| Functionality | 8 <p>Sage HR provides robust functionality across key features like employee data management, performance reviews, and goal setting. Many tools include all the standard capabilities businesses need, with some offering advanced options, such as automatic actions in time-off management. However, a lot of features are only accessible as paid add-ons, and some, like workflow automation, fall significantly behind competitors.</p> | 6 <p>Zoho offers a wide range of features, covering basics along with more advanced functionality like compensation management, 360 performance review, and more at a very low cost.</p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">While Zoho offers plenty of functionality, many features feel underdeveloped, with poor usability limiting their overall effectiveness.</span></p> |
| Ease of Use | 5 <p>Some aspects of Sage HR can be unintuitive. For instance, setting up a performance review requires creating a cycle in one section of the settings and then customizing the review in another. Similarly, certain features, like managing time-off requests, are located in less obvious places (e.g., the time-off hub is under the reports tab). That said, with a bit of guidance, most users can get comfortable with Sage's core functionality in about half a day.</p> | 1 <p>We found trying to use Zoho to be a difficult process. We found that undertaking a simple task, such as adding different employee location options, involved visiting multiple different potential locations where this functionality may have sat before finding the correct location. We predict that it would take an average SMB employee a number of days to be able to proficiently use the product.</p> |
| Look and feel | 5 <p>While Sage is visually acceptable, we found that pages would often take a few seconds, or more, to load.</p> | 4 <p>Zoho has a visually acceptable layout, and web pages load reasonably fast.</p> |
| Customisability | 8 <p>Sage HR offers strong customizability in time-off policies, performance reviews, and surveys, with features like tailored eligibility, conditional logic, and flexible question settings.</p> | 8 <p>Zoho offers a reasonably high degree of customisability. Adding custom fields for employee information, editing performance review templates, and create automated workflows are all functions which Zoho offers.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 6 <p>Sage HR does offer a free trial without needing to speak to sales. Purchasing does not require speaking to sales if you purchase after using the free trial. It takes 10-30mins to compete basic setup (entering company info, adding employees). Fully customizing and setting up the platform takes approximately 1 week; customization and setup is simple enough that you don't require an expert to assist you. More complicated customization can be done with help from the help center.</p> | 9 <p>Zoho provides a 30-day free trial which does not require users to contact sales before accessing the free trial. Fully customizing and setting up the platform takes 1-2 business days.</p> |
| Customer Support | 8 <p>Users can use the SageHR knowledge base which provides useful articles on how to use different features on the platform. Users can also access the in-app AI chat bot and if unsatisfied can ask for a human customer support agent; response times in our experience being around 10 minutes. The human customer support agent is able to answer questions about different features on the platform and users also have an option to hop on a demo call where human customer support agents will demonstrate how to do different actions users are unsure/curious about.</p> | 1 <p>We were disappointed by Zoho's customer support options. A lack of a live chat, and slow response times (>0.5 business day) mean that most support is obtained via the support page on the website. This support page is difficult to navigate and often contains information that does not match to the specific look of the software - we found, for example, that recently posted explanatory YouTube videos did not accurately represent the software.</p> |
| Integratability | 4 <p>While Sage HR offers an open API for building custom integrations, its selection of pre-built integrations is incredibly limited. It doesn't integrate with many popular HR tools like QuickBooks (Accounting), Lattice (Performance Management), and Workable (ATS). Sage HR really only works for teams planning to use Sage for all their HR needs, rather than integrating with third-party solutions.</p> | 5 <p>While Zapier lacks pre-built integrations with some of the most important third party products (such as Slack or Jira), it does provide an open API allowing users to build their own integrations where necessary.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 7 <p>In addition to the open API, users can export a lot of the data throughout the HRIS.</p> | 8 <p>Zoho has powerful data export options. In addition to picking from a range of predetermined reports, users can customise data exports to extract the insights that they are looking for.</p> |
