Empuls: The best Glint alternative for holistic employee engagement

Choosing the right employee engagement platform is critical for building a connected, motivated, and high-performing workforce. If you're evaluating Glint or exploring its alternatives, this guide shows why Empuls might be the smarter choice — delivering recognition, rewards, surveys, intranet, and benefits in one unified experience. 

When it comes to building a truly engaged workforce, businesses need more than just surveys — they need action, celebration, and connection. While Glint delivers powerful people analytics and feedback tools, Empuls goes several steps further by unifying recognition, rewards, surveys, benefits, and a social intranet in one seamless platform. 

From AI-powered award creation and automated recognition nudges to milestone celebrations, tax-free benefits, and a global rewards marketplace, Empuls empowers organizations to foster a culture of appreciation, inclusion, and well-being — not just track sentiment. If you're looking for a Glint alternative that moves from insights to impact, Empuls is the all-in-one solution designed for today’s dynamic workplace. 

If you’re comparing Glint alternatives or evaluating Glint competitors, this guide will help you understand how Empuls stacks up and why it may be the better choice for holistic engagement. 

Deep dive: Empuls 

Empuls by Xoxoday is a unified employee engagement platform built to connect, align, recognize, and support employees across their lifecycle. It brings together everything an HR or people leader needs — from feedback to recognition and rewards — in one easy-to-use solution. 

Core modules

Core modules of Empuls are: 

• Recognition: Peer-to-peer, value-based, spot, jury, nomination-based, and milestone recognition. 
• Rewards: Automated workflows, structured reward cycles, and a global catalog of gift cards, experiences, merchandise, and more. 
• Surveys: eNPS, pulse, lifecycle, and 360° feedback surveys, fully customizable with real-time analytics. 
• Communication (social intranet): Central news feed, town halls, AMAs, wishboards, posts, polls, videos, and community groups. 
• Benefits and perks: Tax-saving and fringe benefits, salary advances, lifestyle spending accounts, and global discounts. 

Strengths in 

The strengths of Empuls lie in: 

• Lifecycle and 360° feedback surveys: Covers every stage from onboarding to exit, with anonymous, reliable, and actionable feedback. 
• Global reward catalog: 10M+ options across 100+ countries, including local brands, Amazon, experiences, and custom swag. 
• Intranet, community groups, employee directory: Drives connection with watercooler-style conversations, team groups, and an org-wide directory. 
• Gamified leaderboards, nudges, and memory books: Boost participation with contests, recognition stats, and celebratory features like yearbooks and wishboards. 
• Seamless integration: Connects effortlessly with Microsoft Teams, Slack, G Suite, HRMS, LMS, PMS, and other workplace tools. 

Empuls is designed to go beyond listening. It enables action through integrated modules that cover the full spectrum of engagement, making it ideal for small teams and large enterprises alike. 

See what our clients have to say: 

“Empuls helped us go from fragmented feedback to a fully connected culture of recognition. Engagement soared by 70% in 3 months.” 
— People Analytics Manager, Max Life

Deep dive: Glint 

Glint, now part of Microsoft Viva, is a survey-first platform focused on gathering employee feedback and providing people analytics. It's built to help organizations understand engagement drivers and take informed actions through manager insights. 

Core modules 

The core modules of Viva Glint are: 

• Employee engagement surveys: Pulse, eNPS, and lifecycle surveys with AI-based insights. 
• People analytics: Dashboards, sentiment trends, and predictive models for attrition and engagement. 
• Manager enablement: Personalized action plans, learning resources, and nudges based on survey results. 
• Integration with Viva and Teams: Embedded experience within Microsoft’s Viva Suite, tailored for the 365 ecosystems. 

Strengths in 

The strengths include: 

• AI-driven text analytics: Natural Language Processing (NLP) to detect sentiment, themes, and feedback trends from open-text survey responses. 
• Customizable surveys: Flexible templates and question libraries for various moments across the employee lifecycle. 
• Manager insights and action planning: Real-time team data and guided plans help managers respond effectively to feedback. 
• Enterprise-ready reporting: Scalable dashboards with filters by department, region, and role. 
• Native Microsoft integration: Deep alignment with Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 for in-the-flow engagement. 

Glint excels at capturing employee sentiment through smart surveys and turning that data into actionable insights, particularly for large enterprises already using Microsoft tools. 

Empuls vs Glint: Comparing key platform features 

Here's a side-by-side breakdown of Empuls and Glint to help you evaluate which platform better fits your engagement needs. Each section compares features within specific categories to bring clarity to your decision. 

Survey capabilities 

Both platforms offer survey functionalities, but Empuls goes deeper with lifecycle and pulse surveys enriched with AI-driven personalization and integrations beyond Microsoft. 

Survey customization & administration 

Empuls provides extensive customization, multilingual options, gamification, and automated nudges — empowering HR teams to drive participation and personalize the experience. 

Employee lifecycle surveys 

Empuls covers a wide range of lifecycle feedback checkpoints, while Glint offers limited templates focused on key touchpoints like onboarding and exit. 

Reporting & analytics 

Empuls offers a robust analytics engine with real-time dashboards, sentiment analysis, action planning, and customizable reports, whereas Glint focuses more on visual insights for survey responses. 

Enterprise capabilities 

Empuls is built to scale globally with multilingual, multi-currency, and multi-region support. Glint offers partial support for global teams but lacks deployment flexibility. 

Platform customization, professional services, data privacy & security 

Empuls meets the highest global compliance standards and offers deep customization and expert consultation, while Glint provides fewer publicly known credentials and options.

Recognition 

Empuls offers extensive recognition capabilities including public/private options, milestone celebrations, gamification, and automated programs — areas Glint does not cover. 

Rewards 

Empuls makes rewards seamless with global redemption options, QR-code flexibility for deskless teams, and gamified leaderboards. These are not part of Glint’s offering. 

Perks 

Empuls enables organizations to offer perks that enhance employee financial well-being with access to discounts, offers, and cashback — features absent in Glint. 

Benefits 

Empuls supports employee wellness with tax-free and flexible benefit administration. Glint does not offer a benefits module. 

Social intranet 

Empuls brings a social experience into the workplace with community features, live posts, wishboards, and digital signage — none of which are available in Glint.

AI capabilities 

Let’s talk about the AI capabilities of Empuls and Viva Glint. 

Modern work needs modern tools—Why Empuls out features Glint 

When evaluating employee engagement platforms, it's crucial to consider both cost-effectiveness and feature richness. Empuls stands out by offering a comprehensive suite of engagement tools under a transparent, flat-rate pricing model.  

For instance, the Basic plan is priced at $49 per month, which allows you to add an unlimited number of employees billed annually, and includes features such as employee gifting, events and festive gifting, bulk and automated gifting, birthday and long service awards, and HRIS & SSO integrations. 

In contrast, Glint, now part of Microsoft Viva, offers its services at $2 per user/month for the Viva Glint module, with additional features available in higher-tier plans like the Viva Suite at $12 per employee/month. However, these plans primarily focus on survey and feedback capabilities, lacking the broader range of engagement tools that Empuls provides. 

Empuls' all-in-one approach eliminates the need for multiple tools, offering peer-to-peer recognition, automated rewards, a global catalog with over 10 million options, AI-powered insights, sentiment analysis, milestone celebrations, and a built-in social intranet—all within a single platform.  

This consolidation not only simplifies the user experience but also ensures cost efficiency, making Empuls a more comprehensive and budget-friendly solution for organizations aiming to enhance employee engagement. 

For businesses seeking a platform that delivers extensive features without the complexity and cost of multiple subscriptions, Empuls offers a compelling alternative to Glint, providing greater value and a more holistic approach to employee engagement.