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Employee App Choices

Employee app choice 2020.

Employee App Choices

Who stood out: Employee App Choices 2020

We have spent hundreds of hours creating our independent assessment report into employee app products. We have included 17 products in the first edition with the aim of showing you what benefits they can bring and what business challenges they can tackle. But even when people see the summary tables in our report, they still ask us “who’s best?”. There is no single ‘best’ product: there is only a product that is the best match for your needs, and that’s why we encourage potential buyers to do the groundwork on requirements and strategy first.

However, we appreciate that in a complex marketplace like this one, some signposting can be helpful. Based on our scenario scores, pricing, vendor track record and customer feedback, some products do stand out in our opinion, and deserve recognition for it. Here we present some products that we expect will often be on people’s shortlists in our inaugural Employee App Choices awards.

Employee App Choice – Europe

Employee app choice Europe 2020.
Actimo
Staffbase.

For this category we explored those products that are headquartered or have a solid presence in any European country. We looked at customer feedback, overall scores, as well as price to identify those we wanted to award this badge to.

Actimo has very good training and performance management facilities that not only support but could rival dedicated systems. The news features are good, but the control that admins have over the look and feel of the whole app make this a really compelling product.

Staffbase is one of the top scoring products this year and has a good price-to-score ratio. The experience for all users, including admins, is excellent, communication is an overall strong area from chat to formalised news, and the analytics are some of the best we’ve seen across any platform.

We also wanted to give an honourable mention to Beekeeper as it has very strong chat and social tools, which will be really valuable for firstline workers. Communications are simple, but effective, and those publishing stories will appreciate the analytics for each campaign and stream.

Employee App Choice – North America

Employee app choice North America 2020.
SocialChorus.

For our ‘North America’ badge we looked for vendors with either a HQ or strong presence in the region, as well as overall high scores. North America tends to be more cost-sensitive, so price-performance is a factor too.

SocialChorus is a great product for internal communicators, with its flexible news creation and visual approach. Its analytics are great, and communicators will particularly value their ability to track the performance of their comms as well as broader campaigns full of separate pieces of communication.

Employee App Choice – Digital Workplace

Employee app choice digital workplace 2020.
Blink.

Our ‘Digital Workplace’ category reflects the desire to provide firstline workers with a single pocket-sized tool that integrates a variety of other, third-party systems and has built-in practical features. We don’t expect any tool to be a full digital workplace, but we wanted to acknowledge those that come close.

Blink fulfils this criterion very well. Not only does Blink score well across a lot of our scenarios, making it a good all-rounder, but the integration options and practical tools on offer are some of the best we’ve seen. There are also good case studies of these practical tools in use by real businesses.

Employee App Choice – Enterprise

Employee app choice enterprise 2020.
Workplace from Facebook.

The ‘Enterprise’ category gives us an opportunity to highlight vendors that might be at a higher price-point but offer very strong products. They might be better suited to enterprise scale businesses, but the price shouldn’t put anyone off at least longlisting them.

Workplace from Facebook has a huge weight of development behind it as it benefits from the work on the consumer-facing product. So, its features pack a powerful punch. Overall, it scores very well and we particularly like the more unusual features, such as its live video or the highly adaptable bots.

Employee App Choice – Value

Employee app choice value 2020.
Groupe.io

As part of the ‘Value’ category we wanted to highlight those vendors that have some very good individual features, or a strong overall approach, while keeping licencing costs low.

Groupe.io is perhaps less well-known than other products included in our report, but we have found that it’s an unexpected gem. The end-user experience is very good, and tools for communicators are well thought through, including a nice variety of templates for message types. Overall, it’s a strong product at a compelling price-point.

You can find out more about what impressed us with these products by reading our full report. While these apps offer great features, we encourage you to consider the many different products in the marketplace and factor in your own priorities too.

The employee apps report is our 400-page detailed analysis, covering 17+ employee apps. Our reviews are completely independent, detail the strengths and weaknesses of each product, and score them systematically, based on nine common business scenarios.

Employee apps report cover.

Our Vendor Neutral Policy

As a consultancy, we think it is essential that we act with our client’s interests foremost, so ClearBox has a strict vendor-neutral policy. This means that we do not enter into any agreements with vendors that would bias our recommendations to clients. No vendor has paid any money to be in our reports. We don’t take payments for referrals or to write reviews. We don’t sell any software or licenses. We only write the reviews we want to, and we fund them ourselves (including all the work that went into the report).

This doesn’t mean that we won’t talk to vendors though: we are keen to keep up to date with developments in the digital workplace field and enjoy a good relationship with many of the companies we talk about.

Suzie Robinson

I've always worked with intranets, and have practical experience with all aspects of intranet management, including research, implementation, governance, and strategy. My roots are in internal communication and I focus on employee experience and engagement.

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