Unily: The best Workvivo by Zoom alternative

What is Workvivo by Zoom?

Workvivo is an employee experience platform founded in 2017, and headquartered in Cork, Ireland. In 2023 it was acquired by global megavendor Zoom, and integrated into the Zoom Workplace suite.
As a solution, Workvivo is heavily focused on social and communities, with a social-network-like user experience. Coming from an ECA (Employee Communications App) background, it has also traditionally focused heavily on the mobile experience for end users, backed up by other frontline-focused functionality like chat and digital signage. More recently, it has expanded its offering by adding more intranet features, which are also available on desktop.

In 2024, when Meta announced that they were deprecating Workplace, Workvivo was announced as the preferred migration partner. The move, orchestrated by parent company Zoom, made sense; for companies looking for a straight social network swap-out, Workvivo seemed like a good replacement. As a result of the announcement, Workvivo has seen strong growth in the last 24 months.

Why might organizations consider Workvivo for their intranet or EXP?

When the deprecation of Workplace by Meta was announced, many organizations looking for a replacement were drawn to Workvivo. The reasons are clear: Workvivo’s newsfeed-based delivery of information, with comments and reactions including ‘likes’ and hastags, closely mimicked the core competencies of Workplace. Workvivo has cornered a social-based experience, and turned it into a differentiator; whether this is a good fit for your organization depends on what you are trying to achieve.

At-a-glance pros and cons

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

Workvivo Center Pros

• Simple front-end UX, easy to understand and use
• Will appeal to employees familiar with social networks
• Strong video features. Good choice for enterprises that use video for comms frequently
• Has recently added some neat AI features with the help of parent company, Zoom

Workvivo Employee Center Cons

• Personalization and targeting capabilities are more limited than other solutions, meaning newsfeeds may fill with irrelevant content
• Lacking deep integrations with productivity tools like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace
• Lacking options for customization or extension

Workvivo vs Unily: Features Comparison

The crucial difference between the two vendors is that Unily is a fully-featured Employee Experience Platform that is built to handle complex use cases, whereas Workvivo is a narrower social point solution.

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

Unily as a Workvivo alternative

As always, finding a solution which is the ‘best fit’ for your individual business circumstances and goals is key. The following are some key considerations that may help to evaluate strong Workvivo alternatives, depending on your needs.

ROI and time-to-value

Both Workvivo and Unily are well recognized employee experience solutions, and have gained exposure from independent analysts like Gartner, Forrester and IDC.

Both have been independently verified as delivering a strong positive return on investment (ROI) for their customers. Unily’s ROI, assessed by Forrester in a Total Economic Impact Report, is 385%, with a time-to-value (TTV) of less than 6 months. Workvivo’s ROI was assessed as 228%, with a similar TTV.

Beyond social alone

A big question when weighing up the pros and cons of Workvivo and Unily, is whether you are looking for a predominantly social solution, or a full-featured EXP that covers off multiple areas including productivity and collaboration and knowledge management.

There are positives and negatives to both. Workvivo is known for its easy-to-use UI which mimics the social networks employees use in their own time, and provides socially-orientated reactions and engagements such as likes, hashtags, comments etc. Unily also provides all of this, yet its social experience is one of a broader set of engagement features overall, which are backed by other areas like knowledge management, email comms and detailed engagement analytics. As such, Unily – unlike Workvivo – is able to replace many tools that organizations currently use, and are paying separately for.

This difference between the two platforms was called out in the recent IDC report, where Unily was praised for its broad set of capabilities. There’s also strong evidence of the greater financial and productivity benefits that come with adopting a more organization-wide and strategic approach to employee engagement, beyond just social and communities. 

Target and personalize content effectively

Unily is known for its ability to set up and configure granular targeting and personalization rules. This is vital to ensure relevant content is targeted towards the right people, as the negative effects of information overload and digital noise have been well documented.

Workvivo is not built in the same way, and has far more limited targeting and personalization abilities. This means that some end-users may encounter a news feed which looks cluttered and populated with information which is not relevant to them. Over time, being overloaded with notifications negatively impacts engagement, and harms the adoption statistics of your EXP.

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Deep integrations with the tools you already use

A key piece of improving the productivity of employees is reducing the time spent searching for different apps and tools. Indeed, a key benefit of an EXP should be bringing together all the tools your organization already uses, within a ‘single pane of glass’ experience.

Unily has always prioritized deep integrations with enterprise productivity solutions like MS365 and Google Workspace, as well as other more specialized systems like Workday and ServiceNow. For Workvivo, this has been less of a strategic priority, and something that analysts including Clearbox and IDC have called it out for.

In this context, it should be acknowledged that being acquired by Zoom, Workvivo has seen multiple benefits, including the more the rapid development of its roadmap. Workvivo itself is now part of the Zoom Workplace suite, so sees itself integrated within a wider, consolidated suite of productivity tools. However, for organizations that don’t use Zoom as their primary productivity suite, or don’t want to be tied into one vendor, this can present a sub-optimal approach.

A structure that meets the needs of complex organizations

We know that both large and small organizations choose both Workvivo and Unily (although Workvivo’s average customer size overall is smaller; the entry point is 250 employees, stated on its website). However, overall Unily has the greater experience dealing with enterprise logos and crucially, businesses with a diverse and dispersed workforce or complex organizational structures.

Without the ability to set up content hierarchies and granular user and attributes based on HR system data, admins may struggle to set up Workvivo’s content and pages in a way that reflects the complex structures of their organization. As was pointed out in the recent 2025 IDC Marketscape report, Workvivo may especially struggle with matrixed organizations. So, in cases such as these, Unily may be the better fit.

Options to customize and extend

When on the hunt for a new EXP, finding something that meets the majority of your needs out-of-the-box should certainly be a priority. However, there are sometimes advantages to selecting a solution that gives you options. If you have in-house developers that want the option to write code or simply desire something which is very flexible and able to cater to complex or unique use cases, Unily is likely the better platform. 
Workvivo is not set up to be customizable or extendable. It does have some developer documentation and APIs, and indications are that it is improving capabilities in this area – yet this is an area where it likely wouldn’t be the best fit.

In summary

When to choose Workvivo

If you’re looking for a socially-focused tool that feels familiar to end users and works well on mobile, Workvivo may be a good fit for you. Perhaps too, you’re keen on a tool that has a good track record of driving up employee engagement scores, and you want to bring everyone together in a community or ‘spaces’ type environment to interact and comment in real-time.

Workvivo will also be a good fit if the structure of your organization is relatively simple, your employees have similar attributes globally and you don’t have complex integration needs.

When to choose Unily

If you want a fully-formed intranet that provides a comprehensive and joined-up approach across social, employee communications, knowledge management and many more areas, Unily will be the stronger fit. If you want to consolidate costs and licenses, and are keen on opportunities to retire some of the tools you already pay for (for example, Email solutions), Unily will also be better suited.

Overall, if you want to drive up Employee Engagement scores but also care about improving productivity and driving agility across your organization, Unily will be the better choice.

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