12 questions to ask when choosing intranet software

Choosing an intranet often turns into a feature-list comparison, and it ends in the wrong place: the product with the longest list wins, and six months later nobody uses it. What works is writing down your own answers before you watch a single demo. The twelve questions below give you a frame for that.

1–4: Scope and users

1. Who will actually use it? Only desk-based staff, or field and store teams too? If the answer is "everyone", mobile experience is not a secondary feature — it is the main criterion.

2. Which three jobs will you finish in the first three months? Distributing announcements, the leave process, document order? Rollouts that aim at more than three usually stall halfway.

3. How many locations and languages? A multilingual interface is one of the most expensive things to add later.

4. Who will run it? A company with no internal owner should not pick a product that requires the vendor for every change. We go into who should own what in our operations article.

5–8: Technical and security

5. Where does the data live and how are tenants separated? In a multi-tenant product, how is your company's data isolated from everyone else's? If the answer is "we filter it in the application code", be careful; isolation belongs in the database. We describe our approach on the security page.

6. How fine-grained are permissions? Can an announcement be shown to a single department, a document restricted to managers only?

7. How is identity handled? Is corporate SSO supported? Does employee data match your Entra ID or LDAP directory, or will it be maintained twice?

8. Are your data-protection obligations covered? Versioned privacy notices, data-subject requests and a record of employee-data processing — are they in the product, or a process you will have to build? Our compliance article opens up these topics.

9–12: Commercial and long term

9. What makes the price go up? Per user, per module, per gigabyte? When all three combine, budgeting becomes guesswork.

10. Do you pay for modules you don't use? A modular product should not charge for what is switched off.

11. How do you get your data back? When the contract ends, in what format are documents, announcements and the user list exported? Getting this in writing before you sign is far easier than negotiating it afterwards.

12. What is the total cost? Licence, setup, training, internal effort and integration work combined. We itemise them in our cost article.

How should you watch the demo?

Instead of following a prepared script, ask for your own scenario. For example: "Tomorrow morning I need to publish a pay-review announcement. It goes only to frontline staff, it requires acknowledgement, and I want to see who hasn't read it. Can you do that live?" A scenario that can't be answered in three minutes won't be easy after go-live either.

Give the same scenario to three vendors and the comparison moves off the feature list and into real use.

Keep the shortlist to three

The longer an evaluation runs, the later the project starts — not the better the decision gets. Trying three products deeply beats skimming five. Deeply means touching the product with your own data, not watching a presentation.

A practical method: load ten real people from one department into each shortlisted product, upload a policy document and publish an announcement. That half-day exercise surfaces a good share of what a three-month pilot would find, especially the differences in mobile use.

Write your answers to these twelve questions on a single page and send that same page to every vendor. Seeing different products answer identical questions side by side is a far more reliable basis for a decision than the impression left by three separate presentations.

The decision meeting should include the HR and internal-communications teams who will live with the tool daily, not just procurement and IT. A choice the users didn't object to reduces adoption risk from the start.

The scoring table

Weight your criteria and score them: mobile access, isolation, manageability and ease of exit deserve the highest weights in most companies. Visual polish and module count usually matter less than assumed — a module nobody switches on produces no value.

If you'd like to see where our own product sits against these criteria, the product page and pricing are a good start; get in touch with anything else.