Honest Staffbase Review: Pros, Cons, Features & Pricing

How I Tested Staffbase

I contacted Staffbase to set up a demo of the software, focusing on key features like the employee app and intranet. While I wasn’t able to test out the platform first-hand, I did get a full tour from Staffbase’s sales team and had a chance to ask questions about specific features, settings, and capabilities. I also dove into Staffbase’s online help center and user reviews to learn more about the software’s limits and integration options.

Staffbase Pricing

Staffbase pricing is by quote only and depends on your company’s size and needs. 

The platform offers modular packages, so you only have to purchase the features your business actually needs. For example, you can mix and match the employee intranet, employee app, SMS capabilities, and digital signage controls. All plans are paid for annually.

I was able to get a quote from Staffbase’s sales team for a workforce of 350 users. They suggested a price range of £25,000–£45,000 (around $34,000–$61,000) per year for a package that includes the employee app and intranet. 

It’s tough to directly compare pricing with Staffbase competitors, since most employee experience platforms, like Workvivo and Simpplr, offer pricing only by quote. However, since Connecteam offers transparent pricing and works for businesses of any size, it does provide some context. 

Overall, Connecteam works out cheaper while still providing key features like a team chat, news feed, and knowledge base. But if you need access to enterprise-grade collaboration tools, Staffbase does offer good value for money. 

Based on the quote I received, it works out to between $8 and $14.50 per user per month, which is impressively affordable for enterprise-scale software like this. Of course, expect slightly higher pricing for additional features or custom integrations.

While there’s no free trial or free plan, I was able to get a pretty in-depth demo of the platform from a Staffbase sales rep.

Staffbase Usability and Interface

I had a great experience with Staffbase’s sales team. They got in touch within a few hours of my demo request and were quick to schedule a demo.

Here’s what I learned during the demo.

Staffbase offers a modern and streamlined user interface that left me impressed. Admins can view the platform’s employee-facing front-end or dive into the feature-rich admin panel. The separation between front-end and back-end wasn’t drastic, but it made the platform very easy to navigate.

On the front-end, Staffbase offers a clean layout that doesn’t require any learning curve for employees. You can customize what tabs appear in the main menu (e.g., “HR,” “Health and Safety,” and “CEO Blog”) so it’s easy for employees to access key resources. The dashboard is fully customizable, so you can decide what appears most prominently. Options include news feeds, videos, integrations, forms, and more.

One thing I especially liked about Staffbase’s interface is that it is fully white-labeled. Your logo and brand colors are used throughout the platform, so employees feel like they’re using a platform that’s custom-built by your organization.

I also appreciated that Staffbase is designed to be accessible to all employees. The platform adheres to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 AA standard and supports keyboard navigation. Staffbase is compatible with screen readers like NVDA, VoiceOver, and TalkBack, and enables you to add alt text to all images within your content.

Staffbase’s back-end can be easily accessed by clicking on your profile icon (if you’re an admin). It’s split up into 8 tabs: Dashboard, Planning, Content, Email, SMS, Screens, Files, and Analytics, reflecting Staffbase’s core features and reporting capabilities, so I really liked this way of organizing the platform.

Within each tab, all the available options are contained in a sidebar, and I never encountered pop-up windows or endlessly expanding menus. Overall, I felt like Staffbase did a nice job of avoiding the layout pitfalls that I’ve seen from other enterprise-scale companies.

Since I couldn’t test the platform myself, I didn’t get to experience what onboarding is like for a new admin or employee. But some user reviews indicated that onboarding isn’t totally seamless. According to one user, “the admin panel can sometimes feel a bit complex when setting up content or managing larger groups, which makes it slightly time-consuming.”

I also wasn’t able to try setting up integrations, although Staffbase offers multiple ways to approach this, including an API, webhooks, and pre-built connectors for popular enterprise platforms like Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow.

It’s also worth noting that implementation takes about 4 months from contract signing to roll-out. That’s lengthy, but the sales rep I spoke with also made it clear that Staffbase’s internal development team does a lot of work to ensure your organization’s custom needs and feature requests are met.

Mobile app

Staffbase doesn’t have a mobile app for admins. This is a big shortcoming in my opinion, since it means you can’t draft news articles or check your post analytics on the go.

That said, there are iOS and Android apps for employees. The app’s UI can be customized with your company’s branding. Plus, it appears as a distinct app under your company’s name in the app stores. So employees will download “Your Company App” instead of the Staffbase app, which I thought was impressive. 

Staffbase’s employee app includes many of the same features as the desktop-based employee intranet. It offers a company news feed, self-service HR tools, and messaging. 

I also found the app’s layout to be pretty intuitive, and it does a good job streamlining information rather than crowding your screen with news and posts.

Unlike the desktop version of Staffbase, the app doesn’t include email or Microsoft 365 integrations. In addition, employees can’t use the Staffbase app offline (without an internet connection), which could be problematic for teams working in the field.

Staffbase Core Functionalities

My demo with Staffbase focused on the intranet, employee app, and content publishing, so I’ve focused on those features.

Content planning and publishing

I was very impressed with Staffbase’s tools for planning and publishing content. Whereas a lot of internal communications tools assume that one person will own internal content, Staffbase recognizes that there’s often an entire team doing this work and offers tools to facilitate collaboration.

For example, an editorial calendar shows your entire team what’s been published recently and what content is planned for the future. It’s easy to reschedule content just by dragging and dropping it on the calendar. 

When it comes to collaborating, you can leave comments, tag colleagues, and even ask for approval within content drafts, so everyone is working with the same information. Staffbase also supports document versioning, which makes it easy to spot changes and revert to an earlier draft when needed. 

Unfortunately, Staffbase doesn’t appear to support co-editing for posts and news articles, which is perhaps one of its biggest gaps (though this feature is available for emails and newsletters).

Staffbase also offers a shared inbox for monitoring comments on your news articles and social posts. You can assign comments to individual team members or mark items as done, which is helpful for splitting up questions among your team members based on who has the most knowledge about a specific campaign or department. 

Staffbase also has its own built-in asset management system. You can store images and videos, organize your content into folders, and easily find media with search and filters. 

Employee news and social feed

The centerpiece of Staffbase’s intranet and employee app is the news and social feed. This is a combined feed that displays news articles published by your internal communications team along with social posts from employees.

The feed is personalized to each employee based on their location, role, what social communities they chose to follow, and what groups you add them to within Staffbase. For businesses, I prefer this approach to an algorithm-driven feed. It provides you with a stronger sense of control and ensures employees actually see the content you need them to. 

During the demo, Staffbase’s rep showed me that I could choose what groups to add each employee to and tailor which groups see what content. 

Staffbase also lets you control which communities are available to join. While employees can pick and choose communities, you still maintain overall control. The only shortcoming I found was that you can’t require post approval for moderation, which, in my view, is important in a work context. 

Employees can like, comment, and bookmark content within their feeds. Staffbase uses AI to translate content with a click, which is nice since it means employees from different countries can interact within social communities.

Another thing I liked about the feed is that you can see which employees have viewed which posts. You can send push notifications to employees who haven’t viewed a critical announcement and even require employees to e-sign that they’ve read a specific update.

Landing pages

Staffbase makes it easy to create landing pages for important content, like your employee handbook, frequently used SOPs, and more. Employees can bookmark these landing pages on their intranet dashboard, so each employee has quick access to the resources they use most.

While this isn’t groundbreaking, I think it’s important. It allows you to keep all the content and documentation your employees need in a single app. Plus, since employees need to go through the intranet or employee app to access this content, they’re more likely to encounter important news and updates in the feed while they’re there. This is a subtle but powerful way to keep employees engaged and in the loop.

I didn’t get to test out building a landing page, but users praised the ease of use and customizability of the page designer. However, one user noted that “loading times can occasionally be slow when handling a lot of media or documents.”

Employee journeys

One especially neat feature Staffbase offers is employee journeys. These are custom content workflows that deliver content to specific employee groups on a preset schedule. For example, you can use journeys to share one chapter of your onboarding guide each day with a new employee, or to send a series of announcements about a new company initiative.

I really like this feature because it allows you to automatically distribute personalized content. 

The only drawback is that there’s no way to set up custom triggers to activate journeys. A journey starts instantly when you click a button, or it can be scheduled to start at a specific time. That means you can’t automatically send messages to employees based on work milestones, such as an employee being with your company for one year, or based on engagement habits.

AI features

Staffbase offers a handful of AI features, including:

• An AI assistant for employees that can search content and answer questions.
• A Companion Editor that can draft news articles, social posts, and other content based on your prompts.
• AI-powered sentiment analysis of comments on news articles and social posts.
• An AI-generated daily podcast that’s personalized to each employee and rounds up the news and posts they need to know about.
• AI-powered content governance, including alerts about duplicate or conflicting information in your intranet.
• Automatic language translation and video captioning.

I appreciated that you can enable or disable any AI feature individually, so you’re in control of how AI operates within Staffbase. However, I noticed that Staffbase doesn’t mark content as AI-generated when using the Companion Editor or provide sources when answering questions with the AI assistant. Without these, employees may not think to double-check AI-generated information.

Email, SMS, and digital signage

My demo with Staffbase didn’t cover the platform’s email, SMS, and digital signage capabilities, but they’re worth mentioning. 

Staffbase offers its own drag-and-drop email builder for creating internal company newsletters. There are dozens of templates and you can segment employees to create custom distribution lists. The feature also supports co-editing, which is a plus. But one user noted that “the email builder can feel a bit too basic if you care about design flexibility or branded layouts.”

You can also communicate with employees via SMS messaging. There isn’t much to this feature. It basically allows you to send brief text announcements to all your employees or select groups. While it’s nice to have this capability in Staffbase, I think large businesses would benefit much more from a full-fledged internal chat app, similar to the one Connecteam includes. 

Finally, if you have digital signage or monitors throughout your facilities, you can program them using Staffbase. It’s easy to create custom slideshows that display localized content or instantly share important updates across all your company’s signage.

Integrations

Staffbase offers native integrations for popular enterprise software, including Microsoft SharePoint, Google Workspace, ServiceNow, Workday, SAP, and more. It also supports user provisioning tools like Okta and Microsoft Entra ID, making it easy to offer single sign-on. For custom integrations, Staffbase offers multiple ways to connect platforms, such as an API, webhooks, and Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Staffbase Security Features

I was impressed by the level of detail Staffbase shares about its security measures. The company is certified to the ISO 27001 and SOC 2 data security standards, which are widely considered to be the gold standards for enterprise cybersecurity. Staffbase is also compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure host all data, and you can choose whether your data is located in the US, Europe, or Australia. 

AI features are compliant with the EU AI Act, and your prompts and data are never shared.

Staffbase protects user accounts with multi-factor authentication and encrypts all communication between users’ devices and Staffbase servers. You can also use single sign-on to log into Staffbase.

You can control employees’ access to Staffbase with a wide range of user roles and permissions. For example, content creators can be limited to publishing content within specific social and news feeds. Editors can add and remove content for specific channels. There are additional permissions for editing intranet pages, accessing data analytics, and accessing administrative settings.

Staffbase Reporting & Analytics

I’m a huge fan of Staffbase’s analytics tools. The data Staffbase presents allows you to quickly see which content and channels are most effective at reaching employees.

Within the analytics dashboard, you can see data about the performance of every piece of content you publish, including news articles, social posts, and landing pages. Charts help you visualize engagement with your content over time, and there are tons of filters so you can break down your data by employee group, location, channel, and even whether employees are on their desktop or smartphone. 

Staffbase’s AI tool also lets you know whether the sentiment on your content is positive or negative.

You can export all this data to a CSV with a few clicks, making it easy to analyze your data with additional filters. In addition, Staffbase’s API makes it easy to share raw data with Microsoft Power BI or other analysis platforms.

One thing I especially liked is that Staffbase allows you to group content into campaigns so you can measure performance across multiple related posts. It’s easy to monitor your top-performing posts for each campaign and see which employees engaged with 2, 3, or more posts from the same campaign. You can also track which groups of employees interacted with your campaign most frequently.

I also loved how Staffbase tracks what keywords employees are searching for most often within the platform. This can help you quickly find out what topics employees want to know more about or what information could benefit from a dedicated landing page.

Staffbase Customer Support

The sales reps I interacted with during my demo were very friendly and answered all the questions I had about specific features.

Current customers can get in touch with Staffbase’s customer support team using an online support form only. There’s no live chat or phone support. I found this surprising considering that Staffbase caters to enterprise-scale companies that need to be able to address issues as quickly as possible. This also makes it harder to solve complicated issues since email can involve a lot of back-and-forth messages. 

On the bright side, I sent a few questions using the support form and got a response in around 4 hours.

Staffbase also has a very detailed online knowledge base that explains how to use many of the platform’s features and settings. A developer portal includes guides to Staffbase’s APIs along with tutorials for building custom widgets and personalizing the employee app. 

In addition, Staffbase has an online learning platform for communication staff called Staffbase Campus. This offers free courses to help your communication staff better communicate with your workforce. Team members can also demonstrate their skills to earn badges and certificates. Staffbase Campus is open to anyone and doesn’t require a paid Staffbase plan, and I think it’s worth checking out even if you decide Staffbase isn’t right for your company.

What Are Staffbase’s Review Ratings From Review Sites?

(As of June 2026)

Staffbase App Review

Overall, I think Staffbase is a very capable platform for companies looking to keep employees engaged through internal communications. With multiple channels, several collaboration tools, and AI translation, it’s best suited for enterprise-scale companies with employees distributed across regional or global locations. 

That said, you must have an internal communications team in order to use the platform effectively. This requirement, along with Staffbase’s pricing, makes Staffbase less ideal for most small and medium-sized businesses.

Connecteam: The Better Staffbase Alternative

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For small and medium-sized businesses, I think Connecteam is a better alternative to Staffbase. 

Connecteam is an all-in-one workforce management and employee communication platform that makes it easy to engage with your employees. A social-style updates feed enables you to instantly reach all your employees (or specific groups) with news and announcements. 

You can track which employees have seen which updates, send push notifications to ensure key messages are seen, and encourage engagement with likes, comments, photos, and videos.

Connecteam also has a built-in online team chat that lets employees communicate 1-on-1 or in groups. This is a key feature that I felt Staffbase was missing, since it makes it easier to stay in touch with your team throughout the workday.

You can segment chats by location, project, or department, moderate conversations to keep them on track, and even schedule messages so employees only receive communications during work hours.

Other key features in Connecteam include a company knowledge base, an employee directory, and an internal help desk so employees always have access to the people and resources they need. You can also schedule employee events, get feedback from employees through digital surveys, and recognize employees’ outstanding work with rewards.

Connecteam is built for distributed teams and, unlike Staffbase, all features for both admins and employees are available on mobile.

Even better, Connecteam is free for small businesses with up to 10 employees. Paid plans for larger businesses start at just $29 per month for up to 30 employees, plus $0.50 per month for each additional employee.

Try out Connecteam free for 14 days to see how it can help your business communicate.

Start now, it’s free!

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