How much does employee engagement software cost, and is there a free or cheap option for small teams?

Engagement software costs $2 to $5 per employee per month as a single module, and roughly $8,000 to $30,000 a year as a full platform that quotes rather than publishes. Microsoft lists Viva Glint at $2.00 per user per month on an annual commitment, and Lattice lists Engagement at $4 per seat per month.[4][3] Culture Amp publishes no rate and states that pricing depends on employee count, product, and service tier with everything billed annually, and Qualtrics prices People Engage on employee count without publishing figures either.[1][2] For quote only vendors the closest substitute for a list price is completed contract data: Vendr records a median annual Culture Amp deal of $21,800 across 503 purchases, ranging from $7,798 to $58,068, last updated February 2026.[5]

Three structural details decide which side of that gap you land on.

The annual minimum usually beats the seat rate

Lattice states that the minimum annual agreement is $4,000, so a 25 person company buying Engagement at $4 per seat pays $4,000 instead of the $1,200 the seat arithmetic implies.[3] Vendors that quote behave the same way without publishing it, because a sales cycle creates a floor below which a deal is not worth signing.

Engagement is sold as a module, not as a product

Microsoft sells Viva Glint standalone at $2.00 per user per month, inside a $6.00 Workplace Analytics and Employee Feedback plan that adds Viva Insights and Viva Pulse, or inside the $12.00 Viva Suite.[4] Lattice prices Engagement apart from Performance, and Culture Amp splits its catalog into Engage, Perform, and an optional Develop add on.[3][1] Two quotes become comparable only once you know which modules each one includes.

Headcount decides which vendors will sell to you

Culture Amp segments customers into organizations under 200 employees, 200 to 999, and 1,000 or more, with service tiers that differ across those bands.[1] Under about 50 employees several well known platforms are priced at a minimum that costs more than the problem, which is why the free routes below are a serious answer.

Four pricing models are in circulation, and a small team is usually exposed to all of them at once: a per employee rate, a per response meter, an annual minimum, and a reward budget outside the subscription.

Per employee per month, billed annually

The standard model charges for every employee in the directory rather than for the people who answer. Viva Glint at $2.00 per user per month and Lattice Engagement at $4 per seat per month both require an annual commitment.[4][3] Culture Amp states that all of its products are billed annually.[1]

Per response, which is how general survey tools meter

Survey platforms charge for volume instead of for people. SurveyMonkey's free Basic plan allows unlimited surveys and questions but shows only 25 responses per survey, Team Advantage runs $30 per user per month annually with a three user minimum and 50,000 responses a year, and responses past an allowance cost $0.15 each.[7] At 40 people running one quarterly survey, volume rarely binds; at 400 people running monthly pulses, volume becomes the whole bill.

Annual minimums and seat floors

Minimums are what make small deployments expensive per head. Lattice publishes a $4,000 minimum annual agreement.[3] SurveyMonkey team plans start at three users and its Enterprise tier at five, so a two person people team pays for spare seats.[7] Polly sells its Team plan at $249 a month for five users billed annually.[8] None of those floors shrink as your headcount does.

Reward budgets sit outside the subscription

Recognition products bill the platform and the rewards on separate lines. Bonusly charges $3 per user per month for its Team plan and states that reward spending is separate from subscription costs.[9] A $10 monthly allowance across 60 people comes to $7,200 a year on top of a $2,160 subscription, so reading only the software line understates the program by more than four times.

The forms tool inside the suite you already pay for

Microsoft Forms is included across the Microsoft 365 business plans, starting with Business Basic at $7.00 per user per month annually.[10] Google Forms appears as the survey builder in the paid Google Workspace plans, starting at $7.00 per user per month.[11] Incremental cash cost is zero. Budget four to six hours to build and pilot the first questionnaire, then four to eight hours per cycle to clean responses and read comments, since none of that is automated.

A free tier of a general survey tool

SurveyMonkey's Basic plan allows unlimited surveys and questions but shows only 25 responses per survey, which fits a team of 25 exactly once.[7] Formbricks gives 250 responses a month free with full API access.[12] These tiers add branching logic and automatic charts that a spreadsheet lacks, in exchange for a ceiling you meet the first time you survey twice in one month.

A pulse app that lives in Slack or Teams

Polly runs surveys inside chat, with a free plan covering 25 responses a month and 45 days of history, Basic at $19 a month for 500 responses, and Pro at $29 a month for 1,000 responses, three creator licenses, and anonymity options.[8] Response rates tend to run higher in chat because nobody has to open a separate tool, though anonymity sits on the $29 tier, which matters when unattributed answers are the point.

The module bundled into software you already buy

A Microsoft tenant can add Viva Glint at $2.00 per user per month instead of buying a separate platform, and Viva Pulse arrives in the same $6.00 plan.[4] A company already running Lattice can add Engagement at $4 per seat per month, subject to the $4,000 annual minimum on the account.[3] Many HRIS products include an eNPS question set in their upper tiers, so audit existing contracts first.

Open source and self hosted

Formbricks publishes a self hosting path alongside its cloud plans, so license cost is zero and running cost becomes hosting plus administration time.[12] Self hosting also keeps responses on infrastructure you control, which usually shortens a security review, though upgrades and backups become internal work.

A recognition tool's free tier

Bonusly is free for up to eight users and $3 per user per month on its Team plan, with rewards billed separately.[9] An independent review updated June 26, 2026 also lists Pebb as free with a $4 per user per month tier.[6] Recognition activity is a weaker signal than a survey, since participation is voluntary and skews toward people already engaged.

25 employees

The free route costs nothing beyond the $7.00 per user per month suite you already hold, and either Polly's free plan or SurveyMonkey Basic covers a quarterly pulse at this size.[10][11][8][7] The cheapest paid module is Viva Glint at roughly $600 a year.[4] Lattice Engagement calculates to $1,200 but bills $4,000 because of the minimum, about $13.33 per employee per month.[3]

60 employees

Viva Glint runs about $1,440 a year, and Lattice Engagement calculates to $2,880 while still billing at the $4,000 minimum.[4][3] SurveyMonkey Team Advantage at its three seat minimum is $1,080 a year no matter how many people you survey.[7] The low end of recorded Culture Amp contracts is $7,798 and WorkTango runs about $8,000, so a dedicated platform lands near five times the cost of a module.[5][6]

200 employees

Viva Glint runs about $4,800 a year and the full Viva Suite about $28,800.[4] Lattice Engagement is about $9,600, clear of the minimum.[3] Culture Amp's median recorded contract is $21,800.[5] This is where a platform earns its price, because cutting results by team for twenty managers every quarter costs more analyst time than the software costs money.[14][13]

Four capabilities stay out of reach on a free stack, and each is a legitimate reason to pay.

Benchmark your scores against outside data

Culture Amp reports more than 8,900 organizations surveyed, 74.15 million surveys completed, and 1.61 billion questions answered, and it sells benchmarks cut by industry, region, and company size.[14] A favorable score of 72 percent means very little without a comparison set.

Guarantee anonymity at small headcounts

Paid platforms enforce a reporting group minimum and add protection against indirect identification. Culture Amp documents three settings for this, from no protection to a strong setting that hides the next smallest group when a filtered group falls below the minimum, with examples run at a minimum of five responses.[13] A form with a required department field and six people in finance identifies individuals by inference.

Keep item level history over years

Polly's free plan retains 45 days of results history, and SurveyMonkey's free plan shows only 25 responses per survey, so your longitudinal record is whatever somebody remembered to export.[8][7] Engagement work depends on trend lines across four to eight quarters, and one missed export breaks the series.

Route results and suggested actions to managers

Paid platforms give each manager a private view of their own team plus prompts for what to do next. On a free stack, one person assembles every manager report by hand, which is workable at three managers and unworkable at twenty.

Six line items sit outside the per employee rate and tend to surface after a contract is signed.

• The annual minimum. Lattice's $4,000 floor is the real price for any company under about 83 seats at the $4 Engagement rate.[3]
• Seat minimums. SurveyMonkey team plans start at three users and Enterprise at five, so a two person people team pays for unused seats.[7]
• Response overage. SurveyMonkey charges $0.15 for each response past a plan allowance.[7]
• Reward funding. Bonusly separates reward spending from subscription cost, and the allowance is normally the larger figure.[9]
• Module creep. Engagement, analytics, and performance are priced apart at Microsoft, Lattice, and Culture Amp, so a cheap looking quote may cover one capability you assumed was included.[4][3][1]
• The opening quote. Vendr records average savings near 13 percent on Culture Amp deals across 503 purchases, so the first number from a quote only vendor is a starting position.[5]

One cost never appears on an invoice: the hours a person spends running the program. Eight to twelve hours per survey cycle, at any realistic loaded rate, frequently exceeds the annual cost of a $2 per user per month module.