Skip to main content
Tools
10 Best Employee Engagement Software of 2023

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:

  1. 1. Trakstar — Best employee engagement software for analyzing survey results by sub-groups
  2. 2. Officevibe — Best employee engagement software for ease of use
  3. 3. Lattice — Best for employee feedback solutions
  4. 4. Workmates — Best employee engagement software for public praise within an intranet-style user interface
  5. 5. Leapsome — Best for closing the loop between employee engagement, performance management and personal development
  6. 6. PerformYard — Best HR software for supporting employee engagement through continuous feedback and regular check-ins
  7. 7. Bonusly — Best for creating a culture of recognition
  8. 8. ClearCompany — Best for implementing a high-touch employee engagement strategy
  9. 9. Hub — Best for enhancing employee engagement through a centralized employee intranet
  10. 10. Cooleaf — Best all-in-one engagement platform for virtual team recognition activities

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).

1

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.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.3 188

Free demo available

Pricing upon request

2

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.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.3 707

14-day free trial

From $3.50/user/month

3

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.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.7 3714

Free demo available

From $11/employee/month

4

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.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.5 4

Free demo available

From $3.50/user/month

5

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.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.8 1280

14-day free trial

From $8/user/month

6

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.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.7 721

Free demo available

From $5-$10/user/month

7

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.

60-day free trial

From $2.70/user/month

8

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.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.6 247

Free demo available

Pricing upon request

9

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.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.5 76

Free demo available

Pricing upon request

10

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.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.9 376

Free demo available

Pricing upon request

Need Expert Help Selecting The Right Employee Engagement Software?

We’ve joined up with Crozdesk.com to give all our readers (yes, you!) access to Crozdesk’s software advisors. Just use the form below to share your needs, and they will contact you at no cost or commitment. You will then be matched and connected to a shortlist of vendors that best fit your company, and you can access exclusive software discounts!

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
Officevibe

Best employee engagement software for ease of use

14-day free trial

From $3.50/user/month Visit Website
3
Lattice

Best for employee feedback solutions

Free demo available

From $11/employee/month Visit Website
4
Workmates

Best employee engagement software for public praise within an intranet-style user interface

Free demo available

From $3.50/user/month Visit Website
5
Leapsome

Best for closing the loop between employee engagement, performance management and personal development

14-day free trial

From $8/user/month Visit Website
6
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
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:

  1. SurveySparrow

    Best for omnidirectional feedback

  2. Kudos

    Best for strengthening team culture

  3. 15Five

    Best for busy teams seeking an evidence-based approach to measuring employee engagement

  4. Medallia

    Best for combined employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) solutions

  5. ActivTrak

    Best for intelligent insights into how your team works

  6. Qualtrics Employee Experience

    Best for real-time employee engagement insights

  7. Nailted

    Best employee engagement platform for remote and distributed tech teams.

  8. Pingboard

    Best for visualization and rich profiles

  9. Trivie

    Best employee engagement gamification for ongoing learning and training goals

  10. Beams

    Best for giving personalized recommendations to improve employee engagement

  11. ThriveSparrow

    Best for monitoring engagement and encouraging recognition

  12. Waggl

    Best for easy employee feedback

  13. Workvivo

    Best engagement app for emotionally connecting your people to your company, wherever they work from

  14. Guusto

    Best employee engagement app for promoting peer-to-peer recognition

  15. WorkTango

    Best for creating a work culture

  16. Motivosity

    Best EX software for affordability & scalability

  17. Assembly

    Best for making employees feel appreciated, connected to their work, and aligned with company values

  18. Empuls

    Best for building a culture of appreciation

  19. BambooHR

    Best for small and medium-sized businesses

  20. Mo

    Best employee engagement platform to build a positive culture people won't want to leave

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:

Other Resources to Support Employee Engagement

Here are a few other resources to help you engage your employees and create high-performing teams:

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:

Stay in Touch

Don’t forget to sign up for our free weekly newsletter, too. We’ll keep you up-to-date with all the latest news, tools, and reviews from the human resources world. Plus, you’ll get insights and strategies from top thinkers in the industry. 

By Kim Behnke

Kim Behnke is an HR Tool Expert & Writer for People Managing People. She draws on her 9 years of human resources experience and her keen eye for systematic processes to support her analyses of the top HR tools on the market. She is passionate about maximizing efficiencies and streamlining workflows to ensure internal systems run smoothly. Kim's HR experience includes recruitment, onboarding, performance management, training and development, policy development and enforcement, and HR analytics. She also has degrees in psychology, writing, publishing, and technical communication, and recently completed a Certified Digital HR Specialist program through the Academy to Innovate HR. When away from her desk, she can usually be found outside tending to her ever-expanding garden.