SAP is the "European" way of doing things, which means there's one right way and you need to align your business to SAP's way of doing things. If you do that, things work very well.

Peoplesoft is the "American" way of doing it, which means that you make your software fit around you. This means a lot of customizations. This makes integrations much more challenging if you're too far off kilter, and things like upgrading is much much harder, because there's too many customizations.

That's the information I had about 10 years old and not sure how much SAP has evolved since then.

Smaller companies these days have a lot more options, like Netsuite is already there for small businesses and Workday is moving in that direction. Startups come and go every day. Rippling appears to be one that is headed in this direction as well.