Meta Workplace alternative: frustrated with Workplace closing? Here are the 10 features you need next

Now that the news about Meta sunsetting Workplace has settled, it’s time to evaluate your options.

We know that choosing a new employee experience platform might be daunting. That’s why we’ve prepared a list of 10 must-have features you should look for in a Workplace alternative. Get comfy, prepare to take some notes, and let’s dive in!

Many organizations relied on Workplace as their central hub for communication, collaboration, and community building. Replacing it is not just about finding a similar tool. It is about making sure your next platform actually supports how your employees work today, whether they are in the office, remote, or on the frontline. The right meta workplace alternative should help you keep employees informed, encourage participation, and reduce the communication overload many teams already face.

Note: If you already know what you need from your next platform, check our complete guide on the highest-rated Meta Workplace alternatives to choose from.

What is Workplace from Meta?

Workplace from Meta, also referred to as Meta Workplace, formerly Facebook Workplace, is a platform designed for business communication. It functions similarly to a social media network but is tailored for professional use, offering features like chat, live streaming, and internal news feeds.

The idea was simple: bring the familiar Facebook style experience into the workplace to make internal communication more engaging and accessible. Employees could join groups, comment on posts, react to updates, and participate in live video sessions with leadership. For many organizations, it became a central hub for announcements, team collaboration, and community building across departments and locations.

However, Workplace from Meta will be closed down and deleted on the 1st of June 2026, and companies have to migrate to another platform or download any existing data before the 31st of May 2026. For many communication teams, this means reassessing their internal tools and finding a reliable meta workplace alternative that can support company wide communication, employee engagement, and collaboration moving forward.

Why is Meta shutting down Workplace?

Meta is shutting down Workplace, its enterprise communications platform, citing a focus on building AI and metaverse technologies as the main reason. However, with chat as one of its main features, Workplace has also struggled to compete with tools that dominate workplace collaboration today, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.

As a result, many organizations that previously relied on Workplace now need to rethink how they connect employees, share updates, and foster collaboration. The challenge is not just replacing a tool but finding a platform that better supports modern internal communication needs, especially for hybrid teams and frontline employees.

10 features to look for in a Workplace alternative

With Workplace by Meta shutting down, many organizations are now reviewing tools that can replace it without disrupting internal communication. The good news is that several platforms offer similar capabilities while also addressing new needs such as better content targeting, analytics, and support for frontline employees. If you are evaluating a meta workplace alternative, it is worth looking beyond basic chat features and focusing on tools that help employees stay informed, connected, and engaged.

Below, we outline the key Workplace features you should consider when choosing a new platform.

1. Communities

As an enterprise social media network (ESN), Workplace is especially known for its social-media-like features, which allow large organizations to bring together employees from different locations and work modes in one digital home. One such feature is the ability to create communities.

Communities give employees a space to exchange ideas, share updates, and collaborate around projects, interests, or locations. In large organizations, they help break down silos between departments and make it easier for employees to find the information and colleagues they need. For distributed teams in particular, communities often become the place where everyday conversations happen.

Strong workplace connections still matter, but the bigger picture is engagement. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, highly engaged teams see 23% higher profitability and 17% higher productivity compared with disengaged teams. Yet only 23% of employees worldwide are engaged, making it essential for organizations to create spaces where employees can connect and collaborate.

When evaluating a meta workplace alternative, look for platforms that allow you to easily create communities for teams, projects, or shared interests while still keeping information organized and accessible.

For example, Rotkäppchen Mumm was able to increase interdepartmental and interregional collaboration through communities. According to one of their recent surveys, 80% of their employees log in to the Haiilo employee app a couple of times a day.

📚 Read how Rotkäppchen Mumm managed to increase collaboration and a sense of belonging

2. Personalized timeline

Another key feature you should look for in a Workplace alternative is the ability to provide all users with a personalized timeline.

Without personalization, employees often struggle to find relevant information among a constant stream of updates. Modern workplaces produce large volumes of communication, from leadership announcements to team updates and project discussions. A strong meta workplace alternative should therefore prioritize the content that matters most to each employee based on their role, location, department, or interests.

Information overload is a real productivity challenge. Research shows that knowledge workers spend more than 60% of their work time communicating and searching for information, leaving less time for focused tasks. Personalized timelines help cut through this noise by surfacing the updates that are actually relevant to each employee.

Large companies such as Johanniter have to regularly deal with these problems. Johanniter’s employees struggled with scattered information that led to both information overload and knowledge silos simultaneously. Having an old-fashioned static intranet didn’t help. Only a small portion of the workforce was using it, and local communication teams had to send out their own newsletters to fill in the gaps.

But since 2018, when Johanniter introduced Haiilo, they managed to solve these problems by providing their entire workforce with a personalized timeline, to which different departments and individuals can contribute. This ensures employees see the updates that matter to them first while still keeping company wide information accessible when needed.

💡 Read more about Johanniter’s success with a social intranet

When broken down into its core blocks, a personalized timeline is essentially a set of filters the platform applies to all the input content. Some of these filters might be up to an end user’s choice, such as the ability to subscribe to communities of your interest. Others, like the working language or the department, are set up during onboarding. When a combination of various filters is applied to all corporate content, the average employee ends up with only the most relevant information to their role.

Therefore, when looking for a Workplace alternative, you must consider the possibility of personalized timelines for all employees, regardless of their location, department, or preferred language.

📝 More on the topic: watch our webinar on-demand to get exclusive insights on the implications of Meta’s closure and the road ahead for Workplace customers.

3. Customization and white labeling

That’s probably the bright side of the Workplace sunset. Workplace did not fully support customization, which limited how organizations could adapt the platform to their brand and internal communication style. Moving to a new meta workplace alternative gives you the opportunity to choose a platform that reflects your company’s identity and communication needs more closely.

Your brand is one of your major assets, and your internal platform should reinforce it every day. Look for a provider that allows you to adjust the look and feel of your platform based on your brand guidelines. This includes elements such as colors, logos, typography, and navigation structure.

With strong white labeling options, you can adjust the entire visual appearance of your new platform, starting with a color palette and the interface name and ending with the number and placement of widgets displayed on the homepage. This not only strengthens brand consistency but also helps employees recognize the platform as part of their company’s digital workplace rather than as a generic external tool.

Customization can also improve usability. By adapting the layout and content modules to match how your organization communicates, employees can find updates, tools, and resources faster.

📝 More on the topic: How to Launch an Intranet: Step-by-Step Guide

4. Content creation and distribution

This one may sound obvious, but it is often where internal communication platforms fall short. A strong meta workplace alternative should make it easy for teams across the organization to create and share content, not just the communication department. When more employees can contribute updates, insights, and best practices, engagement naturally increases and knowledge spreads faster.

To support this, look for a platform that helps democratize content creation. That means intuitive editors, support for different media formats such as videos, images, and polls, and ideally AI assisted features that help employees draft posts or structure updates more quickly.

Just as important is how content is distributed. Modern internal communication requires multichannel capabilities so that updates can reach employees wherever they are. The right platform should allow you to push content to employees’ preferred communication channels, whether that is a mobile app, email notification, or intranet feed.

This ensures important messages reach frontline, remote, and office based employees alike while reducing the risk of critical information getting lost across scattered tools.

You might question the need for multichannel capabilities. After all, why would you push content to other channels if your goal is to get people to use this new alternative to Workplace?

The answer is simple: employees do not rely on just one communication tool during their workday. A strong meta workplace alternative should therefore meet employees where they already are. Some employees check email regularly, others rely on mobile apps, and frontline workers might only see updates through push notifications.

You can view it as a marketing omnichannel strategy. Your marketing department is probably running different campaigns on different channels, but their goal is to get people on the company’s website.

Your multichannel efforts should produce the same result. By reaching your audience across various channels, you can guide employees back to your central platform and encourage regular use of the new ESN. Over time, this helps establish the platform as the main place for company updates, collaboration, and discussion.

5. Employee profiles and directories

This feature is particularly beneficial for distributed and remote workplaces where employees rarely see each other, and as such, it serves a double function. 

On one hand, they help employees find coworkers with the right expertise faster, which boosts productivity. A study by the Harvard Business Review found that employees who used social tools at work were 31% more likely to find the right coworkers and 88% more likely to know who could put them in contact with the right person. 

Additionally, it improves a sense of belonging in the workplace. Employee directories help employees find colleagues from different locations and/or departments more easily, which fosters employee relationships and promotes a more connected work environment. Using directories, employees have better opportunities for building meaningful relationships with their peers.  

For instance, the mechanical and plant engineering group WINTERSTEIGER managed to bring together their 1200 employees across different modes of work and 30 locations to one digital home thanks to Haiilo’s solution.

6. Chat

Having a built-in chat saves employees a lot of time on switching between different apps and ensures the high adoption rates of your new social intranet. When employees can chat privately with each other or in a group on the employee experience platform, it fosters collaboration and productivity.

Some providers also offer voice messages as part of their chat feature. While voice messages are more of a nice-to-have, they can help increase the mobile workforce’s engagement with the solution.

7. Quantitative and qualitative analytics

To truly assess the value of your new provider, you need analytics that allow you to see the whole picture behind your initiatives. Basic metrics such as daily logins, reach, and content engagement are useful, but they only tell part of the story. A strong meta workplace alternative should help communication teams understand not just what employees click on, but how communication influences behavior, understanding, and sentiment.

To achieve this, look for platforms that combine quantitative and qualitative insights. Quantitative data might include metrics such as views, reactions, shares, or completion rates for content. Qualitative feedback, on the other hand, helps you understand how employees actually perceive the information they receive.

You want to go deeper and evaluate the performance of each communication campaign you run. Having impact analytics can help you understand which topics resonate with employees, which formats drive engagement, and where communication may need improvement.

Solutions like Haiilo allow you to add an employee listening campaign at the end of each content post so you can assess the impact of internal content on employee sentiment. You can simply add a scale question and ask employees how they feel about a recent update, or include a comments section for anonymous feedback. This allows communication teams to continuously improve their initiatives while giving employees a clear way to share their perspective.

Over time, these insights make it easier to demonstrate the value of internal communication and provide the evidence needed to inform leadership decisions.

Disclaimer: the image shows a prototype version of the product.

8. Live-streaming

If you want to go all in on consolidation, you might want to add live-streaming to the list. Having a live-streaming feature within your new employee experience solution will allow you to foster interactive communication and decrease digital fatigue from switching between different apps.

9. Integrations with the existing tech stack

According to Oslash, modern organizations use around 300 cloud applications. To put it in perspective, this is more than there are working days in a year. So even if your employees switch software every day, they won’t be able to go through all of them within one year.

With this number in mind, it’s no wonder that consolidation is one of the largest trends in workplace software and is predicted to dominate the market for the next couple of years.

Of course, even if your procurement team starts terminating contracts today, you’ll still be left with many different applications and information scattered across them. That’s where integrations come in handy. Even if you can’t influence the number of communication and collaboration tools the team uses, you can ensure that the new platform brings key information together in one place.

A strong meta workplace alternative should therefore integrate with the tools your employees already rely on every day. Instead of forcing employees to switch between multiple apps to find updates, documents, or conversations, integrations allow important information to flow directly into your central communication hub.

When looking into integrations, don’t overcomplicate it. Having native integrations with Microsoft 365 and or Google Workspace, combined with additional integrations through third party tools, is usually more than enough to connect your digital workplace ecosystem.

Vorkwerk has had a successful experience implementing a social intranet that already has native integration with Microsoft 365. Prior to starting their journey with Haiilo, they rolled out Microsoft across the entire organization. When Haiilo was added to the mix, its smooth integration with Microsoft and the clear processes set up by Vorkwerk’s communication team helped increase adoption and improve collaboration across teams. Today, Vorkwerk benefits from more effective internal communication and a stronger employee experience.

10. Accessibility

The best way to guarantee high adoption rates for the new Workplace alternative is to ensure your workforce loves the app and uses it regularly. That means it has to be accessible to ALL employees. In other words, when looking for a new ESN provider, you should prioritize solutions that have a mobile app on par with the browser version and are easy to use, especially for the end-user.

Is there a better alternative to Facebook Workplace?

If you’ve been using Workplace for a while, you’ve probably seen how strongly good communication and community building influence productivity and employee retention. As Workplace approaches its shutdown, many organizations are now looking for a meta workplace alternative that can continue supporting these outcomes without disrupting internal collaboration.

Choosing the right platform matters because internal communication tools shape how employees stay informed, connect with colleagues, and engage with company initiatives. A strong Workplace migration alternative should therefore combine social features, targeted communication, and analytics that help teams understand what works.

As this article shows, Haiilo is a well rounded ESN for larger organizations and can meet these requirements. Its personalized timeline and communities help employees quickly find relevant information while staying connected to the broader company mission. At the same time, quantitative and qualitative analytics provide valuable insights into both content performance and employee sentiment.

Finally, integrations with your existing tools ensure communication stays connected with the rest of your digital workplace instead of creating another isolated platform.

If you’re looking to empower your employees with content and communities, book a demo today!