Simpplr vs Unily comparison: Which intranet solution is best for your organization?

Introduction to Unily and Simpplr

When comparing Unily vs Simpplr, ask yourself these questions:

• How much time are you prepared to spend building and maintaining your intranet?
• Is there a specific business reason why you would need a highly customized intranet solution—and a dedicated IT team to maintain it?
• How much do you prioritize AI and innovation in your intranet/EX platform? If this is important, do you have dedicated AI experts for ongoing maintenance and upgrades?

What is Unily?

Unily is a UK-based intranet solution that provides a hybrid solution built on top of SharePoint with basic, out-of-the-box functionality that can be highly customized. It offers a broad range of options but requires a dedicated team to build, implement, and maintain them.

Unily excels in facilitating digital workplaces for enterprises with custom requirements.

What is Simpplr?

Simpplr is a US-based employee experience and intranet platform and a true out-of-the-box solution that gives developers the option for extensibility. It stands out by offering a platform approach to EX solutions in a user-friendly interface, personalizing content delivery, and providing advanced analytics.

Simpplr leverages AI and social features to facilitate a connected and informed workplace, positioning it as a competitive choice in the market for modern intranet solutions and employee experience software—without the need for extensive internal resources or maintenance.

Unily vs Simpplr

The comparison between Unily and Simpplr boils down to a choice between customization and user experience.

Unily is best suited for companies that want extreme customization and have a dedicated in-house development team to implement the changes.

Simpplr offers a comprehensive employee experience platform that includes an intranet, AI Assistant, intelligent search, surveys, newsletters, and rewards and recognition, all out-of-the-box. It’s AI-powered to drive rapid user adoption and ease of use, without the need for extra development.

Why Compare Unily and Simpplr?

When choosing an intranet platform, it’s important to find the right fit for your organizational needs and goals. A direct comparison can help identify the aspects of each platform that matter most to your unique situation. Let’s dive in.

Intranet Platforms Analyst Report Reviews

Analyst reports offer comprehensive, impartial assessments of top-tier intranet software solutions. Their value stems from in-depth frameworks,research-backed methodologies, and expertise in the market landscape.

2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Intranet Packaged Solutions

According to the Gartner report, both Simpplr and Unily 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 2023 Gartner Critical Capabilities report comparing intranet solutions across six use cases, Simpplr outscored out all competitors in five of the six use cases reported, and Unily scored the highest one of six.

Here’s a comparison of Simpplr versus Unily:

Use Case	Simpplr ranking	Unily ranking
Employee communications and engagement	1st	2nd
Employee services	1st	2nd
Application portals	4th	1st
Knowledge services	1st	2nd
Work management	1st	2nd
Frontline worker support	1st	2nd

The Forrester Wave™: Intranet Platforms, Q2 2024

In the Forrester report, both Simpplr and Unily are positioned in the Leaders quadrant. Simpplr excels in strategy, whereas Unily holds an advantage in current offerings.

Forrester praised Simpplr for prioritizing employee experience and engagement in its innovation strategy and customer adoption methods. Simpplr excelled with top scores in AI/ML capabilities, surpassing Unily, enabling highly personalized news feeds tailored to each employee’s role and interests. It also led in automating content governance, reporting, rich metadata, developer tools, and surveys, outperforming Unily in these areas. Its lowest scores were for market presence — number of customers and revenue, both of which are expected to rise as more companies discover Simpplr’s industry leadership.

On the other hand, Unily offers strong features like specialized dashboards and reporting for internal communication leaders and technical platform managers. It excels in automating content governance, enabling repeatable employee journeys, executing communication campaigns efficiently, and offers flexibility in managing design, scheduling, and administration tools across sites/subsites.

However, it falls short in providing seamless native collaboration features for communities and frontline worker coordination, relying heavily on integrations with third-party tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack, or digital whiteboards. Forrester also noted that some reference customers expressed concerns about additional costs associated with new features.

Current offering	Simpplr	Unily
Architecture and administration	1st	2nd
AI and analytics	1st	3rd
Employee communications	2nd	1st
Design and customization	4th	8th

Comparative Market Position

In summary, both Simpplr and Unily are recognized as Leaders in the Forrester Wave™: Intranet Platforms, Q2 2024 report and the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Intranet Packaged Solutions. Simpplr’s emphasis on AI/ML, personalized content delivery, and automation offers a significant edge for organizations aiming to enhance employee experience and streamline internal communications. Despite Unily’s competitive offerings, Simpplr’s strategic vision and innovative approach position it as a strong choice for large and midsize enterprises.

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 a consecutive leader in the latest Spring, 2024 grid.

Here’s a comparison of Simpplr versus Unily, based on how G2 reviewers rated software sellers’ ability to satisfy their needs, as shown in the table below:

Satisfaction Ratings for Employee Intranet	Simpplr	Unily
Likelihood to Recommend	93%	90%
Product Going in Right Direction?	98%	92%
Meets Requirements	91%	89%
Ease of Admin	92%	86%
Ease of Doing Business With	96%	86%
Quality of Support	95%	88%
Ease of Setup	91%	83%
Ease of Use	95%	95%
Net Promoter Score (NPS)	80	77

Customer Reviews: Unily

G2: 4.5

Capterra: 4.5

GetApp: 4.6

SoftwareAdvice: 4.6

Customer Reviews: Simpplr

G2: 4.7

Capterra: 4.8

GetApp: 4.9

SoftwareAdvice: 4.8

Features Face-off: Simpplr vs Unily

User Experience and Interface Design

Simpplr and Unily differ considerably when it comes to their search capability.

Unily’s search experience relies on highly manual tags and metadata for success—making content maintenance labor-intensive. If tags are imperfect or metadata is incomplete, searches may not return the right information the user is looking for. If tags are overused or metadata is too expansive, the overwhelming array of tags compromise the user experience, making it difficult to pinpoint the information they need. Unily’s search functionality relies on the end user selecting filters, and content managers/IT specialists on customizing the search workflows.

By contrast, Simpplr’s Workplace Search comes with no-code connectors that integrate into 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.

Implementation and IT Dependency

The rollout process is significantly different between each platform as well. Unily was originally founded as a SharePoint consultancy, with a business model that depended heavily on hands-on development work. Today, the effort required to make changes in the platform shows its age.

Unily requires heavy hands-on work for ongoing maintenance. Every new piece of content has to be manually tagged and uploaded with specialized metadata to preserve the platform’s search functionality. Even that metadata needs to be maintained, or search functionality and usefulness will decline as a function of time.

Simpplr is an out-of-the box solution designed to be fully implemented in weeks, not months—easily configured without the need for custom builds.

Because Simpplr relies on AI-powered search and automatically integrates with everyday work systems, content and search maintenance happens automatically. The AI-powered Auto-Governance Engine™ automatically 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.

AI and Innovation

Unily offers an overwhelming number of options and features that require heavy investment in user experience, system design, custom development, and admin training to implement and maintain their platform. Innovation with Unily is a resource-intensive endeavor, demanding significant time and resource allocations to implement the platform and integrate it with other digital workplace applications.

Simpplr is the most comprehensive AI-powered employee experience platform, built on strong user experience and design principles. The approach is anchored on continued innovation while prioritizing ease of use, helping companies transform their digital employee experience on day one without heavy customizations, long implementations, and admin training—maximizing time to value.

Analytics and Insights

While both platforms offer analytics and insights, Unily requires companies to spend significant effort building unique reporting mechanisms while Simpplr provides automatic reporting and advanced analytics and insights as part of the platform.

Simpplr also uses proprietary AI to help corporate leaders glean company-wide, aggregate insights from employee communications, helping them stay on top of employee sentiment and drive employee engagement.

Customization and Branding

Both Unily and Simpplr offer branded intranet solutions. The primary difference between the two platforms comes down to the amount of customization that’s required of the average customer. Unily’s offering is built on the expectation that customers will want to spend significant time and resources in a continuous loop of building, implementing, and maintaining their corporate intranet. Simpplr’s model is to provide an out-of-the-box solution that requires only essential configuration rather than extensive customization—automating routine maintenance through the power of AI.

Collaboration and Communication Tools

One of the greatest benefits of a modern intranet platform lies in its ability to connect to the collaboration and communication tools that teams already use, providing a unifying portal or gateway to access everything your team needs to be productive.

Although Unily received high scores on employee communications in the Q1 2022 Forrester Wave™ report, Forrester also reported Unily to be “poorest among integration and interoperability, customer base, and strategic partner ecosystem.”

In the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Intranet Packaged Solutions, Simpplr ranked first for both “Employee services” and “Employee communications and engagement.”

Integration Capabilities

In contrast to Unily’s poor integration performance, Simpplr takes integration to a whole new level. When connecting with today’smost popular collaboration and communication tools, Simpplr adds aproprietary AI assistant that goes beyond searching to perform routine tasks like filing expense reports or scheduling vacation time.

By letting employees talk to HR tools, finance tools, and more—while respecting permission settings, of course—Simpplr raises efficiency, productivity, and employee engagement from the moment your team first says, “Hello.”

Security and Compliance

When it comes to security, both platforms adhere to ISO 27001 standards and offer SOC 2 Type II attestations. However, Simpplr takes privacy and compliance a step further by offering TRUSTe verification as well as complying with HIPAA standards, securing communication and collaboration with all key stakeholders, and signing a HIPAA business associate agreement (BAA) if requested.

Pros and Cons: Unily vs Simpplr Comparison

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

Unily: Strengths and Weaknesses

Unily’s greatest strength lies in its ability to be uniquely customized. For companies that are prepared to spend significant time and resources by keeping a dedicated intranet team on payroll, Unily’s platform allows for a wide range of customization. However, this ability comes at a price. On top of the hours and headcount required to build, implement, and maintain custom solutions in a world of constant changes and updates to system specifications, this very customizability makes Unily’s support less than ideal. 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ cautions: “Some customers report slower-than-expected customer support.” According to 2024 Clearbox v3.0, one customer summarized by saying that “ongoing customer support has been difficult, it’s always an extended timeline, and we feel ‘nickel and dimed’ for everything.”

Simpplr: What It Does Best and Where It Falls Short

By contrast, Simpplr’s strength lies in providing a comprehensive, out-of-the-box intranet solution that requires only simple configuration to meet customers’ unique needs, not customization or coding. It is not designed to be ready to use without requiring additional setup or customization, making implementation much more straightforward. If desired, enterprises with more requirements can utilize Simpplr’s Extensibility Center. In fact, Simpplr’s Customer Experience team leads the industry with zero (0) implementation failures.

Simpplr also excels in AI and analytics, as seen below in third-party analyst reports.

Final Verdict: Simpplr vs Unily

For companies looking for an out-of-the-box intranet solution, Simpplr is the named industry leader according to Forrester, Gartner, and G2, with an implementation record that’s unmatched in the industry. Thanks to extensive automation and the power of AI, Simpplr provides an unparalleled experience for front-end users as well as hassle-free maintenance for HR professionals and IT teams.

Choosing the Right Platform for Your Organization

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

• Are you looking for consolidated insights from one EX platform?
• Do you expect employees to manually subscribe to sites and pages relevant to their interests and place in the org?
• Do you have a dedicated technical resource to configure search to display accurate search results?
• Do you have multiple content authors administering content, with resources available to manually ensure that intranet content remains fresh and relevant?
• Do you have additional resources to make changes in the code?
• Do you expect to solve technical issues on your own, without assistance from your intranet solution provider?

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 that cloud-based server systems release constant updates for security, functionality, and new technologies. If your organization commits to custom coding an intranet solution, you’ll need to maintain those resources continuously just to keep pace.

With Simpplr’s true out-of-the-box SaaS intranet solution, you don’t have to worry about security updates, dedicated resources, or disruptive technologies like AI. Our team keeps your intranet ahead of the game, so your team can focus on your business.