Introduction
This report is part of a series of employee monitoring and productivity software comparisons designed for the business owner, compliance officer or HR Manager who is looking for software systems to deal with Insider Threats and measure employee productivity. The questions our audience are asking include:
- How can I easily monitor my employee’s phones and computers without needing technical help?
- How can I prevent sensitive data company data leaving the office?
- How can I see which employees are productive and which aren’t?
- How can I measure employee attendance and absences?
- How can I do this without a huge investment in hardware and training
It is written by KnowIT technical staff from the perspective of Digital Endpoint.
Summary
When comparing these two products it is a little unfair. One is a complete employee productivity monitoring suite with a full set of monitoring features, KnowIT, whilst one is only a productivity and monitoring package.
Feature Comparison
Both of these products advertise that their key aim is to monitor employee productivity and attendance. Unfortunately this is not the actual case. As you can see below in the feature comparison it is only KnowIT that truly monitors employee productivity effectively.
KnowIT is the industry leader in employee monitoring software for both computers and mobile devices and it focuses specifically on productivity and attendance monitoring as its core features.
| Feature | Workpuls | KnowIT |
|---|---|---|
| Instant Messengers | ✓ | |
| AIM | ✓ | |
| Hangouts | ✓ | |
| iMessage | ✓ | |
| LINE | ✓ | |
| ✓ | ||
| Skype | ✓ | |
| Trillian | ✓ | |
| Viber | ✓ | |
| ✓ | ||
| Yahoo Messenger | ✓ | |
| Websites Visited | ✓ | ✓ |
| Chrome | ✓ | ✓ |
| Firefox | ✓ | ✓ |
| Internet Explorer | ✓ | ✓ |
| Browser Search Terms | ✓ | |
| ✓ | ||
| Yahoo | ✓ | |
| Bing | ✓ | |
| Ask | ✓ | |
| Dogpile | ✓ | |
| Duck Duck Go | ✓ | |
| Yippy | ✓ | |
| Webopedia | ✓ | |
| The Internet Archive | ✓ | |
| Mahalo | ✓ | |
| Baidu | ✓ | |
| AOL | ✓ | |
| Nate | ✓ | |
| Naver | ✓ | |
| Daum | ✓ | |
| Zum | ✓ | |
| Webmail | ✓ | |
| Gmail | ✓ | |
| Yahoo! | ✓ | |
| Outlook | ✓ | |
| Screenshots Capturing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Requested screenshots | ✓ | |
| Scheduled screenshots | ✓ | ✓ |
| File Transfer Tracking | ✓ | |
| USB File transfer tracking | ✓ | |
| Web File transfer tracking | ✓ | |
| Cloud file transfer tracking | ✓ | |
| File Activity Tracking | ✓ | |
| Files created | ✓ | |
| Files copied | ✓ | |
| Files moved | ✓ | |
| Files deleted | ✓ | |
| Files modified | ✓ | |
| Application Tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Application usage | ✓ | ✓ |
| Installed applications | ✓ | |
| User Log On Tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Log on/ log off | ✓ | ✓ |
| Lock/unlock screen | ✓ | |
| Global Application Discovery | ✓ | |
| Network Connections Tracking | ✓ | |
| Network Traffic Tracking | ✓ | |
| Print Tracking | ✓ | |
| Keystroke Recording | ✓ | |
| Clipboard Tracking | ✓ |
As you can see from the table above, KnowIT provides far more employee monitoring features than Workpuls.
Workpuls gives you a small set of employee monitoring features that are not entirely useful and cannot be used to really answer key business questions about an employee productivity in the workplace. For example, with Workpuls, there is no way to see what an employee that is deemed as productive actually spends their time doing. This is because productivity is mapped to a monetary value and explains why employees have to have tasks and projects set up to monitor their productivity.
With KnowIT it is different. You can immediately see that the features themselves are geared towards employee productivity. The ability to set productivity groups and get an overall employee productivity score for each employee means you get a powerful at-a-glance look at employee productivity across your entire company without having to waste hours sifting through captured data to find events of interest like you do with Workpuls.
This is something we discuss further in the sections below.
Productivity
Both of these products allow you to create productivity groups and set applications or websites according to whether they are productive or not. But they both measure or define what productivity is differently. To Workpuls productivity is defined as how much money they employee costs the company based on what work they perform. This is why employee productivity is tied to each employee having a project and tasks lists set up for them. If they do not then productivity is not measured properly, even if you do take the time to set up the correct productivity groups and productivity settings for the applications and websites that they use at work.
We say that productivity is not measured correctly by Workpuls because their keyboard and mouse activity is also used to define if they are productive. This is the same as products like Teramind. They more they use their keyboard and mouse then the more productive Workpuls sets them as. This is not entirely accurate and that may be why KnowIT takes a different approach to measuring productivity. Sure, you can set up productivity groups for applications and websites and set their productivity level, same as Workpuls, but to KnowIT the more time they spend inside productive or unproductive applications or websites is what defines employee productivity which is a more realistic way of measuring overall employee productivity.
With KnowIT there is no need for projects and tasks to be set up in order to measure employee activity and it is not based on keyboard and mouse usage either. Because KnowIT measures productivity in a way more like a real company would it allows KnowIT to provide an easy to understand and normalized productivity score for each employee. The higher the percentage score the more time they have spent inside application or websites that are deemed productive for their particular job role or department. This overall score is easy to understand for anyone inside the organization and doesn’t require having to drill in to the captured employee data to find out more information.
Attendance
Attendance monitoring is a key feature of any employee monitoring software and again, as with productivity, both Workpuls and KnowIT say that this is one of their core features. Again, both applications approach and define this differently. For Workpuls employee attendance tracking is at its most basic. It only covers when they lock or unlock their screen during employee working hours that are set before you create the Workpuls installer. KnowIT also allows you to set an employee work time but it also allows you to set a company work time too, with the employee work time overriding the company one if you have staff who work nights for example. Immediately then KnowIT offers you more flexibility when it comes to accurate attendance monitoring.
KnowIT also captures when the employees locks or unlocks their screen, along with log on and log off times, which Workpuls doesn’t do. Both also allow you to set break time for employees which is taken in to account when tracking the overall attendance. Both products give you an easy to understand attendance score that is a percentage value and both allow you to see when an employee has worked extra hours more than the company or employee work schedule or hasn’t worked enough hours. The major difference here is how easy it is to set this all up.
For Workpuls it is set up right at the start and those settings are baked in to the installer you then install on the employee’s machine to start monitoring. That means if you make a mistake or the employee’s work hours change you have to uninstall and reinstall the software by creating a new installer and then using the updated one to use the latest attendance settings. This is not ideal for any company. Even though Workpuls states that these options can be changed later we could not find a way to do so.
KnowIT on the other hand keeps things much simpler. Employee work time or company work time, as well as break times, can be easily changed from inside the online portal at any time.
Reporting
KnowIT provides a daily productivity report and attendance report that is emailed to the manager and optionally the employee. Workpuls has neither of these features which makes KnowIT immediately easier to use. There is no need to have to constantly log in to the online portal to see what an employee is up to the same way that you have to do with Workpuls.
Workpuls doesn’t offer any form of employee reporting.
Other Features
When it comes to real employee monitoring features this is where Workpuls falls short. It has no features to let employers see what employee’s search for when they browse the internet. There are no key logs captured, nor any IM’s. Files transferred or file activity is also not captured. That means that employees can potentially install viruses on their machine or send company sensitive data to a friend on a USB stick and Workpuls wouldn’t be able to alert you. Luckily though KnowIT has all these features as well as built in automated reporting so that managers are immediately notified through email any time an employee uses a prohibited website or application or an unknown application is installed.
Furthermore with KnowIT’s alerts system you can set up alerts for individual employees or departments whenever events of interest happen that you want to monitor. For example, you can set to be alerted whenever staff in your support department browse Facebook or other unproductive sites. This ties in with how productivity is a key feature of KnowIT and this is something that Workpuls doesn’t allow.
Conclusion
KnowIT is immediately the better employee monitoring software because of how it defines both productivity and attendance. If all you want is to know how much your employee’s cost you then Workplus can do the job easily enough for you. But if you really want to get to the nuts and bolts of employee productivity and attendance it doesn’t compare to what KnowIT offers. KnowIT is a fully-fledged employee productivity and attendance monitoring package that really does give you powerful insights into your employee’s behavior in the workplace. KnowIT also contains a full range of employee monitoring features, but it does not currently have a free option, and at 19.99 per month, is significantly more expensive.