Struggling to forecast talent needs?
You’re likely drowning in spreadsheets and outdated data, making it nearly impossible to align your talent strategy with business objectives.
This leads to poor headcount decisions, and you feel the constant pressure from leadership to strategically address your future workforce needs.
Integrating old systems is incredibly costly. Mordor Intelligence reports that 15-20% of IT budgets are spent just connecting legacy tools. This shows how expensive outdated processes become.
The right software bridges this gap, giving you actionable forecasting capabilities to finally build a talent pipeline that supports business goals.
In this article, I’m going to review the best workforce planning software available today. I’ll show you tools that provide deep insights for your organization.
You will discover how to secure a competitive talent advantage and align your people strategy with your company’s long-term objectives.
Let’s get started.
Quick Summary:
| # | Software | Rating | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Workday → | HR executives, large enterprises | |
| 2 | Visier → | Mid to large enterprises | |
| 3 | Anaplan → | Mid to large enterprises | |
| 4 | Rippling → | Mid-size businesses, global | |
| 5 | Paylocity → | Mid-size businesses |
1. Workday
Struggling to align talent strategy with business objectives?
Workday offers Human Capital Management and Workforce Planning products designed to empower your people and help you adapt your workforce for the future. This means you can proactively address demographic shifts and skills gaps.
Your organization can elevate your people and unify your human and AI workforce, moving beyond disconnected spreadsheets and outdated data to make smarter, faster decisions.
Here’s how Workday helps.
Workday provides Human Capital Management and Financial Management tools, leveraging AI-generated insights to help you manage costs and make confident finance decisions. You can streamline payroll, HR, and time management with a unified solution, improving financial forecasting.
Additionally, Workday offers the Workday Illuminate™ AI platform, which delivers measurable value by illuminating the future of work. This enables you to gain total visibility into your agreements and workforce data to optimize resource allocation and align people interventions with strategic goals. Plus, with capabilities like Employee Experience, you can deliver personalized experiences that keep your people primed to perform.
The result is a resilient platform that allows you to manage your people and processes in one place, simplify HR operations, and automate planning, saving time, money, and effort.
Key features:
- Human Capital Management: Elevate your people’s potential and boost productivity by unifying your human and AI workforce for improved talent strategy alignment.
- Workforce Planning: Gain comprehensive visibility and make smarter, faster decisions for headcount planning, supporting strategic shifts from growth to profit.
- Workday Illuminate™ AI: Leverage purpose-built AI to deliver measurable value and illuminate the future of work, saving time and effort through automation.
Learn more about Workday features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Workday is the best workforce planning software for HR executives and workforce planners seeking to align talent strategy with business objectives. Its AI-powered Human Capital Management and Workforce Planning solutions provide comprehensive visibility, accurate forecasting, and gap analysis to streamline HR processes, improve financial forecasting, and reduce a forecast cycle from weeks to just nine days.
2. Visier
Struggling to align talent strategy with business objectives?
Visier helps you overcome these hurdles by providing AI-driven insights, ensuring your talent needs are met with precision. This means you can easily navigate demographic shifts and skills gaps.
You can finally move past disconnected spreadsheets and outdated data, allowing for better headcount planning and strategic workforce decisions. This is truly the proven path.
Visier helps you deliver insights that matter, transforming how you understand and manage your workforce. It unifies all your HR and business data, unlocking insights you couldn’t access before.
You can instantly get answers about your people with Vee, their trustworthy AI digital assistant. This allows you to automate routine analytics and focus on high-impact strategic projects. Plus, Visier’s rich library of pre-built metrics, questions, and dashboards deliver value right out of the box, designed by HR domain experts to address any people-related challenge. The result is a system that scales your impact and reaches users where they work, even within Microsoft Teams.
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Key features:
- AI-driven insights: Adapt faster and elevate performance with intelligent guidance, putting critical information into the right hands at the right time for confident action.
- Unified data platform: Bring together all your HR and business data from various systems of record, enabling you to focus on strategic analysis rather than data manipulation.
- Automated analytics and self-serve AI: Use Vee, the AI digital assistant, to automate routine queries, scale your impact, and empower users to get instant answers about their workforce.
Learn more about Visier features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Visier unifies your people and business data, leveraging AI to provide critical insights and automate analytics. This helps you address talent gaps and forecast future needs with ease, making it a strong contender for best workforce planning software, with customers experiencing 137% higher return on assets.
3. Anaplan
Struggling to align your workforce with business goals?
Anaplan’s HR & Workforce solutions offer purpose-built applications for comprehensive operational workforce planning. This means you can future-proof your workforce by ensuring the right talent is available when needed.
This targeted approach helps you move beyond disconnected data, addressing the challenge of aligning talent strategy with changing business demands and bridging skills gaps efficiently.
Here’s how Anaplan helps you thrive.
Anaplan helps you make silos a thing of the past by surfacing actionable insights and building connections. Its platform integrates HR and workforce planning with finance, sales, and supply chain, creating a unified view. You can flexibly model and analyze your business across all functions. This unified planning environment enables real-time collaboration and strategic scenario modeling for smarter decisions. Additionally, features like Anaplan Intelligence provide precise, predictive insights quickly, using AI to help explore patterns and take action on generated insights. The result: enhanced agility and decision-making for optimal resource allocation.
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Key features:
- Operational Workforce Planning: Purpose-built applications for detailed operational workforce planning, ensuring your organization has the right talent in place at the right time and cost.
- Data Management & Integrations: Connect and integrate planning data from any source, eliminating data silos for a comprehensive, enterprise-wide planning view.
- Anaplan Intelligence (AI-infused): Leverage predictive, generative, and agentic AI for precise insights, optimized decision-making, and uncovering hidden trends to outpace the market.
Learn more about Anaplan features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Anaplan excels in enabling future-proof workforce planning by connecting HR initiatives with broader business objectives. Its AI-infused platform and integrated capabilities for functions like finance and supply chain make it a best workforce planning software, supporting agile, data-driven decisions for your organization.
4. Rippling
Struggling to align your talent strategy with business goals?
Rippling’s HCM suite, including HRIS and Headcount Planning, directly addresses the challenge of comprehensive workforce visibility. This means you can effectively manage employee data and align on headcount quickly, preventing out-of-band compensation issues.
This empowers you to easily manage employee data and prevent costly out-of-band compensation scenarios. It’s about making smarter, data-driven decisions.
Here’s how Rippling transforms your workforce planning.
You can streamline your entire employee lifecycle, from recruiting to performance management. Rippling helps you automate time tracking, build smarter schedules, and even better support new hires with Talent Signal.
Additionally, Rippling offers robust global capabilities, allowing you to onboard, pay, and manage employees across 185+ countries without manual work. Plus, its Workflow Studio triggers advanced workflows using any data, and the Analytics feature lets you report on anything across your apps. This ensures you can easily enforce company rules automatically and gain powerful insights.
The result is a more strategic and agile workforce.
Key features:
- Headcount Planning: Easily align on headcount and compensation bands to prevent issues and maintain budget control, ensuring strategic talent allocation.
- HRIS and Data Management: Centralize employee data for comprehensive visibility, enabling accurate forecasting and informed decisions about your workforce.
- Workflow Studio & Analytics: Automate complex HR processes and gain deep insights across all your applications, helping you make better strategic decisions.
Learn more about Rippling features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Rippling stands out as the best workforce planning software, offering robust headcount planning, comprehensive HRIS, and powerful analytics. Its integrated platform helps you align talent strategy with business objectives, ensuring you gain a competitive advantage and optimize resource allocation effectively.
5. Paylocity
Struggling to align talent with business objectives?
Paylocity offers a unified product suite, including robust Talent Management capabilities, to help you achieve your tomorrow, today. This means you can gain comprehensive visibility into your workforce and strategically plan for future needs.
This platform helps you move beyond disconnected spreadsheets, ensuring your headcount planning decisions are data-driven. You can automate manual tasks, save time, and improve decision-making.
Here’s how Paylocity simplifies HCM.
Paylocity provides a complete platform for the modern workforce, integrating payroll, HR, and talent management functionalities. Its Headcount Planning tool directly addresses your need for accurate forecasting.
You can manage recruiting, onboarding, and performance all within a single system, ensuring a holistic view of your talent pipeline. This unified approach helps you optimize resource allocation, ensuring every hire aligns with your strategic goals. Additionally, features like HR Reporting Software with insights from the Modern Workforce Index give you valuable data to address skills gaps and demographic shifts.
This comprehensive solution streamlines your processes, making it easier to secure a competitive talent advantage.
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Key features:
- Talent Management System: Includes headcount planning, recruiting, onboarding, performance, and compensation management to strategically align your workforce.
- HR Reporting Software: Provides data insights and access to the Modern Workforce Index, enabling informed decision-making for future talent needs.
- Unified Product Suite: Combines payroll, HR software, time and labor, and employee experience tools for an all-in-one talent planning solution.
Learn more about Paylocity features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Paylocity’s integrated platform, particularly its headcount planning and HR reporting tools, makes it an excellent choice for HR executives and workforce planners seeking the best workforce planning software. It helps automate tasks, save time, and improve decision-making, as highlighted by client testimonials.
6. Lightcast
Struggling to forecast your future talent needs?
Lightcast offers labor market data, an essential foundation for major decisions about jobs and skills.
This means you can gain clarity to build workforce strategies with confidence, moving beyond fragmented and complex traditional data sources. Your workforce strategy starts here.
Lightcast solves this by giving you the essential insights to shape what’s next for your team.
You get direct access to comprehensive labor datasets, offering the ultimate flexibility to create custom data displays and applications that power your decisions. Plus, Lightcast’s software makes research simple; you can explore interactive maps and graphs, share them effortlessly, and reduce extensive data workflows to just a few clicks. Additionally, their professional services team can apply advanced labor market information to uncover measurable strategies with a clear roadmap for your growth.
You’ll always make better workforce decisions.
Key features:
- Comprehensive Labor Market Data: Access over 18 billion data points, including job postings and compensation, providing the foundation for informed workforce decisions and strategic talent planning.
- Intuitive Software Tools: Utilize interactive maps and graphs within Lightcast’s software to simplify research, analyze data efficiently, and streamline your data workflows for quick insights.
- Expert Professional Services: Leverage a dedicated team of consultants and data scientists who apply advanced labor market intelligence to your specific questions, delivering measurable strategies and clear roadmaps.
Verdict: Lightcast stands out as the best workforce planning software, offering comprehensive labor market data and intuitive tools to address your talent forecasting needs. Its ability to provide data-backed insights on future skills and talent, combined with expert support, makes it ideal for aligning your people strategy with business goals.
7. OrgVue
Struggling to align your talent strategy with business objectives?
OrgVue helps you solve this by providing a unified platform to connect your data. This means you can finally see your entire workforce clearly.
You can gain complete visibility into your workforce demographics, helping you understand your current talent landscape better than ever.
It’s time to plan smarter.
OrgVue helps you overcome disconnected spreadsheets by giving you a single source of truth for all your workforce data. This lets you move from reactive decisions to proactive strategic planning.
You can dive deep into organizational design, operational planning, and workforce analytics, identifying critical skills gaps and forecasting future needs with confidence. This comprehensive approach means your people interventions are always aligned with your business goals, offering clarity and control over your talent initiatives.
This provides the competitive talent advantage you need.
Key features:
- Unified Data Platform: Consolidates diverse workforce data for a single source of truth, eliminating disconnected spreadsheets and improving data accuracy.
- Workforce Analytics & Forecasting: Provides tools for deep demographic insights, skills gap analysis, and accurate talent needs forecasting.
- Strategic Planning & Org Design: Supports operational planning and organizational design, ensuring talent strategies align directly with business objectives.
Learn more about OrgVue features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: OrgVue is an excellent choice for HR executives and workforce planners seeking the best workforce planning software. Its ability to unify data, provide detailed analytics, and support strategic organizational design directly addresses the pain points of fragmented data and helps forecast talent needs with ease.
Conclusion
Forecasting talent needs shouldn’t be guesswork.
Choosing the right tool is tough, especially with so many options. Many platforms overpromise but ultimately fail to deliver the actionable insights your organization actually needs.
According to Mordor Intelligence, AI-driven platforms can reduce overtime costs by up to 25% and slash payroll errors. This highlights the massive financial impact of adopting modern, integrated solutions instead of relying on outdated spreadsheets.
So, what’s my top recommendation?
From everything I’ve reviewed, Workday stands out as the clear winner. It directly solves the critical challenge of aligning your talent strategy with core business objectives.
Workday’s AI-powered platform provides total visibility into your workforce and financial data, which is a game-changer. It’s the best workforce planning software for turning complex forecasts into clear, actionable strategies.
If you’re also evaluating other essential business software, my article on font management software provides valuable insights.
I highly recommend you contact their sales team. You can discover how Workday unifies all your planning in one place.
You’ll adapt to the future faster.
