The 9 Best Intranet Alternatives for 2023

Traditional intranets are outdated. As the modern workplace becomes more dispersed, agile and flexible, your digital workplace needs to be able to do a whole lot more than it did even just a few years ago. 

Where traditional intranets were only interested in creating a platform for storing and sharing information, disregarding user experience, businesses today have a lot to keep on top of, including:

• Keeping their employees engaged, from wherever and whenever they work
• Making sure their employees get the information they need, how and when they need it
• Creating consistency between the physical and digital workplace, so everyone feels part of the same team

Today, 83% of employees rely on technology for communication and collaboration.¹ That’s no surprise when 60% of businesses have converted to a hybrid work model in the last few years.² In this environment, choosing the right tech is more important than ever.

Many intranets just aren’t fit for purpose. But modern intranet alternatives, like employee experience platforms (EXPs) and collaborative communication tools are up to the job. Read on for a breakdown of the best intranet alternatives for 2023…

Suggested reading: For a deep dive into what makes an intranet and what it can do, read our guide — What Is An Intranet?

HulerHub

HulerHub is the next generation of intranet alternatives — an EXP. As an employee experience platform, HulerHub is a centralised hub that gives users access to everything they need to perform their roles in one place.

More than just a digital space to interact with your colleagues in, HulerHub is a fully-fledged digital workplace that brings together all the collaboration tools you need to increase productivity, make information sharing easier, and improve the employee experience.  

Key features and benefits

• Collections: Enhance collaboration with personalised collections: customised groups of information, articles and videos. This makes information sharing easy as they can be shared with teams or individuals, inside or outside your business — all possible as a seamless extension of your dashboard.
• Mobile friendly: While traditional intranets have no mobile capacity, HulerHub is fully accessible from any device and anywhere in the world. This makes sure everyone’s connected and relevant content, experiences and knowledge can be shared across your organisation.
• Dynamic search: Reduce time spent chasing up documents with smarter and more efficient dynamic search capability; results are organised into visual tiles that make it easy to locate what you need.

• Customisation: Personalisation increases engagement for the user while bringing together everything your business needs to boost productivity and performance.

• Articles: Stop relying on email for every update. Articles help employers create personalised, powerful content and helpful information that can be targeted to specific teams.

• Employee recognition feature: Build a culture of recognition in your business through this feature that facilitates praise and appreciation at the click of a button.
• Integration: HulerHub is vendor agnostic, so it can integrate with all your other tools to bring everything into one place and make your work easier.

From SMEs to enterprise-level organisations, HulerHub provides a modern EXP answer to the problem of replacing your outdated intranet. Unlike traditional intranets which are focused on admin rather than information sharing,

HulerHub is built around a people-first culture that lets you unite your workforce through enhanced engagement and collaboration — no matter where they work.

Jive Software 

Jive Software is a ‘collaboration solution’ that aims to transform your organisation by getting rid of information silos, reconnecting disconnections, and bringing teamwork back into your workplace. Taken together, Jive Software strives to unite your workforce and “ignite communication in every direction”.

Key features and benefits

• PeopleGraph: Technology that maps your workforce and the relationships between them to enable more effective communication and collaboration.
• Urgent notifications: Cross-company capability for time-critical messages that need to be broadcast.
• People directory: Jive gives you the ability to identify experts, locate collaborators and learn about what your colleagues can do — so you can find the people you need as soon as you need them.

Blending document management with a people-centric approach to collaboration, Jive Software offers a powerful collaboration tool for mid-size companies.

Thought Farmer 

ThoughtFarmer helps businesses improve internal communication, promote knowledge sharing, and facilitate collaboration. It offers a range of tools that work together to create a secure and personalised hub that encourages employee engagement and retention.

Key features and benefits

• Native mobile app: Giving you true mobile connectivity with a fully integrated app that lets you communicate and share documents on the go.
• Web interface: This lets you access and interact with company documents without the software being installed on your device — ideal for external clients.
• Change tracking: When multiple colleagues are working on one document this allows everyone to see what changes are being made and when — letting everyone stay up to date and in touch.

Ease of use and a quick onboarding process gives this intranet alternative a solid base to work from, but if you need in-depth customisation and analytics you might want to look elsewhere. It’s on the more affordable side of software providers however so this would be a good choice for SMEs who aren’t too fussy about high-end capabilities. 

Titan Workspace 

Titan workspace is a Microsoft Teams-based digital workplace platform that simplifies the use of Office 365. It includes various pre-built features to promote the adoption of Office 365 and Teams. Clients can quickly deploy collaborative features without requiring any customisations and it enables smooth communication among all internal and external users, including deskless staff.

Key features and benefits

• Workflow automation: Specifically built for Office 365 adoption, this feature allows you to leverage performance with a No-Code approach.
• Document management: Helping you mitigate any risk of document sharing, Titan brings all your documents under one roof — boosting collaboration as well.
• External guest user portal: This gives you a specific task manager to deal with external clients and vendors, letting you engage, communicate, and collaborate efficiently and securely.

Similar in its capabilities to competitors, Titan Workspace is a good fit for those fully invested in Office 365. But if you’re not, you might want to look elsewhere.

HCL Connections 

HCL Connections is a self-styled Enterprise Collaboration Platform that helps keep your employees connected and engaged by focusing on how they work, rather than on specific tools and applications. It integrates seamlessly with existing tools to break down silos and puts people, not content, at the centre of team collaboration.

Key features and benefits

• Intuitive design: Customisable options that can be altered based on your connection speed, HCL Connections helps deliver the best connectivity so you can deliver your best work.
• Supercharged search: Named as a Leader in the 2021 Aragon Research report and geared toward enhanced employee collaboration, this intranet provider lets you find what you need, when you need it, by bringing all your data together.
• Pervasive sharing: Aimed at increasing information velocity to help new ideas form faster and best practices get shared easier, Connections enables easy business-wide sharing.

Full of tips, tricks, and tools to optimise your digital workplace, HCL Connections is a scalable platform for larger businesses. But as an Enterprise Collaboration Platform, for small and medium-sized businesses, with HCL Connections you might be biting off more than you can chew.

ClickUp 

ClickUp is a Productivity Platform that brings teams together to collaborate on tasks, goals, documents, and other work-related items. It can be easily customised to fit the needs of teams of any size and helps them work more efficiently and effectively, increasing productivity.

Key features and benefits

• Dashboards: Real-time updates and project progress notifications give you a birds-eye view of what’s going on and what still needs to be done.
• ClickApps: Helping you break down projects with subtask assignments, link tasks to each other for enhanced workflow, and tackle any plan head-on.
• Chat: Replace Slack, MS Teams, Google Hangouts, and email with in-house, real-time chat that lets you assign people to tasks and link tasks together to get more done in less time.

ClickUp helps small and large companies streamline their project management, helped by its wide variety of features. If you’re not primarily looking for project management, however, this might not be the best fit. 

Interact 

Built using AI to power next-gen communication for your business, Interact is employee experience software that aims to transform how employees connect with colleagues, and how employers engage employees to create a more productive workforce. Giving your digital workplace a global reach, with multichannel tools of communication at your disposal, you can bring your business’ intranet into the modern world with Interact. 

Key features and benefits

• Simple CMS: Intuitive and easy to use, Interact’s content management system lets your employees focus on the work and find their flow.
• AI analysis: In-app AI that works alongside you and suggests positive improvements on what’s being written.
• Real-time monitoring: Give your employees detailed insights as they go, such as site visits, channel effectiveness, and social engagement, so they know where to focus their efforts in the most efficient way.

Used by companies including the Co-Operative Bank and Vitality, Interact’s intranet alternative helps provide collaboration solutions for the corporate world.

FirstUp 

FirstUp is an ‘intelligent communication platform’ for businesses that aims to bring all their employees together and help them feel connected to their company. It allows companies to reach, inform, and align their workforce with the organisation. Leaders can focus on their message while ensuring that the content is delivered to the right people and acted on. 

Key features and benefits

• Universal Employee Profile: Letting you see your workforce in a new light, this feature combines skills, attributes and activities across multiple systems to give you an in-depth snapshot of who your workforce is and what they can do.
• Wellness: Giving you access to targeted communications, combined with greater awareness of the universal employee profiles, lets you implement health and wellness programs easily.
• Talent acquisition: Improve internal mobility and generate a culture of recognition by being able to automatically promote open roles to specific targeted groups.

Styling itself as an employee experience ecosystem, FirstUp is a good fit for Enterprise businesses, having worked with ING and the US supermarket chain Wegmans.

Claromentis

As a modern and customisable ‘digital workplace solution’, Claromentis provides communication, collaborative learning and knowledge management features within an easy-to-navigate interface.

Key features and benefits

• Workflow automation: Reduce manual, repetitive tasks by automating your daily business processes.
• Extranet portals: This allows external users, such as clients and prospective hires, to securely access company info.
• Learning management system: Improve your teams’ learning and development with software that allows customisable training experiences.

Claromentis have worked with customers of all sizes within different sectors, from Guinness World Records to NHS trusts, but its number of features and scalability is best suited to larger organisations.

The best intranet alternative for 2023 

People are adapting — and have adapted — to hybrid and remote working. While some businesses are trying to bring their employees back to the office, most workplaces are moving with the times and switching to flexible, hybrid and remote working patterns. That means businesses need to communicate, bring together and engage their employees from wherever and whenever they’re working, which is no simple task.

In other words, the workplace in 2023 is more sophisticated than it’s ever been, so workplace tech needs to be just as sophisticated. Most intranets simply aren’t cut out to deal with this; an intranet alternative like HulerHub is. 

As an employee experience platform, HulerHub provides you with everything traditional and modern intranets offer as a baseline — and then offers so much more.

Focused on providing the best employee experience, its flexibility means you can personalise it to your brand, give users customisation over their dashboards, and host all the tools, information and apps that your people need to keep them productive and engaged. To see how HulerHub can help your business, book a demo today.

¹ 24+ Mesmerizing Workplace Collaboration Statistics [2022] 

² Technology in the Workplace Statistics 2022: Lasting Effects | TeamStage