Intranet for Internal Communication: How to Choose the Right Platform
What Is an Intranet for Internal Communication?
An internal communications intranet is the company-wide hub where employees access news, updates, knowledge, and shared resources.
It provides a single place for communications teams to publish announcements, foster conversation, deliver personalized content, and measure the impact of messages for employees.
Here are the primary functions of an internal comms intranet:
- Centralized Company News and Updates: Publish announcements, leadership messages, and critical communications in one trusted space.
- Two-Way Feedback: Enable comments, polls, surveys, and open discussion to create dialogue — not just distribution.
- Audience Targeting and Multilingual Delivery: Ensure the right people receive the right messages in their preferred language.
- Collaboration Spaces and Communities: Support team-based groups, interest communities, and cross-functional collaboration.
- Analytics and Acknowledgment Tracking: Measure reach, engagement, and confirmation rates to understand message performance.
Organizations using a modern intranet for internal comms achieve higher message acknowledgment rates and greater cultural alignment, thanks to consistent, targeted communication.
In addition to an internal comms intranet, organizations may also want to consider an intranet for HR and an intranet for IT.
What Should Be Included in an Internal Comms Intranet?
A strong internal comms intranet provides the essentials employees need to stay informed, engaged, and connected. Use this checklist to evaluate the key features your organization's intranet should include for internal communications.
- News and Announcements: A centralized space for company updates, leadership messages, crisis alerts, and team-specific announcements. This feed should be personalized based on role, department, or region, and support multilingual publishing.
- Targeted Communications: Content segmented by attributes like job function, location, business unit, language, or manager structure. Employees receive only the information relevant to them, reducing overload while increasing engagement and message clarity.
- Employee Directory and Org Charts: A searchable directory that includes profiles, skills, contact details, reporting lines, and team structures. This helps employees find subject-matter experts, navigate the organization, and accelerate onboarding.
- Communities and Forums: Dedicated spaces where teams, interest groups, and cross-functional communities can share updates, ask questions, and collaborate. This fosters two-way communication and builds a culture of transparency and connectedness.
- Recognition and Engagement Tools: Features such as peer shoutouts, employee badges, social feeds, reactions, and comments. These allow employees to participate, recognize one another, and strengthen company culture.
- Search and Knowledge Hub: An AI-powered search engine that surfaces documents, policies, FAQs, and resources instantly. This helps eliminate knowledge silos and reduces time spent hunting through outdated files or scattered tools.
- Analytics Dashboard: Real-time metrics that track views, reach, acknowledgment rates, sentiment, and content performance. These insights help internal comms teams refine messaging and demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of their communication.
- Mobile Access: A fully responsive, mobile-first experience that supports push notifications, easy navigation, and offline access. This keeps deskless or frontline workers who need information on the go in the loop.
- Integrations: Out-of-the-box integrations with human resources information systems (HRISs), Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, and Teams. Data remains accurate, workflows remain efficient, and employees can access everything they need from a single source of truth.
This streamlined feature set ensures messages land with the right people and employees have the context they need to do their best work. For more information, check out these intranet best practices and these internal communication best practices.
Internal Comms Intranet Examples
Modern intranets help organizations solve real business challenges, from engagement gaps to communication delays. Here are a few real case studies of brands that made a significant impact on their internal communications methods using LumApps.
- Food Retail Brand: The brand consolidated communication channels into a single hub, resulting in increased message acknowledgment metrics, a 176% increase in comments on internal posts, and a 107% increase in employee-generated posts.
- Global Automotive Brand: Leadership can now share critical updates and strategic initiatives across 17,000 locations, and employees have a connected hub that fosters collaboration.
- Global Media Company: The brand doubled access numbers compared to its previous intranet solution and saw a 30% increase in participants using training and information courses, driven by better information sharing.
Modern intranets prove that connection, not volume, drives effective internal communication. This connection ensures employees receive essential news and updates when it matters most.
Best Internal Comms Intranet Platforms
Choosing the right internal communications intranet requires balancing usability, governance, personalization, and integrations. This enables organizations to meet internal communications goals.
Below is a refreshed look at leading platforms, with LumApps clearly standing out as the most complete and enterprise-ready solution to improve internal communications at scale.
LumApps
LumApps provides a comprehensive internal communication intranet built for global enterprises that need advanced targeting, multilingual delivery, and robust analytics.
The platform offers AI-assisted content creation, intelligent personalization, and a mobile-first experience. Every employee receives relevant updates in their preferred channel and language.
LumApps also includes extensive audience segmentation, granular permissions, communities for two-way engagement, and real-time reporting. These features connect communication activity to measurable outcomes.
With native integrations across Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, HRISs, and leading identity and chat systems, LumApps delivers a fully unified, secure, and scalable communication hub.
For organizations that require a modern intranet to reach every employee anywhere, LumApps remains the clear leader.
Simpplr
Simpplr is a user-friendly intranet platform designed for mid-market communication teams that prioritize ease of use and fast deployment.
The tool focuses on intuitive navigation, governed templates, and streamlined content workflows. These features help teams launch quickly with minimal IT support.
Simpplr provides solid analytics, personalization options, and automated governance features that help maintain content quality over time.
While it delivers a clean, modern experience, its feature depth is lighter. This makes it best suited for organizations looking for simplicity rather than advanced customization or global complexity.
Workvivo
Workvivo centers its platform around culture-building and employee engagement. It offers a social feed-style interface that mirrors familiar consumer social apps. The platform also supports achievements to help build a positive company culture.
Backed by Zoom, Workvivo offers strong mobile capabilities and an approachable user experience (UX). However, it is not as feature-rich in content governance, targeting, or enterprise segmentation.
Because of this, Workvivo is ideal for organizations that want a social communication layer rather than a full-scale intranet anchored in structured content and analytics.
Staffbase
Staffbase delivers a mobile-forward intranet solution designed for organizations with large frontline or distributed workforces.
Its strengths include multilingual content delivery, offline mobile access, and a strong employee app. These help internal comms teams reach staff who aren’t regularly on laptops. Staffbase also offers templates, branded portals, and news distribution tools that simplify publishing.
While powerful on mobile, its desktop experience and analytics depth are not as extensive as some competitors. This makes it a strong option for frontline-heavy environments but less suited for complex enterprise communication strategies.
Unily
Unily is a customizable digital workplace platform built for large global organizations with complex communication and collaboration needs.
It offers flexible architecture, advanced reporting, and community-driven features that can be tailored to different regions, departments, or business units. Unily supports rich media, personalized dashboards, and integrations with major productivity suites.
However, the level of customization often requires more time, resources, and ongoing governance compared to out-of-the-box platforms.
It’s a powerful choice for enterprises that need deep flexibility. But, LumApps tends to offer similar capabilities with a more streamlined, scalable approach.
Why Internal Comms Teams Choose LumApps
More communications teams ultimately choose LumApps because it’s built specifically for global internal communication needs. It’s not just an add-on or generalized employee platform.
With LumApps, employees can access important information, targeted messaging, collaboration spaces, and org charts all in one place.
Here are just a few of the features that set LumApps apart from the competition:
- Personalized Delivery: With targeted content delivery across regions, roles, languages, and locations, employees receive news tailored to who they are and what they need.
- Two-Way Engagement: With access to communities, forums, surveys, shoutouts, and reactions, employees can contribute feedback, celebrate peers, and participate in culture-building moments.
- Measurement and ROI: With real-time analytics on reach, engagement, sentiment, and acknowledgment rates, comms leaders can see what’s working and where they need to adjust.
- Easy Collaboration: With easy, non-company-email-specific syncing across both Microsoft and Google, LumApps makes it easy for teams to collaborate.
- Direct Integration: With employee learning embedded directly into the intranet, LumApps integrates learning directly into the everyday digital workspace employees already use.
- Secure Video Hosting: With video hosting included in the intranet, organizations can use LumApps to safely store, manage, and distribute content without relying on third-party platforms.
- Unlimited Scalability: With no maximum number of employees or users, LumApps will grow with you.
- Recognized by Gartner: With the highest spot for “completeness of vision” on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Intranet Packages, you can trust that LumApps has anticipated every one of you and your team’s needs.
LumApps customers report higher message engagement within 3 months, demonstrating the platform’s impact on clarity, alignment, and communication effectiveness.
Schedule Your Personalized Demo Today
A modern intranet for internal communication gives your teams the clarity, visibility, and connection they need to succeed. It’s the foundation of an aligned, informed, and connected workforce.
More than ever, today’s hybrid organizations need more than simple news posting. They need targeted delivery, multilingual communication, powerful analytics, and a platform that brings employees together no matter where they work.
The right intranet improves clarity, strengthens culture, and ensures employees can quickly find the information they need to do their jobs effectively.
With the rise of hybrid and frontline workforces, companies that invest in a centralized, intelligent communication hub are better equipped to navigate change, maintain trust, and scale their culture.
Explore how LumApps supports global comms teams with advanced targeting, analytics, and employee engagement tools. Visit our intranet solutions for internal communication to find out more, or request a demo to see LumApps in action.
FAQs: Internal Communication Intranets
What Should Be Included in an Internal Comms Intranet?
Key features include personalized news feeds, targeted communications, employee directories, communities, analytics, and mobile access. Integrations with HR systems and productivity tools ensure information stays accurate and connected.
How Do You Measure Internal Comms Success?
Most teams track engagement metrics like content views, reach, acknowledgment rates, sentiment, dwell time, and participation in surveys or communities. Modern intranets provide dashboards that make these metrics easy to monitor and optimize.
What Is the Difference Between an Intranet and Other Tools?
Unlike chat apps or email, an intranet centralizes news, feedback, knowledge, and documentation in one place. It becomes the definitive source of truth for company-wide communication, reducing noise and improving alignment across teams.
This is especially important in today’s remote work landscapes, as well as organizations with global locations.
What Are Examples of Internal Comms Use Cases?
Internal communication intranets support a wide range of use cases that help organizations keep employees informed, aligned, and engaged. Some use cases of internal comms intranets include:
- Change management initiatives.
- Crisis communications during urgent situations.
- Leadership visibility for executives.
- Culture and engagement campaigns.
- Company-wide announcements.
- Employee onboarding.
- Global or multilingual campaigns.
Overall, a modern intranet brings structure, transparency, and consistency to every stage of the employee communication lifecycle.
As CPO, Kees is the driving force behind our product innovation, dedicated to creating a platform that is both intuitive and impactful. He brings twenty years of leadership experience across the digital technology landscape. His experience spans Product Strategy & Management, Professional Services, and Customer Success, having led these disciplines at leading global SaaS companies and consultancies.
