Workday People Analytics
Workday sells four layers of analytics, and People Analytics is the ready-made one that reads your Workday data. Three of its four topics need a Workday product you already own. Its access rules reach the field level. Customers on the Universal Main Subscription Agreement have one data contribution they cannot switch off. Ask for the price and the data terms in writing.
Workday People Analytics works on your Workday data, and the price comes from Workday
Workday People Analytics gives Workday customers ready-made monthly insights from their own Workday data. Data from other systems comes in through Prism or Data Cloud, which are separate products.
You already run Workday HCM and want insights on workers, hiring, skills or employee sentiment. It is also a good fit if Workday data alone answers your questions and monthly refreshes are fast enough.
Most of your people data sits outside Workday. It is a poor fit if you need figures more often than monthly. It is a poor fit if your lawyers will not accept AI training on your data.
Ask Workday for the People Analytics price. For Data Cloud, Workday sets a base platform fee with usage entitlements, plus Flex Credits beyond them. Order forms are non-cancellable and payments are non-refundable, with two stated exceptions.
Workday sells four layers of analytics, and People Analytics is one
Before you compare Workday with anything else, work out which Workday product you are comparing. Workday sells four layers of analytics. They differ in the data they read, the people who run them and the price.
People Analytics is the ready-made layer. It reads four sets of Workday data, which cover workers, hiring, skills and employee sentiment. Three of them depend on a product you already own. Worker topics need Workday HCM, its core HR system. The hiring topic needs Workday Recruiting. The sentiment topic needs Peakon Employee Voice, Workday’s employee survey tool, and an opt-in to the VIBE Index. The skills topic rests on a machine-learning feature that needs data contributions. People Analytics also needs at least 4 months of worker data in Workday. You choose how much history to load, from 4 to 36 months. It analyses up to 400 thousand employees.
A tool inside it called Storyteller searches your data for the most significant results. Workday calls these focus insights. Storyteller is a statistical model. It finds top drivers with a statistical method and gives each an Insight Score. Each insight, trend and KPI gets a short written narrative. A KPI is a headline measure, and you can pick up to 9 for each topic. The product also offers company benchmarking and out-of-the-box answers to common business questions.
Users can click into the detail. The Detailed Data tab previews the first 100 rows. You can send that detail to a discovery board, which is Workday’s drag-and-drop analysis screen and needs no coding. A monthly email digest can go to a list of people. Each digest covers 3 organisations and the top 3 KPIs. The product comes in 11 languages besides English.
The VIBE Index covers fairness and consistency. It measures outcomes such as hires, promotions, leadership, attrition and belonging for groups you define. It uses each group’s share of active headcount as the baseline. The belonging result scores each employee’s Peakon answers against a threshold. It counts only where at least 20% of workers and at least 10 workers took Peakon surveys.
Set-up uses a Workday consultant. They guide you through the topics, fields, population filters, security settings and data history. The fields you choose change how insights are created. On install, People Analytics turns on a refresh that follows your fiscal calendar. It loads data on the first Sunday after each fiscal period ends.
Core reporting is the second layer. Workday HCM and Financial Management include a reporting toolkit with 5,025+ prebuilt reports and 160+ prebuilt dashboards. Discovery boards and Workday Office Connect, which builds reports in Excel, sit in the same toolkit. Advanced reports can go to outside reporting tools as CSV or JSON. The Core Reporting Agent is a conversational assistant that analyses and summarises the report a user has open.
Prism Analytics is the third layer. It brings data from other systems into Workday so you can analyse it beside your Workday data. Data arrives through ready-made connections, API, secure file transfer or file upload. You can connect Salesforce, Snowflake, BigQuery, Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift and Azure Synapse. Prism is a separate product with its own order form. People Analytics comes with a limited licence to Prism for its Sentiment AI Data Insights feature only. That licence lasts while you have an active People Analytics subscription and have set up the feature.
Data Cloud is the fourth layer, and it is the newest. It shares Workday data with outside platforms, reporting tools and AI tools without copying it. It is for teams that want agents, analysts and outside platforms to read live and historical Workday data. It comes in two packages. Professional includes everything Prism does today. Core is a lighter package for simpler, single-source needs.
Our guide to people analytics covers how the rest of this market handles the decision.
Access rules, a traceable number and written uptime
Four things count in Workday’s favour. They are field-level access rules, traceable numbers, audits that cover the product and a written uptime promise. Each one gives you something to hold Workday to.
You control who sees each field
Access rules reach down to single fields and records. That matters because the worker data holds sensitive fields. Row-level rules cover the Hiring and Worker data. Access can be unconstrained, or limited by a primary, a secondary or several hierarchies. Field-level rules can restrict sensitive fields. These include gender, ethnicity and compa-ratio (pay against the middle of the pay range). They also include high potential, high performer, current rating and termination reason. Separate security groups exist for People Analytics, business leaders, HR business partners and three custom groups. Small groups get extra protection. When a group has 1 to 5 workers in any period it covers, the KPI card stays empty. No focus insight appears.
You can trace a number to its source
You can check how Workday got a figure. Each KPI has an information button that explains how it is calculated. Each insight, trend and KPI comes with a short written narrative. Prism records who changed a data feed, what changed and when. It also has tasks to view the lineage of a table or a set of data. Lineage is the record of which source and steps produced a figure. The Core Reporting Agent, Workday’s conversational assistant for reports, explains how it reached its answers. It applies the permissions the user already has.
Audits cover its analytics products
Independent standards already cover Analytics and Reporting. Workday’s ISO 27001, 27017 and 27018 security scope includes Analytics and Reporting and Human Capital Management. The ISO 27701 privacy scope includes Analytics and Reporting. So does ISO 42001, the standard for managing AI. Workday has an independent SOC 2 Type II assessment of its controls. It covers Workday Enterprise Products and other listed products. Check that your product is on the list. Stored data is encrypted with a 256-bit AES key. You can bring your own key. That keeps control of the root encryption keys with you.
Uptime is written into the terms
Workday promises 99.9% monthly uptime for all product lines except HiredScore. HiredScore gets 99.5%. Workday sets this in its Universal SLA. It covers the Analytics and Reporting product line with that SLA and its Support Policy. The SLA also sets a 10% remedy for a second failure in a rolling six months. It rises to 20% for a third failure and 30% for a fourth. Ask Workday what each percentage is a share of.
Which layer suits which situation
Workday sells four layers of analytics. People Analytics gives ready-made monthly insights. Core reporting is the reporting toolkit in Workday HCM and Financial Management. Prism brings in data from other systems. Data Cloud shares Workday data with outside platforms. Find your situation below to see which layer it points to.
You run Workday HCM
People Analytics is built for ready-made insights. Celonis grew from 50 to 3,000 employees in ten years. It uses Workday core reporting, discovery boards and People Analytics. A Celonis leader reports that what took hours or days now runs almost in real time. Staffbase has more than 1,100 employees. It uses People Analytics to be more data-driven. Staffbase reports a downward trend in female turnover and an upward trend in female new hires in product and engineering. It links the change to People Analytics and Peakon together.
Your data sits in many systems
Prism is the layer for this. Rolls-Royce employs around 40,000 people in over 45 countries and had 42 separate payrolls. It selected Prism Analytics. It reports fully automated reporting on headcount and total workforce costs, and budget variances cut by millions of pounds. It used Prism while restructuring during the COVID-19 crisis. DATEV employs more than 8,400 people. At DATEV, all historical HR data is accessible and all relevant data is in one place thanks to Prism.
You want an old HR system’s history
Workday offers a People History use case for this. It brings in data from legacy HR systems and holds all historical workforce data in the data hub. Prism data work is done by Data Administrators or Data Analysts. Report Writers then build discovery boards and reports on that data.
You want Workday data in your own tools
Data Cloud is the layer for this. Workday data is available in Google BigQuery, Salesforce Data 360 and Snowflake. Databricks and Amazon SageMaker are in early access. Power BI and Tableau connect through Live Data Query, and so does Python. Any AI tool that supports the MCP standard can connect. MCP is a common way to link an AI assistant to data. Claude, Copilot and Gemini are examples. Queries follow the same security as the person the assistant acts for. Our guide for companies using their own AI tool or data warehouse covers this route in more detail.
It needs Workday products first, and Workday may train its AI on your data
These limits matter most to you. They cover what the product reads and how fast it moves. They also cover what Workday does with your data and what you must buy next. Check each one with Workday before you sign.
Three topics need a Workday product
Three of the four topics depend on a product you must already own. Worker topics are only available if you have bought Workday HCM, its core HR system. The hiring topic is only available to Workday Recruiting customers. The sentiment topic is only available to Peakon Employee Voice customers who have opted in to the VIBE Index. The skills topic rests on Skills in People Analytics, a machine-learning feature that requires data contributions. Set-up also includes features such as Skills Cloud in Workday that the topics need. Data from a learning system, an engagement tool or an old HR system comes in through Prism. Prism is a separate product with its own order form.
Insights arrive monthly, in small numbers
Data loads on the first Sunday after each fiscal period ends. The refresh follows your fiscal calendar. Storyteller produces only 7 focus insights per fiscal month. The email digest covers 3 organisations, sorted alphabetically, however many the reader can access. The Detailed Data tab previews the first 100 rows. If you need a figure between refreshes, ask Workday how you get it.
Workday may train its AI on your data
Workday may use your data to train its AI features. For customers on the Universal Main Subscription Agreement, the UMSA, the People Analytics Insights Contribution option is on by default. You can disable it. For those customers, the Skills in People Analytics data contribution is also on by default. You cannot switch it off. Workday also switches on data contributions for AI features in the products they buy. It may use that data to train or enhance the feature. Under the Analytics and Reporting product terms, customer content is used to train and improve Workday’s AI and analytics features. This covers the features associated with that product line. You can manage that use as the documentation sets out. Agent interaction data within Workday applications is required to train and improve the agents used with this product line. Workday never shares customer data to train third-party public models.
Install and Peakon data go to Workday
One install step exports data, and Peakon sharing is optional. The People Analytics install includes a step that exports input source data to a machine learning development environment. Workday uses it to improve the product’s detection algorithms. You can also opt in to share Peakon questions, responses and employee identifiers with Workday. The data goes weekly. It helps design future People Analytics features. If you opt out, the stream stops. Workday deletes the data it collected after 14 days. Peakon scores data is highly confidential. Workday asks your administrator to consider that when adding users to Prism.
Outside companies handle your data for AI and analytics
Your data protection review will need to check these companies. Workday’s list of outside processors gives each company a job. Google LLC does natural language processing, translation and similarity matching across all product lines. In plain words, it reads and translates text and finds items that match. TypeSafe AI, Inc. does natural language processing, intent classification and confidence scoring across all product lines. In plain words, it works out what a request means and how sure the AI is. Databricks, Inc. runs a data platform that optimises customer data querying and analytics across all product lines. Google LLC also provides hosting and storage in the EEA and United States for product lines including Analytics and Reporting. Amazon Web Services hosts and stores data for all product lines. Its regions are the EEA, UK, Australia, Canada, Singapore and the United States. Workday’s agents use large language models.
The report assistant is narrow and metered
The Core Reporting Agent analyses only the report a user has open. It handles Advanced reports only. Its summary and table might not include all available data. Set-up for production use needs an opt-in to the Workday Flex Credits and Platform Entitlement Policy. Flex Credits are Workday’s usage-based pricing for AI agents and platform innovations. Under the rate card, each analysis request costs 8 Flex Credits.
Data Cloud status depends on the document
Two Workday documents give different pictures of Data Cloud. Its Data Cloud page puts several parts at general availability. They are the Agent Lake, Live Data Query, zero-copy federation, Prism Data Preparation and Agent-Ready Tools for Data. Zero-copy means another system reads the data where it sits. Its upgrade guide puts Data Cloud itself in Early Adopter. It targets general availability for 26R2, which is October 2026. That date has now passed, so ask Workday for the current status. The guide puts full availability of existing data sets held in Prism through the outbound path at 27R1. That is a later Workday release. The outbound path is the route that lets outside platforms read your Prism data without copying it.
Data Cloud needs more than a licence
Several conditions apply before you can use it. Data Cloud is a separate product that needs a licence and a subscription to Flex Credits. It is only available if your company’s copy of Workday is hosted in the public cloud. It also needs a contract with a supported partner platform. Zero-copy links work only with specific vendor partners. Live Data Query can reach only Workforce and Talent objects. A customer not yet on the public cloud completes a migration agreement when it buys. Workday puts the time at about two weeks for the implementation copy and about six months for production.
You stay responsible
Under Workday’s terms, you are solely responsible for employment decisions made with the service. You do not delegate any part of your employment practices to Workday. AI and analytics features may give new and untested results. So you must judge if they suit you. Do it before users see them. Early access functionality is for evaluation and testing only. You must check its outputs for accuracy.
A discrimination case
A federal court case named Mobley v. Workday, Inc. was filed on 21 February 2023. It is in the Northern District of California, with docket number 3:23-cv-00770. The case type is civil rights, employment discrimination. Ask Workday which of its products the case concerns, and whether any of them is the product you are buying.
You are also choosing a supplier, so look at its finances and plans. Workday is listed on Nasdaq as WDAY. On 21 October 2026 it priced $2.5 billion of senior notes, which is money it borrows from investors. UC Today reported on 5 February 2026 that Workday would cut 400 jobs, 2% of its workforce. UC Today also reported $135 million in restructuring charges alongside the cuts. Ask Workday how these changes affect the team that supports People Analytics.
Ask for the price in writing, and check the exit terms
The price depends on which layer you buy and on your contract. Ask Workday for the People Analytics price. Ask for a list of every extra product it needs. Data Cloud uses a hybrid pricing model. It has a base platform fee with usage entitlements. Flex Credits cover usage beyond them. Flex Credits are Workday’s usage-based pricing for AI agents and platform innovations. Pricing and entitlement levels depend on your organisation’s size and current contract. Workday refers buyers to the account team.
Workday sets some unit prices. Live Data Query costs 30 Flex Credits per 1 million rows processed hourly. The Workday Data Lake costs 10 Flex Credits per 1 million rows processed hourly. Core Reporting Agent analysis costs 8 Flex Credits per request. Workday calls its rates informational, not an offer. The official agreement holds the final terms. Workday also offers annual Complimentary Flex Credits based on company size. Features that come from early access may carry additional fees.
A move to Data Cloud means signing the Data Cloud order form and moving to the UMSA. In the US and Canada edition of that agreement, subscriptions start on the date set in the order form. Fees are due within 30 days of the invoice date. Order forms are non-cancellable and payments are non-refundable, with two stated exceptions. Suppose you end the contract for any other reason than a serious breach by Workday that is not put right. You still owe all future amounts due under all order forms.
Either side may end the contract on 30 days written notice for a serious breach that is not put right. Each side’s liability is capped at the fees for the preceding 12 months for the service concerned. A 24-month cap applies to a breach of confidentiality, security or privacy obligations.
Leaving has its own terms. If you ask before termination, Workday continues the service for up to three months. It charges one twelfth of the preceding 12-month fee, plus five percent, for each month. On written request you get limited access for up to 60 days at no extra cost to retrieve your content. Your content is the data you submitted to the service, and it includes outputs. Workday makes it available through extraction in a machine-readable format, as its documentation sets out. After the retrieval period Workday deletes your content by deleting your instance, which is your company’s copy of the system. Backup copies stay until their scheduled deletion.
You could also get these reports and answers from agents built on your own systems. We have mapped what that looks like. The HR Agent Map
Nine questions for the demo
Use these questions in a demo. Each comes with the answer that would settle it.
- What does People Analytics cost us, and which other Workday products must we buy for it to work? Good answer: A written quote for People Analytics and every product it depends on, with the order term.
- Which of the four topics will we get, given the Workday products we already own? Good answer: A list of topics tied to our HCM, Recruiting and Peakon products.
- Which data contributions can we switch off, and what does the Skills one send to Workday? Good answer: A named list of what each one sends, and a written opt-out for each in the order form.
- Which outside companies process our people data for AI and analytics, and in which countries? Good answer: A named list with the country and purpose of each company.
- How do we get a figure between the monthly loads? Good answer: A stated refresh time for each topic, and a named route to newer numbers.
- Which parts of Data Cloud can we buy and use today, and which are still early access? Good answer: A dated list of parts, tied to the order form.
- What is each 10%, 20% or 30% remedy a share of, and how do we claim it? Good answer: A written answer with the fee it applies to and the claim steps.
- Which file format does “machine-readable” mean for our data, and do outputs come with it? Good answer: A named format, written into the order form, that covers outputs too.
- Which of your products does the Mobley v. Workday case concern? Good answer: A written answer from Workday’s legal team, and what it means for our contract.
Alternatives to Workday
The main alternatives are Workday’s own core reporting, One Model, Crunchr, Visier, Oracle, SAP and your own data warehouse.
Start with the analytics you may already pay for. Workday HCM and Financial Management include a reporting toolkit. It has 5,025+ prebuilt reports, 160+ prebuilt dashboards, discovery boards and Excel reporting. Try it before you buy People Analytics. Then list the questions it cannot answer, and take that list to the demo.
One Model, Crunchr and Visier are independent tools that read your Workday data. One Model connects to Workday HCM through an integration user with read permissions for human resources data. It also brings in labour costs from finance systems and recruiting data from Greenhouse or iCIMS. Crunchr connects to Workday and other HR systems. It can also read Workday through a Workday reporting service called RaaS. It takes data from any system that shares CSV, Excel or Parquet files. Visier has a Workday connector. It can load records from Workday and an applicant tracking system into the same employee record. It needs read access to certain Workday web services. Prism does a similar job inside Workday, so compare which one your team would rather run.
Oracle and SAP sell the same kind of analytics for their own HR systems. Oracle Fusion HCM Analytics is built on top of Oracle HCM Cloud. SAP People Intelligence is an add-on licence to SAP Business Data Cloud. They matter to you if part of your people data lives in one of those systems.
Your own warehouse is the last route. Data Cloud sends Workday data to Google BigQuery, Salesforce Data 360 and Snowflake. You can then analyse it with your own tools. Three of our guides cover these choices. One is for companies whose HR system has analytics. Another is for companies using their own AI tool or data warehouse. The third is for enterprise companies. The comparison page puts every product side by side.
https://www.workday.com/en-us/ai-platform/augmented-analytics-software.html · Workday People Analytics · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/content/dam/web/en-us/documents/datasheets/workday-people-analytics.pdf · Workday People Analytics datasheet · read 6 Nov 2026
https://doc.workday.com/content/dam/fmdita-outputs/pdfs/admin-guide/en-us/Admin-Guide-Reporting-and-Analytics.pdf · Workday administrator guide, reporting and analytics · read 6 Nov 2026
https://doc.workday.com/content/dam/fmdita-outputs/pdfs/user-guide/en-us/User-Guide-Workday-People-Analytics.pdf · Workday People Analytics user guide · read 6 Nov 2026
https://doc.workday.com/content/dam/fmdita-outputs/pdfs/admin-guide/en-us/Admin-Guide-Workday-AI.pdf · Workday administrator guide, Workday AI · read 6 Nov 2026
https://doc.workday.com/content/dam/fmdita-outputs/pdfs/admin-guide/en-us/Admin-Guide-Workday-Data-Cloud.pdf · Workday administrator guide, Data Cloud · read 6 Nov 2026
https://doc.workday.com/content/dam/fmdita-outputs/pdfs/user-guide/en-us/User-Guide-Workday-Prism-Analytics.pdf · Workday Prism Analytics user guide · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/en-us/ai-platform/core-reporting-analytics.html · Workday core reporting and analytics · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/en-us/products/analytics-reporting/data-hub.html · Workday Prism Analytics data hub · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/content/dam/web/en-us/documents/datasheets/datasheet-workday-prism-analytics.pdf · Workday Prism Analytics datasheet · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/en-us/resources/prism-analytics/data-hub-use-cases/people-history.html · Workday Prism use case, people history · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/en-us/ai-platform/data-cloud.html · Workday Data Cloud · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/en-us/ai-platform/live-data-query.html · Workday Live Data Query · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/en-us/ai-platform/agent-ready-data-tools.html · Workday Agent-Ready Tools for Data · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/en-us/topics/it/guide-prism-to-data-cloud.html · Workday guide, Prism to Data Cloud · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/en-us/ai-platform/responsible-ai.html · Workday responsible AI · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/en-us/artificial-intelligence/ai-flex-credits.html · Workday Flex Credits · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/content/dam/web/en-us/documents/legal/flex-credits-rate-card.pdf · Workday Flex Credits rate card · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/content/dam/web/en-us/documents/legal/analytics-reporting-product-terms.pdf · Workday Analytics and Reporting product terms · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/content/dam/web/en-us/documents/legal/usla.pdf · Workday Universal SLA · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/content/dam/web/en-us/documents/legal/workday-subprocessors.pdf · Workday list of outside data processors · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/en-us/legal/universal-contract-terms-and-conditions/umsa/americas.html · Workday Universal Main Subscription Agreement, US and Canada edition · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/en-us/why-workday/trust/compliance.html · Workday compliance · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/en-us/why-workday/trust/security.html · Workday security · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/en-us/customer-stories/a-h/celonis-people-strategy-data-driven-insights.html · Celonis customer story · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/en-us/customer-stories/q-z/staffbase-empowers-their-growth-with-workday.html · Staffbase customer story · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/en-us/customer-stories/q-z/rolls-royce-new-data-hub-understanding-workforce-costs.html · Rolls-Royce customer story · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.workday.com/en-us/customer-stories/a-h/datev-unified-HR-data-self-service-reporting.html · DATEV customer story · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=Mobley+v.+Workday&type=r&order_by=score+desc · CourtListener, Mobley v. Workday, Inc. · read 6 Nov 2026
https://newsroom.workday.com/2026-10-21-Workday-Announces-Pricing-of-2-5-Billion-Senior-Notes-Offering · Workday press release, senior notes pricing, 21 October 2026 · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.uctoday.com/talent-hcm-platforms/workday-to-cut-around-2-of-jobs-in-workforce-reorganization/ · UC Today, Workday job cuts, 5 February 2026 · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.onemodel.co/products/data-mesh · One Model Data Mesh · read 6 Nov 2026
https://help.onemodel.co/hc/en-us/articles/13837028165263-Configure-a-Workday-Datasource · One Model help centre, Workday data source · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.crunchr.com/data-integrations/ · Crunchr data integrations · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.visier.com/docs/descriptions/connector/workday/ · Visier Workday connector · read 6 Nov 2026
https://docs.visier.com/visier-people/Studio/data/data%20connectors/data-connectors.htm · Visier data connectors · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.oracle.com/fusion-data-intelligence/hcm-analytics/ · Oracle Fusion HCM Analytics · read 6 Nov 2026
https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/analytics/26r3/fahia/reference-fusion-hcm-analytics.pdf · Oracle Fusion HCM Analytics reference guide · read 6 Nov 2026
https://www.sap.com/products/hcm/data-cloud.html · SAP People Intelligence · read 6 Nov 2026
https://help.sap.com/http.svc/pagecontent?deliverable_id=39389943&file_path=33fa21241c694bd987971264407f0211.html&deliverableInfo=1&version=cloud&locale=en-US · SAP People Intelligence help guide · read 6 Nov 2026