Workday (NASDAQ:WDAY) vs. Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) Head-To-Head Comparison

Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) and Workday (NASDAQ:WDAY) are both finance companies, but which is the superior business? We will compare the two companies based on the strength of their profitability, earnings, analyst recommendations, risk, valuation, dividends and institutional ownership.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of recent recommendations for Applied Digital and Workday, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Applied Digital	0	1	11	1	3.00
Workday	0	8	18	2	2.79

Applied Digital currently has a consensus target price of $12.73, indicating a potential downside of 2.25%. Workday has a consensus target price of $293.54, indicating a potential upside of 16.07%. Given Workday’s higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe Workday is more favorable than Applied Digital.

Profitability

This table compares Applied Digital and Workday’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Applied Digital	-127.86%	-117.67%	-27.84%
Workday	19.86%	6.13%	3.13%

Risk & Volatility

Applied Digital has a beta of 6.08, meaning that its share price is 508% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Workday has a beta of 1.24, meaning that its share price is 24% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Insider & Institutional Ownership

65.7% of Applied Digital shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 89.8% of Workday shares are owned by institutional investors. 11.8% of Applied Digital shares are owned by company insiders. Comparatively, 19.3% of Workday shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, endowments and hedge funds believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Valuation and Earnings

This table compares Applied Digital and Workday”s gross revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Applied Digital	$221.19 million	13.25	-$149.27 million	($1.37)	-9.50
Workday	$8.70 billion	7.76	$1.38 billion	$1.81	139.72

Workday has higher revenue and earnings than Applied Digital. Applied Digital is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Workday, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Summary

Workday beats Applied Digital on 12 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Applied Digital

Applied Digital Corporation designs, develops, and operates datacenters in North America. Its datacenters provide digital infrastructure solutions to the high-performance computing industry. The company also provides artificial intelligence cloud services, high performance computing datacenter hosting, and crypto datacenter hosting services. The company was formerly known as Applied Blockchain, Inc. and changed its name to Applied Digital Corporation in November 2022. Applied Digital Corporation is based in Dallas, Texas.

About Workday

Workday, Inc. provides enterprise cloud applications in the United States and internationally. Its applications help its customers to plan, execute, analyze, and extend to other applications and environments to manage their business and operations. The company offers a suite of financial management applications to maintain accounting information in the general ledger; manage financial processes, such as payables and receivables; identify real-time financial, operational, and management insights; enhance financial consolidation; reduce time-to-close; promote internal control and auditability; and achieve consistency across finance operations. It also provides spend management solutions that help organizations to streamline supplier selection and contracts, manage indirect spend, and build and execute sourcing events, such as requests for proposals; expense management solutions to submit and approve expenses; and a suite of human capital management applications that enables HR teams to hire, onboard, pay, develop, reskill, and provide employee experiences. In addition, the company offers planning applications; and applications for analytics and reporting comprising augmented analytics to surface insights to the line of business in simple-to-understand stories, machine learning to drive efficiency and automation, and benchmarks to compare performance against other companies. Further, it provides supply chain and inventory solutions to healthcare organizations; solutions to manage the end-to-end student and faculty lifecycle; and Workday Extend for customers and their developers to build custom applications. It serves professional and business services, financial services, healthcare, education, government, technology, media, retail, and hospitality industries. The company was formerly known as North Tahoe Power Tools, Inc. and changed its name to Workday, Inc. in July 2005. Workday, Inc. was incorporated in 2005 and is headquartered in Pleasanton, California.