Are you stuck between Speakap and Blink for your organization's employee communication solution?
Keep reading to find out the major similarities and differences and see which one is right for you.
Speakap vs. Blink — quick facts
Speakap and Blink are both mobile-focused employee communication apps designed for organizations with many frontline workers.
The main difference is the number of features — and cost.
Speakap could be the perfect lightweight top-down communication software for you if you’re just looking for a way to keep employees up to date and enable chat features.
However, if you want more extensive interactions, a centralized hub, and in-depth customization that replaces all other employee intranets, Blink’s features are more than worth the price.
Speakap vs Blink: How they’re similar
Blink and Speakap have a few similarities:
Modern UI
Speakap nails its app by providing a straightforward user experience that is comparable to consumer-oriented apps your employees are already familiar with. With its timeline and one-on-one chats, it will fit right into your employees’ day.
The same can be said for Blink. The user interface is intuitive and modern, making it enjoyable to use for any employee. Users report that the platform “works equally well for desk and frontline workers.”
Timeline
Blink offers a versatile feed to share news, updates, and employee-generated content. You can send important notifications, share inspiring pictures and stories, and collect acknowledgements through actionable posts.
In Speakap, it’s straightforward to share news articles, publications, documents, and images. However, some features are slightly more limited. Some user reviews say “docs can't be opened directly within the app” and that there is a “Limited availability to insert images into posts.”
Custom branding
Blink’s theming options make it simple to add your own colors, images, logo, and even a fully white-labelled app with your company’s branding.
Speakap also offers excellent features to create a branded employee communications platform. You can create a branded app, add a custom logo, and play with menu themes.
Speakap vs. Blink: How they’re different
Analytics
Blink is a robust frontline communications platform that offers a lot of analytic capabilities and customizations to reach and engage every worker.
You can track your employees’ engagement with the content through data on every post’s reach, impressions, and interactions.
For uploaded documents, you can see the total number of views for each file and the change in views over time. You get an overall picture of your organization's engagement through a total user and active adoption count as well
Speakap has metrics that provide insight, including usage, adoption rate, read receipts, and user polls.
However, some users will find the analytics weak compared to other platforms. Besides tracking the employees who engage with your posts, data like reach and impressions are missing.
Omni-directional communication
Blink leans on user-generated content for their feed, making it ideal for organizations that want to open up lines of communication and encourage engagement.
In contrast, Speakap prioritizes a top-down style of communication. This could be a disadvantage for organizations looking for maximum engagement and collaboration between all levels of employees.
The communication style is less targeted to individual groups and teams, and some reviewers report that they “can’t target multiple recipients per post.”
Integrations
Along with a feed for daily updates, a hub for document sharing, pages for long-form content, and a multi-directional chat, Blink can be tailored to the needs of each organization.
You can customize the look of your app through personalized branding and many integrations. You can also add any essential software through Blink’s API.
Using Blink’s micro-app feature, you can add just about any functionality to your centralized app. Complete end-to-end customization can take some work through micro-apps and necessary integrations.
In Speakap, you do have a good range of integrations for HR and e-learning. But you only get read-only interfaces, links, and iframes rather than something more substantial.
Speakap is unlikely to be an overall internal communications solution as it lacks a native way to customize the functionalities within the app.
Besides linking integrations, users can’t add additional functions like payroll tracking into the app itself. Users say a con for their experience with Speakap is that there is “no ability for custom features.” and you “can't connect different apps easily.”
Customer service
Blink’s newness is a major plus for user experience and feature adoption, but this means some essential features are still being rolled out, and bugs do occur.
However, the customer service and development teams are quick to resolve any issues. Blink offers each client a dedicated support contact that oversees the transition and helps to optimize the platform for each business.
Blink also takes customer input and feedback heavily into consideration when developing new features.
Speakap’s users also frequently say they appreciate the company’s customer support, which also assigns a dedicated customer success manager to each account. Nonetheless, users report that “There are some features that would need better customer support.”
Speakap vs Blink: pricing
Blink offers four levels of paid service based on company size, while Speakap offers three pricing tiers based on features and customer service.
Blink levels:
- Essential: $3.40 per person, per month
- Business: Price on application
- Enterprise: Price on application
- Enterprise Plus: Price on application
Speakap levels:
- Basic: Price on application
- Premium: Price on application
- Additional features, customer support
- Premium+: Price on application
- Additional features, priority technical support
Speakap vs. Blink: final thoughts
Both Blink and Speakap are good employee communication tools for organizations with a number of frontline workers. If your goal is to encourage across-the-board engagement with a total communications solution, go with Blink.
If you’re looking for a more targeted top-down communication app that fits into your organization’s existing platforms, go with Speakap.
If you’re not sure, try Blink’s powerful frontline employee communications solution for free.
