Engaging employee communication app, but missing essential collaboration and HR features

Table of contents
  1. Verdict: 6.2/10
  2. Flip Pricing
  3. Flip Usability and Interface
  4. Flip Core Functionalities
  5. Flip Security Features
  6. Flip Reporting & Analytics
  7. Flip Customer Support
  8. What are Flip Review Ratings from Review Sites?
  9. Flip App Review
  10. Connecteam: The Better Flip Alternative
  11. FAQs

Verdict: 6.2/10

Flip is an employee app that makes it easier for companies to connect with their frontline workers and for employees to engage with colleagues. I was impressed by its ease of use—but disappointed by the lack of advanced features.

Flip does a great job providing a seamless social-media-style newsfeed and chat app for your business. Employees can easily share posts and surveys, join channels built around specific departments and projects, and message each other and groups.

However, these core features fall short in important ways. For example, employee profiles are inflexible, there aren’t collaboration tools for your communications team,  and administrators can’t share private surveys.

On top of that, Flip claims to provide time tracking, scheduling, and leave management, but these features are possible only through integrations—and relatively few are available.

Overall, I’d like to see Flip offer much more built-in functionality, including more flexible ways to use its existing features to meet your business’s needs.

Key Features:

  • Newsfeed: Enable employees to share posts through a social-media-style newsfeed.
  • Employee chat: Communicate with 1:1 and group messages.
  • Surveys: Allow employees to share public polls to get feedback from colleagues.
  • Task management: Delegate tasks to employees and add attachments. 
Pros
– Mobile and web interfaces are user-friendly
– Employee directory makes it easy for employees to connect
– Platform is secured with 2-factor authentication and single sign-on
Cons
– No collaboration tools for communication teams
– No employee intranet
– Over-reliance on integrations for features
– Limited customer support

Flip Pricing

Flip offers pricing by quote only. When I initially reached out for a quote, I was told that Flip is offering quotes for businesses with at least 50 employees only because the company is currently overloaded with demand. Normally, companies of any size can sign up.

After contacting Flip several times, I was able to get a demo and quote. The sales rep I spoke with provided a cost estimate of $350,000 per year on a 5-year contract for a company with 5,000 employees. That comes out to $70 per employee per year, which seems like it could be reasonable for a platform with a comprehensive set of powerful features—which I don’t think Flip has.

Most of Flip’s competitors—like Blink, Simpplr, and Haiilo—also offer pricing by quote only. Appspace, another employee intranet app, starts at $3 per user per month but requires a minimum spend of $950 per month.

Team sizeFlipAppspaceConnecteam
(Basic)
10 usersNot available$950/monthFree for life—All features and dashboards
50 usersBy quote only$950/month$39/month
100 usersBy quote only$950/month$64/month
1,000 usersBy quote only$3,000/month$514/month—or contact team for custom enterprise pricing
5,000 users$29,166/month$15,000/month$2,514/month—or contact team for custom enterprise pricing

Flip also doesn’t have a trial or free plan.

Verdict: 4/10

Flip Usability and Interface

I wasn’t able to do a hands-on test of Flip, but I did get a live video walkthrough of the platform from a Flip sales rep. I also consulted user reviews online and reviewed Flip’s help center to dive more into its customization options.

One of my favorite things about Flip is how easy the platform is to use, especially for employees. There’s almost no learning curve, which makes it much more likely your workforce will use it.

To start, Flip’s newsfeed looks and feels much like Facebook. Employees can scroll through posts and like or comment content with a click or tap. They can easily join groups (which Flip calls “channels”) based on departments, projects, or non-work interests. I also like that the newsfeed is fully searchable.

Flip
Flip’s social-media-style newsfeed looks and feels much like Facebook.

Flip also does a great job making lots of information available on a single screen on the web app. Most things you click appear as sidebars rather than redirecting you to a new page, so you never lose track of what you were looking at first. For example, when scrolling through the newsfeed, if you click on a colleague’s name, their profile will appear in a sidebar.

The platform’s navigation menu ensures the main features—like the newsfeed and chat—are just a click away. Administrators also get an admin console, which does a nice job separating the front-end, employee-facing aspects of Flip from the platform’s back-end, administrator-focused settings and tools.

Flip
Flip’s admin console is separated from the front end of the platform and offers control over groups and system settings as well as access to data analytics.

Another thing I liked about Flip is that it’s designed for accessibility. The web and mobile apps are compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act and follow the latest version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Not every platform I’ve looked at does that—for example, Haiilo only partially complies with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Verdict: 10/10

Mobile app

Flip offers mobile apps for iOS and Android that support all the platform’s main employee-facing features. Administrators can use the app to create posts and chat groups, but the full admin console isn’t available within the app.

The mobile app felt as seamless as Flip’s web platform, and I especially liked the chat interface. It looks just like the native messaging app on iOS, and it feels similar, too. Plus, Flip automatically translates messages using AI, which is terrific for facilitating communication between employees in different countries.

The only drawback for employees is that only the newsfeed and chat are available from the main menu across the bottom of the screen. All Flip’s other tools, like the tasks list, must be accessed from a separate menu page—which adds an extra navigation step. The good news is that this menu page is fully customizable, so employees see only the tools your organization actually uses.

Menu ItemAdminEmployee
WebsiteMobile AppWebsiteMobile App
Communication
News feed
Employee chat
Surveys
Productivity tools
Task management
Calendar
Employee directory
Knowledge base
Reporting
Analytics dashboard

Verdict: 8/10

Flip Core Functionalities

Newsfeed

Flip’s newsfeed is the heart of this employee app. Any employee can post to the feed and posts can contain images, videos, file attachments and more. You can also create an unlimited number of sub-feeds for specific projects or departments, and all Flip’s feeds are searchable.

I liked the newsfeed, but I noticed it left out several important features that competitors like Workvivo and Staffbase include. For example, administrators can schedule posts ahead of time, but there’s no way for your internal communications team to collaboratively edit posts or plan out content. Flip also doesn’t have any way to create editorial workflows for posts to be approved before they’re published.

Employee profiles in Flip also felt limited. Employees can add custom photos—but not any other details about themselves. Workvivo offers much more in-depth profiles—something I found really contributes to digital community-building.

Another shortcoming is that Flip’s newsfeed isn’t paired with a company intranet. If you want to publish a longer news story as opposed to a short post, you must host it on another platform and then post a link to the Flip newsfeed. Flip competitors like Workvivo, Staffbase and Simpplr all offer static intranet pages in addition to social-media-style newsfeeds. 

Verdict: 6/10

Employee chat

Flip offers an employee chat function that supports both 1:1 and group messaging. The chat feels really seamless—when you’re on the mobile app, it’s almost indistinguishable from texting.

You can send images, videos, and file attachments in Flip, and the platform supports threading conversations (where users can respond directly to messages) to keep your messages organized. I like that you can mark messages as unread as a reminder to return to them later.

Two
Flip supports 1:1 and group messaging with a mobile interface that feels a lot like texting.

Flip also includes an employee directory. Employees can tap on any colleague’s name in the directory and start a new chat—they don’t need to keep track of individual phone numbers or build their own contact list.

While I think most businesses will find everything they need in Flip’s chat, there are some limitations. It doesn’t support voice or video calling, and there’s no way to schedule messages to send later. In addition, there’s no way for administrators to turn off messaging for specific individuals in a group.

Verdict: 8/10

Surveys

Surveys in Flip work very similarly to polls on Facebook: Any employee can create a survey and share it to your company-wide newsfeed or a single channel’s feed. All responses are public, and everyone can see survey results. 

That’s a big advantage over competitors like Blink, which allow only administrators to create surveys. This approach to surveys is great for connecting colleagues and enabling them to get feedback from one another. 

Two
Flip enables employees to quickly create public polls and share them in the newsfeed.

However, I found it strange that there’s no way to limit survey creation to administrators only—which you might want to do if, for example, employees are misusing them. There’s also no way for administrators to share anonymous surveys with employees. This makes it difficult to use Flip’s surveys to get honest feedback about how employees are feeling or ask their thoughts on potentially sensitive subjects.

Flip also doesn’t offer any way to analyze survey results in depth. You can’t analyze results from multiple surveys in a single visualization or track changes in responses to the same survey questions over time. For example, if you send the same employee satisfaction survey each month, Flip doesn’t give you a way to graph changes in employees’ responses to each question over time. This is a major shortcoming that really limits this feature’s usefulness for managers.

Verdict: 6/10

Task management

Flip offers a relatively basic task management system. Managers can create a task, set a due date, and assign it to 1 or more employees. You can attach files or images, and employees can comment on tasks to ask questions or mark tasks as completed.

However, I thought much was missing that would make Flip really usable as a task management platform. Flip doesn’t have kanban boards, task lists, or Gantt charts, so it’s difficult to visualize everything that must be done and divide up work evenly. Flip also doesn’t let you categorize tasks by priority or label tasks as anything other than “open” or “completed.”

In my experience, an inflexible task management solution like this causes tasks to fall through the cracks.

Verdict: 5/10

Integrations

One of the main issues I had with Flip? It leans very heavily on integrations instead of providing functionality through built-in tools.

For example, Flip says it offers custom forms and automated workflows. But in reality, you can’t create forms in Flip—you must use an integration for WPForms, a drag-and-drop form builder designed for WordPress. This means you need a WordPress account and must go through a convoluted integration process every time you want to create a new form to share with your employees.

Similarly, Flip says it offers HR features like leave management and time tracking. However, these capabilities are only possible if you have an integration with a supported HR platform like ADP, Workday, or SAP. If you already use one of these platforms, employees could easily submit time off requests or track time through that platform. All Flip does is make these HR tools available from within the Flip app. While some employees might appreciate having fewer apps to manage, this feels like a pretty marginal benefit.

Considering how important integrations are to Flip, I was surprised to find that there aren’t very many out-of-the-box integrations. In addition to the integrations I mentioned, you can share chats between Flip and Microsoft Teams or automatically import messages as tickets in Jira. Flip also integrates with employee engagement platforms like Rippling, Heyday, and Circula.

Notably, Flip doesn’t support Slack, Google Workspace, or any major cloud storage platforms. Competing employee apps like Simpplr and Haiilo offer many more out-of-the-box integrations.

I was also disappointed to find that Flip doesn’t have an integration marketplace. Want an integration? You must work directly with Flip’s technical team to implement it. Flip does have an API, so it’s possible to build custom integrations with some coding knowledge.

While this over-reliance on third-party integrations provides a degree of flexibility that might be great for some, I feel that it makes many features and workflows far more complicated than they could be if Flip offered the same feature as built-in functionality.

Verdict: 4/10

Flip Security Features

Flip is certified to the ISO 27001 and the Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalogue (C5) cybersecurity standards. These major security certifications are widely considered gold standards for business software security.

Flip also uses 2-factor authentication and single sign-on to secure employees’ accounts. All data is encrypted both at rest on employees’ devices and during transfer to and from Flip’s data centers.

Flip complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and offers a commissioned data processing contract that governs how Flip can use your company’s data. Also, the mobile app doesn’t have access to users’ personal smartphone data, which your employees will appreciate.

Verdict: 10/10

Flip Reporting & Analytics

Flip offers an analytics dashboard for administrators that helps you monitor employee adoption of Flip and engagement on the app. You can view data about the number of posts employees have shared, how many likes and comments each post received, and how many times each post was viewed. Flip also shows the total number of messages employees sent and the number of tasks and calendar events they created. 

Flip
Flip offers an easy-to-use analytics dashboard, but the data it offers doesn’t provide much insight into your business.

I liked the ease of use and flexibility of the dashboard, but the data it highlights doesn’t feel very insightful. You can filter the data by channel, but it’s impossible to dig into data for individual employees or teams to find out whether they’re actually engaged or satisfied at work. 

The lack of survey data feels really significant, since it means you can’t learn more about how your employees are feeling.

Flip also doesn’t enable you to export your data to Excel or offer pre-made reports you can share.

Verdict: 5/10

Flip Customer Support

I wasn’t impressed by Flip’s customer support. It took several attempts to get in touch with the company’s sales team for a demo, plus several more follow-ups for a quote. I was surprised Flip made it so difficult to learn about and sign up for the software.

Flip also offers support through a ticketing system only. The only options are to “report a bug” or “give feedback”—asking a question isn’t an option. I sent a message with feedback, and a representative from the company responded to me the next day thanking me. 

While I was still disappointed with this support system, I appreciate that Flip responded. Several companies I’ve reached out to, including Blink, never responded when I reached out for support.

Flip has a fairly comprehensive online knowledge base, but most tutorials offer text only—there are few screenshots and no videos to walk you through how to use the software’s features.

Flip’s
Flip offers an online knowledge base with tons of articles, but there are few screenshots and no videos to guide you through the software. 

Overall, Flip’s support felt like the bare minimum. I’d definitely like to see more ways to get in touch, including live chat or phone support, as well as walkthrough videos in the knowledge base.

Verdict: 4/10

What are Flip Review Ratings from Review Sites?

(As of September 2024)

Flip App Review

Flip initially stood out to me for its extremely user-friendly interface, seamless employee chat, and strong security. However, I found the platform to be limiting in several important ways.

Flip doesn’t offer collaboration tools for internal communications teams or provide an employee intranet. It also lacks essential productivity and customization features and relies heavily on integrations for basic functions such as forms and HR tools. 

My overall take is that Flip can be a decent option if your company primarily needs a social newsfeed and employee chat app. But much better alternatives exist. In the future, Flip could really elevate its offering with additional integrations and a more in-depth analysis dashboard.

Connecteam: The Better Flip Alternative

My favorite alternative to Flip is Connecteam, which combines an easy-to-use employee app with a much wider range of features and customization options. 

Connecteam offers a social-media-style updates feed with more features than Flip, including the ability to send employees push notifications about urgent posts and to require them to acknowledge that they’ve read important updates.

An employee chat app enables employees to communicate seamlessly, and administrators can send private surveys and collect anonymous results.

connecteam

Connecteam really stands above Flip thanks to its comprehensive task management tools, which enable managers and employees to collaborate on work. You can set up one-time or recurring tasks, organize tasks by priority or due date, and get real-time updates on each task’s status.

I also like Connecteam’s built-in features to help you manage your workforce. It has a drag-and-drop employee scheduler, an online knowledge base, forms and checklists, and more. There’s an integrated time clock, too, so you don’t have to rely on third-party integrations to track time.

An

Connecteam is completely free for businesses with 10 or fewer employees. Paid plans start at only $29 per month for up to 30 users, plus $0.50 per additional user per month.

Get started with Connecteam today!

FAQs

Does Flip offer a free trial?

No, Flip doesn’t offer a free trial or plan. There’s no way to test out the software before you commit to it, but you can request a live demo from a Flip sales rep. 

Is Flip HIPAA compliant?

Flip doesn’t specify whether it complies with HIPAA. Companies that must comply with HIPAA should be aware that Flip’s data servers are located in Europe. While this isn’t against HIPAA rules, storing HIPAA-protected data outside the US is against the terms of many US healthcare providers.

What integrations does Flip have?

Flip integrates with HR platforms like ADP, Workday, or SAP; employee communication platforms like Microsoft Teams; and employee engagement platforms like Rippling, Heyday, and Circula.

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