Best employee experience software: 13 tools for 2023

According to McKinsey’s “Great Attrition” research, employees that viewed their workplace experience as positive were eight times more likely to stay with an employer, compared to employees who saw their workplace experience as negative.

So employers that want to retain top talent need to focus on improving the employee experience.  

Employee experience is the sum of all interactions an employee has with their employer. It may involve their physical work environment, their relationship with peers, and even the technology they use to do their work. 

Optimizing the employee experience becomes more challenging when employees are working from home, but technology can help. In this post, we’ll cover the best employee experience software companies can use to engage and support their employees.

What is employee experience software? 

Employee experience software is technology that provides an array of tools to engage employees, track performance, make knowledge more accessible, and improve communication.  

What are the benefits of digital employee experience software?

• Employee engagement: Employee engagement goes beyond standard communication. It involves helping employees feel connected and informed. 
• Employee productivity: With effective engagement strategies, employees become more productive in their day-to-day operations. 
• Company culture: Creating a company culture is an ongoing process. With employee experience software, leadership can share content that promotes company values and foster a sense of ownership among employees.
• Employee retention: With a proper employee engagement system in place, you can recognize employees for their accomplishments, invite them to provide feedback, and empower them to share ideas. 

It’s important to remember that a fun, inclusive work environment makes even the toughest jobs enjoyable, and that’s what good employee engagement enables and encourages.

Features to look for in an employee experience solution

1. Employee onboarding: Can the company streamline the onboarding process with access to correct company resources, training materials, and other relevant information?
2. Internal communications: How effortlessly can team members communicate with each other, share updates, and collaborate on projects?
3. Performance management: Does the software enable employee performance tracking and help identify areas for improvement? Is the data easily understandable — for both the employee and the company? 
4. Learning and development: Does the employee experience software provide access to timely courses and training material to help employees stay up-to-date with their skills and knowledge?
5. Employee recognition: Can the software recognize employees that hit their KPIs and do above-average work?
6. Analytics and reporting: Does the software display analytics data in a clear format that’s understandable without confusion?
7. Integrations with existing workflows: How well does the employee experience platform integrate within your existing tech stack and workflows? Does it support the core software a company is using?
   
   

13 best employee experience software solutions

Now let’s take a look at the best employee experience management software of 2023.

1. Happeo

Best for: Internal communication, knowledge management, and collaboration

G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Notable customers: Doctolib, Decathlon, Marqeta, SmartRecruiters

Happeo is an employee experience software with a comprehensive suite of tools to give their employees an experience of togetherness and collaboration through employee communities and social channels. It also provides tools to create and manage unique intranet pages and includes advanced analytics with content, search, and employee engagement data.

How Happeo enhances employee experience:

• Offers multilingual support (useful for international remote teams)
• Improves communication by helping you create employee communities 
• Enables you to search various workspaces (Slack, Confluence, Jira, etc.) 
• Encourages employee participation through emojis and GIFs 
• Allows posting rich-media stories on news and announcement channels
• Supports third-party integrations from its user-friendly App Marketplace
• Offers DMs, video calls, emails, and event schedules
• Provides a People Directory that allows employees to have access to the experts they need to do their jobs efficiently
  
  

2. Motivosity

Best for: Performance recognition, community building, and timeline feed

G2 rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars

Notable customers: Bosch, KPMG, Fujifilm, SalesRabbit

For encouraging employees for good performance, and boosting their morale with rewards and gifts, Motivosity (as the name suggests) is the tool you are looking for. It has an integrated community-building feature and a customizable gift store.

How Motivosity enhances employee experience:

• Helps create profiles, personality maps, and interest groups for community building
• Allows you to monitor employee sentiment with anonymous eNPS tracking
• Encourages collaboration
• Offers one-on-one calls and summary reports
• Generates automated gifts cards through a customizable company store 
• Sends spot bonuses 
  
  

3. Qualtrics EmployeeXM

Best for: Ease of use and great customer support

G2 rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars

Notable customers: Samsung, FedEx, Ferrari, JetBlue, Verizon

Qualtrics EmployeeXM, used by 75% of the Fortune 500 brands, focuses on driving engagement, talent planning, and in-the-moment listening, supported by smart artificial intelligence (AI). Qualtrics EmployeeXM offers outstanding customer support and a highly user-friendly platform.

How Qualtrics EmployeeXM enhances employee engagement:

• Provides real-time data for facilitating immediate action
• Shares employee feedback at scale 
• Automatically maps feedback to the right managers and stakeholders
• Uses Driver iQ to discover the revenue generation points for higher ROI
• Provides no-code XM Automated Actions to send notifications 
  
  

4. Lattice

Best for: Performance reviews, team management 

G2 rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars

Notable customers: Reddit, Monzo, Webflow, Demandbase

Lattice is primarily a performance tracking and boosting platform where KPIs and OKRs matter a lot. With in-depth data and analytics, individual growth plans, and streamlined compensation management, Lattice can help you “build a high-performance company.”

How Lattice enhances employee engagement:

• Enables writing in-depth performance reviews
• Connects behavioral trends and performance data to support employees
• Includes competency matrices that help employees know their growth path
• Supports building a strategic compensation plan based on performance data
  
  

5. Kudos

Best for: Building company culture and employee recognition

G2 rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars

Notable customers: DHL, Chewy, Russell, Telarus

Kudos is an employee experience solution based on peer-to-peer recognition and rewards, resulting in an open, inclusive, and motivating work culture. Someone can use those “kudos” to buy a gift for themselves. You can also use Kudos as an alternative to thank you cards.

How Kudos enhances employee engagement:

• Encourages rewarding employees with rewards 
• Tailors rewards to fit the work culture and company budget
• Helps employees take part in the Kudos Wall to foster company values 
• Sets up nomination-based awards with custom nomination forms
• Promotes work anniversaries, birthdays, and other employee milestones 
• Allows customizing the platform to integrate recognition with your brand’s mission
  
  

6. 15Five

Best for: Individual growth leading to organizational transformations

G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars

Notable customers: WPEngine, Spotify, HubSpot, Pendo, MongoDB

15Five is more of an employee feedback tool where managers send surveys regularly to gauge employee sentiment. You can also keep track of goals and recent developments or take timely action to resolve any challenges and bottlenecks. If you can overlook the customer support and interface navigation issues, 15Five is a good tool for managers. 

How 15Five enhances employee engagement:

• Offers the Role Clarity feature to help employees understand their job better 
• Allows you to create structured goals and OKRs 
• Helps leverage performance coaching by certified professionals for individual growth 
• Presents easy-to-access review cycles that measure against standard benchmarks
• Features public feed of “high-fives” given and received by employees 
  
  

7. Bonusly

Best for: Employee encouragement, mutual appreciation, and morale-boosting

G2 rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars

Notable customers: Hulu, Invision, Survey Monkey, Chobani

Bonusly focuses on “bonuses” — you give points, you receive points. It helps in fostering collaboration and good faith between members and teams and builds a fun, engaging work culture where everyone is ready to give 100% to add value to the business. Besides the fact that individual statistics might be hard to find, Bonusly is great for peer-to-peer and manager-to-peer recognition.

How Bonusly enhances employee engagement:

• Encourages celebrating birthdays and work anniversaries with bonuses
• Allows you to create fun, custom awards
• Enables adding extra points to a particular bonus as a team manager
• Tracks the most and least popular bonuses with detailed analytics
• Uses the open application programming interface (API) to help build apps 
  
  

8. Vantage Circle

Best for: Access to a wide variety of e-commerce vendors 

G2 rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars

Notable customers: Tech Mahindra, ACP, Tata Motors, Piramal, Wipro, Landmark Group

Vantage Circle works on the premise that if you reward good deeds, they happen more often. Boasting an easy-to-use interface and exclusive offers from big corporate brands, Vantage Circle brings the “shopper” in your employee alive. Although it might be better to work on the points redemption tracking functionality on the mobile app and to activate the “undo” feature to get the credit back. This is an excellent alternative if you want to engage your employees’ good performance with rewards.

How Vantage Circle enhances employee engagement:

• “Gamifies” engagement scores with innovative leaderboards and benchmarks
• Provides cash back on points via gift cards or merchandise from popular brands
• Allows you to share memories in an online yearbook (for work anniversaries)
• Lets employees run classified ads to sell or buy within the organization
• Uses heatmaps to address employee feedback collection issues
• Leverages single sign-on (SSO) to integrate with multiple human resource information system (HRIS) and chat tools
  
  

9. Empuls

Best for: Companies looking for affordable pricing and a wide selection of brands

G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars

Notable customers: Pepsi, ShareChat, redBus, Freshworks

Empuls is a cloud-based collaboration solution that includes document management features, surveys, and social intranet functionality. 

How Empuls enhances employee engagement:

• Offers an employee social media network 
• Presents actionable insights from employer net promoter score (eNPS) surveys 
• Analyzes recognition trends across teams and departments
• Offers cash back from 20,000+ brands across 25 categories
• Automates reward workflows for birthdays and work milestones
• Offers instant credit up to 4x an employee’s salary
  
  

10. Culture Amp

Best for: Companies looking for a solution with better pricing and more suited for non-English users

G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars

Notable customers: Canva, Etsy, Oracle, McDonald’s

Culture Amp is a new entry to the employee engagement space. What sets Culture Amp apart is its survey tool — a fan favorite in the nonprofit world. Employees find the interface easy to use and still provide a robust feature set. However, goal tracking and data reporting can often prove challenging and takes time to get used to. 

How Culture Amp enhances employee engagement:

• Allows you to view individual contributions via calibration charts
• Helps you apply multi-source feedback to better gauge performance
• Offers ready-made survey templates
• Provides turnover forecast based on engagement and performance data
• Encourages participation in the community of HR professionals and people leaders
  
  

11. WorkTango

Best for: Companies looking for an attractive user interface and ease of use

G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Notable customers: DoorDash, Accruent, Allianz, Kaiser Permanente

WorkTango is another worthy employee engagement software alternative. You can run surveys, check employee sentiment, and engage them with rewards. The software features limited reporting functionality and customization features, but customer support responds fast and is rapidly developing. 

How WorkTango enhances employee engagement:

• Enables you to give public or private recognition
• Lets you share custom recognition on peer-nominated awards and milestones
• Provides high-fives, GIFs, and emojis to make it more personable and fun
• Encourages you to give 10+ rewards across 85 countries (great for your remote team) 
• Allows you to add live notes and agendas to dynamic conversations 
• Includes trends, heatmaps, and insights for any employee/role attribute
  
  

12. Achievers

Best for: Companies looking for an appealing design and helpful customer support

G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars

Notable customers: Scotiabank, Discover, Kellogg’s, Coborn’s

Achievers has built quite a name in the employee engagement tool industry with its user-friendly interface and excellent customer support. 

How Achievers improves employee engagement:

• Helps you to recognize employees by team or individually
• Allows you to create visual notes on special occasions like birthdays and anniversaries 
• Encourages building employee connections and networking. 
• Enables the use of quick voting polls to see what’s popular and what’s not 
• Offers rewards from 2,500+ brands across 150 countries
  
  

13. Awardco

Best for: Employee recognition and rewards

G2 rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars

Notable customers: Paramount, Southwest Gas, Lendio, Percepta

Awardco is an employee recognition platform that lets employees choose gifts from an online store. However, the availability of a mobile app would even be better. Also, better sorting and filtering of products in the gift store could be better. 

How Awardco boosts employee engagement:

• Encourages submitting a detailed explanation as a background of the recognition 
• Lets you create MemoryBooks for work milestones
• Allows one-click integration with tools like Notion, HubSpot, and Salesforce.
• Encourages incentivizing and “gamifying” tasks like security compliance or fitness training
  
  

Improve the employee experience with Happeo

 If you want to focus on digital independence and personal customization, you can't go wrong with Happeo. Explore Happeo’s features and see how our software can help you engage your employees and create a better work experience.