Report:

Magic Quadrant for Intranet Packaged Solutions

Top Vendor Products for Intranet Packaged Solutions in 2024

• Firstup
• Interact
• LumApps
• Simpplr
• Staffbase
• Unily
• Workvivo by Zoom

Intranet Packaged Solutions Vendor Product Comparisons 2024

• Firstup - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Focused marketing strategy — Firstup's sales and marketing strategy helps shape customer thinking, promoting the idea that intranets need to deliver multichannel employee experiences rather than a traditional website.
  • Agile innovation — Firstup's innovation practices focus on intelligent content delivery. Recently, its innovation efforts have expanded to include data-driven alerts and notifications. Data-driven capabilities will help with its emerging work management efforts.
  • Trends awareness — Market responsiveness to industry trends continues to be a priority for Firstup's offering strategy, which emphasizes improving governance, security and data quality — not just adding features.

  Cons:

  • Solution breadth — Firstup's emphasis on employee communications and engagement may not meet the needs of organizations seeking a traditional intranet with complex work management features.
  • Data center locations — Firstup offers its product and services across global regions but maintains data center and hosting options only in the U.S. and Ireland. Organizations requiring greater control over data sovereignty or needing more diverse hosting options may prefer to look at other vendors that better support their region.
  • Developer audience — Organizations looking beyond out-of-the-box connectors to back-end applications prioritize IPS vendors that cater to developer needs for internally developed integrations and broad API support, as well as low-code/no-code options. Firstup may not be a good fit for environments with complex integration needs and where developers play a core role in shaping intranet capabilities.


• Interact - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Customer collaboration — Interact's platform is a good fit for organizations with defined goals and requirements during the sales and deployment process. The vendor is willing to share the details of its technical foundations with organizations focused on platform assurance and compliance.
  • Customer experience — Interact has a good understanding of the IPS market and its specialized industries. It effectively grasps a buyer's needs for its workforce, including frontline staff, and collaborates well with organizations to customize its solution.
  • Innovation — Interact continues to be highly regarded for its continuous innovation such as its GenAI-influenced features focused on enhancing the employee experience.

  Cons:

  • Sales and offering strategy — In many organizations, content management needs influence IPS evaluation and selection criteria. While Interact does offer support for secure and compliance-driven use cases, there are additional everyday content needs for which other IPS vendors can offer a stronger differential.
  • Industry use cases — Potential clients should question Interact on how it can support their intranet use cases that fall outside of the vendor's preferred verticals.
  • Solution breath — The expected capabilities of IPS solutions include multichannel employee communication, social and community efforts (such as employee resource groups) and frontline superapps. While these are areas that Interact supports, based on Gartner's market research analytics and client inquiries, the vendor is not well-known for those scenarios. Potential clients should question and assess these areas if Interact is being considered.


• LumApps - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Productized integrations — Prospects and clients looking for an IPS that can unify a large number of back-end systems will appreciate LumApps portfolio of over 100 integrations. Such capabilities can help shorten sales cycle times. It also participates in partner ecosystems of key vendors such as Microsoft, Google, SAP and Workday, which can also help with lead generation.
  • Industry product strategy — LumApps addresses vertical needs through a product-driven approach that incorporates sector requirements as microapp components. Partners are aligned with vertical needs.
  • Innovation — LumApps continues to invest in the area of multichannel communications, including campaigns, infusing AI capabilities into the back-end editorial and work management experience. A "companion" app helps frontline and desk workers by acting as a digital assistant that includes an AI-based chatbot.

  Cons:

  • Vertical depth — Although LumApps addresses vertical needs through its products, customers might want more sector-specific expertise and less dependence on partners, which can distance them from the IPS provider. Additionally, organizations may find microapps too shallow to help guide them in solving the vertical needs of their intranet, thus look for a vendor with more hands-on experience.
  • Extensibility trade-offs — Some customers report requiring greater-than-expected development, deployment and design effort when using LumApps. Organizations seeking a more out-of-the-box approach with prepackaged connectors may prioritize other options in the market.
  • Partner expansion — LumApps' partner ecosystem continues to expand, but its progress is still evolving. Potential clients should analyze LumApps' partner options and verify with the vendor where there is a track record of success in those new advancements.


• Simpplr - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Out-of-the-box solution — Simpplr's product is built for buyers that want prebuilt functionality while providing common options for customization. Gartner clients often recognize how Simpplr's prepackaged approach reduces dependency on IT support, enabling rapid deployment.
  • Customer experience — Customer feedback from Gartner Peer Insights indicated that Simpplr's support and service respond quickly and are knowledgeable. Customers also appreciated the product's features and functionality, including search, self-publishing and content governance. They note that it is easy to use and deploy, and content creation is simple.
  • Go-to-market strategy — Simpplr's go-to-market strategy combines a direct sales team with a robust partner ecosystem to reach a broad range of customers. Its value-centric approach segments the sales team into enterprise, commercial and small to midsize businesses. Its partner ecosystem consists of strategic and technology partners, and global and regional systems integrators specializing in the IPS market.

  Cons:

  • Customization and build options — Organizations looking for higher integration with more sophisticated goals in a complex environment may prefer other vendors that provide more flexibility in configuration and building options compared to Simpplr's highly packaged product.
  • Geographical presence — Simpplr's operations are primarily focused on the U.S., with a relatively limited presence in Europe. Non-U.S. clients should verify that there is sufficient local support to meet their needs. Additionally, those with industry-specific requirements may find that Simpplr does not fully align with their needs.
  • Integration and features — In Gartner Peer Insights feedback, some customers indicated concerns with integration capabilities with systems such as Google Chat and GitHub. They also pointed out some areas for improvement in its mobile experience and digital asset management.


• Staffbase - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Employee communications focus — To complement Staffbase's integration with Microsoft applications and development tools, it is exploring opportunities to include Copilot in its intranet environment. Organizations looking for a complementary IPS that focuses on employee communications may find Staffbase a good fit.
  • Unified solution — In Gartner Peer Insights feedback, customers expressed appreciation that the product provides a unified solution for both desktop and mobile users. They found it highly intuitive and praised its excellent administrative features and customer service support.
  • Product strategy — Staffbase introduced new business-outcome-based metrics and dashboards for measuring intranet performance beyond platform and content. For instance, it can measure campaign performance against business goals. Staffbase is also rolling out industry-specific solutions for manufacturing, healthcare and education.

  Cons:

  • Data sovereignty accommodation — Staffbase primarily serves organizations in Europe, North America and Australia. Regional hosting is available, with data being hosted on Microsoft Azure in those regions. Prospective customers in other geographical regions should evaluate data sovereignty requirements for their specific region.
  • Feature completeness — Customer feedback from Gartner Peer Insights indicated that improvements are needed in Staffbase's analytics and reporting, notifications, and search functionality. For example, customers indicated not being able to find information and documents on the intranet.
  • Industry experience — While Staffbase has industry experience based on deployments in the manufacturing and healthcare sectors, it has no vertical-specific offerings. Some organizations may want to consider industry-specific solutions based on their industry and operational needs.


• Unily - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Content-centric scenarios — Unily's content management services enable sales efforts to focus on work activities driven by content. It provides strong page creation, site editing, and video and image management. Editorial management helps with governance efforts, including keeping content relevant.
  • Unique employee experiences — Unily's sales efforts leverage a mature audience builder function that segments workers to enable personalization combined with the Unily user profile foundation. At scale, this can be a challenge for large, diverse companies, making Unily a welcome option.
  • Large-scale deployment — Unily's options for operational configuration help it handle secure extranet-like scenarios. Its provisioning, granular security permissions and configuration model can support IPS scenarios more commonly found in large complex enterprises such as multiple intranet hubs.

  Cons:

  • Emphasis on large companies — Unily targets large companies with 10,000 or more employees. Midsize and smaller companies may have difficulty engaging with Unily sales or dealing with its IPS product, which is designed for more complicated environments.
  • Gaps in frontline support — Sales efforts may run into marketing and product gaps when it comes to work management and collaboration needs of frontline staff. For example, its mobile app enables more of a pass-through experience, which can suffice. However, organizations looking for a miniapp that abstracts task and service activities and orchestrates back-end workflows may find other options in the market specific to frontline staff more compelling.
  • Development options may conflict with enterprise standards — Unily's technical marketing efforts target large organizations, which are more likely to want to custom integrate other enterprise applications. However, Unily relies on the Angular Module Federation framework, which may run counter to existing front-end architecture standards.


• Workvivo by Zoom - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Market presence — Workvivo is one of the few IPS vendors in this research with a strong employee community capability. It has gained more market presence through its partnership with Meta to migrate its customers from Workplace. The retirement of Workplace by Meta and Workvivo's formal partnership creates a temporary strength in 2024 and 2025.
  • Value-added capabilities — An IPS typically does not include real-time communication capabilities to support town hall and other synchronous events. Workvivo's leverage of Zoom technology expands the value proposition of its IPS, providing sales and marketing efforts that differentiate it from competitors.
  • Agile workforce expansion — Workvivo's responsiveness and execution strength enables it to exploit opportunities quickly, as indicated by its Meta partnership. Use of Workplace by Meta for frontline workers can jump-start Workvivo's efforts to move more strongly into this workforce segment.

  Cons:

  • Microsoft standardization impact — While Zoom is a recognized brand, there are organizations that have abandoned Zoom as part of their standardization on the Microsoft stack. While buyers may like Workvivo as an IPS, they may bypass it due to a commitment to their standardization efforts.
  • Emphasis on social and multichannel communication — IPS market trends are expanding into new areas that require more native IPS vendor support for tasks, workflow and work management. Workvivo's emphasis on social, community and multichannel communication may not convince decision makers seeking a pragmatic business case for integrating the intranet into daily work routines.
  • Limited regional presence — While Zoom has a large global presence, Workvivo is largely present in North America and Europe. Organizations in regions where Workvivo has less adoption may prefer to assess other options, including local providers.


• ServiceNow - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Sales strategy — ServiceNow's size and overall presence across multiple markets enables it to minimize common new entrant sales challenges, such as accessing senior leadership. Because ServiceNow is broadly present in many organizations, it can leverage existing champions to support adoption of its IPS offering. ServiceNow benefits from customers pursuing vendor consolidation.
  • Digital employee experience — Its existing presence in organizations for employee services, work management and frontline support can become an advantage for those seeking to reduce digital friction and proliferation of vendors.
  • Work management — Organizations seeking to make their intranet more supportive of everyday work activities can take advantage of the process-, role-, task- and workflow-centric heritage of ServiceNow. This is attractive to IPS decision makers looking to advance the business value of an IPS buying engagement and communications.

  Cons:

  • Intranet specialization and breadth — ServiceNow is new to the IPS market, and its most common packaging is with its HR offering. Gartner client inquiry conversations signal concern as to how broadly the ServiceNow IPS technology will evolve versus it being a more limited extension to its overall product portfolio.
  • Licensing clarity — Employee Center Pro is a stand-alone offering but is commonly bundled with HR Service Delivery. Additional functionality is also available via licensing uplifts with other ServiceNow. This may not be a concern for buyers that prefer a more independent solution without cross-selling pressures.
  • IPS-specific innovation — ServiceNow is entering the IPS market, leveraging its strengths in other markets related to HR and IT service management. Innovation specific to traditional IPS expectations is more strongly handled by longtime players in the market. For example, there are stronger social and community options (such as for organizations migrating from Workplace by Meta). ServiceNow can be seen as disruptive given its focus on employee services, integrations and workflow. Decision makers seeking a more balanced IPS may prefer to look to competitors.


• Akumina - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Configuration flexibility — For organizations wanting to integrate their own infrastructure with their intranet, Akumina offers extensive configuration options, including platform integration with their chosen infrastructure, such as a specific search engine.
  • Localized and personalized experiences — Akumina has intranet users in 118 countries. For organizations with global operations, it can support content in 228 languages. The platform can handle complex organizational structures, where each group requires its own localized and personalized experience.
  • Integration capabilities — Organizations that need to surface their line-of-business application functions and information with their intranet will appreciate Akumina's prebuilt integrations with Microsoft 365 (M365) especially, but also Workday, Salesforce and ServiceNow. Its APIs enable connectivity and custom solutions, facilitating data flow across various platforms.

  Cons:

  • Offering strategy — Originally built as a customizable platform that appeals to organizations that have higher integration needs, Akumina is still evolving its out-of-the-box capabilities. Buyers looking for high levels of delegation to end-user groups to maintain their own content and employee experience needs may prefer alternative market options that prioritize ease of configurability and design simplicity.
  • Product fit — Akumina is best for organizations with sophisticated personalization goals and the need to integrate with existing IT infrastructure. Organizations opting for out-of-the-box solutions may face steep training challenges. In inquiries, Gartner clients note the platform's power, but both IT's custom integration efforts and end-users' learning curves can delay time to value.
  • Global focus — Akumina targets global entities. Smaller regional companies may feel overwhelmed with the effort necessary to fully deploy the product and realize its potential. A large percentage of Akumina implementations rely on a certified partner.


• MangoApps - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Modernization from internally built intranets — The vendor is a strong fit for modernizing highly complex and customized legacy intranet implementations, such as those built on Drupal, Liferay, IBM or SharePoint Online. Customer feedback from Gartner Peer Insights also indicated an appreciation of its customization capability and found it easy to use and intuitive.
  • Customer experience — MangoApps doubled its number of customer webinars and virtual meetups in 2023. Webinars enable it to share experiences, success stories and best practices. Virtual meetups provide a networking platform for peer-to-peer exchange and collaboration. Customer feedback from Gartner Peer Insights also praised its customer service and support.
  • Innovative — MangoApps is investing in newer technologies like augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) in the intranet space. For instance, it aims to provide employee gamification with AI-enabled avatars. Moreover, it plans to develop natively built-in and customizable purpose-built and industry-specific smart workspaces in the future.

  Cons:

  • Analytics and reporting — MangoApps offers limited analytics and reporting capabilities compared to other vendors evaluated in this research, such as allowing customers to compare the reach and engagement of their intranet content against competitors. Client feedback from Gartner Peer Insights also indicated that there is a need for improvement in its analytical capability to provide a customizable dashboard and reports.
  • Frontline support — MangoApps targets industries with a large number of frontline workers. However, if the IPS primarily targets office workers only, then clients may find MangoApps' frontline worker support less of a priority. Additionally, clients with significant frontline workers may prefer specialized vendors that more deeply focus on frontline workers' operational and task-associated requirements.
  • Geographical presence — While it serves numerous global organizations, the majority of MangoApps' customers are based in North America. Organizations in other regions should evaluate its capability to meet region-specific requirements.


• Powell Software - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Microsoft extensibility — Powell Software's IPS for Microsoft 365 taps into the platform's capabilities while enabling a unique digital experience, different from a native SharePoint Online modern intranet.
  • Personalized experiences — For organizations needing to address a variety of content delivery or role-based experiences, Powell Software has strong personalization features, such as content targeting and role-driven pages.
  • Market understanding — The vendor's IPS solution is well-suited for organizations that have adopted Microsoft 365 as the foundation of their digital workplace but are impatient with Microsoft's pace of innovation around intranet packaged solutions. A good example of this is its AI chatbot feature that can leverage alternative large language models.

  Cons:

  • Maturing global footprint — Powell Software relies heavily on partners for co-selling, implementation and postdeployment assistance (i.e., to help customers maximize the impact of their intranet). However, while it has an ecosystem of over 50 partners and 600 certified trained experts in 20 countries, its partner network is not as extensive as other providers evaluated in this research.
  • Offering flexibility — Powell Software's business model is reliant on Microsoft 365. Clients may consider this level of dependency as a risk that any investment in the IPS offering will be eclipsed by Microsoft's own IPS maturity over time, or diminished if they switched to other productivity suites such as Google.
  • Platform extensibility — Powell Software comes with a catalog of connectors for popular business applications, but this approach relies heavily on its universal connector "web parts." Companies needing to surface diverse views of line-of-business application information will need to ensure that Powell Software can meet their needs.


• Appspace - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Blended workplace communication — Appspace, especially when combined with its hybrid work coordination tools, enhances the workplace experience. It aids sales teams in securing IPS deployment by navigating multiple stakeholders. Features like personalized news feeds, social interaction and digital signage bridge physical and digital work environments.
  • Leverages current investments — Its Microsoft 365 integration attracts organizations with investments in Microsoft since the product can be deployed on top of SharePoint Online or integrated with Microsoft 365. SharePoint Online content is accessed directly from the intranet, and Appspace access can be embedded directly within Teams.
  • Marketing intranets for frontline — Frontline worker support is enhanced through a mobile app with access to personalized news feeds and internal communications. Workers can also create posts and leverage its native digital signage capabilities.

  Cons:

  • Legacy system consolidations — Organizations that want their intranet to consolidate information from multiple IT systems will find that Appspace has limited advanced content management and extensibility.
  • Split market attention — Many vendors have portfolios that span multiple markets. However, smaller vendors have more limited resources. Due to Appspace's strong branding on workplace experience, customers may perceive it as having a prioritized focus on areas other than its IPS efforts.
  • Vertical depth for frontline capabilities — Although Appspace offers frontline worker support, it has no native task and work management capabilities, which can impact frontline operation scenarios where work management is a priority.


• Axero - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Appeal business and IT champions — Axero's brand balances a technology-driven IPS with a collection of prebuilt capabilities that can find stakeholders on both the business and IT sides of an organization.
  • Customer experience — Axero's customers value the product's customization capabilities, based on conversations in Gartner client inquiries. They express confidence in the company's responsiveness and commitment to product development, making it a worthy choice for nontechnical use cases.
  • Technical expertise — Axero represents itself as a technology-driven organization that offers a versatile IPS with robust API interfaces. This type of brand uniqueness aligns well with its marketing, sales and customer experience objectives for customers that prioritize this level of customization.

  Cons:

  • Geographic reach — Axero's geographic presence is concentrated in the U.S., so organizations outside this region should ensure that Axero sales and product support resources are adequate for their needs.
  • Evolving partner network — Axero's partner network across all global regions (outside the U.S.) remains a work in progress. Other IPS vendors have large portfolios of partner relationships that help with sales, support and (if the partner is an IPS-related technology vendor) prepackaged integrations. Potential buyers should discuss these needs with Axero to assess options.
  • Market awareness — While Axero's marketing efforts have improved, it has not gained significant market presence when compared to other leading IPS vendors (based on Gartner market analysis, client inquiries and search analytics). This can make it difficult for champions to counter perceived risks compared to other IPS alternatives.


• Haiilo - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Digital employee experience — Haiilo's Modern Intranet customers benefit from an intuitive, simple UI for communicators, while giving employees control of their own experience.
  • Offering strategy — Haiilo has a simple and economical pricing model compared to most other providers evaluated in this research.
  • Operations — Haiilo's strong operations instill customer confidence in its reliability and potential for growth. The vendor makes higher-than-average investments in engineering and design, fosters a strong and active customer community to extend support, and achieves good employee satisfaction ratings.

  Cons:

  • Market presence — Haiilo's IPS customers remain strongly based in Western Europe, with a presence in North America.
  • Offering breath — Haiilo demonstrates more commitment to the internal employee communications and employee engagement use cases than other intranet use cases. Large organizations in regions other than Western Europe may have to rely on Haiilo partners rather than the vendor itself.
  • Developer audience — Haiilo may be limiting for organizations that require internal developers to integrate and shape the system to meet complex global or other types of interoperability needs. While Haillo does have customization and flexible configuration capabilities, professional developers may prefer other options.


• Igloo Software - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Customer support — Igloo's customers praise its ability to build solid partnerships, and it received positive customer satisfaction feedback through Gartner's Peer Insights for its support.
  • Value-add program — Igloo exceeds standard analytics capabilities by offering a monthly insights program and benchmarking service. Organizations can evaluate their maturity compared to other customers using anonymized usage and KPI data, which is still not offered by most of the other vendors evaluated in this research.
  • Pricing — Customer feedback from Gartner Peer Insights suggested that cost-effectiveness was one of the factors influencing the decision to select the software. This is especially crucial for smaller organizations with budget constraints that seek a platform offering diverse capabilities for their intranet.

  Cons:

  • Geographical presence — Igloo's geographic presence continues to be predominantly concentrated in the U.S. and Canada, with a significantly smaller footprint in Europe. Prospective customers in other regions must determine whether Igloo's limited experience in meeting region-specific requirements and its partner model meet their preferences and operational requirements.
  • Innovation and UI — Igloo provides a unified search option for workers to find useful information from sources other than the intranet, such as in enterprise content services. However, unlike some of its competitors, it does not offer federated search. Moreover, the display and layout of buttons, text and images in blogs and pages do not promote a more immersive experience when compared to other vendors evaluated in this research. In Gartner Peer Insights and client inquiries, some Igloo customers also highlighted issues around not having that immersive experience with its user interface.
  • Data control options — Igloo may not be a good fit for organizations that have strict data residency and data sovereignty requirements. While the vendor claims that it is compliant with standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA and ISO 27001, these claims are not as evident as with other vendors in the market. Therefore, clients are advised to verify for themselves how compliant Igloo is with those standards.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Intranet Packaged Solutions, 16-Dec-2024, ID G00806402

View Market Definition
View Vendor Movements