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
- 7. Leapsome — Best for closing the loop between employee engagement, performance management and personal development
- 8. PerformYard — Best HR software for supporting employee engagement through continuous feedback and regular check-ins
- 10. 15Five — Best for busy teams seeking an evidence-based approach to measuring employee engagement
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.
Motivosity
Best EX software for affordability & scalability
Motivosity was the brainchild of Scott Johnson, founder and CEO of Workfront. The platform was developed to provide tools for fostering connection, recognition, leadership, and accountability within the workplace. To accomplish this, they offer everything from award systems, leaderboards, workforce surveys, and eNPS scoring.
Motivosity is a super affordable employee engagement solution that, with their basic plan, provides personality profiles, interest groups, visual org charts, peer-to-peer shoutouts, highlights and company news, and HRIS integration.
Motivosity costs from $2 to $5/user/month and offers a free demo.
SurveySparrow
Best for omnidirectional feedback
SurveySparrow allows you to conduct omnidirectional assessments of your employees using 360-degree feedback software. Assessment status can be tracked with filters according to status and type, like self-assessed, partially evaluated, or evaluation complete.
The survey reports give detailed real-time insights into strengths, weaknesses, blind spots, and hidden talents. Using 360 feedback tools, you can conduct appraisals backed by performance reviews to build a better-equipped team.
SurveySparrow costs from $99/month and offers a 14-day free trial.
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.
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.
PerformYard
Best HR software for supporting employee engagement through continuous feedback and regular check-ins
PerformYard’s employee engagement and evaluation software provides flexible features that help HR teams create a simplified employee experience. Their platform includes continuous feedback tools like 360-degree reviews, project-based reviews, custom rating scales, and cascading goal structures to keep employees continuously engaged in their roles. Meanwhile, employees receive a streamlined experience focused on quality feedback and effective performance discussions. To further support employee engagement, PerformYard has modules for goal management and 1:1 check-ins as well.
PerformYard provides dedicated customer success managers to every customer. From onboarding, to employee training, to ongoing support, you’ll have someone at your side to help you get your system set up.
PerformYard integrates with most major HRIS and payroll systems, including ADP, BambooHR, Gusto, Paycom, Paylocity, Rippling, UKG, and Workday.
PerformYard costs from $5-$10/employee/month. They also offer a free demo through their website.
Kudos
Best for strengthening team culture
Kudos is an employee engagement software that enables employees to interact and build a culture of feedback.
The Kudos platform enables employees to give and receive virtual 'kudos' from their colleagues for a job well done. In addition, employees can also use the platform to submit recognition requests, which are then reviewed and approved by managers. Compliments can be given anonymously if desired, and there's a database of pre-written compliments in case you don't want to write your own.
It is also a robust communications platform that can be used for everything from announcements and company-wide updates to one-on-one conversations. Users can send private messages and give public praise with @mentions, and managers can give team-wide shoutouts and spotlights. The platform includes an activity feed highlighting all the kudos given and received and customizable leaderboards that show who is leading the 'praise' pack.
Kudos’ culture and people analytics feature allows you to collect data about your employees and use that data to improve employee engagement and team morale.
The software integrates with popular productivity platforms like Slack, Google Suite, and Microsoft Office 365, so you can easily use it alongside the tools you already use daily.
Kudos pricing is available upon request, and you can request a demo through the website.
15Five
Best for busy teams seeking an evidence-based approach to measuring employee engagement
15Five Engage is an action-oriented employee engagement solution for HR leaders and executives who are eager to drive change. HR teams can easily measure engagement, understand key drivers, and pull actionable insights from their science-backed assessment tools and reporting dashboards. Inspired by the Human Potential Index, 15Five’s surveys are based on the latest research in positive psychology and can be completed in just 6 minutes from any device.
Engagement results can be measured at the company, department, or team level. Their software also allows for granular data comparisons across 17 distinct engagement drivers such as capacity, role clarity, co-worker relationships, autonomy, and fairness. 15Five also offers in-house advising and coaching to help HR and leadership teams interpret their results and tailor their employee engagement strategy to their unique needs and challenges. This includes strategies focused on specific teams, or around key topics like remote work, burnout, and DE&I.
15Five integrates with Slack, Rippling, Sapling, Gusto, Workday, and BambooHR. They also have a customizable API that allows for additional configurations with Jira Cloud, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams and Google Calendar, as well as a free mobile app for Android and iOS devices
15Five’s Engage plan costs from $4/user/month, billed annually. Users can test out the platform with a 14-day free trial.
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 | Motivosity Best EX software for affordability & scalability | Free demo available | From $2 to $5/user/month depending on product chosen | Visit Website |
5 | SurveySparrow Best for omnidirectional feedback | 14-day free trial | From $19/month | Visit Website |
6 | Cooleaf Best all-in-one engagement platform for virtual team recognition activities | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
7 | Leapsome Best for closing the loop between employee engagement, performance management and personal development | 14-day free trial | From $8/user/month | Visit Website |
8 | PerformYard Best HR software for supporting employee engagement through continuous feedback and regular check-ins | Free demo available | From $5-$10/user/month | Visit Website |
9 | Kudos Best for strengthening team culture | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
10 | 15Five Best for busy teams seeking an evidence-based approach to measuring employee engagement | 14-day free trial | From $4/user/month, billed annually | 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:
- Medallia
Best for CX and EX solutions combined
- ActivTrak
Best for intelligent insights into how your team works
- Nailted
Best employee engagement platform for remote and distributed tech teams.
- Pingboard
Best for visualization and rich profiles
- Qualtrics Employee Experience
Best for real-time employee engagement insights
- Workmates
Best employee engagement software for public praise within an intranet-style user interface
- Trivie
Best employee engagement gamification for ongoing learning and training goals
- Waggl
Best for easy employee feedback
- Jenz
Best employee engagement app for intuitive, mobile-friendly employee communication and engagement
- WorkTango
Best for creating a work culture
Selection Criteria for Employee Engagement Software
Are you wondering what features I look for when selecting the best employee satisfaction platforms? Here’s a summary of my evaluation and selection criteria:
- User Interface (UI): Engagement software ought to be... engaging! I’m looking for employee engagement tools that are visually appealing and fun to use. Bonus points if they employ gamification tactics or borrow ideas from social media.
- Usability: Will both employees and managers find the system easy to use? And will the features encourage them to engage on a regular basis?
- Integrations: Does the software connect easily with other employee management tools? Are there pre-built integrations to major HR systems?
- Value for $: Does the pricing make sense for engaging employees in both small and large teams? Is the pricing structure easy to understand?
Employee Engagement Software Key Features
There are various types of software in this category. These include survey tools to help you collect feedback and messaging software to improve internal communication—plus options such as 1:1 feedback tools. Here are the main features you should look for:
- Daily Engagement with Employees: dashboards, gamification, and activity feeds where team members can interact to boost engagement throughout the employee lifecycle
- Goal Setting & Tracking: tools that define goals and expectations, then reward engaged employees for achieving them
- Performance Evaluation: monitors performance from onboarding onwards, according to give Key Performance Indicators
- Employee Training Tools: ensures that everyone knows how to make the best use of the software
- Survey & Feedback Options: gather real-time feedback from employees to monitor progress, identify problem areas and improve retention
- Employee Recognition: identifies and rewards employees who are achieving excellence in their work
- Collaborative Spaces: team-building communities that foster common interests among members
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?
Is there any free employee engagement software?
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)
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