Unily: The best Staffbase alternative

What is Staffbase?

Staffbase is an employee comms solution, headquartered in Germany. Staffbase comes from an Employee Communications App (ECA) background, where it has focused strongly on serving frontline employees in sectors such as manufacturing and logistics. To underline this point, it is one of the few vendors to have appeared in Gartner guides for both ECA and Intranet Packed Solutions (IPS).

Staffbase has added more intranet-like functionality over the years, such as with the acquisition of Valo in 2021. Until very recently, Staffbase has been highly Microsoft-centric, and targets organizations using Sharepoint and Microsoft 365 who want to improve their ability to reach employees with omnichannel comms. In fact, Staffbase has gone back-and-forth with positioning over the past couple of years, at one point calling itself an employee communications solution before re-adopting the term ‘intranet’ recently.

Staffbase’s product offerings are broken up into three pillars, which can be bundled together or purchased separately: Employee Email, Intranet or Employee App. 

Why might organizations consider Staffbase for their intranet or EXP?

Staffbase is a strong option for multichannel comms, which have been its real focus. It also has a strong track record in serving frontline-heavy orgs, though other solutions have since caught up:

At-a-glance pros and cons

Here are some high-level pros and cons potential buyers might want to consider:

Staffbase Pros

• Good and easy to use omnichannel comms tools, including digital signage (Staffbase Screens).
• Some nice-looking campaign management capabilities (Mission Control).
• Easy to use and effective Email tool, with drag and drop builder and multilingual capabilities.
• Focus on scoping and developing integrations, with recent improvements to the developer platform. 

Staffbase Cons

• Search is notably behind other vendors, and lacking search management tools including fuzzy matching, previewing and filters.
• A newsfeed-based mobile app with few real frontline-specific features e.g. no shift swapping or task management.
• Very limited knowledge management tools – defers much of this functionality to Sharepoint.
• No employee recognition or kudos.
• Social tools are also notably behind others.
• Was behind on AI overall – although is now investing heavily in this area. 

Staffbase vs Unily: Features Comparison

The biggest difference between Staffbase and Unily is that Staffbase has focused on employee comms alone, whereas Unily offers a more complete solution, with capabilities across a whole range of employee needs.

This is reflected when comparing the features and functionality of the two.

3. Knowledge and collaboration tools

Unily has been praised by Analysts and customers alike for creating vast, searchable content repositories. Indeed, Unily’s knowledge management capabilities are market-leading; this is vital if you want employees to be able to find key policies and documentation, for compliance use cases as well as upskilling. There are also major productivity benefits to realize from strong knowledge management capabilities; giving employees the up to date information they need, and making it highly findable, saves time and money across organizations every year.

This is not an area of priority for Staffbase’s product, where you can create a basic ‘file store’ but not much more. This essentially means employees will need to search separate tools and systems for what they need. 

4. Enterprise-ready integrations

From Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace to Workday, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and custom APIs, Unily connects with the tools your people already use. Integrations power productivity - embedding workflows, surfacing critical data, and automating tasks within the employee experience layer. Unily also offers additional widgets from its Feature Store, which hosts an unrivalled 200+ options, all ready to plug-and-play.

So while Staffbase offers solid Microsoft integrations, and is just beginning to add links to Google Workspace, broader enterprise system support remains somewhat behind.

5. Governance at scale

Unily includes advanced governance tools tailored for global enterprises, including:

• Role-based access control, including security roles
• Smart workflows and approvals
• Auto-expiring content
• Analytics to flag stale content

Staffbase currently lacks some of these features, such as security roles, and relies on a more simplistic system of allocating users into roles or groups. The platform as a whole requires admins to observe set policies and use analytics to manually track governance, rather than offering many tools to automate to process.

For organizations requiring robust and repeatable governance structures, including tools to automatically flag stale content, Unily will be a better choice. 

6. Insightful analytics, measurable ROI

Unily’s powerful analytics suite surfaces platform usage, campaign impact, content reach, and workforce engagement - all from a single dashboard. Combine that with an average 385% ROI, and you get a measurable, strategic advantage.

In Summary

When to choose Staffbase

Staffbase will be a good fit if employee comms is your primary need, and it’s important to reach workers at their desks, on mobiles and on the factory floor. Staffbase will also be a good fit if email is your single most important communication method, or if you need modern campaign planning capabilities and an understanding of campaign reach. Staffbase will also work well if your organization has a relatively simple structure, without complex personalization and targeting requirements. 

When to choose Unily

If you need a single, full-featured employee experience platform where everything your employees need to get their jobs done lives in one place, Unily will be a stronger fit. If your organization is globally dispersed, and you have a complex structure with multiple nuanced roles and employee languages in play, Unily will serve you well. Likewise if brand identity, look and feel, and specific elements of navigation or UI are crucial for your business, Unily will better be able to serve these customization needs. 

Get started. Get your personalized demo.

Discover how Unily could transform your organization.

Get a demo