Top 3 Airspeed Alternatives For Employee Engagement
Looking for Airspeed alternatives? We compared best options to help you choose.
Airspeed has long been a favorite for employee engagement with its user-friendly interface, virtual coffee meetups (Coffee Talk), and connection features recognizing birthdays, anniversaries, and special occasions for the entire team.
It's also been a game changer in employee recognition, allowing coworkers to reward one another with kudos for displaying culture-positive behavior.
That being said, Airspeed competitors are hitting back hard with their offerings and competitive pricing structures, giving users great alternatives to this Slack integration. Here we list three of the top Airspeed alternatives for 2025.
Want the key takeaway?
BuddiesHR is the best alternative to Airspeed.
Airspeed alternative snapshot
Getting right down to it with a side-by-side comparison for a quick overview, here is BuddiesHR, Donut, and Heytaco.
1. BuddiesHR
BuddiesHR offers a suite of modular Slack apps designed to enhance employee engagement. Its key features are:
- Alfy Matching: Onboard and introduce new hires while strengthening camaraderie between teams. Involve everyone in chats and allocate mentors for faster integration into company culture.
- Billy Birthday: Increase team cohesion by recognizing birthdays and anniversaries. Fully automated, taking into account different time zones, and bringing fun to everyday activities.
- Clappy Kudos: Tag company values in recognitions to promote and enforce them organically. Increase employee satisfaction by providing recognition of culture positive behavior.
- Pulsy Survey: Promote a listening-based culture by running polls and receiving real-time feedback. Respond proactively to team interests. Pre-built templates with a frictionless user experience.
- Linky Directory: Build your org chart in seconds, and run performance reviews smoothly with linked data from an updated org structure.
- Stany Standup: Free up hours by eliminating the need for daily check-in meetings. Increase transparency, control, and collaboration by getting the full picture. Increase productivity across teams.
- Ticky Tracking: Stop chasing your colleagues for their timesheets. Ticky reminds team members to take action and log their time. Get a clear view of project costs as employees enter their hours.
Watch a BuddiesHR demo
Watch Clappy Kudos in action. By far the most popular way of recognizing team achievements and entrenching company values, Clappy’s easy integration with Slack provides you with a powerful way to increase employee satisfaction.
Demo of Clappy Kudos - Slack app for sending Kudos, praise, shoutouts
How does BuddiesHR compare with Airspeed?
BuddiesHR holds its own against Airspeed with fun, engaging, and powerful apps that provide a full employee engagement suite. BuddiesHR cleverly offers each of their apps as standalone Slack integrations, giving you the opportunity to use only what you need. They are focused on increasing human connection through responsive, and on-time interventions for promoting employee satisfaction.
BuddiesHR steals the show with its free plan, competitive pricing ($2 a month per user), and standalone app purchases at $0.80 per app. Overall, this platform is a notable Airspeed competitor.
2. Donut
Donut is an employee experience platform that automates various people programs within Slack. Its notable features include:
Donut journeys: Automate employee process from onboarding right through to offboarding. Set up review meetings, training sessions, performance reviews, and mentorship.
Donut channels: Facilitate meaningful connections that drive teamwork, transparency, and growth. Donut Intros connects teammates for virtual coffee chats. Increase collaboration by bringing people together from different departments, or build trust by providing acces to the leadership team.
Donut for Zoom: Add Donut to Zoom to use Icebreakers, a game that makes your virtual calls more inclusive, engaging, and fun. Teams that play together continue together, increasing in strength and resilience.
Watch a Donut demo
Help your team to connect organically with one another when they’re located in different offices, or home-based. Watercooler gives your team the opportunity to discover what other team members care about, increasing a sense of connection and helping your team to build stronger bonds.
How does Donut compare with Airspeed?
Airspeed and Donut both focus on improving employee engagement within Slack, but they cater to slightly different needs. Donut excels in automating people processes such as onboarding and mentorship, while Airspeed is designed to connect and celebrate employees with a view to keeping them engaged in the workplace.
The best choice depends on whether you want to prioritize automated workflows (Donut) or fostering personal connections (Airspeed). Compared with Airspeed and BuddiesHR, the Donut pricing structure can be fussy, and quickly increases costs as you add more users.
3. Heytaco
Heytaco focuses on peer-to-peer recognition by allowing team members to give virtual "tacos" as tokens of appreciation. Key features include:
- Recognition system: Make recognition effortless and fun by celebrating teammates with virtual tacos—boosting engagement, morale, and team connection.
- Tagging with company values: Empower your team with meaningful recognition that brings core values to life—making them visible, actionable, and impactful every day.
- Gamification: Turn everyday recognition into a fun and rewarding experience with leaderboards, levels, and Tacotars that spark team spirit.
- Taco TV: Share taco activity on office TVs to drive engagement and create company-wide excitement.
- Custom Rewards: Set up a "Taco Shop" where employees redeem tacos for personalized rewards.
- Analytics: Measure team engagement, uncover taco-giving trends, and identify meaningful patterns in recognition.
Watch a Heytaco demo
Learn how you can give a taco via Slack to recognize team members and encourage connection between remote workers.
#2 How to Give a Taco in Slack
How does Heytaco compare with Airspeed?
HeyTaco and Airspeed both focus on employee recognition and engagement, but they take different approaches. HeyTaco gamifies peer recognition by fostering a fun, informal culture with leaderboards and personalized incentives. Airspeed, meanwhile, offers a holistic engagement approach centered on connecting employees and fostering culture beyond just recognition.
Compared with other Airspeed alternatives, Heytaco is only free for 30 days, after which you need to move on to one of their paid plans. However, you can cancel your subscription at any time.
The best Airspeed alternative
Based on a comprehensive analysis of the top three Airspeed alternatives, the results speak for themselves.
BuddiesHR not only has seriously competitive pricing (especially for small businesses who rarely go above 30 users), but also offers a powerful employee engagement suite for companies that want to decrease their employee turnover, and bring inclusivity into the workplace.
References:
1. Airspeed.com
2. BuddiesHR.com
3. Donut.com
4. Heytaco.com
