Zoho Connect Reviews in 2023: Alternatives, Pricing, Reviews - SSR

Zoho Connect brings the ease of use and visual cleanliness that characterizes Zoho products to a robust team collaboration software. Setting Zoho apart in the intranet space are their wide range of features, from a knowledge base to automated workflows.

As a company that makes all sorts of business software tools, from a CRM to an expense tracker, you’d kind of expect them to have a good intranet and team collaboration app. Zoho Connect will not disappoint those that seek the consistency and reliability of other Zoho products. This social intranet helps unite people and resources within a single platform, through tools like forums, events, a knowledge base, and much more. 

Zoho Connect does check most boxes when it comes to a corporate intranet. Although the final feature list will vary depending on the plan you get, all of them include groups, custom apps, boards, knowledge base manuals, channels, events, and forums.

The free forever plan throws in all this, provided that you have less than 25 users (as well as some other technical limitations, such as the number of integrations). Then, if you have a bigger team or want more features, the list gets lengthier with each plan. It can grow to include things like video conference, surveys, polls, idea sharing, mandatory reads, a team schedule, and truly lots more.

This is precisely why the words that come to mind when contemplating Zoho Connect are robust and scalable. Robust, because the final feature list can be breathtaking if you for the enterprise or ultimate plan, for instance. Scalable, because this means that Zoho Connect can fulfill simple and basic intranet requirements for small teams, or the more complex needs of a large company.

As an example of a more complex feature, there’s the addition of external users to the intranet. Zoho Connect can be used as an intranet for your company and as an extranet for your clients. Information can be published and sent to either channel from the same platform. Also, a user can be a part of multiple external networks and an internal one at the same time. 

Lastly, on the question of scalability, it is worth noting that Zoho Connect does not require a time commitment when you subscribe. You can pay as you go and either upgrade to a larger plan or downgrade the free version at any time and without talking to anybody.

While Zoho Connect’s feature list is quite impressive, this also means that some of the tools might be very basic. For instance, some users online have complained about the knowledge base lacking a change tracking feature, which can be important when keeping track of company manuals. We’ve seen similar criticism about their authoring tool’s multimedia capabilities, or the look and feel of their chat app. 

In other words, as it’s frequently the case with all-encompassing platforms, some teams looking for a more robust tool for specific needs might be better off with a stand-alone solution. To this note, we’d add a common recommendation with buying HR software, which is to make a list of the deal-breaker tools and make sure you see a demo of them. If there’s a free trial, even better, you can try them before committing to a specific platform.

Max Healthcare, Toyota, NHS England, Azizi, Canon

• Document management: Generate manuals, store and organize files. 
• Multilingual capabilities: Zoho Connect is available in 19 different languages. ‍
• Choose how to interact: You can use groups, feeds, channels, and forums.

Depending on the plan, Zoho Connect also has capabilities for: 

• Peer-to-peer recognition
• Social advocacy
• Idea sharing
• Workflows
• Organization chart
• Article templates
• Workload view

• Zapier
• Mailchimp
• Asana
• Google Drive & Google Calendar
• Appear.in

Zoho Connect starts at $25 per month if you have less than 25 users. If your team is between 26-100 users, it’s just $1 per user per month. These prices get more interesting in the yearly plans. For more than 100 users, you can use their price calculator, which is really transparent. There is also a free version of Zoho Connect if you’re below 25 users and need only basic features and capabilities.

The free version of Zoho Connect gets you 25 users, 3 groups, 3 private applications, 3 dashboards, 3 handbooks, 10 integrations, as well as channels, events, and forums.

Zoho Connect can be a good bet for all sorts of organizations that want a well-known social intranet that can grow with them and adapt to their needs as they go.

Getting started with Zoho Connect is as easy as signing up with your business email. After confirming your account, you’ll get asked to create an internal network, an external one, or both. Then you can start inviting colleagues and you’re ready to go. At first, you’ll be signed up for a free plan by default but you can upgrade whenever you like.

Whether it’s to ensure proper adoption, handle requests, or provide customer support, the team at Zoho has created many resources for customer success. These include: 

• User Guide
• Getting Started Guide
• FAQs
• Forums
• Customer Self-Service Portal
• API documentation

The Zoho story goes back to 1996, with the founding of AdventNet Inc. Back then, the company made a network management tool that was popular internationally, but mainly in the Japanese market. Then, in 2001, they launched Zoho CRM, which quickly became one of their best-selling apps. 

Then, in 2005, the company caught up with the times and started offering cloud-based applications. They began with the Writer app, then Show (a presentation tool), Creator (custom application builder), and Zoho Sheets. It wasn’t long until they realized that there could be a Zoho tool for just about every kind of business app. If you’re curious, the Zoho ‘about page’ actually has an interactive timeline where you can see the evolution of the company year to year. Nowadays, Zoho has over 75 million users worldwide, several offices across the globe, and more than 50 products for marketing, finance, customer and tech support, team collaboration, and of course, HR and recruitment.