Energage review: overview, features, pros, cons, and alternatives

Solutions: Employee survey platform providing valuable insights

Pricing: Free demo; cost varies depending on the plan

Energage alternatives: Empuls, SurveyLab, Fingerprint for Success, 15Five, Lattice

What is Energage?

Energage is an employee engagement platform claiming to offer forms and surveys that can energize and engage your workforce. The company (formerly known as Workplace Dynamics) has been researching company culture and employee satisfaction for the past 16 years. This research includes data about standout organizations with high engagement rates used to build the platform and create insightful surveys. It's typically used by medium and large organizations across various industries.

Features

The Energage platform consists of four integrated services, each serving a different function within the larger Energage ecosystem.

Workplace Survey

Energage offers two options for collecting the data you're looking for. You can start with the Workplace Survey, which is research-backed and includes 24 questions. It only takes about 5 minutes to complete.

Energage's Workplace Survey is popular across various industries, and it has so far been used to survey over 23 million employees in 70,000 organizations.

It also powers the prestigious Top Workplaces USA Award, for which you can earn a full suite of recognition awards depending on the employee feedback collected. Businesses that operate by strong values and keep communication channels open tend to perform best in this.

Insights

Energage uses AI technology to analyze your employees' feedback and help you identify areas that need improvement. The software considers context to come up with personalized solutions.

That sounds great on paper, but Insight's results aren't always easy to read – especially if you've never used the platform before. Energage does offer training, but why not use software that's intuitive and easy to use out of the box? Fingerprint for Success's Benchmarking Tool gives you a clear idea of how you're performing against the competition, offering plenty of data-driven insights and recommendations that are easy to read and understand.

Pulse

Energage Pulse is supposed to offer customized solutions to acquiring employee data. Unlike the Workplace Survey, Pulse surveys are designed to capture targeted data in real-time. It's marketed as an employee feedback tool that's especially effective in times of uncertainty, change, or crisis.

On the other hand, creating surveys isn't the most exciting of activities. There are more effective ways to gain valuable insights into how your employees think, act, and communicate. The People Analytics feature available with the Fingerprint for Success app helps leaders and managers better understand and anticipate team dynamics and performance.

Employer Branding

This tool helps businesses quickly generate their own culture story. The survey's questions are built around employee experience, culture, and overall sentiment, and the results are thrown into an AI-powered engine. A third party overlooks the procedure and certifies the outcome, highlighting key strengths and culture highlights you can use on your sites, job postings, career pages, and more.

However, it seems that most AI-generated culture stories are rather generic, unable to capture the essence that truly makes organizations stand out.

Professional Services

Aside from its software solutions, Energage offers professional 1:1 services to businesses that want to make the most out of their survey insights. First, there's the executive culture briefing with an Energage consultant, which is meant to help you understand the culture drivers that fuel success. There's also the manager culture workshop, an on-site training session/discussion centered around top-level company themes and action planning.

Energage Pros

Energage isn't the most popular employee engagement software on the market. That said, it does quite a few things right:

• ‍The Workplace Survey is easy to set up and distribute to staff via an email link. Responder anonymity and confidentiality play a big role in Energage's success, as employees feel comfortable answering the questions truthfully.‍
• The software is backed by research-based methodologies. Energage has been researching top-performing organizations since 2004, and this research fuels the platform's software.‍
• There are plenty of valuable insights. The data is broken down by department, tenure, and management, and you can easily compare it with last year's results.‍
• Energage's customer support team is always available to answer questions.

Energage Cons

Energage struggles a bit in the following areas:

• ‍The platform can be hard to navigate. Energage's biggest strength is also one of its most significant weaknesses. Because there's so much generated data, deciphering it and making sense of everything can be challenging, especially if you don't enlist the help of an experienced consultant.‍
• Survey questions aren't fully customizable. There isn't too much room for customization when it comes to the Workplace Survey, which is a shame. The Pulse feature offers more options, but it's still not enough.‍
• Plans are costly, and many services are locked behind tiers. Energage doesn't disclose any pricing details on the website – and for a good reason. For what is essentially a survey tool, Energage charges a fair bit more than what many organizations feel comfortable paying.‍
• You can only distribute the surveys via email. This might be due to some kind of engineering limitation, but it doesn't make too much sense. Other engagement tools allow employees to fill out forms and answer questions directly on their browser or via an app.

The truth is that simple surveys can feel a bit outdated as a performance management tool. Many employees have spent countless hours completing online surveys and shudder at the thought of having to fill out yet another one.

There are better, more fun, and more engaging ways to learn more about your employees. For example, Marlee, the world's first AI coach, helps employees be their best selves with exciting activities and personalized advice.

Energage User Reviews

But what do users say about Energage? The platform scores highly on some of the most popular software review websites. Here are some quick numbers for you:

Capterra: Energage receives an overall score of 4.5, scoring a high of 4.6 for customer service and a low of 3.9 for value for money. A user said: "The software is robust and has the ability to drill down to the lowest level of information that may be needed." Another user commented: "Though having a lot of information is great, I felt the number of reports was a bit overwhelming."

Trustradius: Energage receives an overall score of 9.7/10, achieving perfect scores for ease of use, customer support, and functionality. However, there are only a handful of reviews published on the website, so it's better to take this high rating with a grain of salt. A user said: "Their team answers one-off questions with immediacy, thoroughness, and a personal touch. Everyone I have communicated with at Energage could not be nicer."

G2: Energage receives an overall score of 4.6, with many users expressing discontent with the pricing model. According to G2, Energage is 38% more expensive than the average employee engagement product. A user commented: "I dislike the cost of receiving the survey results. This is way too expensive for small non-profits such as ours."

Featured customers: Energage receives an overall score of 4.8 with 1500+ ratings.

Most Energage customers find their surveys and insights helpful but are disappointed with the platform's expensive plans.

Energage Alternatives

Energage is a good employee engagement tool if you plan to focus solely on surveys. But if you're looking for software that can do more, there are plenty of other options to choose from.

Fingerprint for Success

Fingerprint for Success combines 20+ years of research with advanced AI technology, making coaching accessible and effective for both individuals and businesses.

The app offers leaders the tools needed to better analyze and understand team dynamics, benchmark individuals or even whole teams, and come up with solutions that make a difference in the workplace.

Many high-profile organizations, such as Canva, SAP, Baraja, and more, have successfully used F4S's tools to build high-performing teams that scale their unique workplace culture and drive significant growth. (More on this below.)

Empuls

Empuls is a "holistic" employee engagement platform that combines collaboration tools, communication channels, social media-like feeds, and feedback collection to keep everything in one place. There's even a reward system and leaderboard ranking to help you keep employees focused and engaged. Empuls is definitely a lot to take in at once, but its array of features, tools, and services have been proven to boost productivity and reduce turnover.

SurveyLab

SurveyLab is similar to Energage in that it resembles traditional survey tools. However, unlike Energage, Surveylab offers fully-customizable surveys and questionnaires in any language, even supporting languages written from right-to-left languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. SurveyLab works on all devices, and you can use it to collect responses from multiple sources, including email, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, QR codes, and many others. It offers real-time results that you can easily export, and it's competitively priced.

15Five

15Five is a performance management platform with a suite of four standalone products that organizations can use to engage employees and improve performance. The Engage tool comes with assessment and analysis tools that attempt to capture the pulse of your organization. It's easy to use and offers plenty of customization options. The Perform and Focus tools are designed to help you measure performance and get a better understanding of how your team members react to challenges. 15Five offers four transparent pricing plans with full lists of each plan's capabilities and features.

Lattice

Lattice is a popular employee engagement platform with an array of solutions and useful app integrations to connect with your favorite software. The engagement tool offers customizable employee engagement surveys, pulse surveys focusing on real-time data, eNPS, as well as onboarding and exit surveys to help you better understand how employees feel about your business during crucial moments. Certain plans also include performance, goals, and growth tools. Like 15Five, Lattice offers transparent pricing plans and special bundles for users who want to use multiple products.

Fingerprint for Success As an Alternative to Energage

Energage, like many other popular employee engagement platforms, is quite rigid in the way that it extracts crucial employee data. Yes, bombarding people with the same old surveys is easy, and for some organizations, that works.

The problem with this traditional approach is that it doesn't take into account the individuals' unique traits and motivations and is thus unable to paint the whole picture. If you want to receive honest answers, you need to ask the right questions. The world is full of diversity, and engagement software needs to reflect that-one-size-fits-all approaches are a thing of the past.

Fingerprint for Success does things a bit differently, putting individuals and their needs first. While the end goal is the same (i.e., discover more about your team's traits, drives, and motivations and use it to promote an engaged workforce), the software is designed to feel more like a companion, and less like a chore.

Features

Fingerprint for Success is built on 20+years of research, creating advanced tools that deliver accurate results and expert guidance through deep personalization and state-of-the-art AI capabilities:

People Analytics: The platform measures 48 distinct traits through predictive analytics. Find out what motivates your employees, as well as whether your team's interests and motivations align.

Benchmarking: How do employees stack up against top performers in the industry? F4S benchmarks against the working population in 14 cultures, successful entrepreneurs, and business leaders who run profitable businesses.

AI and Human Coaching: Fingerprint for Success offers plenty of coaching programs powered by the world's first AI coach, Marlee. For example, the Big Picture Thinker program can help employees improve their strategic skills and think faster. The Vital Wellbeing program, on the other hand, is the perfect solution for dealing with self-sabotage and building emotional resilience.

Ranking Talent: Talent management made easy. An easy way to spot untapped talent that can thrive in entrepreneurship or high performance roles.

Culture Map: A one-of-a-kind tool that analyzes your company's culture by taking a deep dive into your team's work styles and motivations. It also provides expert recommendations on fixing friction points and facilitating team bonding, helping you reach your goals faster.

Talent acquisition and development

• What fires you up at work
• What drains your energy
• What gives you a sense of fulfillment
• What you're passionate about
• What type of working relationships you thrive with

Create your free F4S account now and check it out for yourself.