Hand picked by our HR Technology experts after product testing, user research, and much debate - enjoy!
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!
We take research seriously. To make sure we’re offering our readers the very best solutions in a given software category, we are methodical, rigorous, and expansive in our research. We consult with HR professionals, vendors, and industry experts. We cut through the noise to bring you a carefully curated list of vendors, along with other essential information, to help you find the right software platform for your business.
Here’s how we chose who makes the cut:
Product: We believe in gaining a comprehensive understanding of a product before we recommend it, so we start by getting to know the software. Whenever possible, we meet with a senior executive (CEO or Head of Product) for a demo and Q&A. We also test 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 go straight to the source and compile feedback on user experience. Real-world input supports our commitment to diligence in our software evaluation methods and the products we recommend. Keeping up with the everyday experience of HR pros also puts new vendors on our radar, and it keeps us close to our community so we can better connect the right products to the right people.
Financial metrics: We are certified finance nerds, so we use all the data we can get our hands on to make selections for our guides. We comb through data for concrete statistics like retention rates, growth, profitability, and scalability. We evaluate the bottom line of each product because we know making a software purchase can put your reputation on the line.
Best for a use case: Software is never a one-size-fits-all product. Sometimes the best solution is free or cheap. Other times it’s the one that is best for global companies or the one that’s sized right for early-stage startups. Keeping this in mind, we include solutions across the spectrum so our readers can find the best fit for their unique needs.
Here's more detail if you want to read more about how we research vendors. Our dedicated staff writers rely on hard data, impartial experts, and user feedback to ensure our reviews are helpful, truthful, and hopefully a pleasure to read!
After vetting dozens of vendors, we shortened our list to these top employee experience solutions.
Why we love it
:
Promoting workplace camaraderie is at the heart of Workvivo. It does it by allowing employees to recognize their coworkers' achievements by nominating them for awards. Employees can also provide feedback, share news and events, and add comments, kudos, and shout-outs.
Workvivo
Review:
Workvivo facilitates two-way conversations and helps capture an organization’s pulse with polls and surveys. There’s a personalized activity feed that helps employees to interact with colleagues through posts, shoutouts, articles, etc. With the news and events features, you can share the latest company news and upcoming events – ensuring employees never miss an update again.
Workvivo helps employees feel they’re on the same team by connecting them to the company’s goals and values. Individual and team achievements can be recognized publicly using shoutouts, promoting peer recognition and rewarding achievements. There’s also a “people directory” that allows you to connect with colleagues across different teams and locations.
Workvivo
Customers:
Workvivo's client list includes Kent, Amazon, Mercedes Benz, Stanford, and many other big names from diverse industries.
Workvivo's client list includes Kent, Amazon, Mercedes Benz, Stanford, and many other big names from diverse industries.
Workvivo
Pricing:
Workvivo offers custom pricing plans. We suggest you get in touch with their sales team for a price quote and to get answers to any questions you may have about the platform.
Workvivo offers custom pricing plans. We suggest you get in touch with their sales team for a price quote and to get answers to any questions you may have about the platform.
Best For
Workvivo is a great tool for companies looking to increase communication and productivity in their office with an intranet. Ideally, if you are a mid-sized company, you might find that Workvivo is right for you.
Why we love it
:
Kudos® have paired their employee recognition software with additional employee engagement functionality. Features like spaces and galleries and culture tools are unique to the space. They also do consulting for companies that need extra assistance.
Kudos
Review:
Kudos®’s platform is specifically designed to engage employees through peer to peer recognition, that can also include employee rewards. Recognition sent within the Kudos® platform is tied to company values and qualities, reinforcing your culture and enabling deep data insights into the health of your workplace culture. In addition to software, they offer consulting services.
Kudos
Customers:
ATCO, Bulgari, Arch Insurance, KidsPeace
ATCO, DHL Express, Bulgari, Arch Insurance, KidsPeace, Make-A-Wish
Kudos
Pricing:
Kudos has two editions which are priced as follows:
Kudos has two editions which are priced as follows:
Best For
Clients with teams that span 250 to thousands of users in practically any country and industry. Great for those that want complete communication and feedback tools in their recognition software.
Why we love it
:
Empuls offers a suite of tools to connect with employees, seek their feedback, and provide incentives to improve the employee experience. For instance, you can leverage eNPS surveys, lifecycle surveys, and engagement surveys for feedback, as well as recognize their efforts with greetings and rewards.
Empuls
Review:
Empuls' Employee Experience Software allows organizations to quickly identify and address key areas for improvement based on employee feedback. The built-in social intranet facilitates open communication, and can also be used to celebrate achievements, stay informed about company news, take part in social activities at the office, and collaborate on different projects. You can also show your appreciation for your employees by sending them virtual greeting cards, rewards and gifts when they reach important milestones.
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
Pricing:
Empuls offers three pricing plans. Here are the prices if you choose to pay annually:
Empuls offers three pricing plans. Here are the prices if you choose to pay annually:
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
:
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 is used by many well-known companies, including Spotify, +Babbel, Unity, PayFit, Learnerbly, Modus Create, Spryker, DCMN, and more.
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.
Leapsome’s pricing starts at $8 per user per month. You pay for the module(s) you want to use, which are:
Best For
Leapsome is a great choice for companies of all sizes.
Why we love it
:
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:
Samsung, Orbis, KPMG, Five Star Bank, ABC Medical, American Express, Unilever, IBM, McDonald's
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.
Why we love it
:
Goals, OKRs, recognition, conversations, feedback, incentives – this is what WorkTango's employee experience software comprises. Use this all-in-one tool to elevate your employee experience.
WorkTango
Review:
If you want it all, WorkTango has it. People teams can leverage all of WorkTango'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 WorkTango on a monthly basis. It’s no wonder they boast a 95% customer retention rate.
WorkTango
Customers:
Allianz, Hitachi, Kia Motors, Meredith, Patagonia
WorkTango
Pricing:
WorkTango 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:
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:
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
:
Eloomi packs several tools that can help you deliver great employee experiences. You can use the platform’s onboarding module to transition new employees seamlessly into your team, boost productivity with 1:1 reviews, and build a healthy and positive company culture with continuous feedback surveys, rewards, and recognition features.
eloomi
Review:
Eloomi provides managers with a host of tools to deliver great employee experiences. These tools streamline coaching, mentorship, learning path creation for quick onboarding, training programs delivery, and survey design and deployment for employee feedback. It also provides in-depth analytics and insights so you can see exactly how your employees are engaging with your initiatives and what areas need improvement. In addition, you can encourage goal achievement by adding points, rewards, and certificates.
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
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.
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:
The software has over 3,100 companies from 100+ countries. Some of them are ZipRecruiter, TOAST, SurveyMonkey, and Chobani.
Bonusly
Pricing:
Bonusly pricing is as follows:
If billed annually, users can expect to pay:
Best For
Small to mid-sized companies.
Why we love it
:
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 has a large customer base from multiple countries. Some of its noteworthy customers are Netflix, Airbus, and AstraZeneca.
Peakon
Pricing:
Peakon has three pricing tiers:
You must contact a sales representative for specific costs.
Workday Peakon has custom pricing so the best way forward would be to request a demo.
Best For
Large and enterprise companies.
Why we love it
:
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.
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:
Whole Foods, Equinox, Kayak, Sequoia, and Instacart
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.
For employees, the first 10 sessions every calendar year are free. After that, they will have to pay out of pocket, or in some cases, their insurance covers the costs. For employer costs, contact Spring Health and talk to your benefits administrator.
Best For
Any company looking to enhance employee experience by providing mental health resources.
Why we love it
:
Pingboard drives employee engagement with various networking features such as rich employee profiles, an org chart, and an employee directory.
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 is used by over 750,000 employees at organizations like Duolingo, The Linux Foundation, The Motley Fool, Carta, Cloudflare, and Meetup
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.
Pingboard offers two different pricing plans. When paid annually, here's what they look like:
For an additional $49 per month billed annually, you can add the Develop Add-On to any existing Pingboard plan. This feature helps managers facilitate 1:1 meetings that focus more on employee growth.
Best For
Small to mid-sized companies.
In a recently updated article, Josh Bersin describes new workforce issues, including rising voluntary turnover rate and falling employee productivity. His answer? The employee experience platform.
Simply put, an employee experience platform isn’t a single suite like an HCM. It’s a group of solutions working together to help your HR team create an overall better employee lifecycle. As such, the use cases for employee experience software will range based on your HR department’s needs. But there are a few general reasons to seek these solutions out:
It’s easy to fall into the trap of buying the right software and thinking your problems are solved automatically. That’s a major oversight! There are many obstacles to overcome, especially when just introducing an employee experience platform. As such, here are a few things to look out for:
As with any software purchase, it will be easier to get buy-in from upper management if you’re able to clearly explain benefits and ROI. Employee experience software, as its name suggests, aims to benefit the employee experience.
Measuring experience isn’t perfect, as employee satisfaction and happiness are nearly intangible metrics. However, there are a few different categories of data that can provide higher-ups with enough information to know that your new software is making a difference.
Employee experience software includes a wide variety of tools. Therefore, the pricing structures are going to be very different depending on whether it’s an engagement tool, onboarding software, or other types of HR tech.
However, there is a common thread with the vendors on this page. They are on a subscription basis, most of them operating on a per-employee-per-month or per-user-per-month basis. This means that the price will automatically take your business size into account.
There may be additional implementation fees, training and coaching costs, and other charges to look out for when demoing a product.
Employee experience software hosts many different features, mainly because there are so many different types of software under the landscape’s umbrella. Let’s break down key features that the vendors on our shortlist offer:
Software purchases are big decisions, especially when it comes to software that may affect your employees’ day-to-day working lives. It’s incredibly important to try before you buy. This is typically done through a demo with someone on the vendor’s product or sales team.
Write down your company’s key considerations and goals in preparation for the demo call. Then, craft the questions to ask that get to the heart of those considerations. If you need a place to start, here are some suggestions for questions to ask:
Implementation will vary based on the solution. Some solutions on this page are apps you simply have to download and sign up for. Others are entire software suites that require an implementation team and a longer process. During demos, be sure to ask what the timeline is, if there are additional fees, if there is a dedicated support team, and how the rollout is executed.
Employee experience software is any solution designed to enhance your workforce’s day-to-day.
A good employee experience software positively impacts your workforce, while also providing value to your business. Employees who are happier in their day-to-day work are more likely to stay with your company longer and tend to be more productive. Therefore, your company doesn’t lose money to turnover and will actually make more money thanks to productivity.
Types of employee experience software include engagement tools, wellness apps, employee directories, social networks, EAPs, rewards & recognition software, learning management systems, and performance management platforms.
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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