The number of startups and new companies has exploded in the last decade, and competition for top talent has never been this fierce.
While increased employment is definitely a good thing, it can also lead to a serious problem: high employee turnover.
Since employees have so many options, businesses are under pressure to have an outstanding work culture and environment in order to retain their best employees. Luckily, employee engagement tools have made it easy to motivate employees and create engaged teams
In this article, I'll go over the top 14 employee engagement software that you can use for remote and on-site teams.
Make sure you check out our Definitive Guide to Employee Engagement, before diving into the tools.
Basics first:
What is an Employee Engagement Software?
Employee engagement software is a category of application programs used by businesses to improve employee job satisfaction and retain top talent. The aim is to help employees become immersed in their company's mission and culture, allowing them to be more productive and effective.
The majority of modern employee engagement software is managed by human resource departments and sold as software as a service on a subscription basis.
What Features Should an Employee Engagement Software Have?
Let’s look into some of the software's most important features:
Pulse surveys
These are the surveys that HR teams can send to employees on a regular basis to learn about important metrics such as employee satisfaction, team communication, and so on.
You can create one for the whole company or for individual teams by customizing pulse surveys with your questions. To check-in with your employees, you can also select one from a library of pre-built survey templates.
Goal setting
Employees can set goals for the near future using an employee engagement software.
Employees can mark whether or not they have met their goals when the next round of surveys is published.
Reports and dashboards
Managers and the HR department have access to and can analyze reports for the whole company.
They will use these to figure out the employee engagement rate, employee net promoter scores (eNPS), and more.
Employee recognition and appreciation
Being recognized and appreciated for the work you have done is a great morale-booster.
The software allows you to show your appreciation for the employees by offering them badges, certificates, and awards, among other things. You may also use engagement software to keep track of their birthdays and anniversaries.
Gamification
Most employee engagement tools have a gamification function that adds interactive competitions, assignments, and quizzes to their daily tasks to make them more entertaining.
Notifications
Most of these tools have a notification function that notifies workers when they accomplish their goals, or when they are rewarded for their achievements, and so on – since immediate feedback and social affirmation are essential in reinforcing positive behavior.
As you see, almost all features of employee engagement tools are there to improve overall employee experience, therefore enabling them to be more active and engage.
The 14 Best Employee Engagement Software
Here's a list of 14 great employee engagement software options, along with features, pricing, and user reviews:
1. Kudos
Kudos is a recognition, feedback, and communication platform for employees.
It focuses on improving employee relationships and assisting employees in assimilating into a business culture.
Kudos is multilingual and has a bunch of simple features that keep the employees engaged and inspired.
Key Features
- Provides service awards, certificates, and manager badges for employee appreciation.
- Internal communication options include newsletters, photo galleries, media sharing, and more.
- Allows for the public or private exchange of continuous real-time employee feedback.
- Provides easy-to-understand data in the form of reports, dashboards, and leaderboards.
- Android and iOS mobile apps are available.
Pricing
The price is available on request.
User Ratings
- G2: 4.8/5 (1000+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.8/5 (600+ reviews)
2. Reward Gateway
Reward Gateway is an employee engagement portal that allows you to manage employee communication, discounts, and acknowledgement all in one place.
It's an all-in-one employee engagement tool that lets you pick and choose which features are the most important to your business.
Key Features
- Provides rewards and peer recognition for boosting employee morale.
- Employee surveys with ongoing real-time feedback can be used to determine the needs and problems of employees.
- Employee discounts are available on a variety of purchases.
- Provides a dedicated center for employee health and well-being.
- Channels that can be customized to reach out to a larger number of people.
Pricing
There is a free trial available. Plans start at £6 per user per month (approximately $8 per user per month).
User Ratings
- G2: 4.5/5 (100+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.9/5 (20+ reviews)
3. Peakon Engage
Peakon is a platform for employee engagement that allows you to build meaningful surveys and turn the team’s feedback into actionable insights.
These questionnaires will assist you in making essential decisions on how to improve employee engagement.
Key Features
- Uses Intelligent Listening technology to create two-way conversational surveys for the entire organization, and even for the employee lifecycle.
- The design, scheduling, distribution, and analysis of surveys are all automated.
- The surveys are translated into more than 50 languages.
- Notifies you in real time about important changes, goals, and possible problems, so you can figure out what needs extra focus.
- Managerial performance can be improved by contextual learning and preparation.
Pricing
They offer three plans: Essential, Business, and Premier for various needs. The price is available on request.
User Ratings
- G2: 4.6/5 (80+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.8/5 (30+ reviews)
4. UserGuiding - Employee Training and Onboarding
The more knowledgable the user about the digital platforms that you use, the more engaged they will be.
UserGuiding is a no-code user onboarding software that can be used to improve digital adoption, enable digital transformation and change, and create a user/employee onboarding flow.
With UserGuiding, you can create an employee onboarding experience in minutes, and establish a completely interactive internal-knowledge-base for your company.
Key Features
- Interactive walkthroughs for web products and platforms,
- Tooltips,
- Onboarding checklists,
- Interactive Resource Centers that can also be linked to external knowledge bases,
- eNPS surveys,
- Hotspots.
Pricing
UserGuiding’s pricing plans are based on the number of active users you have. When billed yearly:
- Basic Plan: Starting from $69/month.
- Professional Plan: Starting from $199/month.
- Corporate Plan: Custom quote.
User Ratings
- G2: 4.7/5 (391 reviews)
- Capterra: 4.6/5 (40+ reviews)
5. Flourish
Flourish helps you collect and structure your employees’ improvement ideas on a regular basis so that it becomes clear what's needed the most.
Through uncomplicated pulse surveys, they will give you insight into and shed light on what's most important to focus on at the present time.
Key Features
- Standard or Custom Pulse Questions, always based in research.
- Insight into the teams' ongoing improvement work
- Logics behind the reason for successful teams and their best practices.
- Collects feedback via Microsoft Teams, Slack or Facebook Messenger.
Pricing
Offers a trial and there are two plans available: Essentials and Pro.
6. Fellow
Fellow is a meeting management tool that improves employee engagement and efficiency before, after, and during meetings.
It enables you to schedule team meetings, one-on-one meetings, and get instant feedback on your teams’ performance, and more.
Key Features
- Provides shared schedules, meeting structure templates, and real-time note-taking to improve the team's meeting efficiency.
- All the tasks addressed in the meeting can be assigned, organized, and prioritized.
- Real-time feedback on meetings, projects, and even on employee performance is also available.
- Allows you to invite customers, suppliers, companies, and others as guests to your meetings, which improves the customer experience.
- To improve the workflow, it integrates with resources like Slack, Asana, and Google Docs.
Pricing
For teams of less than ten members, it offers an unlimited free plan. Paid plans begin at $5 per month per user.
User Ratings
- G2: 4.8/5 (40+ reviews)
- Capterra: 5/5 (20+ reviews)
7. Culture Amp
Culture Amp is a full-featured employee engagement software that offers actionable insights for increasing employee engagement, retention, and performance.
Key Features
- Tools for interaction, culture and pulse surveys, and performance evaluation are available.
- Created by data scientists and psychologists, this service includes employee engagement survey templates as well as customizable surveys.
- It assists you in determining the level of engagement among different teams and demographics.
- Provides an automated survey based on the lifecycle of an employee, such as onboarding, departure, and so on.
- Allows you to compare survey results with over 60 industry benchmarks (innovation, company trust, leadership, and so on) given by other companies.
Pricing
Self-starter, Standard, and Enterprise are the three plans available. The price is available on request.
User Ratings
- G2: 4.6/5 (90+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.7/5 (50+ reviews)
8. 15five
15five is an employee engagement platform that helps you improve the company's performance by inspiring your employees to give their best.
Employees will need 15 minutes to complete the survey, and managers will need 5 minutes to evaluate the responses, according to the concept of this employee engagement tool.
Key Features
- Uses more than 30 evidence-based models to help you create any type of survey.
- Employees' positive behavior is reinforced by a combination of education, technology, and psychology.
- The 'full potential index,' which is based on four psychological sciences, is used to measure employee satisfaction.
- Provides comprehensive data on employee satisfaction.
- Allows you to create, monitor, and manage Key Results and Objectives. (OKRs).
Pricing
Plans start at $7/user per month.
User Ratings
- G2: 4.6/5 (1000+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.7/5 (800+ reviews)
9. Lattice Performance Management
Lattice is a remote employee management tool that provides a variety of products for tracking the distributed workforce and gaining insight into employee engagement.
This employee engagement software includes a variety of engagement surveys that can be used to collect employee feedback on a wide range of topics and to foster an employee-centric company culture.
Key Features
- It combines employee engagement and performance management software to create a comprehensive employee management solution.
- Provides insights into key KPIs, allowing you to establish a plan of action.
- Compares the findings of current and previous engagement surveys to track changes in your company's culture.
- Provides pulse surveys to get employee feedback on a variety of topics.
- Templates for employee engagement surveys produced by academics and practitioners are available.
Pricing
Paid plans start at $9/user a month.
User Ratings
- G2: 4.6/5 (2000+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.6/5 (50+ reviews)
10. Energage
Energage engagement platform is designed to help the company's work culture improve over time. Energage's software provider offers a comprehensive SaaS platform that combines four solutions (workplace survey, pulse, insights, and employer branding) to assist with employee recruitment and retention.
Key Features
- Create personalized pulse surveys to communicate with employees on a regular basis.
- Improves collaboration by assisting in the inception of workplace communications.
- Artificial intelligence is used to provide valuable insights into engagement survey results.
- After the workers complete the survey, they are given numerous awards.
- Managers can improve their coaching skills through an online engagement program.
Pricing
Offers a demo. The price is available on request.
User Ratings
- G2: 4.6/5 (80+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.5/5 (30+ reviews)
11. TINYpulse
TINYpulse is an employee engagement platform that helps you enhance internal communication, assess business culture, and lower turnover.
This engagement platform enables you to collect continuous feedback on employee satisfaction as well as their reasons for staying or leaving your company. It can be used for both large and small teams.
Key Features
- More than 300 scientifically designed employee engagement survey templates are available.
- Allows you to tailor questions to your specific requirements.
- Provides anonymous, real-time employee feedback.
- Gmail, Outlook, Slack, and other services are all supported.
- Generates informative employee data on leadership and other important trends.
Pricing
A 30-day free trial is available. The price is available on request.
User Ratings
- G2: 4.4/5 (150+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.7/5 (30+ reviews)
12. Officevibe
Officevibe is a collaboration tool that helps your team create trust, strengthen relationships, and grow as a team.
It has a continuous three-step circuit (share, discuss, and address) that helps you and your team to understand and overcome different team issues. This method can also be used to boost employee engagement.
Key Features
- Offers pulse surveys, anonymous feedback, and detailed reports to help you understand your team’s feelings, goals, and needs.
- Allows you to work with team members and have meaningful discussions.
- It has a library of resources, blogs, and other tools to help you develop your skills.
- Slack, Teams, Google, and more are all easily integrated.
Pricing
It offers a free basic plan. Paid plans begin at $4 per month per account for a minimum of five users.
User Ratings
- G2: 4.3/5 (600+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.6/5 (40+ reviews)
13. Qualtrics
Qualtrics provides a wide range of products and services to meet a company's different needs.
As part of their employee experience product, they provide an employee engagement software tool that displays real-time employee engagement insights so you can see which areas need to be addressed so as to increase employee performance.
Key Features
- Patented 'organization hierarchy tool' that sends survey results to all company leaders and managers automatically.
- The innovative ‘iQ tool' uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide intelligent data analytics.
- A pre-packaged employee engagement solution with an in-built survey tool, workflow, analytics, and an action plan is available.
- Allows you to see how your actions affect kpi and employee productivity.
Pricing
There is a free trial available. The price is available on request.
User Ratings
- G2: 4.2/5 (200+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.7/5 (200+ reviews)
14. BambooHR
BambooHR is a cloud-based employee engagement platform that covers the entire employee lifecycle, from recruiting to offboarding.
Its employee satisfaction tool lets you use the Employee Net Promoter Score to estimate employee satisfaction (ENPS).
Key Features
- Establish which procedures should be prioritized based on their importance to employees.
- Allows employees to provide honest feedback while maintaining anonymity.
- Provides a thorough analysis of employee feedback, allowing you to make improvements to your business.
- Based on the keywords, categorizes all feedback as positive, neutral, or negative.
- Provides training courses for maximizing employee satisfaction.
Pricing
There is a free trial available. The price is available on request.
User Ratings
- G2: 4.3/5 (600+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.5/5 (1000+ reviews)
Final Thoughts
To prioritize ‘employee sentiment,' most companies are shifting to a people-first work culture.
Employees who feel respected are more inspired and engaged in their work. A highly engaged employee will contribute to the growth and development of your business.
According to employee sentiment research, an employee engagement software platform is a great way to collect feedback, hear employees’ voices, and gain actionable insights.
So why not pick the best one for your company and boost your employee experience while still keeping employees loyal and highly motivated?!
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best employee engagement software?
For employee digital training, UserGuiding is a solid product. Flourish is the best for easily collecting feedback, Kudos is perfect for improving and monitoring employee relationships while and Fellow for managing online meetings.
How big is the employee engagement market?
According to researchandmarkets.com, the global market size of employee engagement and feedback market size was $817 million in 2019, and is expected to grow to $2.13 billion in 2026.
How can you engage with remote employees?
Employee engagement tools and software are mostly designed for engaging with remote employees, getting feedback from them, and turning these feedbacks into to-dos and actionable insights. So, you can use a variation of the tools on our list to engage with remote employees.