Simpplr vs Workvivo

Introduction to Simpplr and Workvivo

When comparing Simpplr against Workvivo, ask yourself these questions:

• How important is it for your intranet to keep information organized so employees can be productive?
• Do you have resources available to govern a constant flow of messages and chats?
• How important are available integrations to support your enterprise?

What is Workvivo?

Workvivo is an all-in-one employee app that combines internal communication, engagement, recognition, intranet, and measurement. Workvivo’s greatest strength lies in communications and social engagement with a feed-based interface that will remind users of common social media offerings.

What is Simpplr?

Simpplr is a leading intranet platform and true out-of-the-box solution, designed to enhance internal communication and teamwork within organizations. It stands out by offering a user-friendly interface, personalized content delivery, AI-powered search, advanced analytics, and strong integrations with popular productivity software.

By leveraging AI, Simpplr offers a 1:1 personalized experience, making it a competitive choice for modern intranet solutions and employee experience software—without the need for extensive internal resources, manual governance, or maintenance.

Intranet platforms analyst report reviews

Analyst reports offer comprehensive, impartial assessments of top-tier intranet software solutions. Their value stems from clear metrics and methodologies.

In both the Gartner Magic Quadrant or the Forrester Wave analyst reports, Simpplr stands out as the industry leader.

2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Intranet Packaged Solutions

According to the 2023 Gartner report, both Simpplr and Workvivo are in the Leaders quadrant, but Simpplr leads the pack along both axes—Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. Simpplr’s particular strengths include:

• Delivering a cohesive, personalized employee experience regardless of where employees work
• Incorporating technology innovation rapidly, in a controlled, deliberate way
• Being “simple” to acquire, deploy, and use
• Showing greater user awareness and adoption of product capabilities
• Adopted more frequently than most other providers across both office and frontline worker use cases

In the additional Gartner Critical Capabilities report comparing intranet solutions across six use cases, Simpplr beat out all competitors in five of the six use cases reported.

Here’s a comparison of Simpplr versus Workvivo:

The Forrester Wave™: Intranet Platforms, Q2 2024

Simpplr is recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave report for intranet platforms. Forrester rated Simpplr the highest score possible in AI and/or machine learning, as well as the maximum score in Innovation and Adoption criterion within the Strategy category.

Workvivo, while recognized as a strong performer by Forrester, trailed behind Simpplr in the report. Forrester praised its integration abilities, employee survey tools, and comprehensive trend reports. However, concerns were raised about its shortcomings in developer resources, lack of an AI-based intelligent agent, and customer dissatisfaction with workflow automation and developer tools.

Comparative market position

In summary, Simpplr is recognized as a Leader in both The Forrester Wave™: Intranet Platforms, Q2 2024 report and the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Intranet Packaged Solutions. This recognition highlights Simpplr’s strong strategy, impressive current offering, vision, and execution abilities.

Client feedback and market reputation

G2 Grid® Report for Employee Intranet | Spring 2024

There are 200+ contenders for the Employee Intranet grid. However, only eight contenders appear in the top Leaders quadrant, meaning they’re strong in both user satisfaction and market presence.

Simpplr has consecutively been named a Leader and is once again a leader in the latest Spring 2024 grid. Products in the Leader quadrant are rated highly by G2 users and have substantial Market Presence scores.

Workvivo is in the High Performer segment. High Performing products have high customer Satisfaction scores and low Market Presence compared to the rest of the category.

Customer reviews: Workvivo

G2: 4.9

Capterra: 4.5

GetApp: 4.7

SoftwareAdvice: 4.7

Customer reviews: Simpplr

G2: 4.7

Capterra: 4.8

GetApp: 4.9

SoftwareAdvice: 4.8

Features face-off: Simpplr vs Workvivo

When comparing Simpplr and Workvivo, it’s essential to look closely at their features. Both platforms offer a variety of tools designed to enhance employee engagement and streamline internal communications. From personalized content feeds to integrated social media features, let’s examine how Simpplr and Workvivo compare their capabilities to meet the needs of modern workplaces.

User experience and interface design

Workvivo’s design centers around a social feed and chat functionality, similar to a social media experience. This interface can help boost employee engagement by helping teams learn more about each other in a virtual social setting. However, this complete freedom in social posting poses compliance and legal risks, requiring strict content moderation workflows and significant internal resources, especially across large workforces.

In the Simpplr platform, social interactions are also important—however, they are not the primary driver of employee engagement. Simpplr delivers employee experience with the intranet at its core, with deep capabilities across other functional areas including surveys, recognition & rewards, enterprise search, insights, and advanced analytics. Simpplr’s AI-powered social listening also helps monitor employee-generated content, minimizing the human oversight required.

Search functionality

Simpplr and Workvivo differ considerably when it comes to searching for the information users need.

Workvivo’s search experience relies on highly manual tags and metadata for success—making content maintenance labor-intensive. Workvivo’s search won’t return the right information if tags are inaccurate or metadata is incomplete. If tags are overused or metadata is too expansive, the user will be flooded with an overwhelming array of options, making it difficult to pinpoint the information needed. In short, the burden of search success relies on content managers and IT specialists in Workvivo.

By contrast, Simpplr’s Enterprise Search comes with turnkey integrations that connect to external tools, ticketing systems, messaging platforms, and file storage apps, which are constantly indexed and updated—without manual effort. Simpplr’s AI-powered search removes the complexities and hassle of manual tagging while allowing users to interact with the search through natural language and receive personalized results—no training needed.

Simpplr’s latest Smart Answers combines the ability to look up answers and summarize the information in a conversational manner, using LLM and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GenAI). Simply ask a question and get the best “human” answer possible based on existing intranet content.

Content management and governance

Workvivo’s strengths lie in internal communications and social interaction. The platform is designed around tools that encourage social interaction among employees. However, the platform lacks content management governance, similar to the experience of social media feeds. Companies that deploy Workvivo should be prepared to implement strict internal workflows with strong editing components and oversight to ensure content accuracy, reliability, and relevance.

With Simpplr, content governance and maintenance happen automatically. The AI-powered Auto-Governance Engine™ removes outdated content and reduces the prominence of “news” content once its relevance fades. Simpplr even integrates with HR systems, using essential employee data such as role, location, department, and social connections to serve and recommend personally tailored content without manual effort.

Integrations and AI assistance

Although Workvivo claims to have 40 integrations with popular HR software systems, the platform’s integrations often aren’t deep enough to create a seamless work experience for employees. Anything additional requires custom development that incurs ongoing time and cost—and delays deployment—making it a poor fit for companies that need more tailored workflows and processes.

Simpplr, however, offers 200 low-code or even no-code integrations to unify the employee experience.  Simpplr also adds a proprietary AI assistant that integrates with the most popular HRIS to enable service delivery, answering common employee requests, such as “What is my PTO balance?”  By providing a conversational interface to streamline service delivery with HR systems,  (while respecting permission settings) —Simpplr raises efficiency, productivity, and employee engagement from the moment your team first says, “Hello.”

Reporting and analytics

Both platforms offer reporting and analytics. However, because Workvivo is based on a social-media-style feed, its out-of-the-box metrics tend to lack the deep, actionable insights that help improve decision-making and strategy. Companies will require custom development to achieve in-depth reporting and analysis.

Simpplr offers advanced, AI-powered insights right out of the box, including analytics related to employee experience.. The platform provides clear recommendations to improve employee intranet adoption, content consumption, social engagement, and governance.

A note on Zoom’s acquisition of Workvivo

Zoom purchased Workvivo in 2023, and some observers have expressed concern that Zoom may use Workvivo to build out the Zoom platform instead of focusing on third-party integrations with productivity suites like Google and Microsoft. Workvivo’s new pricing model also charges for extensive integrations with other enterprise tools, suggesting that the concern is not unfounded.

Pros and Cons: Simpplr vs Workvivo Comparison

While Simpplr has clear advantages over Workvivo in AI, automation, and integrations, each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses, as shown below.

Workvivo: Strengths and weaknesses

Workvivo’s greatest strength lies in its ability to introduce employees to each other through a centralized internal social media feed. For companies that need to raise social employee engagement more than they need to improve productivity, Workvivo may be a good choice. However, companies considering Workvivo should keep in mind the additional resources needed for content governance and integrations.

Simpplr: Strengths and weaknesses

By contrast, Simpplr’s strength lies in providing a true out-of-the-box intranet solution that requires only simple configuration to meet customers’ unique needs, not customization or coding, making implementation much more straightforward. In fact, Simpplr’s Customer Experience team leads the industry with zero (0) implementation failures. Simpplr also excels in AI, automation, and no-code integrations, making the platform far easier to manage and maintain over time.

Final Verdict: Simpplr vs Workvivo

Choosing the Right Intranet Platform for Your Organization

In considering Workvivo vs Simpplr for your organization, ask yourself the following questions:

• Do we have internal resources available to code and maintain custom integrations with dozens of productivity tools?
• Would an intranet that prioritizes socialization over productivity meet our long-term business needs?
• Are we prepared to dedicate significant resources to content governance and management, overseeing a constant flow of social chatter for legal compliance across our entire workforce?

If you answered no to any of these questions, Simpplr is likely to be a better fit for your organization.

Future-proofing your intranet with Simpplr

On a final note, remember this—if your organization commits to manual governance of employee-generated social media feeds and content, you’ll need to maintain those resources continuously over the entire life of your intranet.

With Simpplr’s true out-of-the-box SaaS intranet solution, you don’t have to worry about manual search maintenance, content governance, or custom integrations. Simpplr automates it all for you, so your team can focus on your business.

Watch a quick 10-minute demo to see Simpplr in action.