How much technical training will be required?
• What kinds of technical support are provided?
• What recruiting capabilities are built in?
• Which HR processes will be automated?
• How will information be exchanged with carriers (for employee benefits)?
• Does it accommodate benefits carriers’ rules?
• How can we import employee data into this system? (API, Excel spreadsheets, employee records, other databases, and paper documents)
• What built-in security measures does it contain?

Moving on, here are some of the most frequently asked questions from HR professionals when it comes to human capital management software: 

What is the best HRMS system?

While some of the top vendors in HRMS software are UKG, SAP SuccessFactors, Namely, and Rippling, “the best” is really a matter of your business size and requirements. There are many HRMS vendors, out of which there are likely one or two that will align with what you’re looking for. 

What is the difference between HCM, HRMS, and HRIS?

The main difference between HRIS, HRMS, and HCM is that the former two refer to a specific type of software, systems of information, as their names imply (human resource information system and human resource management system). HCM, on the other hand, stands for human capital management. This is a set of business practices around the acquisition, management, and optimization of a business’s workforce. 

What is HCM software?

HCM software is a software tool that takes most features you would expect out of a labor management platform but builds it purposefully for the business practices that encompass human capital management. This software puts together widely varying features such as workforce planning, performance reviews, and employee onboarding in a single management platform where they can all help to generate insights that drive broader business decision making.

How come definitions of HCM, HRMS, and HRIS vary so much? 

This is a good question precisely because the definition of each term varies widely from vendor to vendor, and among HR professionals as well. That being said, the differences between each software category are all about features and use cases. Most thought leadership indicates that HRIS is the most circumscribed type of solution, focusing on core HR needs. HRMS takes it up a notch in features, while still sticking to HR use cases, and HCM is about rounding up all those features with strategic planning for the business in mind, with the workforce as the main component to analyze and optimize.