In a hybrid work setting, business leaders and office managers must understand how employees engage with office space. It’s critical to staffing correctly, working productively, and utilizing real estate and other workplace resources effectively.
It’s not necessarily about variety of features — we’ve found the greatest office management tools are those that are adoptable.
If your team doesn’t actually use your office booking tools, it’s easy for desks, rooms, and parking spaces to become double booked. This is frustrating for workers, skews office usage metrics for admins, and leads business owners to reconsider even paying for an expensive workplace.
What makes workspace tooling adoptable?
It has to work seamlessly within the collaboration tools your team has already bought into, like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
That’s something that Officely offers while Skedda, and many other office booking solutions, simply do not.
If all of that sends you shopping for a more adoptable, usable Skedda alternative — you’ve come to the right place.
Getting to Know Skedda’s Workplace Management Software
The team at Skedda have created a robust platform for reserving lots of different types of spaces — offices, university rooms, sports fields, labs, and beyond.
For business owners, office administrators, and folks who manage people and culture; its most important use cases are probably office, meeting room, and parking space booking. Layered on top of that are visitor management and workplace analytics to help business leaders understand how their space is being used.
A unique feature of Skedda is its rules system, which admins can use to set up guidelines, permissions, and policies around how people book your spaces. Between this and pricing that starts at $99 per month with an annual contract, Skedda is best for larger businesses and complex spaces that require more management than most typical hybrid offices.
Why Shop for Alternatives to Skedda for Office and Room Booking
Let us be the first to say that Skedda is clearly a well-built product! As we just mentioned, its variety of features is especially key for people who have to manage large spaces with complicated regulations, such as laboratory buildings and sports complexes.
But if that doesn’t sound like your office, you may be one of our readers who’s searching for a simpler, easier-to-use alternative.
Speaking of ease of use, there’s another major factor that may send people searching for a Skedda replacement: Adoption.
While Skedda can work alongside some of your other workplace tools, it’s still a freestanding workspace management tool. It doesn’t operate inside the platforms your employees already use daily to collaborate — like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Consider that knowledge workers switch between different apps and websites about 1,200 times a day to get their work done (sheesh). No one wants to adopt yet another separate piece of tech into their workflow!
When adoption of your workplace management platform is low, it’s easier for desks, meeting rooms, and parking spaces to get overbooked. This makes for a not-so-great experience when workers do come into the office, dampening their desire to come in again. Not only does this then lead to a depressed company culture, it makes for lots of empty space that leaves business owners questioning why they need an office —or an office manager! — in the first place.
6 Top Skedda Alternatives to Try in 2024
If you want to buy into highly-integrable office management software as a service (SaaS) your team is actually going to use to help build a great culture and make the most of your real estate investments, allow us to introduce you to your top options.
1. Officely: The Top Skedda Alternative for Hybrid Teams
Let’s explore the features that make it the best alternative to Skedda and one of the leading options for modern businesses who want to balance great culture with wise resource usage.
Officely Pros
Works Inside Slack and Microsoft Teams: Adoption is the key to success with desk booking software. However, most of the tools on the market are built as separate, freestanding web and mobile apps. This makes for low adoption, because employees have to remember to check and use these apps outside of their typical workflow. This creates a constant struggle for them, as well as the office administrators who rely on these tools for event planning and space management. We’ve cracked the code on adoption by building Officely to live exactly where your team already works and collaborates — inside Slack and Teams. This high level of integration allows employees to book a space in just a couple of clicks, seamlessly gelling right into their everyday flow for maximum adoption.
Simple for SMBs to Set Up and Use: Lots of workplace management software ends up expanding into adjacent spaces, which you’ll see in Skedda’s features for coworking businesses, universities, sports venues, and beyond. This growth also usually comes with higher pricing and more complex features. This may be fine for enterprise companies, but it leaves the small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) overpaying for a complicated system they can’t fully utilize. Officely is designed specifically for SMBs, offering the just-right features at an affordable price. Additionally, we provide flexible month-to-month pricing instead of locking you into an annual commitment because, as a smaller firm ourselves, we understand that change happens.
Fosters a Flexible Work Environment: Our mission at Officely is to enable flexible work for as many companies as possible. After all, we believe the future of work is flexible! That’s why the Officely platform is especially tailored to work in, and help unlock, flexible workplaces. Many other workplace management tools cater to more traditional settings, with fixed office mandates.
Officely Cons
No Visitor Management: Of course, we don’t believe all additional workplace management features are unnecessary! In fact, something that several other desk booking tools offer that we’d like to eventually expand into is visitor management. Integrated visitor management can be invaluable in flexible environments where employees frequently come and go. It assists receptionists in welcoming and directing visitors to the appropriate locations, and would seamlessly complement our smart room, desk, and parking spot booking platform at Officely.
Try Officely Today
See who's in the office, organize socials and events, and increase your office attendance all within Slack.
deskbird is a workplace management platform offering tools for desk and meeting room booking, team scheduling, and an admin and analytics panel for office owners and managers. deskbird’s aim is to simplify office management, optimize business real estate expenditures, and increase office attendance and engagement.
deskbird Pros
Customization: deskbird allows for deep customization and rule setting to fit the specific needs of different organizations, which is especially applicable for larger companies with lots of spaces and workers.
Mobile App: deskbird provides a mobile app for on-the-go access.
deskbird Cons
Complexity: Smaller offices with fewer resources and less complex needs might find some features unnecessary (and expensive).
Annual Contract Required: To get the pricing deskbird advertises, you have to sign up for their yearly plan.
User Experience Hiccups: Reviews are overall good, but many indicate booking limitations that look like hiccups in the desk booking experience and usability issues that make viewing scheduling and desk availability a little wonky.
3. OfficeRnD
OfficeRnD streamlines operations for coworking spaces as well as hybrid offices. With OfficeRnD Hybrid specifically, employees can book desks and rooms and HR, IT, and Facilities teams can efficiently manage workspaces.
OfficeRnD Pros
Comprehensive Features: OfficeRnD offers a wide range of features for managing spaces, including interactive mapping, a recurring meeting room booking system, meeting room schedule building, bulk desk booking, and more.
Community Focus: OfficeRnD has a special focus on fostering workplace community, with features like event management and communication tools.
Reporting and Analytics: The platform provides detailed reports and analytics to help operators best understand their teams, spaces, and resources.
OfficeRnD Cons
Cost: After the free tier, annual pricing for OfficeRnD Hybrid is higher than many competitors — reflecting its focus on larger companies that need more features and users.
Learning Curve: Despite its user-friendly design, due to the complicated features there may still be a learning (and adoption) curve when using this workspace management software.
Low Customization for Price: Interestingly, despite the claims for deep customization, the leading negative reviews seem disappointed that they can’t personalize it more for the price.
4. Kadence
The desk booking platform Kadence provides tools for, you guessed it, booking desks — as well as room scheduling, visitor management, employee coordination, and even access to office spaces around the world for your most distributed teammates.
Kadence Pros
Kadence AI: This AI-powered, chatbot-esque feature helps automate tasks like booking rooms, syncing with colleague schedules, and more.
Integrations: Kadence boasts easy integration with various workplace tools, though that doesn’t mean it works and lives fully inside the ones you use most (Like Officely does with Slack and Teams).
Visitor Management: Kadence includes features for managing visitor information, which helps front desk personnel and security teams welcome and direct visitors.
Kadence Cons
Pricing: Slightly higher than other similar tools, and it gets complex quickly with an enterprise package and adds on that cost extra.
Complexity for SMBs: Leaner offices probably don’t need all the extras Kadence has, which contribute to the higher pricing and the lacking support we’ll talk about next.
Lacking Support: Reviews indicate that customer support can be slow, which isn’t ideal when trying to drum up engagement and adoption with your new workplace booking software.
5. Robin
Robin enables desk and room booking, visitor management, wayfinding, digital room displays, and workplace analytics to create a hybrid work environment that benefits both people and businesses.
Robin Pros
Comprehensive Booking Features: The platform provides robust booking tools for desks, rooms, and other office spaces, ensuring efficient resource utilization.
Wayfinding: Visitors and workers can find the right place at the right time with Robin’s wayfinding solutions.
Mobile App: User-friendly mobile app allows employees to manage bookings from their smartphones.
Robin Cons
High Pricing: Robin starts at $399/month annually, locking you into a long-term contract and making it one of the more expensive options in its category.
Enterprise Focus: Between the pricing, depth of features, level security, and focus on large and high-powered industries — it’s clear Robin is an enterprise solution.
Usability: Reviews indicate that, despite its enterprise readiness, Robin could use some shaping up in terms of navigability, user friendliness, and customization.
6. Envoy
Envoy Workplace is a robust suite of office management features including desk and room booking, workplace mapping, employee scheduling, announcements and reminders, analytics, delivery management, and even a ticketing solution for reporting issues.
Envoy Pros
Depth of Features: If you need them, which some large companies might, Envoy Workplace does have tons of useful features for managing all things office related.
Health and Safety Features: Envoy Workplace includes features such as capacity limits, health questionnaires, and contact tracing to prevent outbreaks among teams.
Helpful for Receptionists: Delivery and visitor management (add-on feature) makes life easier for front desk folks.
Envoy Cons
Confusing Pricing: Getting all the good features of Envoy Workplace requires buying into a higher pricing tier, and possibly paying for add-ons.
Too Big for SMBs: Robust features can be both good and bad, but they’re likely to add little but complexity and expense if your team is more lean.
Freestanding Tool: Like all the tools aside from Officely on this list, the freestanding nature of Envoy Workplace makes it more difficult to integrate into employee workflows.
Which is the Best Skedda Alternative for You?
There’s little point paying for a workplace management tool that your team isn’t even going to use.
So as you evaluate the Skedda alternatives we've detailed for you above, consider not only how each meets your needs — but also how well each can quickly and fully be adopted into employee workflows.
Our focus on adoption is what defines Officely, and makes it the best office, room, and parking booking tool for empowering flexible work.
Officely is easy to integrate and lives inside Slack and Teams, so it’s ready and waiting for your team to see who’s going in and what’s going on in the office, and book a desk for their visit in just a few clicks. At a higher level, it improves not only culture but engagement, productivity, and resource utilization.
Ready to upgrade to flexible work enablement? Book a demo to give Officely a try today.
Try Officely Today
See who's in the office, organize socials and events, and increase your office attendance all within Slack.
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