Hub Expert Review, Pricing, Alternatives - 2023

This vendor provides one of the most comprehensive customer support systems in their category. They basically hand-hold you till they deliver a personalized intranet platform customized to your exact taste and business needs.

Hub is an intranet software offered by Pancentric Digital — a UK-based digital agency that applies strong UX design principles to digital innovations. We see reflections of these principles in their intranet service that not only dons a simplistic UI interface but also allows users to customize every aspect of the platform to their personal tastes. Hub’s themes, content, and even site navigation are some of the things you can customize as a user. This essentially provides full control of the comms platform to the administrators and managers.

At its core, Hub is a communications and employee engagement platform. The software allows you to create news pieces and articles through a simple content management system interface, send personalized content to specific employees, gather feedback, and create must-read content to ensure information is appropriately disseminated and received by concerned parties.

If your organization has multiple offices or partner brands in different geolocations, then you will appreciate Hub’s communities feature that allows you to set up multiple intranet environments for each of the numerous partner companies under your organization’s umbrella. While speaking about the Hub intranet’s communities feature, one client we interviewed remarked: “Being able to have multiple communities, each serving different purposes within the same software platform was a game changer for me.”

This feature truly is a game changer as it qualifies the software as a sort of intranet/extranet hybrid. With communities, you not only have the opportunity to communicate with your employees, you can also create, manage, and communicate with different client groups within their private community on the platform.

Hub intranet also strives to improve employee engagement by offering collaborative social-media-esque features like instant messaging, groups, forums, and an activity feed that shows recent news, articles, and company activity on the intranet platform. Employees can easily access these features straight from their mobile devices as Hub is a mobile-responsive platform.

In addition to the collaborative and communicative features you’d typically find in an intranet service, Hub incorporates some other functionalities that we found interesting, at least from seeing them during a live demo. For example, the e-learning feature allows for video content deployment and intelligent candidate assessment to evaluate the impact of your company’s e-learning efforts.

Besides their UX design philosophy, this company upholds strong security principles, and they have taken active steps to ensure the safety of their customers’ data. They built Hub intranet on a strong security framework that can repel a plethora of cyber attacks. Additionally, the platform is hosted on Google Cloud, which provides end-to-end encryption of your data. They are also ISO 27001-certified. which is a testament to their compliance with ISO’s information security management.

Hub intranet does not have a free version, so it would not be a good fit for small companies with light communication and document management needs that are looking for a free intranet platform.

Hub intranet is used by reputable brands like Network Plus, Domino’s, Nikon, RSA Insurance, and Legal & General.

• Targeted Comms: One of Hub’s interesting communicative features is the ability to tailor internal comms to specific users. You can address certain information to relevant employees, departments, and managers with intelligent tagging. The software will then notify the concerned parties so they do not miss out on critical information. You can also take it a step further by using the tool’s contact directory to send discrete emails to your employees.
• Task Management: With Hub intranet, you can assign, manage and track tasks for individual employees and groups.
• Management Reports: Hub offers one of the most robust reporting features in this space. With a total of over 20 different management reports, you can gain valuable insights into your employees’ engagement activities, content performance, personal data analytics, log-in activity and so on. These reports are highly interactive, with graphs and charts you can easily filter and drill down to highlight key metrics.
• Content Management System (CMS): This software provides a simple content management system to help create, manage, and share useful company content with relevant individuals on the intranet network. In addition to just creating regular content, Hub allows you to build complex online forms for your employees to submit critical information to assigned managers, and intelligent workflows allow you to manage that information or provide status updates with ease.‍
• File Management: Hub intranet provides unlimited storage options to hold all your company’s documents, images, and videos. These files can be easily accessed by anyone with granted user permission, and you can also set expiry dates, and content owners get notified 4 weeks prior to content expiry, giving you the tools and time to review and renew your content. An interesting aspect of this feature is version control. That is you can see how the document changed over time and revert to a previous version of the file you require.
• E-Learning: Hub provides a learning management system environment together with their intranet service. It allows you to upload training videos and documents, build intelligent, scorable assessments, create staff forums, set up training events, and conduct anonymous employee well-being surveys.
  

Hub intranet integrates with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Sharepoint. You can embed RSS feeds from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as connect with Slack channels and Microsoft Teams. 

Their developers can also build custom APIs if you want to connect with other third-party software. Lastly, Hub integrates with Eventbrite making it easier to create, promote, and manage company events within the platform

Hub Intranet do not provide their pricing information upfront. You will have to request a quote via a form provided on their website. The price you will pay, in the end, is dependent on the number of users or employees in your company. The good thing about their pricing model is that they offer volume discounts, so your price-per-user significantly reduces with increasing the number of users. They also offer a 15% discount for non-profit organizations.

Hub intranet is a good choice for companies operating out of multiple locations, for organizations with several subsidiaries, and for corporations with huge clientele that requires constant communication.

The idea for the development of Hub intranet started in 2010. Initially, Pancentric Digital built bespoke intranet platforms, with separate codebases, for their clients. At some point in this venture, they made a singular intranet platform and rolled out instances of it. This platform is what became Hub Intranet. They then had some clients sign up and test. As time went by, they relayed feedback to the development teams to improve specific areas of the intranet.

Little by little, the Hub intranet incorporated new features to make the platform usable by just about anybody. In a recent major design overhaul in early 2022, the company completely reprogrammed the front-end of the platform to allow for more flexibility over the styling of containers and the content within them. They also revamped the admin user interface to make it more appealing and modern.

In addition to these UI restructuring, Hub intranet redeveloped their Homepage builder and revolutionized the homepage editing process to a slicker drag and drop system that makes it much quicker and easier to view and edit homepages.

These redesigns and restructurings is a testament to their willingness to listen to customers and implement changes that will guarantee their satisfaction. As most of these redesign ideas are feedback from concerned customers.

Hub Intranet keeps evolving, and we expect to see new positive changes in coming quarters.

Hub’s implementation begins with a demo, during which your business will be assigned an account manager. After the demo, you’ll be given a free trial branded to your business, with full admin access to your very own Hub. Should you decide to move forward with Hub, your account manager will undertake all the technical setup of your intranet platform, as well as user importing, single sign-on and other site configurations — such as Slack. If you require more complex bespoke integrations, you can always inform the account manager who will then pass on your request to their developers.

Hub Intranet offers the most extensive customer success support system in this category. Right from the onboarding stage, they provide an account manager to liaise with you and guide you through the setup process.

It is at this stage that they set up a series of consultancy sessions to get themes, features, and functionality that are tailored to your specific business needs. The amazing part about this process is that they can build you new functionalities within the intranet platform; should you request one.

Additionally, The Hub team provides training programs to help you and your team get the best value out of your intranet software. You can reach them via numerous channels; email, phone, and live chat. You can also take advantage of their Client Hub, which is an exclusive community with educational resources like articles, how-to videos, and so on.

Hub intranet is one of three solutions provided by Pancentric Digital — a digital agency that utilizes design thinking to deliver innovative service design, web design and development, and strategic consultancy. Over the course of two decades, they have cemented themselves as industry leaders in digital insurance and intranet portals with their Go-Insur and Hub intranet platforms respectively., They also have an email automation software, Enabler, to help large corporations automate their email marketing and customer nurture campaigns.

Pancentric Digital is a widely decorated company, raking in over 30 industry awards including the prestigious MGA 'Initiative of the Year' Award at the MGAA'S 2022 Annual Conference, which is an award that recognizes excellence across all areas of the insurance market. The company operates in 50 countries across the globe and they are trusted by reputable brands such as John Lewis, Tesco, Burger King, Hitachi, AXA Mansard Insurance, and Zurich.

Does Hub intranet provide a native mobile app?

Hub does not have a native mobile app. They provide a responsive, browser-based intranet platform.

‍What devices can Hub intranet work on?

Hub supports the following browsers: Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Firefox

Operating systems: Windows, macOS, Ubuntu, Android, and iOS.