An employee intranet is a secure, internal network designed specifically for employees within an organization. It acts as a digital work hub where staff can access important company information, communicate with colleagues, and collaborate on projects. Unlike public websites, employee intranets are only accessible to authorized users, ensuring sensitive information remains protected.
Beyond serving as a central place for company news and updates, an employee intranet simplifies daily tasks. Employees can use it to find documents, submit forms, check policies, or even request time off. This easy access to resources saves time and helps everyone stay organized, so people don’t have to waste time searching through emails or old files.
An employee intranet also helps build a sense of community within an organization. It often features spaces for team discussions, company announcements, or social events. By bringing together information and people in one virtual space, the intranet encourages connection and collaboration, no matter where employees work.
What are some examples of an employee intranet?
Examples of employee intranets include company intranet portals where team members can find HR documents, onboarding guides, internal news updates, and collaboration spaces. Many organizations use intranets to host directories, share project files, and manage workflow approvals. For instance, a retail company might use an intranet to distribute training materials across different store locations, while a tech firm could use it to manage development resources and updates.
Below are two employee intranet examples:
1. Credit Acceptance: Sharing stories and celebrating success
Credit Acceptance, an auto finance company, uses their intranet to bring their people together. Employees can log in to read weekly stories about team achievements, watch video spotlights, and celebrate milestones such as anniversaries. Special features highlight employees who help their communities and share personal stories, making the site a hub for recognition and company news.
After launching their employee intranet with Simpplr, Credit Acceptance’s employee engagement propelled to 98%, with more employees reading and sharing content about their colleagues.
2. Agero: Connecting frontline and corporate teams
Agero, a driver assistance company, uses their Simpplr-powered company intranet to connect 1,400 employees across call centers and corporate offices. Employees can post shout-outs, share updates, and access companywide news. The intranet makes it easy for anyone — from dispatchers to managers — to recognize great work, celebrate company values, and keep up with everything happening across locations.
By empowering peer-to-peer awards and real-time shoutouts, employee participation soared, with recognition posts jumping 22x in the first month.
These examples show how an intranet can help employees find what they need and stay updated on what’s happening in their company.
What is the difference between employee intranet vs. company intranet?
While the terms “employee intranet” and “company intranet” are often used interchangeably, there can be subtle differences. An employee intranet typically focuses on features and resources tailored specifically to staff needs, such as HR tools, internal communication, and cross-functional collaboration.
In contrast, a company intranet may encompass broader functions, potentially including access for external stakeholders, partners, or contractors, in addition to employees, depending on organizational needs.
Here’s an example: Suppose Acme Corporation has a single intranet platform.
From the employee’s view: You log in and see company news, access your holiday calendar, submit expenses, read the staff handbook, and chat with teammates. It’s all about your daily needs at work.
From the company’s view: Leadership considers not only employees but also external partners and vendors with access. For instance, a vendor might use the intranet to upload invoices or check project updates but won’t see HR policies or internal chats. The company intranet is organized so each type of user gets the right access.
Think of the employee intranet as your personal toolkit at work — the things you need to do your job. The company intranet is the whole workshop, with different areas and tools for everyone who does business with the company.
What is employee intranet software?
Employee intranet software is an application that drives a private network system (an intranet) used within a company or organization. It’s designed to serve as a centralized portal for employees to share information, collaborate on projects, and increase productivity.
Much like the internet, the intranet enables users to share and view files but with a higher level of security and privacy. Only employees and other organizational stakeholders can access the intranet, and each user is assigned specific permissions.
What are employee intranet platforms?
Employee intranet platforms are intranet solutions that can deploy an intranet for an organization. The terms employee intranet platform, employee intranet software, and employee intranet solution are used interchangeably throughout this article.
Your employee intranet platform can be powered by CMS (Content Management System) — the engine that powers all communication, collaboration, and resource-sharing across your company. Selecting and managing the right CMS is pivotal for driving adoption, engagement, and long-term impact.
Benefits of using employee intranet software
An employee intranet offers many organizational advantages that help enhance productivity and can contribute significantly to an organization’s success. Some of these benefits include:
1. Centralized information access: Employees can easily find important documents, company policies, and updates in one secure location, reducing time spent searching for information.
2. Enhanced internal communication: Intranet platforms streamline announcements, news, and discussions, ensuring everyone stays informed and connected across departments.
3. Improved collaboration: Teams can work together on projects, share files, and exchange feedback in real-time, fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation.
4. Streamlined onboarding: New hires can access training materials, handbooks, and organizational charts, making the onboarding process faster and more consistent.
5. Increased employee engagement: Interactive features like social feeds, polls, and recognition tools help employees feel valued and encourage participation.
6. Customizable user permissions: Administrators can control who has access to specific resources, ensuring sensitive information is available only to authorized personnel.
7. Efficient knowledge management: Wikis, FAQs, and searchable resource libraries allow organizations to capture and share institutional knowledge easily.
8. Time-saving automation: Automated workflows, such as leave requests and IT support tickets, reduce manual processes and speed up routine tasks.
9. Enhanced security: Company data is protected by internal authentication protocols and access controls, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access.
10. Mobile accessibility: Many employee intranet solutions offer mobile apps, giving employees flexible access to information and tools, even on the go.
Employee intranet software features
Traditional intranets are considered communications or productivity solutions, such as internal messaging or project management.
In fact, intranets today are built to address broader employee experience challenges. The best intranet platforms have integrations that will connect your employees to all the essential tools they need in a single digital destination:
- Company news and communications
- Internal messaging
- Video management
- Information management
- Project management
- Document management
- Human resources software
- Data collection, storage and analysis
When it comes to modern intranet platforms, the list above represents the bare minimum required to be an effective intranet platform. The following additional features take an intranet platform further, distinguishing it from competitors:
- Auto-governance engine: An intranet should be able to monitor out-of-date content so its usefulness doesn’t diminish over time.
- Smart search: Search functionality should be personalized and powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to help users find exactly what they need quickly and easily.
- Employee listening: Your intranet should leverage AI to unearth key insights in real time, keeping your finger on the pulse of employee sentiment.
- Native video: Given the importance of video in news, onboarding, training and more, a top intranet platform should offer integrated video capabilities.
- Personalized feeds: Like today’s most engaging social media, your intranet should surface content that’s uniquely interesting to each individual employee.
- AI virtual assistant: At the cutting edge of AI, your intranet should let users talk to or chat with it in their own native language (over 130).
What makes a good employee intranet platform?
When evaluating intranets for enterprise use, it’s important to consider various factors. The needs of enterprises can vary, but here are important considerations:
- User experience: How intuitive is the user interface? Is it flexible to meet the specific needs of different departments, teams, and employee segments?
- Collaboration and communication: Does the intranet facilitate seamless collaboration among team members? What communications tools are integrated? Can users share documents and projects within the intranet?
- Integrations with existing systems: How well does the intranet integrate with existing enterprise applications (e.g., HR software, CRM, IT, knowledge management)
- Content management: How easy is it to create, edit, manage, and update content on the intranet? Is there automation to streamline processes?
- Security and compliance: What security measures are in place to protect sensitive data and ensure user privacy? Are there audit trails and access controls to monitor and manage user permissions?
- Scalability and performance: Can the intranet scale to accommodate organizational changes? What is the performance track record?
- Analytics and reporting: Does the intranet provide analytics and reporting features to track user engagement and content effectiveness? What insights can it provide to analyze the employee experience?
- Training and support: What training resources and documentation are provided?
- Cost and ROI: What is the total cost of ownership? How quickly can my organization expect to see a return?
- User adoption: Have other organizations of similar size and industry successfully adopted the solution? What is recent user feedback from current users?
- Future roadmap and innovation: What does the roadmap look like for future updates and improvements? How often are vendor release updates and what is the process for implementation?
Read our intranet buyer’s guide for a roadmap to help you through the intranet buying process.
Employee intranet: build vs. buy
When it comes to developing an employee intranet, organizations face a fundamental decision: should you build a custom solution in-house, or buy a ready-made platform from a specialized provider? Understanding the differences, advantages, and tradeoffs of each approach is key to making the right choice for your business.
Building your own employee intranet
Building an intranet refers to designing, developing, and maintaining a platform tailored specifically to your organization’s needs, typically using internal IT resources or a contracted development team. Building makes sense for large enterprises with unique, highly specialized requirements, robust IT teams, and the resources to support ongoing development and maintenance.
Pros of building your employee intranet in-house:
- Fully customizable: Every feature and workflow can be built to your unique specifications
- Content control: You retain complete control over data, integrations, and security measures
- Brand alignment: The intranet can look and feel like an extension of your organizational culture
Cons of building your employee intranet in-house:
- High development costs: Considerable investment in software development, infrastructure, and ongoing support
- Resource intensive: Requires ongoing commitment from IT and other stakeholders for maintenance, updates, and security
- Long time to launch: Custom development can take months, or even years, before employees see value
- Slow updates: Keeping up with the rapid evolution of technology especially features like AI, mobile support, and global language capabilities can be challenging
Buying employee intranet software
Buying means partnering with a third-party intranet provider and using their platform. These platforms are designed to serve a range of common business needs.
Modern intranet platforms integrate with myriad solutions for communications, collaboration, project management, HR management, document sharing, and much more. They can even offer AI interfaces that let employees handle routine tasks like scheduling vacation time or uploading expenses by speaking or chatting naturally on their phone — in over 130 languages.
Pros of buying employee intranet software
- Quick deployment: Prebuilt, low-code solutions with out-of-the-box integrations launch in days or weeks
- Lower total cost of ownership: Avoid hardware and maintenance costs when buying a solution that often comes with software updates and support features
- Feature-rich: Benefit from best-in-class features like mobile access, advanced search, automatic updates, and AI-driven assistance
- Security and scalability: Trusted providers offer robust security and scalability, meeting the needs of growing, global, and distributed teams
- Ongoing vendor partnership: Some intranet platform providers provide exceptional support for customer success
While building can offer total customization, it demands significant resources and ongoing maintenance. For most organizations, buying an intranet platform delivers faster results, continuous innovation, and a solution that just works. Given the extreme specialization of today’s best intranet platforms and the resources required to build and maintain them, most companies see a far better ROI from partnering with a dedicated third-party intranet provider.
Top employee intranet platforms
With the clear advantages of buying over building an intranet, the next step is choosing the right platform for your organization. Selecting a solution goes beyond comparing features to finding an intranet that drives engagement, streamlines communication, and grows alongside your business. The market offers a range of modern, powerful options, each with unique strengths and considerations.
When evaluating top employee intranet platforms, consider your organization’s size, unique needs, and future growth plans. The right choice will empower your people, streamline workflows, and foster a culture of connectivity and engagement.
Below are the top five employee intranet platforms leading the way in innovation, usability, and value.
1. Simpplr: the #1 employee intranet software
Simpplr’s AI-powered employee intranet platform is purpose-built to drive engagement, streamline employee enablement, and improve experience at every step of your organizational growth.
Here’s what sets Simpplr apart:
- Rapid deployment for immediate value: Simpplr is designed for fast implementation so your teams can connect, collaborate, and access critical resources in weeks — not months.
- Intuitive, consumer-grade experience: With a modern, mobile-responsive interface, Simpplr makes it easy for employees at every level to find information, share updates, and contribute — no steep learning curve required.
- Personalization at scale: Dynamic content delivery ensures every employee sees what’s most relevant to them, boosting engagement and making the intranet an indispensable daily tool.
- Enterprise-grade security: Robust security features like SSO, MFA, and granular permissions safeguard your data, ensuring compliance and peace of mind.
- Integrated enterprise search: Powerful search and contextual navigation help users quickly find people, documents, and expertise, eliminating information silos.
- Continuous innovation and support: Simpplr’s platform evolves with your needs, backed by a dedicated support team and a customer-centric approach to improvement.
With Simpplr, your intranet becomes a vibrant, engaging digital workplace hub that empowers employees, drives adoption, and maximizes ROI. If you want an intranet that your workforce will actually use and love, Simpplr is the clear choice.
2. Staffbase employee intranet solution
Staffbase is known for its comprehensive internal communications features, including mobile apps that keep frontline and remote workers connected. Its user-friendly interface streamlines targeted messaging, survey tools, and content management, and it offers strong integration with Microsoft tools.
While ideal for communication use cases, Staffbase’s advanced features can require add-ons, and some users note limitations around deep integrations with niche business tools.
3. Unily modern intranet
Unily offers a highly customizable intranet experience with robust collaboration, knowledge sharing, and social engagement tools. Its extensive integration capabilities and multilingual support make it popular among large, global organizations.
On the downside, Unily’s wide range of customization options can result in a steeper learning curve and longer setup times. Additionally, costs may rise quickly for organizations requiring newer add-on modules.
4. LumApps employee communication software
LumApps stands out for its seamless integration with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, enabling smooth document collaboration and communication. The platform emphasizes personalization, with tailored newsfeeds and employee journeys backed by analytics.
However, LumApps native collaboration tools like internal communities are less extensive than those of some competitors. Pricing may also increase for organizations with more advanced or complex requirements.
5. Workvivo employee engagement solution
Workvivo is an all-in-one employee app that combines internal communication, engagement, recognition, intranet, and measurement. Workvivo has strong community-building and employee communication capabilities, enhanced by integration with Zoom for real-time engagement, including town halls and events.
Despite these strengths, some customers have expressed dissatisfaction with the search functionality, reporting, and feeds, saying they feel overly social or noisy. Workvivo’s search experience relies on highly manual tags and metadata for success — making content maintenance labor-intensive. Workvivo’s workflow automation is also less extensive compared to other vendors, particularly in areas like campaigns and employee journeys.
How to get employees to use an intranet
To maximize the ROI of your intranet implementation, user adoption is everything. No matter how great your intranet looks on paper, it can’t improve your teams’ efficiency and productivity if they aren’t using it.
Why does intranet adoption fail?
One common reason is a lack of relevance — if the intranet doesn’t provide employees with content, tools, or updates that are useful to their daily work, they simply won’t log on. Another frequent pitfall is poor user experience. If the platform is confusing, slow, or cluttered, employees will revert to old habits and alternative tools, leaving your investment underutilized.
The importance of user-friendly features and an easy-to-use, mobile-friendly design can’t be overstated. The ideal intranet includes an app that works natively on the devices your employees carry around.
How to increase employee intranet adoption
1. Make your employee intranet intuitive and easy: Choose an intranet that’s user-friendly right out of the box. Simpplr’s intranet, for example, is designed with intuitive navigation and a modern interface so your teams can easily find what they need — no training required.
2. Prioritize speed of deployment and onboarding: The faster your intranet is up and running, the quicker your employees can start benefiting from it. Simpplr is built for rapid deployment, ensuring your teams don’t have to wait months to experience improvements in communication and collaboration.
3. Personalize and streamline content: Empower employees by delivering relevant news, documents, and resources tailored to their roles and locations. When people see that the intranet makes their job easier, engagement rises naturally.
4. Foster ongoing engagement: Use features like recognition, feedback loops, and company updates to keep the intranet dynamic and central to your company culture.
5. Celebrate success and milestones: Recognize teams and individuals who actively use and contribute to the intranet. Public recognition not only rewards usage but also motivates others to get involved. Consider gamification elements such as badges, leaderboards, or spotlight features to create a sense of achievement and friendly competition.
6. Listen to employee feedback and adapt: Continuously gather user feedback to understand what’s working and what’s not. Encourage employees to share suggestions and make it clear their input leads to real improvements. This iterative approach helps the intranet remain relevant and trusted, further encouraging ongoing use.
7. Champion leadership involvement: Adoption starts at the top. When leaders and managers actively use the intranet to communicate and share information, it sets the tone for the rest of the organization and demonstrates the platform’s value.
Don’t overlook the list of out-of-the box integrations. A successful rollout depends on your intranet software integrating with the popular solutions your employees already use — Slack, Zoom, Google Drive, Dropbox, Workday, Google Analytics, LinkedIn, and more.
Ultimately, driving intranet adoption is a continuous journey, not a one-time event. By addressing relevance, user experience, and ongoing engagement, you set the stage for sustained participation across your organization.
With platforms like Simpplr — built for rapid deployment and seamless, intuitive use — you lower the barriers to adoption and ensure your intranet quickly becomes a vital digital work hub for your teams. Boosting adoption isn’t just about technology; it’s about creating an intranet employees genuinely want to use every day.
Best practices for a seamless employee intranet login experience
Your intranet login process is your employees’ first touchpoint — and it can make or break first impressions. A seamless, secure, and well-designed login ensures employees get immediate value from your intranet while keeping company data protected. Here’s how to get it right:
1. Security
- Implement single sign-on (SSO): SSO lets employees access the intranet using existing company credentials. It simplifies access, reduces password fatigue, and strengthens security by centralizing authentication.
- Use multifactor authentication (MFA): Protect sensitive information with an added layer of security, ensuring only verified users can access the system.
2. Searchability
- Instant access to search after login: The moment employees log in, they should be able to quickly search for people, documents, or resources. Minimize barriers and clicks between logging in and finding what they need.
3. Design and experience
- Fast, responsive login page: A cluttered or slow-loading login screen can frustrate users. Aim for a visually clean, branded interface that loads quickly on all devices.
- Persistent session (with timeout policies): Keep employees logged in for reasonable periods without frequent reauthentication, balancing convenience and security.
- Clear error messaging: If something goes wrong during login, provide clear, actionable feedback, not cryptic error codes.
Simpplr intranets are built for seamless logins with enterprise-grade security, SSO, and a mobile-responsive design. Your teams get a frictionless, secure entry point — so they can focus on work, not passwords.
Ready to see how Simpplr can transform employee experience? Reach out for a demo to see how this can work for you!
Watch a 5-minute demo
See how the Simpplr employee experience platform connects, engages and empowers your workforce.
- #1 Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant™
- 90%+ Employee adoption rate