10 best employee communication software & apps in 2024

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Key Features

• Enables employees to connect while working remotely
• Adaptable open-source design and capability for on-premise app deployment
• An integrated real-time message translation technology that enables multilingual communication
• Integrations with numerous workplace tools to achieve higher employee productivity
• Customizable themes, and personalize the platform's user interface for individual employees
• Support is extended through email, live chat, phone, documentation, and other online measures.

Pricing

Deploy and host the free version of Rocket.Chat on your server:

• $0/user/month

Based on team members/users & omnichannel agents:

• $7 /user/month: Minimum of 25 users
• $35 /agent/month: Minimum of 5 agents

2. Slack

An app that facilitates professional business communication, Slack is excellent for managing group tasks. For example, team members can be grouped into chat rooms to work on projects, or included in channels to stay aligned on projects.

In addition, Slack enables instant messaging to specific individuals without requiring that you do so through the business' main chatroom. To this day, Slack remains one of the most popular employee communication apps in the IT and tech sector due to its user-friendly interface and ease of setup.

Key Features

• Easy to use
• Provides smooth integration
• Highly customizable
• Efficient asynchronous communication
• Streamlines project management

Pricing

• Standard Plan: $6.67/user/month (billed annually) or $8.00/user/month (billed monthly)
• Plus Plan: $12.50/user/month (billed annually) or $15.00/user/month (billed monthly)

3. Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a popular team collaboration and management software that offers a simple chat-based center for seamless employee collaboration.

It's an easy-to-use employee communication tool that takes little to no time to set up and become an integrated part of your daily operations. You can conduct a real-time chat, video call, and screen sharing from a single platform.

It's a good team communication solution for organizations that already use Microsoft Office in their daily work.

Key Features

• All Microsoft Office apps are integrated
• Unified platform for all communication methods (chat and video)
• Simple to set up and use.

It is somewhat expensive and a bit clunky for smaller teams without the feature of on-premise hosting.

Pricing

• $5 /user/month

4. Monday.com

Monday.com primarily markets itself as a workflow tool for developing a company (equipped with several features to strengthen the Human Resources). Despite not being a full HR software, they are a handy tool containing many collaboration and internal communication features.

With built-in communication features (like commenting, approvals, @-tagging, notifications & alerts, customizable dashboards, a built-in inbox, and email integration), Monday.com can be your day-to-day group chat app to handle all conversations and dependencies.

Key Features

• It prioritizes people management first
• Simple user interface
• Ease of managing workloads
• Facilitates effective collaboration
• It includes reporting and analytics and offers first-rate support

One drawback of Monday.com is that though it is a sophisticated project management tool with a wide range of applications, many of its key features are only accessible at higher tiers.

Pricing

• Basic: $8/seat/month
• Standard: 10/seat/month
• Pro: 16/seat/month

5. Chanty

Chanty is an employee communication tool that serves as a one-stop solution for organizing simple tasks, holding discussions, critical communications, and sharing data.

This work chat application enables you to quickly access the whole history of messages and locate your team members. As a result, you can easily interact and work with your team spread across the globe.

Key Features

• Share several content types (video, GIFs, and podcasts) in a single app
• Using pins, you can store creative and unique ideas
• Share code snippets and get an immediate response in a team chat.

The major drawback with Chanty is with several users, it becomes cluttered, making it very difficult to find a particular message. In addition, it does not have many dynamic scheduling and collaborative features.

Pricing

• Free for individuals
• Business: $3 /user/ month

6. Mattermost

Mattermost is a widely used open messaging platform for developers. It enables teams to create high-performance workflows for various teams because of its more than 600 integrations.

With open-source code comes unlimited UX and UI customization and white labeling. Mattermost provides real-time cross-device collaboration and can be hosted on-premises or in the cloud. It works best as an employee communication app for technical teams.

Key Features

• Core integrations with essential tools that accelerate workflow and improve productivity
• Streamline the search process easily through specific search modifiers
• White labeling allows for font, on-screen text, and user interface customization

Being a highly secure collaboration software focused on the developer community, Mattermost may not be the best choice for organizations that want to bridge the gap between technical and non-technical teams.

Pricing

• Free for starters
• $10/month/user for Professionals

7. Yammer

Yammer by Microsoft is a team communication and enterprise-level social network tool that makes it simple for employees to work together across various departments, locations, projects, and business applications.

Due to its complexity, Yammer is not the best employee communication app for lean teams whose priority is to ship fast and often. But, it's a great chat platform for bigger organizations that prioritize enterprise security and mapping their org structure to a team chat.

Key Features

• Easily create and join groups relevant to the project and interests
• The Priority Messages tool in the Yammer inbox allows users to organize the most important conversations
• Allows users to create groups, providing a collaborative workspace for teams to organize project deadlines, share files and gather feedback.

A drawback with Yammer is that the platform's advertising is quite intrusive, as evidenced by the numerous emails and unwanted phone notifications, among other things.

Pricing

• $8/month/user

8. Poppulo

Poppulo is built specifically for internal communications and transforms employee engagement with your emails by facilitating them to be more targeted, personalized, relevant, and interactive. 

Poppulo offers integrated surveys to help you comprehend results while enabling you to assess internal communications performance across intranet, email, and video. Poppulo makes it possible to demonstrate the importance of internal communications by aiding performance understanding.

Key Features

• A range of communication tools, such as creating interactive emails, managing campaigns & events, tracking results, creating surveys, and analyzing engagement
• Connect with pre-existing third-party systems like Oracle, PeopleSoft, and Workday via a REST API to enable data synchronization

One drawback of Poppulo is you require some training to understand the publishing templates. Although difficult for novice users to adapt to, it is highly powerful once mastered. It also doesn't include any instant messaging features which are central for employee communication today.

Pricing

• $5/user/month

9. Connecteam

Connecteam's all-in-one employee app is a solution to disperse organizational communications, increase employee engagement, get honest feedback, reduce turnover, and improve everyday productivity. 

This employee engagement tool can be customized to perfectly match your business needs, organizational language, and company culture. 

Key Features

• Announcements and employee communication features
• Employee onboarding, training, scheduling, and task management
• Employee time clock and attendance tracking
• Live polls and real-time chat
• Mobile-first user interface
• Performance monitoring.

Connecteam's disadvantage is that it does not support many integrations and can be pretty expensive for a startup or a small team.

Pricing

• Basic: $47/month or $39/month (billed annually) 
• Advanced: $95/month or $79/month (billed annually) 
• Expert: $191/month or $159/month (billed annually)

10. Happeo

Happeo is a social intranet with the goal of enhancing staff communication and collaboration. The app is intended for companies that use Google Workspace. Happeo enhances employee engagement, two-way communication, and workflows by fusing a social network with a team collaboration platform.

All employee communication occurs in Channels, the digital workplaces where team members meet, socialize, and collaborate. You can publish messages, share initiatives, and like postings in the safe social environment provided by channels.

Key Features

• Create a custom company homepage with relevant dynamic content for each user, function, and role without any technical expertise
• A modern approach to knowledge-sharing documents like staff handbooks and HR policies
• Robust analytics allow you to learn how people interact with one another

Pricing

• $5/user/month

Why security matters when it comes to employee communication software?

The likelihood of security breaches increases as work shifts to digital workplaces and hybrid work settings. According to Lensa, remote work was the most popular employee benefit in every state over the last year. Also, one in five businesses in 2020 had a security breach because of remote workers.

Key security features to look for in your communication software are:

• End-to-end encryption
• On-premise deployment
• Multi-factor authentication
• Industry and regional regulatory compliance
• Security certificates
• Open source code
• Ease of use

With so many options on the market, how do you choose the best employee communication app for your team?

Selecting the right apps for employee communication will depend on your objectives. Some apps mentioned in the list are ideal for communicating the most recent business news, some for encouraging collaboration, and others for building communities.

While looking for the best employee communication app, you must also determine if you need to follow any industry or local regulations. A lot of important business and personal data gets exchanged through employee communication apps, and it needs to stay private.

As one of the most secure messaging apps on the market, Rocket.Chat continuously puts emphasis on security and data protection, all the while maintaining the high flexibility of the platform for employees.

Get our team collaboration guide to learn about the most efficient collaboration methods in remote and hybrid work environments.

Combat some of the biggest challenges hybrid workplaces face today and round your team for success. Contact us now to engage your employees in a hybrid work setting.