10 best desk booking alternatives to connect and engage employees

The emergence of the hybrid era is undeniable. It has revolutionized workstyles all over the world, and led us to completely rethink our work models - which means more work to figure it all out.

This profound upheaval had two main consequences for the work environment:

  • First, it brought HR and Workplace teams new issues and challenges related to culture, flexibility, connectivity and the social aspect of work.
  • Then, we experienced a multiplication of the number of tools and software that companies, HR teams and their employees use to navigate these new work models. Especially when it comes to switching to remote-first or hybrid work.

Among the most-used solutions - and even before the pandemic - are desk booking softwares. We can find dozens of different desk-booking tools, used by millions of employees across the world on a daily basis.

But here's the problem:

According to the most recent studies and examples from Future of Work leading companies, booking an office or a room no longer seems to be the top priority for companies with a hybrid work model. What is? Reinforcing team cohesion, feelings of belonging, culture, or even offering a more flexible work environment are among the most cited by these studies. 


The new challenges and problems brought by this transition to the hybrid way of working lead us to wonder whether desk booking solutions are still the best suited to help modern organizations thrive.

Thus, many companies have been gradually looking to offload their desk booking softwares to meet their new needs - and good news is, there are many solutions!

Here’s our 10 best desk booking alternatives for a hybrid work model: 

All-in-one softwares for your Hybrid Work model

Café

Used for: Social & Culture, Office and Schedule Management, Space Booking, Analytics

Available on: Web App, IOS, Android, Slack, Microsoft Teams 

Café offers new ways to schedule real-life interactions across teams to improve serendipity and connectivity in your organization.
Café connects people across the organization in three ways: by getting to know each other’s hobbies, encouraging in-person meetups, and organizing events.

Best features:

- Slack & Microsoft Teams integration: set locations, view teammates' statuses based on calendars (meetings, office hours, birthdays) and see where team and work besties are working from.
- Get detailed office & event analytics to build the best hybrid strategy
- Create and customize your profile with interests to let people know who you are
- Create and manage events, celebrating birthdays, work anniversaries and welcoming new hires

Hybrid companies using Café:
Veepee, Chick-Fil-A, Wise, Amadeus

Pricing and reviews: 

  • G2: 5/5
  • Free plan: YES
  • Premium plan: from $5 per user/month

Pult

Best for: Desk and Room booking, Guest Management, Shared Schedules 

Available on: Web App, Slack, Microsoft Teams 

Between traditional desk-booking and hybrid management tools, Pult is one of the few solutions offering desk and room booking, hybrid scheduling as well as guest management. As most of the modern hybrid platforms, Pult can be easily plugged in and used with Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Best features:

- Office insights, analytics and predictions
- Integration with Personio
- Guest Management
- Desk and room booking
- Workplace planner and shared calendar 

Hybrid companies using Café:

HeyCar, Chrono24, Penta, Pawlik

Pricing and reviews: 

  • G2: 4,5/5
  • Free plan: NO
  • Premium plan: from $1.40 per user/month

"The answer to "who's where?": Work statuses and shared calendars

Scoop 

Best for: Shared Schedules, Random Coffee, Slack Users, Analytics

Available on: Web App, Slack

Scoop is the hybrid schedule built in Slack, allowing users to easily find out who's coming to the office. Scoop is a perfect alternative if you're looking for a basic tool to choose the best day to come to the office, meet your teammates and engage employees. Scoop also gives detailed analytics to track office attendance. 

Best features:

- Weekly or daily summary of who is coming to the office
- Set status in Slack to let people know where you work from
- Sync with your Google Calendar and see your upcoming meetings
- Plan in-person meetings and rituals when you come to the office

Pricing and reviews: 

  • G2: 4,5/5
  • Free plan: YES
  • Premium plan: from $6 per user/month

Officely

Best for: Desk booking, Slack Users, Analytics

Available on: Web App, Slack

If you're looking to replace your old desk-booking with a solution that fully (and only) integrates with Slack, Officely may be the best alternative! 
Once you connect the Officely app with your Slack workspace, your team will be able to book a desk and see who's coming to the office in a dedicated Slack Channel.
Additionally, Officely also offers detailed analytics to track office attendance and occupancy rate.

Best features:

- Book rooms and desk from Slack
- See who's coming in the Office and get visibility over
- Customize your booking options: parking, bike racks…
- Find events and announcements 
- Get insights and analytics from office usage  

Pricing and reviews: 

  • G2: 4,5/5
  • Free plan: YES
  • Premium plan: $2.50 per user/month

Best for virtual Workplace or virtual events

Time spent working from home or remotely has increased very sharply in the past 3 years. And this sudden change increased the feeling of isolation and loneliness for many employees.

On the other hand, many companies have switched from a full-office to a virtual or remote-first model. Either way, desk-booking tools are no longer meeting all the needs of these companies, and virtual work software has turned into an interesting alternative. 

Gather

Best for: Remote Work, Event Management & Social, Virtual Meetings 

Available on: Web App

Gather allows remote-first and virtual companies to re-create their workspace in a fully virtual environment, including the social interactions and the serendipity of being at the office. 

It also helps teams to better collaborate while working remotely with integrated tools and widgets.


To summarize, platforms like Gather are reducing the limits between social, productivity, and workplace management tools, removing lots of friction caused by full-remote working. 

Best features:

- Integrated tools to improve collaboration and cohesion (whiteboards, documents, games, etc.)
- Fully customizable space: choose a template, decorate your desks, or create a fully custom environment
- Host 1:1 or team meetings and link your space to your Google Calendar
- Create social events from a variety of  social activities 

Hybrid companies using Gather:

Y Combinator, Notion, Yelp, Amplitude

Pricing and reviews: 

  • G2: 5/5
  • Free plan: YES
  • Premium plan: $7 per user/month

Sowork

Best for: Remote Work, Event Management & Social

Available on: Mac, Windows 

If you're enticed by the idea of creating a virtual version of your office, but mainly to help your employees to socialize, SoWork may be the solution you need. 


Working in a hybrid environment doesn't imply that all the employees can easily meet and connect IRL - they may need somewhere else, other than the office. SoWork is a very gamified platform, built for a social purpose: to strengthen your company culture by connecting people with events.

Best features:

- Create and personalize your offices and room - including decoration!
- Create and host office events in SoWork, from 20min to 24h
- Browse and customize activities to find the perfect event for your team 

Hybrid companies using SoWork:

Microsoft, Tinder, Pernod Ricard, Harvard Business School

Pricing and reviews: 

  • G2: –
  • Free plan: YES
  • Premium plan: $8 per user/month, 3$/user for office events 

Best for Workplace management

Switching to a hybrid model and a hybrid tool doesn't mean you no longer have to manage your workspaces. Some things remain essential to keep your places and people safe and organized, such as employee check-in or guest management. If you're looking for a robust solution to better manage your workspaces, here are a couple of suggestions:

Swipedon 

Best for: Guest Management, Office Management, Security & Compliance

Available on: WebApp, Mobile App 

Swipedon is a platform that centralizes and organizes your workplace, making it friction-free for your employees to join. It offers plenty of possibilities for employees, guests, contractor management, as well as room and desk booking.
But what makes Swipedon different from most of the desk booking solutions is its ease of use, the visibility it gives to workplace managers and above all - the platform has been designed to prioritize the safety and health of its users. 

Best features:

- Self check-in and manage your guest from Apple and Android devices or no device with a QR-only option
- Create custom sign in flows to manage contractors
- Security and privacy options to ensure users health and safety
- Recreate your floor plan, configure desks and booking options

Hybrid companies using Swipedon:

KrispyKreme, Asics, CAT, Mitsubishi Motors 

Pricing and reviews: 

  • Workplace management: From $29/month (single location)
  • Desk booking: $6 per office/month

GetNSpace 

Best for: Desk Boooking, Analytics, Guest Management.

Available on: WebApp, Mobile App 

Getnspace is a simple and modern software, built to offer hybrid employee visibility over people, places and schedules when it comes to joining the office.
As with most desk-booking, Getnspace allows you to upload a very detailed floor plan to book desk and meeting rooms, but also displays a visit planner to let people know who's coming to the office. 

On top of that, Getnspace offers workplace managers and administrators detailed workplace analytics, as well as guest management.

Best features:

- Intuitive desk-booking
- Visit planer to see who's at the office
- Detailed workplace analytics
- Analytics API to Customize analytics dashboards

Hybrid companies using Getnspace:

United Way, Baylis Medical, Second Harvest

Pricing and reviews: 

  • Desk booking: From $3 per desk(or $15 per room)/month
  • Guest management: From $80 per location/month 

Make your office social: Event and Social softwares 

The most valuable learning that every company or employee got from the post pandemic and return to office period: people tend to feel isolated if there isn't intentional room for connection. This social environment is vital for the well-being of the employee, the cohesion as well as the feeling of belonging to a company.

Going hybrid or remote-first is such an important challenge - and a risk, for companies that don't manage to keep a high level of social interaction. If you're in this situation, here are a couple of options: 

Epoch

Best for: Event management, Internal communication, Feedback & NPS

Available on: WebApp

Epoch is an all-in-one employee experience platform, built to help office managers and HR teams to engage, entertain and connect their employees while strengthening the company culture. The platform allows you to create, manage and promote events, learning programs and internal initiatives from one place. Epoch integrates with every-day tools to automate announcements via Slack, calendars or email. On top of that, Epoch gives you the possibility to track engagement, participation, and feedback with reporting and analytics from your events and communications.

Best features:

- Streamline and schedule all your communications
- Integration with everyday tools (chats, calendars, meetings…)
- Detailed analytics to track engagement, participation, and feedbacks

Hybrid companies using Epoch:

Instacart, Reddit, Asana, Unity

Pricing and reviews: 

  • Free plan: NO
  • Reviews: – 

Donut 

Best for: Random Coffee, Celebrations, Slack Users

Available on: WebApp, Slack App

If you're looking to bring more fun and connectivity across your organization, Donut may be for you.This Slack app, designed for remote and remote-first teams, helps people to connect and build internal networks across the organization. Donut allows you to use Slack to celebrate birthdays and new hires, connect people from different teams or share news and fun. Last but not least, Donut also improves collaboration and internal communication by encouraging you to design mentorship and peer-to-peer review programs.

Best features:

- Virtual water cooler Slack channel
- Integration with Zoom to ice break your meetings
- Random matching to build internal network
- Mentorship program to strengthen culture and cohesion
- Automated birthday and new hire alerts


Hybrid companies using Donut:

Slack, Netflix, Okta, Buffer

Pricing and reviews: 

  • G2: 4.5
  • Free plan: YES
  • Premium plan: From $59/month 

Book your space from Slack

Hot desk 

Best for: Desk and Room booking, Shared Schedule, Slack Users  

Available on: Slack

Hot Desk is building the most simplified hybrid tool, making it easy for people to book spaces and meet at the office directly from the Slack App and in a single click. Hot Desk also gives you access to a shared calendar to see who's coming to the office.  

Best features:

- See who's coming at the office today
- Book a room directly from Slack
- Browse spaces, get capacity and equipment information
- Display your meetings and booking in Slack

Pricing and reviews: 

  • Free plan: YES
  • Premium plan: from $2.15 per user/month

Buka

Best for: Desk and Room booking, Analytics, Slack Users  

Available on: Webapp, Slack

Buka is also one of the simplest and most convenient tools to use if you're looking for a new desk-booking solution that integrates with Slack.
Use Buka dedicated channels to book a desk or a room, see who's coming to the office today and access your analytics dashboard. 

Best features:

- Book a room directly from Slack
- Office and rooms shared schedule
- Browse spaces, get capacity and equipment information
- Office analytics 

Pricing and reviews: 

  • Free plan: YES
  • Premium plan: from $1 per user/month

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Timothée Bourcier

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