Executive Summary
Key Takeaways
Workforce management emerging providers are gaining traction by addressing operational friction in scheduling, time capture and frontline experience with greater speed and usability. Enterprises are evaluating these providers as targeted software that delivers faster time to value and improved adoption in specific labor models or industries. The emphasis is on simplifying workflows, reducing supervisor burden and improving employee interaction with the system. Reliability, rule consistency and integration stability remain critical requirements despite the focus on agility and focused capability.
Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Workforce Management Emerging Providers evaluates 13 software providers offering products that support core workforce management and frontline operational execution. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as Workforce.com, Deputy and Connecteam. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. Connecteam, Deputy, Factorial, Planday, Skedulo and Workforce.com were rated Exemplary, with aTurnos rated Innovative. When I Work and Zoho were rated as Assurance, while Alloc8, SISQUAL, Spica and Synel were rated as Merit.
Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (20%) and Platform (60%), which includes adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. Workforce.com, Deputy and Connecteam achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by streamlined workforce management workflows that enable rapid deployment and adoption, and strong platform usability designed for intuitive supervisor and employee interaction. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities supporting varied roles and operational contexts.
Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. Connecteam, Deputy and Planday were the Leaders in this category demonstrating strong customer advocacy and a clear investment in successful outcomes. Providers with lower performance often lacked publicly available customer validation or failed to demonstrate structured ROI measurement and proactive lifecycle engagement.
Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should assess emerging providers based on the reliability of core workforce management processes and the consistency of rule application. Prioritize solutions that demonstrate rapid deployment and sustained user adoption in frontline environments. Validate integration maturity with payroll and HR systems to avoid manual reconciliation. Assess scalability of governance, support and product capability as operational complexity increases.
The Findings
The software providers and products evaluated in this research offer product and customer experiences, but not every feature is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to support the relevant business processes and use cases. Moreover, having too many product capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities is important and meets your enterprise’s requirements.
An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes in line with TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is evident throughout the provider’s website, the buying process and the customer journey.
Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories
The research finds Workforce.com atop the list, followed by Deputy and Connecteam. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Workforce.com, Connecteam and Deputy have done so in four categories and Factorial, Zoho and Planday have done so in one category.
The quadrant chart below presents ratings for Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x- and y-axes, respectively, to visually classify software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience has above-median weighted performance on the axis, in aggregate across the two product categories, place farther to the right. The performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determine placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.
The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. Placement represents the software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements of product and customer experience.
Exemplary: This rating (upper right) applies to those providers that performed above the median on Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Connecteam, Deputy, Factorial, Planday, Skedulo and Workforce.com.
Innovative: This rating (lower right) applies to those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The provider rated Innovative is: aTurnos.
Assurance: This rating (upper left) applies to those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: When I Work and Zoho.
Merit: This rating (lower left) applies to those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: Alloc8, SISQUAL, Spica, and Synel.
We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations, recognizing that ratings or rankings do not solely represent a provider’s value nor indicate universal suitability of a set of products.
