What’s the harm in having separate HR software for employee experience?

Well, your laid-off employee may still receive your company newsletter or colleague birthday reminders from HR. Or, a promoted employee may receive their previous team’s company updates mixed up with the onboarding emails for their new role.

That’s what using fragmented software for digital employee engagement leads to — a complete oversight of your employee experience.

A poor employee experience forces HR and employees to waste time on administrative tasks and navigate complex software without clear workflow visibility.

That’s a nightmare if you’re a large organization with global operations.

Employee experience software ensures homogenous employee management from job postings to onboarding. Within this, choosing customizable software like Softr helps design custom flows that meet your organization’s culture and HR requirements.

In this guide, we help you understand:

1. What is employee experience software,
2. Why adopt an employee experience solution,
3. How to choose or build one.

What is an employee experience solution?

Employee experience solution is the system your organization designs using tailored engagement strategies and tools to improve employee satisfaction. These solutions are applied throughout the 6 stages of the employee lifecycle:

Attract → Hire → Onboard → Perform → Develop → Exit

Here’s what entails in each stage of the overall employee experience:

• Employee Scouting: Set up a job posting distribution network and an Applicant Tracking System to find exceptional candidates for available positions. Requires subscribing to solutions like LinkedIn for job ads, dedicated ATS software, or spreadsheets to track applications.
• Employee Onboarding: Design an onboarding process to equip newly hired employees with the right tools, resources, and guidance from day one. Requires dedicated employee onboarding tools or no-code tools for workflow automation.
• Employee Engagement: Implement strategies that enable real-time communication and improve communication among employees and management. Requires dedicated employee engagement or workplace culture software.
• Performance Tracking: Implement workflows to track employee KPIs that give management insight into workforce efficiency and ways to develop them to improve output. It requires OKR software, performance tracking tools, or project management software with workforce analytics, among others.
• Employee Feedback Systems: Implement feedback loops to get insights from employees on their managers, feedback from laid-off employees, address grievances, and find ways to improve employee retention. Requires dedicated feedback or surveying automation tools.

Using different software for each stage of the employee lifecycle makes it expensive and complex to run HR operations. On top of it, to get visibility into these workflows, you may have to invest separately in data aggregation software.

Instead of these workarounds, simply adopt HR software for employee experience. It systematically centralizes the above workflows to create a seamless and consistent experience for employees, management, and HR teams.

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Why does employee experience matter?

Would you think employee experience could be tied to a company’s resilience to the recession? It turns out it is!

According to Gallup, employee engagement is the shield your business needs to face uncertain markets head-on. It can lead to an 18% increase in sales productivity, a 78% reduction in absenteeism, and a 23% improvement in profitability.

Such benefits associated with engaged employees help navigate uncertain markets and recessions—a recurring headline even today since the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Researchers discovered that as the economy began to rebound after 2009, having an engaged workforce became a strong differentiator in EPS (Earnings per share). Companies with engaged workforces seemed to have an advantage in regaining and growing EPS at a faster rate than their industry equivalents. Conversely, companies with average engagement levels saw no increased advantage over their competitors in the economic recovery.”

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— Excerpt from ‘The Benefits of Employee Engagement’ by Gallup

Neglecting employee experience negatively impacts key employee management KPIs as follows:

Employee productivity

The easiest way to disengage employees is to make them perform manual tasks that take them away from their main job (for which you hired them!). No one likes to do them, and it may result in

• Increased absenteeism,
• Tendency to avoid risks,
• No motivation to innovate in their job,
• Procrastination on tasks like manual reporting,

This can result in project delays or a reduction in output quality.

For example, consider a newly hired employee — unable to navigate their new job, and lacks clarity of their role. With few resources to help them get started, they will not perform well and start losing their morale. Eventually, they will start viewing their job as a mere daily task to check off.

Such situations happen when there is a need for proper employee onboarding, engagement with management, lack of feedback, and poor performance-tracking workflows.

Thus, due to poor employee experience at the beginning of their job, you set a poor foundation to make the most of the newly hired employee for no fault of their own.

Employee engagement

When employees feel ‘wasted’, they will not give their best to the assigned tasks. This hampers not only individual performance but also team dynamics where their contributions may have proven useful otherwise.

Eventually, it leads to siloed departments that lack communication and performance visibility — even investment in collaboration software will not help. 

Engagement comes from within, where your employees should ‘feel’ confident to open up, share ideas, collaborate, and deliver.

Thus, HR teams must invest in designing a centralized employee experience portal that nurtures open communication and collaboration from the day you hire them.

Employee retention

As discussed in the above example, a disengaged employee may start seeking a new job that promises more structure, better pay, learning opportunities, or a healthier work culture.

Not only is it hard to retain talented employees, but it also impacts other areas of hiring processes:

• Increase in employee recruitment costs as you repeatedly spend on hiring, onboarding, and training the recruits.
• Leakage of company knowledge as trained employees leave without contributing significantly to the company.
• Poor company branding due to high turnover rates results in talented candidates avoiding applying for your job openings.

An employee experience software enables HR teams to bring all touchpoints of employee management together to ensure the employee not only performs but also doesn’t leave.

Checklist: 12 key features of an employee experience solution

An employee experience software helps you avoid mishaps discussed in the previous section. When choosing a vendor, consider the below 12 must-have features:

1. Applicant Tracking System that centralizes hiring operations, finds, interviews, and assesses required talent.
2. Employee onboarding to streamline employee documentation and provide them with adequate resources and team introductions for a smooth transition into the company.
3. Data management to centralize employee data, control its access, and use it to generate reports.
4. Customization that tailors the employee experience tool as per your organization’s culture and HR workflows.
5. Employee feedback systems: Survey and polling tools to analyze employee sentiments, get feedback, and find engagement gaps.
6. Analytics and dashboards to gauge organizational health by tracking key employee management metrics across performance and engagement levels.
7. Workflow automation to share and sync data across the app and with third-party apps to automate manual tasks.
8. Collaboration: Messaging, notifications, or email automation tools to help teams communicate and collaborate for work.
9. Performance tracking tools: Features to monitor and manage employee performance through goal setting, feedback loops, and regular check-ins.
10. LMS that enables employees to upskill and meet industry benchmarks of performance.
11. Employee engagement solutions: Employee recognition, incentives, and reward systems to encourage performance to meet business goals.
12. Integrations: Direct third-party app integrations and API access help with seamless data migration and existing software synchronization.

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5 best employee experience solutions in 2025

Let’s look into each software and its best use case in detail:

1. Softr — Best custom employee experience solution 

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Softr helps you design custom employee experience workflows with its flexible no-code app builder platform. Most businesses design custom HR operational workflows that fit their business size, goals, cash flows, etc. Softr’s workflow automation, building blocks, integrations, custom code, enterprise-grade security, and more, help you design a custom web and PWA mobile app that meets your unique HR needs.

Its editable templates help you quickly launch the custom app without technical expertise. It also provides an AI App Generator to develop a custom Softr app by simply using prompts.

Here’s a quick tutorial for building an HR Portal using Softr:

Further, the pricing plans support your app’s growth from template to complex app — making it a truly scalable employee experience solution for startups, SMEs, and enterprises.

Softr Key Features

• Recruitment management: Publish jobs, organize job applications inventory, track candidate progress, and automate repetitive tasks for seamless hiring.
• Automate employee onboarding: Improve employee engagement by assigning onboarding tasks, setting up permissions rules, conducting team introductions, and sharing resources to support their new role.
• Employee management: Create a detailed team directory to allow everyone to find employee information, manage access, streamline time-off requests, and more.
• Internal communications: Make a company intranet to drive employee engagement via team discussions, events, company news, and more.
• Performance tracking: Track employee time, determine client billable hours, capture employee feedback, and track assigned project tasks. Using this data, generate reports to overview employee performance and output.

Softr Pros

• 10+ data sources and 30+ integrations help share and sync data to expand your Softr app’s capabilities.
• Benefit from a matured ecosystem of the Softr community, product, support team, and resources like ‘Softr Academy’ and certifications to make the most of Softr for your HR use case. 
• Editable and customizable templates for complete HR and Recruitment workflows that reduce build time to a few hours.
• Softr’s generous free plan with a custom domain helps run pilot tests or handle small teams with no technical knowledge or investment.
• Implement enterprise-grade security via built-in SSO, workspaces, team collaborators, access permission, and more. Softr is GDPR and SOC2 Type 2 compliant with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Softr Cons

• No dedicated mobile app — although you can convert your employee experience web app to a progressive web app (PWA) and launch to iOS and Android phones.
• Basic building blocks do not support feature-level customizations. You have to use the custom code feature as a workaround.

Softr Pricing

• Free plan: The forever-free plan lets you create one Softr app for up to 10 users, using basic building blocks and actions, and publish it on a custom domain.
• Paid plan: Access 10+ data sources to build unlimited complex employee experience apps using API, advanced building blocks, custom code, and more. The basic paid plan starts at $49 /month (paid yearly).

Softr Customer Review 

“It is relatively easy to develop very complex features. Yes, there is some learning curve but none compared to the functionalities you can achieve. The learning curve for an employee is short to none. This is almost non-achievable in enterprise competitors. Also, expect to use some "hacks" or workaround sometimes to achieve what you want, so it adds to the learning curve. For example, you might use a "block" intended to send forms in another way for another use case than creating a form. The customer service is in a different league. I really mean it. They usually respond in 1-4 minutes and most of the time are really helpful and very technical.”

— Softr Review on G2 by Ofir Bar, (Small Business) 

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2. Qualtrics EmployeeXM — Best for employee management analytics

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Qualtrics EmployeeXM provides scalable employee experience software to combat attrition costs, optimize talent development, and improve employee engagement. For this, it provides advanced predictive employee analytics solutions that help strategize your investments for improving employee productivity and performance.

Qualtrics EmployeeXM is suitable for medium to enterprise companies with large headcounts. Its predictive analytics helps you gain visibility in current and future employee metrics to optimize for better business outcomes.

Qualtrics EmployeeXM Key Features

• Design and overview candidate experience to find gaps, identify retention opportunities, model employee journeys, and generate employee reports.
• 360° employee feedback system helps design and develop core and add-on competencies for holistic employee development.
• Predictive employee insights help identify retention risks, make hiring decisions, and plan the workforce.
• Design inclusive organization by identifying DEI gaps, using action guides to improve strategy, and generating impact reports.
• Conduct surveys for analyzing employee engagement like pulse surveys and exit interviews.

Qualtrics EmployeeXM Pros

• Exhaustive tools to manage end-to-end employee lifecycle.
• Real-time feedback tools and reporting capabilities.
• A broad partner network tailored to specific use cases, industries, or regions.

Qualtrics EmployeeXM Cons

• Not suitable for startups, small businesses, or companies with compact teams as they may get overwhelmed with unnecessary features.
• Non-transparent pricing plans may lead to scope creep.
• Initial setup is time-consuming.
• The software has a learning curve and requires training HR and employees.
• Requires knowledge of data analysis to make the most of the software.

Qualtrics EmployeeXM Pricing

You can contact Qualtrics EmployeeXM’s sales team to request pricing. The custom plan price depends on the employee count and add-ons chosen for each product.

Qualtrics EmployeeXM Customer Review

“I appreciate the flexibility and comprehensive features of Qualtrics Employee Experience most. It also helps with strategic planning initiatives by providing valuable insights from employees based on surveys or polls. (However, it) is not very user-friendly and can become confusing when trying to perform certain tasks. Oftentimes, we have had difficulty understanding how to grant access or edit settings which required us to contact Support for assistance.”

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— Qualtrics EmployeeXM review on G2 by Naomi Stevenson, Associate Product Manager, Fulfillment at Saltbox

3. CultureAmp — Best workplace culture software

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Culture Amp provides employee management tools that work together to establish and maintain your organization's culture. This includes AI-powered analytics to track employee engagement, use insights for employee development, and manage performance for better retention rates.

Culture Amp is suitable for companies looking to implement OKR methodology to link employee performance with learning and development initiatives for better alignment with company goals.

Culture Amp Key Features

• Survey templates capture employee feedback and use integrated performance-tracking tools to develop holistic employee reports.
• AI-powered people analytics uses existing HRIS data and integration with third-party tools to accurately determine manager productivity and retention insights. 
• Design career paths as per required competencies with individual growth plans and use a skills coach to implement them.
• Performance tracking tools help compare with benchmarks and use action plans by successful companies to improve metrics.
• Implement continuous feedback and calibration system via 1-on-1s, shoutouts for employee recognition, and goal tracking.

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Culture Amp Pros

• Integrated LMS, benchmarking, and action plans to develop employee skills.
• Exhaustive employee management resources and active community support.
• Users report Culture Amp has an intuitive user interface easy to use with  

Culture Amp Cons

• Lacks sufficient customization features like modifying 1-on-1 module or design, reports, etc.
• Lacks dedicated mobile app experience in any form except a responsive web app.
• Users report a learning curve as they experience being overwhelmed with its available features. 
• Limited integration options.
• Expensive for startups or small businesses.

Culture Amp Pricing

Culture Amp provides use-case-specific bundles (Engage, Perform, Develop) or you can opt for full platform access. Based on your employee headcount and required features, their sales team will share custom quotes.

Culture Amp Customer Review

“Culture Amp offers a wide range of features and capabilities, which can be beneficial for many organizations. Without someone to actively steer and drive adoption, smaller organizations may find some of the functionalities difficult to role out.”

— Culture Amp review on G2 by Laura Dryden

4. WorkTango — Best for employee recognition and feedback

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WorkTango’s employee experience solution focuses on streamlining employee recognition and feedback systems. It enables companies to listen to their employees via surveys to determine employee sentiment and engagement. Based on the data, it will suggest action plans to design, improve, and automate employee recognition and rewards.

WorkTango is suitable for organizations looking for dedicated software to implement employee recognition programs to improve employee engagement.

WorkTango Key Features

• Run ‘company awards’ where WorkTango manages employee nominations, awarding, recognition across platforms, and more.
• Design incentives that help employees improve performance to meet company goals.
• The rewards marketplace allows access to swags, products, experiences, etc with zero-markup and global shipping. Includes provision to donate rewards points to charity.
• Allow anonymous conversations for feedback and analyze employee sentiment to improve engagement.
• Leader tools help management award teams for milestones, implement feedback loops, and track employee engagement via reporting.

WorkTango Pros

• Dedicated solutions to manage employee engagement for remote teams and companies undergoing organizational transformation.
• 40+ integrations and works across Slack, MS Teams, and MS Outlook.
• The rewards marketplace provides access to millions of rewards and 1.2 million charities to choose from.
• Allows peer-to-peer employee recognition.

WorkTango Cons

• Lacks dedicated performance tracking tools to link employee rewards.
• Poor user experience with sluggish interface design.
• Users report delays in points redemption.
• Expiry limits on points limit access to rewards that need time to collect for redemption.

WorkTango Pricing

Your organization can opt for ‘Recognition and Rewards’ or ‘Employee Survey and Insights’ modules or pay for full platform access. With a minimum contract length of 12 months, the sales team will share a custom quote based on employee headcount and the module chosen.

WorkTango Customer Review

“The idea of employee-to-employee recognitions eliminates the hierarchy of titles and allows for the company to come together as one with no one feeling left out. It is a great platform to recognize hard work, which in turn supplies a higher output of motivation and dedication. (However,) it usually takes a very long time to accumulate the points for higher-priced incentives. With the fact that your points expire, it is near impossible to achieve obtaining incentives that have a high point value.”

— WorkTango review on G2 by Michelle Mauro, Accounts Payable Coordinator

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5. 15Five — best for employee performance management

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15Five is an HR software for employee experience with a strong focus on performance-tracking tools for achieving business goals. You can also link employee compensation with performance metrics to incentivize them. For managers, you get dedicated learning solutions via live coaching, on-demand training, and AI assistance for better team management.

15Five is suitable for companies who want to get visibility into manager and employee performance to find and fill gaps that hinder business growth.

15Five Key Features

• Engagement surveys that are psychometrically validated help with targeted assessments, benchmarking, and determining engagement metrics.
• Predictive analytics help model employee management decisions for precise action planning.
• Goal management helps design, track, and manage OKRs.
• The dashboard centralizes data and generates key employee management metrics for visibility, insights, and recommended actions.
• Implement microlearning for managers and employees using interactive content and bite-sized videos.

15Five Pros

• 15Five provides features focused on upskilling and improving the effectiveness of managers.
• Includes compensation reviews, payscale benchmarking, and rewards management as add-ons.
• Easy to set up and learn the software using resources, although users do report feeling overwhelmed initially with the available feature scope.

15Five Cons

• No live chat or implementation support — only email support with a high waiting time to resolve issues.
• Per-user pricing makes 15Five expensive for small businesses with large teams (like the field services industry).
• Users report a clunky and slow user interface experience.
• Limited customization options across surveying and design.

15Five Pricing

• Free plan: 15Five does not provide a free plan.
• Paid plan: Their basic paid plan called ‘Engage’ starts at $4/user/month which includes engagement surveys, predictive modeling, and basic analytics. To access performance reviews, OKRs,15Five AI, advanced dashboard, and microlearning, you can opt for higher-paid plans.

15Five Customer Review

“Most employer tools that have a lot of features are "blegh," but 15five keeps it fun, intuitive, and is overall a top-notch product. (However,) the increasing costs are a downside to 15Five. The annual cost is a good option for an organization that is established and has an established employee base but as a start-up that has ebbs and flows of positions needed, it's not a viable solution.”

— 15Five review on G2 by Alexandra Hayden

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4 common challenges when implementing employee experience solutions

We have shared solutions for these 4 common implementation challenges for employee experience solutions:

1. Difficult to integrate with existing systems

Many companies use a patchwork of software tools for HR, communication, and performance management, leading to data silos-led inefficiency.

To seamlessly share and sync data with existing systems, your HR software for employee experience must have adequate integration capabilities. This includes API access and customizability via code for custom integrations. Adopting a no-code app builder like Softr brings this functionality to develop custom employee experience software for a smooth transition.

2. High costs of traditional tools for smaller companies

Enterprise HR software like Oracle, Lattice, Zoho, etc come packed with too many features. Startups, small businesses, or companies with small teams may end up paying for irrelevant features for their business growth stage.

Thus, choosing a simpler software that allows easy setup and whose features and pricing plans scale as your team grows is more reasonable. 

3. Resistance from employees unfamiliar with new technologies

Employees have their jobs to do and making them learn administrative software will only decrease their productivity and output.

Choose an employee experience software with a minimal learning curve. Also, ensure the vendor provides adequate training resources, community exposure, and customer support to help with end-user adoption.

4. Lack of customizability in off-the-shelf solutions

Off-the-shelf employee experience is generalist software that provides average features without specializations.

You don’t need generalists when it comes to HR workflows — but rather customizability to align with your unique business needs. This helps you achieve the required positive impact on key HR metrics, improve software adoption, and justify return on investment due to better alignment with business goals.

Why choose Softr as your employee experience solution?

Here’s how Softr’s no-code app ecosystem combats the above 4 implementation challenges, making it an ideal employee experience solution choice:

One-click to share and sync data:

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Softr is a no-code front-end builder — you can build a custom app on top of 14 data sources. Its 30+ direct integrations across analytics, media, messaging, payments, and more help enhance capabilities and data sharing. This includes custom code features and API access to implement custom integrations as per your existing software and operations.

Scalable pricing plans 

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Publish a custom employee experience app with basic actions and building blocks without paying a dime. Seamlessly scale with tiered pricing plans suitable across business sizes to develop complex workflows and automation.

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Additionally, Softr follows a bundled user pricing model (and not per user!) This helps you avoid shocks due to higher billing amounts just because you grew your headcount and business!

Easy to use and adopt

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Softr is known for its ease of use and intuitive interface builder. Exhaustive templates for various employee management use cases make it easy to get started without a big learning curve.

Custom no-code app builder

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Softr is a no-code platform – that gives you enough flexibility to mold the building blocks to design your app, without any technical knowledge. You can also use the custom code feature if required. Thus, you avoid the efforts and investment that are required to launch a custom-coded employee experience app. This allows you to focus on improving employee engagement and productivity.

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Get started with editing our employee portal template today.

Softr provides many HR management templates across employee directories, onboarding, applicant tracking, feedback tracker, employee training manager, and many more.

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To get started, we advise you to edit our Employee Portal Template which covers many of the above features. Simply connect data source, make it on-brand, add a custom domain, and adjust automation to own it for your company:

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Learn more – Employee Portal Template by Softr

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We have helped DS Automotive, a UK-based Jaguar Land Rover Specialist, to make it easy for its employees to access company information across booking data, customers, vehicles, and more.

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Learn more about how DS Automotive improved their employee experience with Softr — Employee Portal for DS Automotive