The Best Employee Engagement Software List
After reviewing all of their features in detail, here’s my shortlist of the best employee engagement software I’ve included in this article, with detailed summaries below:
- 2. Workvivo — Best engagement app for emotionally connecting your people to your company, wherever they work from
- 5. Workmates — Best employee engagement software for public praise within an intranet-style user interface
- 6. Leapsome — Best for closing the loop between employee engagement, performance management and personal development
Our one-on-one guidance will help you find the perfect fit.
Employee engagement is all about connection. You want your employees to have a positive emotional connection with your company. Employees who feel positive about their employers will work harder to achieve their goals. They'll go the extra mile and do what it takes to make the company successful.
On the flip side, unengaged employees have low satisfaction levels. They often feel their contributions aren't valued. When they don't feel valued or heard, they wonder to themselves, why should I try so hard? Instead, they clock-in and clock-out, completing their minimum requirements, and not much else. It's not a pretty picture. But, it is fixable.
Employee engagement software can rescue your organization from these employer doldrums. It can help you instill purpose, create open communication, and gather valuable employee feedback. It can also offer you an easy and fun way to recognize your top performers and create a better employee experience for all.
In this article, I've summarized my pick of the best employee engagement software to help you find the right fit for you.
What is Employee Engagement Software?
Employee engagement software helps organizations get the best from their workforce. It includes a range of features that encourage employee feedback, analyze survey sentiment, and recognize top achievements. The aim is to create a happy and productive team environment where employees feel positively connected to their company.
Overviews of the 10 Best Employee Engagement Software
Here are some brief overviews for each of the employee engagement solutions on my list, showing what each does best (with screenshots to highlight some of the functionalities).
Trakstar
Best employee engagement software for analyzing survey results by sub-groups
Trakstar is an HR performance software that helps businesses track, measure, and improve employee engagement. The software provides various tools to help managers identify engaged employees, understand the factors contributing to employee engagement, and take action to improve engagement levels. Trakstar also offers a suite of HR analytics tools to help businesses understand the impact of employee engagement on key business outcomes such as productivity, retention, and profitability.
Its reporting features allow you to segment your engagement survey results in various ways. Data can be filtered by department, location, or any other custom criteria you may want to analyze. Results can be filtered by period, allowing you to track how responses have changed over time. Moreover, Trakstar provides several built-in reports, including satisfaction scores, response rates, and detailed responses to open-ended questions. Its real-time dashboard provides a bird's eye view of the survey process, allowing you to see how many employees have completed the survey, what percentage of employees have provided positive or negative responses, and which questions are causing the most difficulty.
Trakstar integrates with 25+ popular software systems including ADP Workforce Now, BambooHR, Google Workspace, Namely, Office365, Okta, OneLogin, Salesforce, Slack, UKG Pro, and Zoom.
Trakstar offers customized pricing details and a free demo upon request.
Workvivo
Best engagement app for emotionally connecting your people to your company, wherever they work from
Workvivo is an employee experience app designed to foster engagement and emotional connection between employees and your company culture, no matter where they're located. Their platform functions as a modern intranet, communications hub, and employee engagement tool, blended into a single social network experience.
Their system incorporates a familiar social media-like feel that maximizes engagement. Users can also personalize their activity feed to see more content from colleagues or departments that they’re interested in the most. Leadership members are also enabled to communicate across the platform through multimedia messages, and have access to other engagement tools such as surveys and engagement analytics to keep tabs on team morale. Additional tools like public shout-outs and peer-driven award nominations also give employees a voice and help them develop a deeper connection to your company culture, goals, and values.
Workvivo integrates with many commonly used HR tools, including payroll software, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.
Workvivo offers customized pricing details upon request, and you can request a free demo through their website.
Officevibe
Best employee engagement software for ease of use
Officevibe is an employee experience platform that helps you engage with your team members, at home or in the office, and cultivate trust. The platform is used by over 50,000 managers worldwide in companies including Dyson, Trivago, and Bose.
With a science-backed approach, Officevibe helps you understand your teams better with features such as the Pulse Survey. Team members can answer them anonymously, which creates a safe space to share honest feedback you can act on. Other features include customizable 1-on-1 surveys, feedback templates, and reports that help you take action in real-time.
You and your team members can use the platform to set your agenda ahead of time so that everyone can come prepared. Afterward, you can share your notes and collaborate to achieve your desired results.
Officevibe integrates with Microsoft Teams, Slack, Office 365, Google Workspace, and BambooHR.
Officevibe costs from $5/user/month and offers a 14-day free trial. Officevibe is free for 1 team of up to 10 users.
Lattice
Best for employee feedback solutions
Lattice Engagement is an employee engagement tool you can use to collect feedback from employees that you can use to improve company culture and engagement. It has a benchmarking feature allowing you to compare the latest survey results to previous ones to assess how the company is performing. You can also compare internal survey results to third-party benchmarks giving you an idea of how you are faring with other companies.
Company policies affect all employees, making it crucial to get feedback from employees whenever you plan to implement changes in the workplace. Lattice Engagement is an excellent tool that lets you solicit, receive and analyze employee feedback, ensuring that employee concerns get taken into consideration when planning new company regulations. You can use Lattice Engagement’s Pulse feature to get real-time insights from employees so you can gauge the effectiveness of new initiatives and implement corrective actions. Lattice Engagement allows you to create automated onboarding surveys so you can assess the new hire process and improve long-term retention rates.
You can integrate Lattice with other HRIS and productivity software, including SFTP Integrations, Google Calendar, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, Jira, and Outlook Email + Calendar.
Lattice Engagement pricing starts at $9/user/month, and they offer a free live demo upon request.
Workmates
Best employee engagement software for public praise within an intranet-style user interface
Workmates is an employee engagement platform that includes a comprehensive suite of tools to help employers develop and improve their relationships with their employees. Its intranet-style user interface acts as a central hub for internal communications, engagement, recognition, and culture-building activities, which staff at all levels can participate in. Key features include employee surveys, polls, recognition programs, goal setting, performance tracking, and communication tools.
The software also includes analytics capabilities, allowing employers to better understand how their employees are feeling and how they can further support and engage with them in the workplace. Employees can also give virtual high-fives or kudos to colleagues to recognize a job well done. These shout-outs are publicly viewable by all others to help foster team camaraderie and boost employee morale.
Using Workmates, employees can share feedback with management anonymously through surveys or polls without fear of retribution or negative consequences from sharing their thoughts openly in person. Additionally, it allows them to set goals to track progress over time or get recognition from managers when those goals have been achieved successfully. This helps encourage employees to strive towards excellence while providing them with the support needed from management for long-term success within the organization.
Workmates' employee rewards module is also an essential component of the software. This feature allows managers and team leaders to recognize, reward, and incentivize their employees throughout the year by offering bonus points, badges, and certifications based on performance. Furthermore, these bonus points can be redeemed at select stores for merchandise or digital rewards, offering employees a wide array of attractive options for redemption. As such, this rewards program encourages healthy competition amongst employees, boosts morale in the workplace, and further nurtures a positive working environment.
Integrations are available with 30+ popular HR software systems, such as ADP, Bridge LMS, Engagedly, Google Calendar, Office 365, Okta, OneLogin, Slack, Twilio, and Yammer. They also have a Zapier integration you can use to connect Workmates to other tools as well.
Pricing for Workmates starts at $3.50/user/month. You can also request a free demo through their website.
Leapsome
Best for closing the loop between employee engagement, performance management and personal development
Leapsome is the all-in-one tool that helps organizations maximize their employee engagement and is trusted by companies like Spotify, Northvolt, and Babbel. Leapsome enables a continuous cycle of engagement, feedback and personalized learning that powers the growth of your people and business.
Leapsome comes with features such as employee engagement surveys that enable you to identify engagement drivers and measure your employees‘ satisfaction over time. Whether through custom questions or Leapsome's expert templates, the tool helps you turn company sentiment into action. These surveys are fully customizable from questions, frequency, participants; segmentation by department, performance, and more.
With Leapsome you can share and request peer feedback to anyone, at any time and control settings such as public, private or mentor visibility. This feature makes it easier to tie your actions to the company values or competencies. Leapsome’s learning module lets you assemble the conducive learning paths to assist your employees’ professional development and help them further their career.
Leapsome's performance and 360° reviews are fully customizable and easy to set up, and help you establish a company culture that thrives on continuous feedback. Whether you anonymous to non-anonymous feedback, prefer to use expert templates, skill frameworks, development paths, automations, powerful analytics, Leapsome comes packed with all those features.
Leapsome integrates with HRIS tools, SSO, and many popular communication and collaboration tools.
Leapsome costs from $8/user/month.
Bonusly
Best for creating a culture of recognition
Bonusly is an employee recognition software that encourages and facilitates peer-to-peer recognition. It works on a points system and allows employees to collect rewards based on their points. It also has tools to automate employee milestones and track the performance of your rewards and incentives programs.
Each month, employees are allocated a budget of points that they can then send out to their peers alongside personalized recognition messages. Images, links, GIFs, emojis, and company values hashtags can all be added to their peer recognition messages. Other team members can then comment on the public recognition, and chime in on why they appreciate the employee and send them additional points.
The points each employee collects can be used to select from various rewards through the platform. It supports different reward types like gift cards, charitable donations, cash out options, and custom rewards that you can configure.
In addition to exchanging positive peer feedback, the software can be used to automate celebratory messages for important dates like anniversaries, birthdays, and employee start dates. Employees can comment on these messages too, to celebrate their colleague's milestone.
The software integrates with workplace communication tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack, as well as various HR platforms like SAP, ADP, and BambooHR. Plans start from $2.70 per user per month, and a 60-day free trial is available.
ClearCompany
Best for implementing a high-touch employee engagement strategy
ClearCompany is the easiest way to bring all of your employee engagement processes into a single, automated solution. Their easy-to-use software allows you to quickly set up surveys, create and approve employee goals, celebrate employee successes and personal milestones, and send shoutouts of recognition to individuals and teams.
Users can strengthen employee-manager relationships with 1:1 collaboration tools, track morale and employee sentiments with employee surveys, and celebrate milestones or peer-to-peer recognition. Team leaders can ensure employees and managers are consistently aligned on key priorities, goals, and drivers of success while being engaged and recognized for their contributions.
ClearCompany is best for companies based in the U.S. and Canada.
ClearCompany integrates with tools for assessment tests, background checks, calendars, job postings, payroll and benefits, and SSO.
ClearCompany offers customized pricing upon request.
Hub
Best for enhancing employee engagement through a centralized employee intranet
Hub is an intranet solution that's designed to help businesses of all sizes improve their employee engagement. It acts as a centralized hub where employees can access company news, updates, and internal resources, or collaborate and share ideas with their colleagues.
Hub's platform is a great option for businesses looking to improve employee engagement as well as internal communications. Features like email broadcasting, instant chats, and private messaging help employees stay informed and connected, while public or private group forums and workspaces help them work together more effectively. Hub also includes additional collaboration tools like discussion boards and project management tools to further improve team productivity too.
You can use Hub to directly measure employee morale, motivation, and sentiment using their integrated forms, surveys, and polls feature. Plus, Hub includes a variety of employee recognition features, such as customizable badges and leaderboards, which can help to further boost morale and encourage friendly competition among team members.
Hub's automations make sure key dates like staff birthdays, work anniversaries, or first days for new hires never go unnoticed. These activities show up in the social media-style activity stream, where employees can reply with their own comments or Likes as they choose.
Another unique feature is their automated Hub Alerts, which notify employees of company updates, announcements, or updates to shared content like company policy documents. This helps keep everyone in the loop and ensures that important news never gets lost in the shuffle.
To give you confidence that your internal communication strategy is working, Hub also includes 17 built-in reports covering content engagement, user comments, employee searches, and many other items.
Integrations are available with numerous single sign-on applications, including Azure Active Directory, Google, Office 365, Okta, and OneLogin, and with popular programs like Microsoft Outlook, Google Drive, and Microsoft SharePoint.
Cooleaf
Best all-in-one engagement platform for virtual team recognition activities
Cooleaf helps companies empower and celebrate their employees by supporting a powerful engagement strategy. Whether your team is remote, hybrid, or fully in-person, you need a way to build team connections. To help you get set up, Cooleaf’s engagement experts will partner with you to create meaningful experiences, from step challenges to virtual recipe swaps.
From employee onboarding to ongoing engagement, Cooleaf provides a strategy to help your people feel heard, valued, and understood. You can use their platform to foster DEI, improve learning and development, and promote health and wellness, all while recognizing and rewarding team wins. By participating in your virtual team community, your people will earn reward points that they can redeem for charitable donations, gift cards, team swag, and more through their customizable global rewards catalog.
Cooleaf also empowers companies to capture employee sentiment through pulse surveys, and measure their employee experience through powerful dashboards and analytics. Employees will also appreciate how easy it is to recognize their co-workers achievements thanks to their popular integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Cooleaf also integrates with many other platforms including popular HRIS providers, single sign-on platforms, and learning & development systems.
Cooleaf offers customized pricing upon request. You can also request a free demo through their website.
Need Expert Help Selecting The Right Employee Engagement Software?
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Best Employee Engagement Software Comparison Chart
Here’s a comparison chart that summarizes basic details about each of my top employee engagement software selections. You can view pricing details and the availability of free trials or demos side-by-side to help you find the best option for your budget and business needs.
Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Trakstar Best employee engagement software for analyzing survey results by sub-groups | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
2 | Workvivo Best engagement app for emotionally connecting your people to your company, wherever they work from | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
3 | Officevibe Best employee engagement software for ease of use | 14-day free trial | From $3.50/user/month | Visit Website |
4 | Lattice Best for employee feedback solutions | Free demo available | From $11/employee/month | Visit Website |
5 | Workmates Best employee engagement software for public praise within an intranet-style user interface | Free demo available | From $3.50/user/month | Visit Website |
6 | Leapsome Best for closing the loop between employee engagement, performance management and personal development | 14-day free trial | From $8/user/month | Visit Website |
7 | Bonusly Best for creating a culture of recognition | 60-day free trial | From $2.70/user/month | Visit Website |
8 | ClearCompany Best for implementing a high-touch employee engagement strategy | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
9 | Hub Best for enhancing employee engagement through a centralized employee intranet | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
10 | Cooleaf Best all-in-one engagement platform for virtual team recognition activities | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
Other Employee Engagement Software Options
Here are a few more worthwhile options that didn't make the list of the best employee engagement software:
- SurveySparrow
Best for omnidirectional feedback
- Kudos
Best for strengthening team culture
- 15Five
Best for busy teams seeking an evidence-based approach to measuring employee engagement
- Medallia
Best for combined employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) solutions
- ActivTrak
Best for intelligent insights into how your team works
- Qualtrics Employee Experience
Best for real-time employee engagement insights
- Nailted
Best employee engagement platform for remote and distributed tech teams.
- Pingboard
Best for visualization and rich profiles
- Trivie
Best employee engagement gamification for ongoing learning and training goals
- Beams
Best for giving personalized recommendations to improve employee engagement
- ThriveSparrow
Best for monitoring engagement and encouraging recognition
- Waggl
Best for easy employee feedback
- Guusto
Best employee engagement app for promoting peer-to-peer recognition
- WorkTango
Best for creating a work culture
- Assembly
Best for making employees feel appreciated, connected to their work, and aligned with company values
- Motivosity
Best EX software for affordability & scalability
- PerformYard
Best HR software for supporting employee engagement through continuous feedback and regular check-ins
- Empuls
Best for building a culture of appreciation
- IntelliHR
Best HR software for engagement analytics and continuous feedback
- Sogolytics
Best for enhancing employee engagement through insightful analytics and personalized strategies
Selection Criteria for Employee Engagement Software
Are you wondering how I created this list of the best employee engagement software? I'm happy to explain my selection process. I started off by creating a long list of employee engagement systems based on recent market data and positive user ratings. Next, I dug into the details of each system to ensure all the core features were present. After that, I looked further into the key features below to compare each system to the next on in my stack.
Here's a summary of the main details I used during my evaluation process:
Core Functionalities
Whenever I create a top 10 list of software, I always start out by creating a list of the core features it should include. That way, I can be 100% confident that nothing important is missing. For employee engagement software, here are the core functionalities that were required for an item to make it onto my initial long list:
- Integrated tools to collect real-time feedback from employees, including pulse surveys, polls, or suggestion boxes to keep a pulse on your workplace culture
- Social engagement features such as activity feeds, chat channels, discussion boards, @tagging colleagues, and knowledge-sharing tools that help boost engagement
It's important to note that there are different sub-types of employee engagement software in this list. Some are designed to act as survey tools to help you collect feedback, while others are built to help improve internal communication, or are designed to address employee recognition as well as engagement.
Key Features
In order to give you a well-rounded list of options, I reviewed the following key features for each system as well:
- Communication tools: The best systems include company-wide communication tools to ensure everyone's on the same page and receiving the same information. This includes features like activity feeds, company announcements, news updates, newsletters, and event notifications.
- Employee recognition tools: With many systems spanning engagement and recognition, I took special note of any systems that included peer-based recognition tools. That includes features like public shout-outs for key achievements and recognition for important milestones across the employee lifecycle (e.g., work anniversaries, birthdays, a new employee's first day, etc.).
- Gamification features: Some systems allow employees to earn points for key activities like recognizing colleagues or digital badges or awards for achieving certain goals. These features really help to boost engagement by incentivizing these activities to increase employee participation.
- Rewards and incentives: Some systems take engagement and recognition one step further, making it possible to offer employees tangible rewards and perks for reaching their goals or key milestones.
- Employee performance tools: This includes tools that link engagement and performance, such as 1:1 check-in details that are fed into performance review reports, and tools that collect 360-degree feedback from other colleagues.
- Goal setting & tracking tools: These features are often linked with performance management, but I paid special attention to any systems that included goal-tracking tools that make monitoring productivity intuitive. Many systems also allow you to track KPIs (key performance indicators) or OKRs (objectives and key results) too.
- Insightful analytics: There's little point in collecting loads of employee engagement metrics if you're not going to do anything with them. I took a closer look at the analytics each system covered, including any tools that help monitor employee sentiment, identify problem areas, and any insights to boost employee retention.
Usability
It’s important to find an employee engagement platform with a user-friendly and intuitive interface. Not only will this improve participation rates, it will also make it easier for you to track engagement levels and metrics. This helps you gain more actionable insights that can really help you improve your company culture. Other usability features I kept an eye out for are things like customizable templates, mobile apps, and benchmarking metrics to put engagement levels into perspective.
Integrations
It's always important to pick software that works with the HR software and other tools your organization is already using. I noted any important integrations in my summaries above. For employee engagement software, key systems you'll want it to integrate with include performance management systems, HR management systems (HRIS, HCM, HRMS), and your cloud-based work operating system of choice (e.g., Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Google Workspace, etc.). I also looked for integrations with messaging tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Pricing
The reality is, investing in a new software system often comes down to price. And that's totally okay. That's why I did my best to include pricing details for all the systems in this list. Sometimes these details aren't available due to the modular nature of their system. However, on the flip side, that means you can pick and choose (and pay for) the modules you actually want. In general, for engagement software, you can expect to pay between $3 to $20 per user, per month. I also recommend getting your hands on the software through a free demo or free trial first, before you commit to a contract too.
Employee Engagement Software: Frequently Asked Questions
Here are some answers to questions people often have about employee engagement software and how it works:
What is an employee engagement program?
Why is employee engagement important?
How do I choose an employee engagement software?
Are there any free employee engagement software systems?
Other Resources to Support Employee Engagement
Here are a few other resources to help you engage your employees and create high-performing teams:
- How To Maximize Employee Engagement In This New World (a podcast)
- 35 Employee Engagement Ideas (Including Remote-Specific)
- Best Employee Perks Programs to Automate Rewards
- 4 Fun Ways To Showcase Your Personality Through Employee Recognition
- 51 Employee Engagement Survey Questions and Best Practices
- Best Employee Wellness Platforms for Employee Health & Well-Being
- Thinking About an Employee Intranet? Read This First
- Best Employee Survey Tools for Staff Feedback
- How to Do Employee Recognition The Right Way (a podcast)
Other Employee Experience Software Reviews
Looking for another style of software to boost engagement and employee satisfaction? Take a look at these other options I've already curated for you:
- Employee Experience Software for Engagement & Performance
- Employee Evaluation Software for Performance Reviews & Recognition
- Employee Wellness Platforms for Employee Health & Well-Being
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