Employee experience software is growing in importance. Companies are now realizing that happier employees are more productive, stick around longer, and make a bigger impact on their business. Therefore, this “employee-first” culture has become a major talking point in business strategy.
Employee experience spans the range of the hire-to-retire pipeline. As a result, employee experience software is not simply engagement, rewards, or recognition tools. This SaaS category is defined as any software that improves employee experience.
This means there is a wide range of possible software solutions to enhance your employee experience initiatives. Below, we break down the best-in-the-biz HR technology to boost retention, streamline employee processes, reward, recognize, and engage your employees, and so much more!
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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:
Here's more detail if you want to read further on how we research vendors.
After vetting dozens of vendors, we shortened our list to these top employee experience solutions.
Why we love it
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Empuls focuses on all things employee engagement and experience. Companies, particularly SMBs, use it to connect and align their employees, measure sentiment through real-time feedback, and incentivize good performance rewards and recognition features.
Empuls
Review:
Empuls is a cloud-based, holistic employee engagement platform built for SMBs to improve their internal culture. Trusted by over 1000 brands across the world, Empuls packs features that facilitate continuous employee communication, collaboration, rewards, recognition, Pulse / eNPS surveys, people analytics, and more.
Empuls
Customers:
Rakuten, Signzy, Luminous, Brenntag, Near
Empuls
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Empuls
Pricing:
Empuls has two plans. When billed annually, they cost as follows:
Best For:
Empuls is built for small and mid-size businesses.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Used by big brands such Spotify and Mercedes-Benz, Leapsome helps you understand your employees using surveys and gives you the insights you need to drive change. It's highly interactive and fully customizable.
Leapsome
Review:
Leapsome has tons of functionality. By sending out pulse surveys, you’ll be able to check in on employee culture and mitigate any major issues before they start. The platform uses Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to analyze open-ended response questions, providing your HR team with quantifiable data to make actionable decisions.
After receiving data from surveys, you can make use of Leapsome’s robust learning, 1:1, and team-building features to fix any shortcomings your employees pointed out.
Leapsome
Customers:
Leapsome
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Leapsome
Pricing:
Leapsome is priced based on a few factors: number of employees, feature set, and contract length. It starts at $7 per user per month billed annually. They offer a 14-day free trial to try before you buy, no credit card required.
Best For
Leapsome is a great choice for companies of all sizes.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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With Eloomi, you can build your ideal culture for feedback and performance. Although, Eloomi is loaded with resources for employee experience, its striking feature is a tool called 'My 360+' that enables meaningful feedback and skills mapping.
eloomi
Review:
eloomi benefits the employee experience in many ways. Firstly, you’ll be able to create online courses using videos, documents, and other rich media to coach employees through onboarding, new responsibilities, employer branding, and more.
The solution also offers an engagement tool, where your human resources team can send out surveys to capture feedback through multiple choice, sliding scale, and short answer questions. These surveys can even be tied to the learning modules you create.
Finally, you’ll be able to take all this data and combine it with performance management information, fleshing out a holistic view of your organization.
eloomi
Customers:
eloomi
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eloomi
Pricing:
Eloomi has four pricing tiers. Learning covers all LMS features. Development offers surveys, feedback, and performance management capabilities. Appraisals provides talent management and development planning. The Complete Solution plan brings everything together into one platform.
eloomi also has a free version of the LMS, called eloomi Infinite Play.
Best For
Companies of all sizes will find eloomi useful. Small businesses will especially benefit from the free LMS.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Pingboard drives employee engagement with various networking features such as rich employee profiles, an org chart, and an employee directory.
Pro: Pingboard’s employee directory is a very handy tool to discover individuals within the org based on their name, department, location, skills, interests, and more. It is especially useful in fostering connections in remote teams.
Pro: Pingboard’s simple and intuitive org chart provides a bird-eye view of the entire organization, making it easy to discover who’s in charge of what, who reports to whom, and the different departments and how they interact with each other.
Pro: Pingboard’s employee profiles make it easy to know basic information about a coworker before getting in touch with them. Users believe that the tool is like a social networking site for the workplace.
Con: Since Pingboard charges per employee once you cross the 100-employee threshold, it can get quite expensive for large-scale businesses and enterprises.
Con: Users find the process of changing/updating their status cumbersome as it cannot be done directly from their profile. For instance, if you want to set your status to “out of office”, you have to go through the Out of Office section of the application.
Con: While events/out of office updated on Pingboard automatically shows up on Google Calendar, the reverse isn’t possible.
Con: According to users, the mobile experience of the application is quite underwhelming.
Pingboard
Review:
Pingboard is an employee directory and org chart software dedicated to increasing transparency and connecting employees. People profiles are highly customizable, allowing employees to share fun facts like their pets or favorite movies.
For your HR team, the org chart provides a simplified view into company structure. Gone are the days of poring through spreadsheets and files to put together hierarchies to plan successors or promotions. Everything is right in front of you with a well-designed UI.
Pingboard
Customers:
Pingboard
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Pingboard
Pricing:
Pingboard offers a 14-day free trial before you start. At the end of the trial period, you can sign up for the Team or Company plans.
Team costs $99/month paid annually for up to 50 users. Company costs $199/month paid annually for up to 100 users. If you have more than 100 users, it’s an extra $1 per head. They also offer month-to-month subscriptions at a higher rate.
Best For
Small to mid-sized companies.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Goals, OKRs, recognition, conversations, feedback, incentives – this is what Kazoo's employee experience software comprises. Use this all-in-one tool to elevate your employee experience.
Kazoo
Review:
If you want it all, Kazoo has it. People teams can leverage all of Kazoo’s functionality to build a healthy employee experience. While it can be a challenge to have your employees adopt new software, over 80% of employees engage with Kazoo on a monthly basis. It’s no wonder they boast a 95% customer retention rate.
Kazoo
Customers:
Kazoo
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Kazoo
Pricing:
Kazoo has three pricing plans, which are segmented by purchasing just the Recognition or Performance capabilities, or both as a complete system. The details are as follows:
Best For
Although Kazoo 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.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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People Element's employee experience platform comes with interesting features; identify trends using analytical tools, build surveys within seconds, and get guidance from a dedicated experience manager.
People Element
Review:
People Element is an all-in-one employee engagement platform, with custom and full employee lifecycle survey solutions, all with real-time natural language processing abilities. It also offers exit interview functionality, which is handled through an in-house call center. Finally, People Element’s powerful action planning tool allows you to build out your next steps in just a few minutes after gathering survey data.
Customers will like the lower price point compared to other engagement vendors without the sacrifice of high levels of personal support. In addition, no matter what pricing plan you’re on, you’ll have unlimited access to all survey templates.
People Element
Customers:
People Element
Stats:
People Element
Pricing:
People Element is priced based on employee count. While the exact details are not shared online, it’s advertised as a lower-cost engagement solution.
Best For
Companies with 20 to 30,000 employees are PeopleElement’s sweet spot, especially in the healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, and education industries.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Workvivo is a comprehensive employee engagement platform that improves employee experience via multiple ways. Employees can find like-minded peers through community spaces, get recognized using a public recognition system, learn what's happening in business, and more.
Workvivo
Review:
Workvivo is essentially an enterprise company social network and communication platform. Your people can shout out colleagues, share content, react to company news and events, and share values.
On top of the social media aspect, Workvivo provides surveys, goals and values portals, and collaboration rooms. The platform is especially useful for remote companies looking for a better way to connect their disparate employee base.
Workvivo
Customers:
Workvivo
Stats:
Best For
Large and enterprise organizations.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Trusted by innovative companies such as Webflow, AngelList and Figma, Sapling has an extensive set of features ranging from people directory and org chart to social profiles and employee records. If your company is remote, Sapling might be just what you need.
Sapling
Review:
Sapling has everything for HR teams—applicant tracking, payroll, time tracking, onboarding, offboarding, people management, and the list goes on. It might sound like a jack of all trades but a master of none, but it actually excels in all of its functions, especially in employee experience.
Due to being a full HRIS, Sapling is able to engage your employees from hired to retired. Detailed employee profiles, an easy-to-search company directory, killer onboarding workflows, smart emails, insightful pulse surveys, and more all enhance the employee experience.
Sapling
Customers:
Sapling
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Sapling
Pricing:
Sapling's pricing varies depending on which features you want. The People Operations Platform is the base system. Then, you can add any of the Essential and/or Premium modules you desire, which include surveys, an org chart, PTO management, recruiting, learning management, performance management, and content creation.
The final price will depend on the applicable platform fee, plus a per-user-per-month fee. The base platform starts at $4,000 per year.
Best For
Companies of all sizes looking for a full HRIS that will greatly benefit the employee experience.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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PayActiv is a tool that aims to improve financial wellness for employees. It provides employees financial education, lets them find discounts in the marketplace, and analyzes their spending patterns to estimate how much they can save.
Payactiv
Review:
PayActiv puts financial power in the hands of your employees. Through a nicely designed mobile app, employees check their finances in real-time, track spending trends, receive debt management advice, read educational content, and more.
All of this is to enhance your employee’s financial experience. It has benefits for the company too—PayActiv’s customers have seen a 36% increase in retention.
Payactiv
Customers:
Payactiv
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Payactiv
Pricing:
Pricing is not available online. You must contact a representative at PayActiv.
Best For
PayActiv is best for companies with wage workers.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Peakon uses journey mapping to improve employee experience and retention. Collect data from your employees at every stage of their employment, get insights to uncover reasons for employee turnover, and forecast your attrition risk in real time.
Peakon
Review:
Peakon was recently acquired by Workday, providing the company the funding it needed to grow its product to the next level. Peakon can be trusted for everything from onboarding to engagement, to retention to leadership development, to DEI to performance feedback.
Peakon shines in its analytics. Once it receives survey data, it provides a number on a 1-10 rating scale to tell your company how you’re doing. For example, if your feedback on company communication was only a 4.6, you can take actionable steps to fix the issue and track how the survey results change month over month, year over year, and so on.
Peakon
Customers:
Peakon
Stats:
Peakon
Pricing:
Peakon has three pricing tiers:
You must contact a sales representative for specific costs.
Best For
Large and enterprise companies.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Wellable lives up to its name. It provides various wellness solutions the likes of which are health content, fitness classes from top instructors, tobacco cessation program. It's customizable, holistic, and lead by subject matter experts.
Wellable
Review:
Wellness initiatives can seriously impact your workers, so providing a software solution like Wellable only makes it easier for them. Wellable focuses its efforts in three areas—technology, culture, and physical spaces.
Technology provides employees with the tools to make it simpler for them to achieve personal goals and communicate with others, all from their own devices. Culture hones in on building programs that support leadership development and team building. Finally, physical spaces make sure you’re able to provide employees with somewhere to go to focus on wellness during the day, whether turning conference rooms into a yoga studio for an hour or optimizing healthy foods in the company cafeteria.
Wellable
Customers:
Wellable
Stats:
Wellable
Pricing:
Employers can choose between self-directed or full-service pricing models for an annual program or single challenge:
Additional features, such as Health Content, Wellness Services, and Smoking Cessation cost extra. There are up-front implementation and setup fees. Wellable also offers a free trial.
Best For
Any company trying to improve employee wellbeing.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Reward Gateway helps you build a tailored employee experience platform. Their implementation team will help you design a strategy that is unique to your business. Fancy an employee recognition system? You can get that and much more.
Reward Gateway
Review:
Reward Gateway is very well respected in the employee experience space. Through an engaging peer-to-peer recognition program, you’ll allow your employees to celebrate the wins with each other. As its name suggests, Reward Gateway offers many types of rewards for peer and managerial recognition, including gift vouchers and cashback offers.
Reward Gateway
Customers:
Reward Gateway
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Reward Gateway
Pricing:
Each of Reward Gateway’s solutions are available for standalone purchase. However, price is not publicly available, so you must contact a sales representative. If you’re a UK or AU user, the company offers a Reward Gateway for Small Business plan which is £6 per employee per month.
Best For
Companies of any size will find a use case in at least one Reward Gateway module.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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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.
Bonusly
Review:
Bonusly’s goal is to increase 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.
Impressively, almost 90% of Bonusly users are active on the platform within the first month, and it ends up that almost 80% of employees will receive recognition at least once a month. Recognition comes with numerous rewards choices, whether gift cards, experiences, professional development, or charity donations.
Bonusly
Customers:
Bonusly
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Bonusly
Pricing:
Bonusly pricing is as follows:
Best For
Small to mid-sized companies.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Spring Health is a mental healthcare software that takes a holistic approach to improve employee wellness. It asks employees a few simple questions and in turn provides personalized care.
Pro: Spring Health uses data-driven insights and machine learning models to create a personalized mental healthcare plan for every individual
Pro: Spring Health provides every member with a Care Navigator who walks you through your healthcare plan, answers any questions, helps you schedule your therapy sessions, and acts as a guide in your mental wellness journey.
Con: You cannot access Spring Health’s services unless your employer has paid for it.
Con: Spring Health is only available in English
Spring Health
Review:
Spring Health melds clinically-proven tech with world-class mental health providers to give your employees the best mental health experience possible. Customers receive personalized support, which means that a custom mental health program is built for your company’s and individual employees’ needs.
Spring Health
Customers:
Spring Health
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Spring Health
Pricing:
The first 10 sessions every calendar year are free for employees. Afterwards, sessions are covered by insurance. For employer costs, contact Spring Health or talk to your benefits administrator.
Best For
Any company looking to enhance employee experience by providing mental health resources.
Worth Checking Out:
It’s important to diagnose any problems with your employee experience before you jump into a purchase. Every company is different, so each problem is unique. There’s no reason to get expensive engagement software when you already have engagement tools built-in to your HRIS and the metrics are good. Similarly, there’s no reason to get an employee wellness app if your company already has an in-house wellness program.
To help you get a sense of what kind of return on investment you’ll get from purchasing employee experience software, check out our HR Tech ROI Calculators. If you’d like to learn more about employee engagement software, take a look at our detailed landscape with benefits, features, use cases, pitfalls, and more.
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