.jpg)
We put in the effort to make this guide awesome
39
Hours Researched
.svg)
6
Experts Consulted
.svg)
28
Vendors Reviewed
Our criteria: How we chose the best vendors
We take our research seriously and want to make sure we are presenting our readers with the very best solutions in a given software category. Here's how we select vendors to be in our buyer guides:
- Product: We want to have a deep understanding of a vendor's product before recommending it. This usually means getting a demo by a senior executive (their CEO, head of product, etc), and/or using the product ourselves to make sure it has a solid UI, intuitive workflows, and the features to make it a best in class offering.
- User feedback: We do our best to understand what users say when they experience this product. User input allows us to accomplish a more thorough due diligence of products, put new vendors on our radar, and generally make sure we are presenting the right products to our readers.
- Financial metrics: We are very much finance nerds and so use a product's retention rates, growth, profitability, and scale to understand whether or not it is truly best in class.
- Best for a use case: Sometimes the best solution is the cheapest, the best tool for international companies, or the best for startups. We try to include a diversity of solutions so that our readers can find the tool that is best for what they need.
Here's more detail if you want to read further on how we research vendors.
In this guide you'll find
- Top Employee Engagement Tools
- What is Employee Engagement Software and What Are the Benefits?
- Most Common Pitfalls of Employee Engagement Software
- The Business Case Behind Employee Engagement Platforms
- Questions to Ask on Demos
- Employee Engagement Software FAQs
- Final Advice on Employee Engagement Software + Our Best Pro Tip
If you're looking to buy employee engagement software, you've come to the right place. We continue to do regular research on what the best employee engagement tools are, along with what price you should pay, questions to ask vendors on demos, ROI calculations, and a whole lot more.
The right employee engagement platform will allow your organization to build a stronger culture, which will lead to better employee retention, and an easier time hiring. Employee engagement tools have become even more important as:
- 2 out of 3 millennials state their organization's purpose and culture are the reason why they chose to work there. Without a healthy culture, companies simply cannot retain young talent.
- People Analytics is becoming a more important discipline with 71% of companies regarding it as a high priority in their organizations. A top employee engagement solution allows HR to have more insight into what's going on in their organization.
- Employee engagement software allows companies to keep their hand on the pulse of their organization to see what managers need more training, which teams have higher flight risk, and how key objectives are being met within the organization.
The below guide is meant to help HR and People teams to select the right engagement platform for their business. We've provided a shortlist along with general info on use cases, pitfalls, best practices, etc. You may also be interested in performance management software which allows companies to track the goals of an individual, group, division, and company. Good luck!
Featured in
Top Employee Engagement Tools
We track thousands of HRTech solutions, these are the best Employee Engagement Tools and services per our research and expert council.
Why we love it
:
WorkTango combines engagement surveys, continuous performance management and employee recognition into one powerful platform to help you improve employee experience and by extension, company culture.
- WorkTango is available in English, Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Korean, although the latter is only available for the performance management module.
- You can add modules as you go and these will be charged on a prorated basis.
- Billing is only done annually and all plans require a minimum agreement for a 24-month subscription (see our FAQs for more and their pricing page for full details).
- Several users have complained about the rewards redeeming process being not very intuitive.
WorkTango
Review:
WorkTango packs features for employee engagement, rewards and recognition, and performance management—all into a single user-friendly platform. Their three-pronged approach allows People teams to use one vendor that seamlessly shares data across all three modules.
To put it in stats, WorkTango sees over 80% of users engaging with their platform on a monthly basis. They also have a customer retention rate of over 90%.
WorkTango
Customers:
Allianz, Hitachi, Kia Motors, Patagonia
Allianz, Hitachi, Kia Motors, Meredith, Patagonia
WorkTango
Stats:
- 95% customer retention rate
- 600+ global customers
- 1-3% average improvement in productivity
- 10-20% higher employee retention
- 95% customer retention rate
- 600+ global customers
- 1-3% average improvement in productivity
- 10-20% higher employee retention
WorkTango
Pricing:
WorkTango has three plans. The pricing of those plans depends on the modules included. For example, you can either purchase Kazoo’s Recognition or Performance solutions individually or have them combined in a single plan (i.e. the full platform). When billed annually, the pricing of Kazoo’s plans is as follows
- Growth: Designed for companies with 100 - 250 employees, this plan costs $5 per employee per month for the Recognition module, $9 per employee per month for the Performance module, and $12.50 per employee per month for the full platform (Recognition + Performance).
- Standard: Designed for companies with 250 - 1000 employees, this plan costs $4.25 per employee per month for the Recognition module, $7.50 per employee per month for the Performance module, and $10.50 per employee per month for the full platform (Recognition + Performance).
- Enterprise: Designed for companies with 1,000 or more employees, this plan has custom pricing. Contact WorkTango's Sales team for a quote.
WorkTango has three plans. The pricing of those plans depends on the modules included. For example, you can either purchase WorkTango's Recognition or Performance solutions individually or have them combined in a single plan (i.e. the full platform). When billed annually, the pricing of WorkTango's plans is as follows:
- Growth: Designed for companies with 100 - 250 employees, this plan costs $5 per employee per month for the Recognition module, $9 per employee per month for the Performance module, $2.50 for surveys, and $12.50 per employee per month for the full platform (Recognition + Performance).
- Standard: Designed for companies with 250 - 1000 employees, this plan costs $4.25 per employee per month for the Recognition module, $7.50 per employee per month for the Performance module, $2.00 for surveys, and $10.50 per employee per month for the full platform (Recognition + Performance).
- Enterprise: Designed for companies with 1,000 or more employees, this plan has custom pricing. Contact WorkTango's Sales team for a quote.
Best For
Although WorkTango can be used by any company size, from SMBs to Fortune 100 enterprises, their 600+ clients are predominantly mid-sized to small enterprises in knowledge worker industries, such as software & tech, FSI, healthcare, and business services.
Why we love it
:
With an adoption rate of over 90%, Assembly is a rewards and recognition platform that also allows you to customize and send out all sorts of engagement forms and receive actionable feedback.
- Explore the platform for free, no need for a credit card or demo
- Great set of features for the price point
- Make your own rewards and even set up a points system with automated incentives
- You have the option to go with a month-to-month plan or a long-term contract. For the latter, you can reach out to their team for a custom deal if it’s a larger team. However, keep in mind that the minimum agreement is 12 months.
- Coins and points do expire, so sometimes they’ll expire by the end of the month before you can use them, although you get more the next period.
- SSO is only included with some plans. For others, it can be purchased as an add-on.
Assembly
Review:
Assembly started out as an employee rewards product and rapidly grew into a comprehensive platform that facilitates employee engagement, project management, and performance management.
Thanks to customizable forms and workflows, companies can use Assembly to send pulse surveys, conduct routine standups and 1:1s, track progress, automate employee recognition, and much more.
To put it in numbers, Assembly sees around 90% of employees use it on a monthly basis which is evidence that companies are successfully using it to build stronger cultures with more engaged employees.
Assembly
Customers:
Cocacola, Quest Nutrition, Nesco Resource, HelloTech, Amazon
Coca Cola, Goodside Health, StubHub, Amazon, Keck School of Medicine, Quest Nutrition
Assembly
Stats:
- Over 2,400 organizations use Assembly
- Assembly has an adoption rate of over 90%.
- Assembly’s rewards catalog has over 600 gift cards and 40 charities to choose from.
- Companies see >90% monthly participation from employees
- Hundreds of reward options in the US and internationally
- Used by over 3,000 organizations
Assembly
Pricing:
Assembly has four plans that are priced as follows:
- Starter: Limited to 10 members, the Starter plan is free of charge and is designed for small teams that are interested in employee recognition.
- Lite: For $2.80 per member per month, billed annually, the Lite plan is designed for teams that want to maximize their employee engagement. This plan is limited to 50 members.
- Standard: For $4.50 per member per month, billed annually, the Standard plan packs all the necessary features for businesses to amplify cross-functional engagement, without any limits on the number of members on board.
- Premium: Designed for large organizations that need a custom and unique program, the Premium plan can accommodate unlimited members. Contact Assembly’s Sales team for a price quote.
Assembly offers a free version for up to 10 employees. Paying customers are charged $2.80 - $4.50 per employee per month depending on the features you're looking for and if you choose an annual vs monthly plan.
Best For
Assembly can be used by companies of all sizes across different verticals.
Why we love it
:
Empuls is one of the few employee engagement platforms that let you create your own social intranet to keep them abreast of the latest company updates, industry news, and seek feedback via interactive polls and quizzes. Your team can also celebrate milestones using built-in rewards, gift cards, and exclusive employee discounts.
- Empuls features a modern UI that’s easy to navigate. They also offer plenty of self-help articles to help you get started.
- The platform is quite comprehensive, with tools covering employee communication, engagement surveys, recognition, rewards, and analytics.
- Employees are able to participate in surveys on the go with the help of Empuls’ mobile app available on both iOS and Android devices.
- Their affordable and tiered pricing ensures different size companies can try out the tool and scale up or down as needed. They also offer a 30-day free trial that anyone can sign up for.
- A few users find the options for rewards rather limited. Several of them are specifically wishing for the inclusion of more Amazon gift cards viable in their countries.
- Employees cannot share their points with each other at this time.
- Once you assign a sub-domain, you cannot change it later.
- Several users have experienced performance speed issues with Empuls’ mobile app.
Empuls
Review:
Empuls is one of the few employee engagement platforms that let you create your own social intranet to keep them abreast of the latest company updates, industry news, and seek feedback via interactive polls and quizzes. Your team can also celebrate milestones using built-in rewards, gift cards, and exclusive employee discounts.
Empuls
Customers:
Empuls has over 1000 global customers, including Prodevans, Bahwan Cybertek, Magzter, FCA India Automobiles Private Limited, KPIT, Quixy, and more.
Empuls has over 1000 global customers, including Prodevans, Bahwan Cybertek, Magzter, FCA India Automobiles Private Limited, KPIT, Quixy, and more.
Empuls
Stats:
- Empuls has 1000+ customers worldwide and is used by 150,000+ employees worldwide.
- Empuls is trusted by 2500+ people leaders.
- Empuls has 1000+ customers worldwide and is used by 150,000+ employees worldwide.
- Empuls is trusted by 2500+ people leaders.
Empuls
Pricing:
Empuls offers three pricing plans. Here are the prices if you choose to pay annually:
- Starter: This plan costs $20/year per employee. It offers features, including rewards and recognition, employee surveys and feedback, social intranet, and reports and analytics.
- Proficient: This plan costs $50/year per employee. It offers features, including white labeling, polls & quizzes, customer support, and everything that is in the Starter plan.
- Enterprise: This is a custom plan that offers everything from Proficient plan, plus custom HRMS integration, multi-region deployment, multi-currency payoffs, and dedicated customer success manager.
Empuls offers three pricing plans. Here are the prices if you choose to pay annually:
- Starter: This plan costs $20/year per employee. It offers features, including rewards and recognition, employee surveys and feedback, social intranet, and reports and analytics.
- Proficient: This plan costs $50/year per employee. It offers features, including white labeling, polls & quizzes, customer support, and everything that is in the Starter plan.
- Enterprise: This is a custom plan that offers everything from Proficient plan, plus custom HRMS integration, multi-region deployment, multi-currency payoffs, and dedicated customer success manager.
Best For
While Empuls offers several competitive features for every business, it’s most suitable for small to medium-sized businesses who want to build a people-first environment.
Why we love it
:
Leapsome is highly flexible; you can choose to build on their best-practice surveys and questionnaires developed by psychologists or customize everything — from questions to timelines and anonymity settings.
Leapsome
Review:
With customizable, easy-to-set-up employee engagement surveys, Leapsome allows you to measure the pulse of your company culture and make strategic decisions based on real-time insights. The platform also features Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning technologies that analyze written responses to open-ended questions, helping you quickly uncover sentiment, identify common themes, and undertake data-driven actions to tackle the biggest challenges.
Leapsome
Customers:
Mercedes Benz, Spotify, Trivago, Eventim, Babbel, Plus Dental
Spotify, Babbel, Trivago, PlusDental+, Mercedes-Benz.
Leapsome
Stats:
- More than 1.2m unique pieces of feedback are shared across the Leapsome platform
- 99% customer satisfaction for interactions with Leapsome’s success team
- 1.2M unique pieces of feedback shared
- 99% customer satisfaction
Leapsome
Pricing:
Leapsome’s pricing depends on the number of your employees, the modules you want to use, and the length of your contract. Its modular pricing starts from $7 per user per month when billed annually. To get a detailed quote, contact Leapsome’s sales team. You can also test out Leapsome free of charge for a full 14 days - no credit card required.
Leapsome starts at a 24-day free trial. Once that is over, pricing will depend on the number of employees you'll have using the tool and the modules you'd like to use. Their modular pricing starts at 7 USD user/month if billed yearly.
Best For
Leapsome can be used by companies of all sizes across different verticals.
Why we love it
:
Eloomi helps your HR team run employee engagement surveys and get real-time feedback from your employees. You can use this information to identify areas for improvement and motivate your employees with points, rewards, and certificates.
- Eloomi is quite comprehensive, with modules for onboarding, training/learning, performance management, employee engagement, and recognition.
- The platform comes with a library of ready-to-use templates to help you create online training faster. It also has a mobile app for your employees to access training materials on the go.
- Their surveys are customizable and private, helping you get specific and honest feedback from employees.
- You can request other members of the organization to provide feedback on certain skills of employees.
- You can make use of Eloomi’s micro-sized online training content to prevent overwhelming onboarding experiences.
- Because of the sheer number of features Eloomi offers, there’s a steeper learning curve for the average user to get the hang of the platform and understand it to its fullest.
- A few users reported experiencing bugs and speed issues when generating reports, especially ones with a large volume of data, but have noted that Eloomi’s customer support team is quick to resolve such issues.
- The platform’s pricing isn’t transparent and free trials aren’t available at this time.
eloomi
Review:
Eloomi offers employee engagement surveys to help you gauge the health of your employee culture and take steps to improve it. You can customize these surveys and make them private, so you are able to derive specific and honest feedback from your employees on what’s working and what isn’t. These surveys are also a great way to drive engagement and make your employees feel heard. If you need a bit of help getting your employees to fill these out, you can introduce points, certificates, or rewards as incentives.
eloomi
Customers:
Eloomi’s customer list includes BONUS Vorsorgekasse AG, Breakout Games, Carne Group, ElectricBrands, Nufarm, Domino’s, and more.
Eloomi’s customer list includes BONUS Vorsorgekasse AG, Breakout Games, Carne Group, ElectricBrands, Nufarm, Domino’s, and more.
eloomi
Stats:
When Kompan, one of the largest playground manufacturers, trained more than 1000 employees using Eloomi, only 1% of them reached out for help, although the platform was new to around 80% of them.
When Kompan, one of the largest playground manufacturers, trained more than 1000 employees using Eloomi, only 1% of them reached out for help, although the platform was new to around 80% of them.
eloomi
Pricing:
Eloomi offers custom pricing, so the best way to find out how much it costs is to request a demo.
Eloomi offers custom pricing, so the best way to find out how much it costs is to request a demo.
Best For
Eloomi is for HR leaders and managers of mid-sized and large businesses to make onboarding easier for employees, engage them through frequent feedback, and track the progress of their personal development.
Why we love it
:
Bonusly helps bring visibility around small wins in multiple ways. You can create surveys to communicate with employees, integrate it with your communication tools to boost recognition, or evaluate recognition trends with detail reports.
- Available in German, English, French, and Spanish
- Works worldwide
- Also includes an employee feedback system
- Their starter plan is for small businesses (50 people or fewer). More users might require an upgrade. They also offer custom discounts for non-profit and education organizations.
- The platform isn’t very customizable.
- Reward catalog is mainly oriented towards gift cards, cash, or donations.
Bonusly
Review:
Bonusly’s goal is to increase employee engagement and retention through authentic interactions and positive reinforcement. Through its social media-style interface, Bonusly allows employees to shout out their colleagues for great work on a company-wide scale. Bonusly has also recently added an employee feedback feature, allowing companies to gain real-time, actionable insights into employee satisfaction levels through pre-made and custom surveys.
Bonusly
Customers:
Hulu, InVision, SurveyMonkey, Headspace, and more
Bonusly
Stats:
- Customers from over 100 countries
- Over 16 million bonuses given
- 89% of Bonusly users participate within their first month
- 79% receive recognition at least once a month
Bonusly
Pricing:
The pricing details of Bonusly are as follows:
- Core: This plan costs $2.70 per user per month when billed annually.
- Pro: This plan costs $4.50 per user per month when billed annually.
- Custom: This plan is designed for large organizations and has custom pricing.
Note: Free trials and demos are available
Best For:
Bonusly serves companies in different verticals. As for company size, Bonusly has been used by companies between 50-5,000 employees.
Why we love it
:
Officevibe helps companies engage employees and increase their satisfaction - all while nurturing managers and improving how they tackle challenges in the workplace.
Officevibe
Review:
Officevibe is a cloud-based platform that focuses on employee engagement and manager growth. It allows managers to measure employee satisfaction through pulse surveys, then provides them with guidance on how they can improve the work environment and culture. In line with those efforts, the platform facilitates manager-to-employee and peer-to-peer recognition. It also offers features for poll creation, reporting, 1:1s planning, scheduling, and more.
Officevibe
Customers:
WeTransfer, Dyson, Bose, PayScale, Trivago
Officevibe
Stats:
- Founded in 2014
- 275 employees and growing
Officevibe
Pricing:
Pricing: Officevibe has three plans:
- Free: This plan is free of charge for 1 team with up to 10 users.
- Essential: This plan allows for unlimited teams and costs $5 per user per month.
- Pro: Designed for larger teams, this plan costs $7 per user per month.
- Business: Available for companies with over 500 users, this plan has custom pricing. Contact Officevibe’s Sales team to get a quote.
Best For:
Officevibe can be used by companies of all sizes.
Why we love it
:
Officevibe helps companies engage employees and increase their satisfaction - all while nurturing managers and improving how they tackle challenges in the workplace.
Officevibe
Review:
Officevibe is a cloud-based platform that focuses on employee engagement and manager growth. It allows managers to measure employee satisfaction through pulse surveys, then provides them with guidance on how they can improve work environment and culture. The platform packs several pre-made templates and questions to ease the survey creation process. It also offers features for OKR tracking, polls creation, reporting, 1:1s planning, scheduling, and more.
Officevibe
Customers:
WeTransfer, Dyson, Bose, PayScale, Trivago
Officevibe
Stats:
- Founded in 2014
- 275 employees and growing
Officevibe
Pricing:
Pricing: Officevibe has three plans:
- Free: This plan is free of charge for 1 team with up to 10 users.
- Essential: This plan allows for unlimited teams and costs $5 per user per month.
- Pro: Designed for larger teams, this plan costs $7 per user per month.
- Business: Available for companies with over 500 users, this plan has custom pricing. Contact Officevibe’s Sales team to get a quote.
Best For:
Officevibe can be used by companies of all sizes.
Why we love it
:
ClearCompany is a one-stop-shop for all sorts of enterprise-grade HR software. You can combine their employee engagement solution with their onboarding, performance management, and workforce planning solutions.
- ClearCompany offers a host of HR solutions that work well with another. You can choose the solution you need or combine them all to have a comprehensive talent management platform in your stack.
- The majority of users find ClearCompany’s interface to be quite intuitive and easy to navigate.
- Many users have highly rated ClearCompany’s support team for speed and quality of response. Several users have also reported a smooth implementation experience.
- ClearCompany’s pricing is not readily available on their website. You also can’t create a trial account on your own from the website and have to go through the sales team for more info.
- Some users felt that the reporting feature is limited in customizations.
- According to a few users, the candidate search function doesn’t always bring up the correct candidate(s) and could use some improvement.
- ClearCompany doesn’t currently have a mobile app, but the platform is well optimized for mobile use both for hiring managers and candidates.
ClearCompany
Review:
ClearCompany's employee engagement solution can take care of everything from recognition and celebrations to goal-planning and real-time feedback. It is also a mobile-friendly and multilingual tool. Their survey tool is particularly powerful, with template reviews that are proven to work and you can choose or create your own from.
Another thing we like about this vendor is their excellent customer service and the wideness of their offer. With their platform, you can choose to use only one or a few modules or use one of their tools for each stage of the employee lifecycle.
ClearCompany
Customers:
The Salvation Army, Fujifilm, Chick-fil-A, and the Supreme Court for the State of Arizona.
ClearCompany
Stats:
- Over 2,000 clients
- Founded in 2004
- 640,000 total users
ClearCompany
Pricing:
With ClearCompany, you can choose to buy a single module, several, or the whole platform. The latter includes an ATS, onboarding tool, performance management, planning & analytics, and, of course, the employee engagement tools. However, the price for either modality isn't provided, as it would be based on your company size and particular needs.
Best For:
ClearCompany is best suited for companies looking for a complete employee engagement solution and also get their ATS, onboarding tool, or many types of HR software from the same vendor.
Why we love it
:
For employee engagement: TINYpulse saves you time by providing crystal-clear, actionable insights about your team’s engagement. It allows you to distribute surveys and use the data to identify trends and take appropriate action on them.
- TINYpulse helps you save time by offering a standard set of questions, so you don’t have to worry about what and how to ask.
- Survey results can be visible to everyone, confidential, or completely anonymous, empowering employees to give honest feedback.
- TINYpulse Engage helps large organizations to create an environment where employees feel heard.
- The Cheers to Peers solution helps in cross-department recognition.
- The user interface can be a little difficult to get used to for new users and admins.
- If employees do not interact with the tool, you cannot get much out of it. There should be some type of incentive structure to motivate employees to use it.
- You might find some of the existing questions irrelevant to your team or goals.
- The price of the software isn't available on their site, and they don't offer free trials.
TinyPulse
Review:
TINYpulse Engage lets you send out standardized surveys at the perfect time. While it has a library of over 300 pre-built templates and science-backed questions, you still have the option to choose a different question from the library or write your own.
Surveys are available in five types: Scale 1-5, Boolean, Open Text, Multiple Choice, and Multi-select. You can schedule, pause and remove these surveys at any time. You can make these surveys completely anonymous so your employees feel more comfortable responding honestly. You can even send private messages to respondents to clear any doubts you might have about their feedback.
TinyPulse
Customers:
TINYpulse’s customer list includes Microsoft, First Financial Credit Union, One Click, Wheelhouse DMG, and more.
TinyPulse
Stats:
- Covered by Forbes, BBC, Harvard Business Review, and TechCrunch.
- Microsoft has a 50% engagement rate on average with TINYpulse.
TinyPulse
Pricing:
- Cross-department engagement: You can share your survey results with other team leaders to help them build an improved workflow culture.
- Anonymous feedback: This empowers employees and everyone in the system to share their feedback without hesitation.
- Employee recognition: Acknowledging your employees' efforts from time to time will make them feel appreciated, which helps increase their loyalty and retention.
- Quick decision-making: It offers useful data filters to simplify the process of finding the best work and recognizing it.
- Real-time data: You will receive real-time feedback to start damage control before it starts controlling you.
Best For:
TINYpulse is suitable for mid-sized and large businesses to boost their retention rate and relationship building among teams.
Why we love it
:
Reward Gateway is an employee engagement platform (SmartHub) that combines employee recognition, surveys, communication, discounts (instant vouchers and cashback offers), and analytics in a single solution.
- Remarkably good customer support due to their 24/7 help desk team and multiple communication channels
- Varied rewards including products from Amazon, customizable ecards, and experiences
- You can purchase modules separately if you prefer it
- No free trial
- The “Reward Gateway for Small Business” version is only available for companies in the UK and Australia
Reward Gateway
Review:
Companies looking to boost their employee retention should take a look at Reward Gateway’s engagement solution (we also have them featured on our rewards page). Their product offers employee communications, peer to peer recognition, automated awards and so much more.
Reward Gateway
Customers:
Ikea, McDonald's, Unilever, Heineken
Reward Gateway
Stats:
- Net Promoter Score of 72
- Used by 5 million employees
- Over 1900 customers
Reward Gateway
Pricing:
Reward Gateway does not publicly share price. You will have to get in touch with a salesperson.
However, if you are a UK customer, they offer small business pricing for companies with under 100 employees. It costs £6 per employee.
Best For:
Reward Gateway is best for any company looking to boost their engagement efforts.
Why we love it
:
With over 30 science-backed and customizable survey templates, detailed analytics, and more, Culture Amp helps over 6,000 companies keep their employees engaged. Behind their all-in-one employee experience is platform is a team of data experts focused on all things engagement.
- People science team
- Tons of engagement surveys
- Their people science plus offering is not available for very small companies
- Enterprise clients might find that they lack some of the integrations and customizations a bigger team needs.
Culture Amp
Review:
Culture Amp is an all-in-one employee experience platform, that runs the gamut from engagement to performance management to employee development and skills coaching. With over 6,000 customers that include some big names across many industries, it's a tried-and-true solution for any company looking to boost engagement efforts.
Culture Amp
Customers:
Culture Amp
Stats:
Culture Amp
Pricing:
Culture Amp has three different plans. Each one features all of the engagement and performance management features that CultureAmp is known for. The plans differ in coaching and education features.
The plans are as follows:
- Self-starter: Designed for 25-200 employees. Includes all Engagement and Performance features. Limited HRIS integrations. Group coaching and education. Coaching and education features include survey design review, project working sessions, and demographic mapping under education.
- Standard: Designed for 200-1000 employees. Includes all the features from Self-starter. All HRIS integrations. Adds one-on-one Coaching features, including feedback strategy review, project planning, and results & report sharing follow up. Group Education features.
- Enterprise: Designed for 1000+ employees. Includes all Standard features. One-on-one Coaching and Education features, including meetings with Success coach, action guidance, management training, and People Scientist insights.
You may also purchase the employee engagement or performance management modules individually. While you must contact a representative for exact pricing, as these will vary depending on the modules subscribed, most companies pay between $3 to $9/per person per month.
Best For:
Why we love it
:
Officevibe helps companies engage employees and increase their satisfaction - all while nurturing managers and improving how they tackle challenges in the workplace.
Officevibe
Review:
Officevibe is a cloud-based platform that focuses on employee engagement and manager growth. It allows managers to measure employee satisfaction through pulse surveys, then provides them with guidance on how they can improve work environment and culture. The platform packs several pre-made templates and questions to ease the survey creation process. It also offers features for polls creation, reporting, 1:1s planning, scheduling, and more.
Officevibe
Customers:
WeTransfer, Dyson, Bose, PayScale, Trivago
Officevibe
Stats:
- Founded in 2014
- 275 employees and growing
Officevibe
Pricing:
Pricing: Officevibe has three plans:
- Free: This plan is free of charge for 1 team with up to 10 users.
- Essential: This plan allows for unlimited teams and costs $5 per user per month.
- Pro: Designed for larger teams, this plan costs $7 per user per month.
- Business: Available for companies with over 500 users, this plan has custom pricing. Contact Officevibe’s Sales team to get a quote.
Best For:
Officevibe can be used by companies of all sizes.
Why we love it
:
15Five’s Engage solution comes with a robust survey tool that can help you accurately measure employee engagement. With 30 templates and 120 questions to select from, you can choose or design surveys that reflect your goals.
15five
Review:
15Five has been around since 2011, and has over 2,000 customers that rely on their performance management suite to figure out what drives their employees, and how to incorporate this knowledge into feedback/coaching. The product is easy enough to setup where they didn’t even have a sales team the first 6 years of the business.
15five
Customers:
- Hubspot
- Capital One
- Spotify
15five
Stats:
- Over 2,000 customers
- 3 unique survey templates and 120 different questions to choose from
- Founded in 2011
15five
Pricing:
15Five has three product tiers, Basic, Plus, and Performance. All are billed per person per month on an annual basis.
- Basic is priced at $7 per person per month. It's presented as the essentials package for small companies or large teams within a bigger company.
- Plus is 15Five's recommended package, priced at $14 per person per month. It's designed for organizations of all sizes.
- Performance is their custom plan with even more features on top of the Plus plan. You must get in contact with 15Five to discuss pricing.
Best For:
15Five is good for companies of any sized. Their $7 per user per month plan is affordable for small businesses, while large corporations will see plenty of use with more expensive plans.
Why we love it
:
Profit.co is more than just an OKR solution; their platform also packs features for performance management, task management, employee engagement and recognition.
Profit.co
Review:
Profit.co’s OKR module allows companies to create and track corporate, departmental, team and individual OKRs. The top management defines the corporate objectives, the various departments can create their own OKRs to further the corporate vision, while teams and individuals can set their own objectives in service of those larger goals. Through Profit.co’s real-time reporting dashboard, managers can check the progress of their teams and catch potential problems early on.
Profit.co
Customers:
SunTec, Wex, Telmar, Sandvik, CWB Financial Group
Profit.co
Stats:
- Founded in 2018
- Used in over 65 countries
Profit.co
Pricing:
- Startup: This plan is free of charge for up to five users.
- Growth: This plan costs $7 per user per month, billed annually.
- Enterprise: This plan has custom pricing. Contact Profit.co’s sales team to get a price quote.
Profit.co’s Growth and Enterprise plans can be trialed for free for up to 30 days, no credit card required.
Best For:
Profit.co caters to businesses of all sizes.
Why we love it
:
Perceptyx simplifies survey creation; their platform hosts a library of more than 250 benchmarked questions. They also offer translations for over 160 languages and on-demand expert help.
Perceptyx
Review:
Perceptyx is a comprehensive employee listening platform. It features 4 solutions that help you drive employee engagement, gain insights into your company culture, promote inclusion, and deliver better experiences at every stage of the employee lifecycle - all while developing capable leaders.
Perceptyx
Customers:
Sysco, Dell, 3M, FedEx, Citi, OhioHealth
Perceptyx
Stats:
- Founded in 2003
- More than 30% of the Fortune 100 companies use Perceptyx solutions
Perceptyx
Pricing:
The pricing of Perceptyx’s solutions isn’t disclosed on their website. Contact their sales team to get a custom quote based on the size and needs of your business.
Best For:
Perceptyx mostly caters to large companies.
Why we love it
:
Synergita helps company’s dig deep to understand their employees’ performance and company culture. The platform’s natural language processing (NLP) feature allows you to uncover sentiment, while HiPo Score helps you identify top performers.
- Synergita’s platform is affordable and scalable. On top of that, you get to choose between their modules for employee engagement, performance management, and OKR tracking, or combine them as needed.
- The majority of users find Synergita’s UI to be user-friendly and fairly easy to navigate.
- With the help of natural language processing (NLP), the platform can analyze the tone of your employees’ responses and assign team a sentiment score, which is valuable data you can use to improve the experience of your employees.
- Several users noted that the reporting module lacks customizations, and speed/performance issues can be experienced with it, particularly when working with larger reports.
- A few users have also reported that the customer support team is slow to respond and resolve issues.
- The platform currently doesn’t offer a mobile app for on-the-go access.
Synergita
Review:
Synergita is a cloud-based solution for employee engagement, recognition, performance management as well as goal setting, and tracking. To achieve all of the above, the platform packs a comprehensive set of features including engagement surveys, AI-powered sentiment analysis, measure culture score, performance reviews, 1:1 meetings, e-communication, peer recognition, HiPo rating, and employee development planning.
Synergita
Customers:
Secova, Global Edge, Indegene, American Micro
Synergita
Stats:
- 150+ customers
- 350K users
- 6M goals
Synergita
Pricing:
Synergita has three modules, Engage, Perform, and OKR. When billed annually, those modules are priced as follows:
- Synergita Engage: Synergita’s Engage plan costs $2 per employee per month and includes basic talent information, continuous feedback, rewards & recognition, e-communication, culture score, and employee as well as feedback reports.
- Synergita Perform: For $4 per employee per month, Synergita’s Perform packs lots of features including advanced talent information, smart goals & achievements tracking, metrics import for goals, performance reviews/appraisals, normalization, custom workflows & feedback templates, people & performance reports, 9-box report, strength & weakness report, and reminders as well as notifications.
- Synergita Perform Plus: For $7 per employee per month, Synergita Perform Plus packs everything in Synergita Perform, along with 360-degree feedback, promotion cycle, career aspirations, appraisal letter distribution, skill repository & mapping, HiPo score, employee headcount trends, and employee performance trends.
- Synergita OKR: Synergita’s OKR plan costs $4 per employee per month and includes basic talent information, personal OKR, company/dept OKR, and OKR reports.
Note: Synergita’s modules can be combined together. You can take advantage of the price calculator on their website to find out how much your subscription is going to cost based on the modules you need.
Best For:
Synergita can be used by companies big and small, across different industries.
Why we love it
:
Unlike many vendors in the recognition space, Motivosity believes in an employee driven culture which manifests itself in a product focused on peer to peer recognition and engagement versus the top down nature of most incumbent players in this space.
- Employees can access this system from their phones, desktop, and apps they are in at work such as Teams/Slack
- One platform that combines rewards, recognition, employee engagement, and more
- Built in reporting with insights around potential attrition, most recognized employees, managers that need coaching, etc.
- Only has dollar (not points) based rewards. Their research shows dollars is more effective, but many companies want points.
- Doesn’t allow for as many rules regarding who can give what points to who (for example, a team member could theoretically give 100% of their rewards to a friend each month).
- Certain features aren’t as built out as in other tools - for example the 1:1s or coaching are not as robust as in point solutions focused on performance or coaching.
Motivosity
Review:
Motivosity combines four products in one. Their platform allows you to connect with employees, understand their performance drivers, and recognize them for a job well done. What’s great about Motivosity is that it isn’t just for managers to use, but employees too. The platform facilitates peer-to-peer recognition so everyone’s feedback is heard.
Motivosity
Customers:
Instructure, University of Michigan, WGU, Cotopaxi, HealthEquity
Motivosity
Stats:
- 96% of employees login on a monthly basis
- The average HR admin spends just 43 minutes/mo in the system
- Their solution is based around 3 pillars: Building Community, Employee Recognition, Manager Relationships
Motivosity
Pricing:
Motivosity offers 4 products:
- Connect: Connect costs $1 per person per month and is automatically bundled with the other Motivosity products. E.g. if you purchase Recognize, Lead, or Listen, you’ll automatically get everything within Connect as well.
- Recognize: Recognize costs $5 per person per month.
- Lead: Lead costs $6.50 per person per month.
- Listen: Listen costs $2 per person per month.
Best For:
Movitosity’s employee recognition software has customers from 10 person startups to 10,000 employee large enterprises. However, their sweet spot tends to be mid market (100-3,000 employee) companies that are looking to take their employee experience to a new level.
Why we love it
:
Glint helps companies measure employee sentiment in real time, with customizable surveys spanning employee engagement, effectiveness, lifecycle, culture, diversity and inclusion.
Glint
Review:
Glint considers itself a People Success Platform. It is now a part of LinkedIn/Microsoft and definitely one of the pioneers in this space. They are worth taking a look at, especially because of their predictive AI-for-HR analytics and People Science team.
Glint
Customers:
- Ancestry
- Spectrum Health
- DISH Network
Glint
Stats:
- Owned by LinkedIn
- Founded in 2013
- Raised almost $80M in funding
Glint
Pricing:
While Glint does not share their pricing publicly, you can try out a free demo before you buy.
Best For:
Glint is best suited for companies looking for extremely in-depth analytics with their employee engagement platform.
Why we love it
:
Aside from the fact that they snatched one of the best possible names for an employee recognition and engagement platform, Kudos® features robust people analytics that provide companies with insights into their employee experience and the overall health of their work culture.
- Unique, company culture-oriented features are present all across the platform, such as in the way they approach analytics, or on the actual Culture Accelerator module.
- Excellent relation of mobile / desktop functionality. You basically get all the bells and whistles on both versions.
- Unless you get a demo and start exploring the tool with the help of an insider, we’d say it’s somewhat hard to get a good idea of what features are like, how they work, and even what they do, just from their website alone.
- From our research, we could gather that the points system and how this works can get a bit confusing for some users.
Kudos
Review:
Kudos® is a cloud-based employee recognition and engagement platform. Leveraging the impact of peer-to-peer recognition, values reinforcement, open communication, and actionable feedback, Kudos helps organizations boost engagement, reduce turnover, improve culture, and drive performance.
With robust dashboards and real-time people analytics, Kudos® provides organizations with deep insights and a clear understanding of their workforce.
In addition to software, the team at Kudos® also offers consulting services for companies that need extra help.
Kudos
Customers:
KidsPeace, Kronos, DHL, Chewy.com, Make A Wish
Kudos
Stats:
- Founded in 2010
- Used in over 80 countries
- Available in 8 different languages
Kudos
Pricing:
Kudos has two editions which are priced as follows:
- Plus: For $5 per user per month, Kudos Plus helps you run effective employee recognition program with features for peer-to-peer recognition, optional rewards, and a lot more. Discounts are available based on the final user count and contract term.
- Enterprise: For $7 per user per month, Kudos Enterprise gives you everything the Kudos platform has to offer, with additional functionality to run Kudos across multiple countries, operations centers, etc. Enterprise customers also get insights from Kudos’ dedicated people analytics teams, culture programming assistance, discounts based on the final user count/contract term and more.
Best For:
Kudos® is best-suited for companies with large teams, from 250 to thousands of users in practically any country and industry.
Why we love it
:
Darwinbox's engagement solution lets you take a proactive approach to employee engagement. It includes a feature-rich enterprise social network called Vibe, easy-to-customize pulse surveys, organization-wide polls, in-depth surveys, custom groups for employees with similar interests, an e-noticeboard, and more.
- Darwinbox is a one-stop shop that provides various solutions to streamline every HR-related aspect of the employee lifecycle. From recruitment to payroll, engagement, performance management, rewards, and people analytics, Darwinbox helps HR teams keep up with the ever-evolving HR Tech space.
- The platform’s modules are offered over a scalable, pay-as-you-go model that makes it possible to customize and add different modules and solutions to the existing tech stack, as the organization grows.
- According to users, the Attendance and Payroll solutions of Darwinbox are well-designed, easy to use, and effective.
- While Darwinbox is designed to be a mobile-first tool, users have reported that the UI is clunky and outdated, and the application needs improvement in terms of speed.
- Darwinbox is not transparent with the pricing of their solutions.
- According to users, Darwinbox's self-serve support documentation isn’t easily accessible and the customer support team is slow to respond and resolve queries.
Darwinbox
Review:
Simple, intuitive, and easy-to-use, Darwinbox's employee engagement solution includes a host of features like an enterprise social network called Vibe, customizable employee pulse surveys, organization-wide polls, e-noticeboards to broadcast messages, seamless integration with the Employee Recognition module, and custom groups to help employees find others with similar interests.
Darwinbox
Customers:
HDFC Bank, Starbucks, WeWork, Domino’s Pizza, Tokopedia, Vedanta, and Swiggy
Darwinbox
Stats:
- Darwinbox serves 700+ enterprises and over 2 million employees in 90+ countries
- Darwinbox has been rated as the #1 HCM platform on Gartner PeerInsights
- Aarti Industries, a leading Indian chemical manufacturing company, recorded a 94% accuracy in workforce management with Darwinbox
Darwinbox
Pricing:
Darwinbox does not disclose their pricing upfront on their website. Custom pricing and a free trial are available upon request for a demo of their various products.
Best For:
Darwinbox is best suited for large-scale businesses and enterprises with 500+ employees. In fact, over 50% of their customers are organizations with 1000-5000 employees.
Why we love it
:
Emplify measures 14 drivers of employee engagement, helping company leadership understand and solve underlying engagement problems.
Emplify
Review:
Emplify uses a data driven methodology to understand the state of engagement in the org (which they point out, is different than happiness/satisfaction!), and then uses their dedicated engagement strategists and manager coaches to help organizations action this data. They look at different data points across the organization, and strive to get statistically significant data on a regular cadence that aligns with your business’s metrics.
Emplify
Customers:
- Ivy Tech Community College
- California Closets
- OKC Zoo
Emplify
Stats:
- Customers have seen 50% reduction in turnover
- Emplify has completed 2,500+ executive strategy sessions
Emplify
Pricing:
Emplify prices its platform based on employee count, and is billed annually. You must contact the Emplify sales team to negotiate actual numbers.
Best For:
Emplify is best suited for companies that want to diagnose engagement issues with more than just software alone. Emplify teams your company up with their "People Insights Consultants" to help you make sense of the data.
Why we love it
:
What makes Quantum Workplace stand out is their hands-on customer service. Once you buy their software, you don’t just get a one-off implementation service that most vendors provide but instead an ongoing support team that helps you make the most of your investment.
- Easy to use, the user interface is intuitive, you can find what you’re looking for and still see the most important items pinned on top.
- The option to personalize surveys, make them from the best practices templates, or build entirely from scratch.
- The ability to share and review recognition with your teammates in a social newsfeed format. What’s great is that you have the option to make it as detailed and scheduled or as succinct and impromptu as you please.
- An ever-present customer service team. Many users have complimented on their responsiveness.
- Easy to use, the user interface is intuitive, you can find what you’re looking for and still see the most important items pinned on top.
- The option to personalize surveys, make them from the best practices templates, or build entirely from scratch.
- The ability to share and review recognition with your teammates in a social newsfeed format. What’s great is that you have the option to make it as detailed and scheduled or as succinct and impromptu as you please.
- An ever-present customer service team. Many users have complimented on their responsiveness.
- Many users have expressed their issues with canceling, rescheduling, and the inability to schedule 1-on-1s on a short notice.
- Some users have found the goals feature to be a little confusing to understand because of its extensivity.
- This is a rather unprecedented one, but we found many users wishing for more vibrant colors for the platform.
- Many users have expressed their issues with canceling, rescheduling, and the inability to schedule 1-on-1s on short notice.
- Some users have found the goals feature to be a little confusing to understand because of its extensivity.
- This is a rather unprecedented one, but we found many users wishing for more vibrant colors for the platform.
Quantum Workplace
Review:
Quantum Workplace’s employee engagement software is easy to navigate and is highly flexible in terms of customizations. It has three types of engagement tools: Engagement surveys, pulse surveys, and lifecycle surveys.
While the first type of survey is more in-depth and conducted after a long period of time (usually annually), pulse surveys allow teams to quickly survey employees on any topics and get real-time feedback. On the other hand, lifecycle surveys are fully automated and take place during key moments like hiring, onboarding, and retirement.
All the tools are built with research-backed survey design and provide you with multiple ways to slice your data.
Quantum Workplace
Customers:
Quantum Workplace is used by over 10,000 companies, including Dentsply Sirona, Panera Bread, Fossil Group, DSW, BKD, and Getty Images.
Quantum Workplace
Stats:
- Used by 10,000+ companies
- 20 years of being in the HR tech industry
- 940,000+ employee voices captured as of 2019
Quantum Workplace
Pricing:
Pricing is not disclosed upfront but you can get it after booking a demo.
Best For:
Quantum Workplace is best suited for mid-sized and large enterprises who have greater needs for engagement.
Why we love it
:
Not only is Peakon a great employee engagement solution, it has a ton of analytical functionality that makes it great for people planning too.
Peakon
Review:
Peakon is a data driven solution focused on allowing organizations to make better people decisions. Their people analytics software includes real time management training modules that are suggested based on employee data. While based in Denmark, their largest market is the US. Peakon powered data is being used in their customers’ annual reports alongside more traditional financial metrics. Peakon was recently acquired by Workday.
Peakon
Customers:
- Duke University
- Lush Cosmetics
- Aldo
- Verizon
Peakon
Stats:
- 1000+ customers
- Recently acquired by Workday
- Customers have cut employee turnover from 64% to 23%
Peakon
Pricing:
Peakon has three different plans:
Essential is the basic plan. It offers the baseline engagement features, a mobile app, an d 24-hour online support.
Business is the next plan. It provides everything from Essential, but adds personalized benchmarking, custom insights, action plans, and HRIS integrations. You'd also have a dedicated Customer Success consultant.
Premier is the top level plan. You'll receive everything previously mentioned, plus micro-learning sessions, attrition prediction, hierarchy mapping, business impact metrics, and unlimited custom dashboards. You all have extended Customer Success support and change management training.
You must contact a Peakon representative for cost details.
Best For:
Peakon will be best used by large and enterprise sized organizations who can make use of the nitty gritty people planning features.
Why we love it
:
Used by several Fortune 500 companies, Reflektive's platform offers all the tools you need to analyze then drive employee engagement and performance.
Reflektive
Review:
Reflektive’s software covers the gambit of performance management to employee engagement. This means their product allows you to measure and track OKRs, 1:1’s, real time employee engagement, etc all from one platform. Reflektive was recently acquired by LTG, the company who owns PeopleFluent.
Reflektive
Customers:
AirBNB, Dropbox, Comcast, Squarespace
Reflektive
Stats:
- Some customers decreased turnover by over 70%
- Founded in 2013
- Over $100M in funding
Reflektive
Pricing:
While Reflektive does offer a free product demo, they do not publicly reveal pricing. You must contact a sales representative.
Best For:
Larger companies will see the best ROI from Reflektive, but that doesn't mean small businesses won't find use cases.
Looking for HR Tech Advice? Join our community
Ask questions, share knowledge, find new job opportunities, network and more in our closed HR Tech Buyers Community
Final Advice on Employee Engagement Software + Our Best Pro Tip
We wrote a bit about cross functional buying committees in the past and think they are so relevant for employee engagement platforms.
A cross functional buying committee is a group of 5-10 people who care about a given topic, in this case culture/retention. They brainstorm, and then figure out the best way to tackle the issue is to execute some sort of initiative, in this case buy employee engagement software. Then, there are usually 1-2 leaders in the group who do all the work of executing the initiative. They usually have KPIs related to the results of the initiative - and of course in this case will be the people who are in charge of talent management.
There are some huge benefits to having this committee. First off, getting budget for your initiative is so much easier. You now have leaders from marketing, sales, engineering, etc on your side when you go to the CFO to get money. They can help you pitch, and throw their weight behind the initiative.
You also have the help of every organization during implementation. This is especially useful when rolling out a tool like employee engagement where individuals need to be bought into the initiative across all different functions. Having the person from your engineering team who’s on the committee tell their team why they need to use a solution can resonate a lot more than someone from outside of the organization doing the same.
Final Advice
The best employee engagement software is a game changer for organizations looking to supercharge their workplace experience, and decrease employee turnover. There are no silver bullets when it comes to disengaged employees or having perfect insights into what’s going on with your business. However, this is a great place to start.
If your company needs a better way to start gathering employee feedback, or is simply looking for ways to improve culture, then our suggestion is to start by getting demos with 2-3 of the top employee engagement software companies in order to figure out the details around how this would work within your organization. Good luck!
If you want to be the smartest in the room when it comes to People, sign up for our weekly newsletter
Join 20,000 HR Tech Nerds who get our weekly insights