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
iMonitorSoft is a competent enough computer monitoring package for companies who have the time and patience and IT team to set it up, but it isn’t designed to monitor actual employee’s in the workplace. iMonitorSoft also looks outdated and this is reflected in several key monitoring features as well. There is no real way to actually use iMonitorSoft in the workplace to monitor employees effectively because it just doesn’t have the tools and features to allow that to happen.
KnowIT, which is a much cheaper alternative, and is cloud based meaning it is much easier to install also, delivers companies not only a wide range of general computer monitoring features but actual bona fide employee monitoring features as well. These are designed to give companies greater insight into the attendance and productivity of each employee in the workplace in an easy to understand format. It’s also unobtrusive which means that once you have set it all up you just wait for the daily or scheduled reports to get a valuable insight on the workers in your company. There is no need to be logged in all the time micromanaging them like you do with other so-called employee monitoring packages.
Feature Comparison
In order to monitor employee’s effectively an employee monitoring package needs to have tools that are fit for the job. Below you can see the feature comparison against KnowIT and iMonitorSoft. iMonitorSoft has features that are designed for general computer monitoring, such as a teenager. There is nothing here for actual employee monitoring. And whilst the overall number of features is impressive as it is compared to competitors you can see that KnowIT has more core employee monitoring focuses features for both productivity and attendance which makes is the better choice for employers looking for the right employee monitoring solution for their needs.
| Feature | iMonitorSoft | 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 iMonitorSoft for monitoring employee productivity and attendance specifically.
This is something we discuss further in the sections below.
Productivity
For any employee monitoring software just advertising that the software can be used to monitor employees is not enough. To be the best employee monitoring software the software must have features that are actually designed to measure employee productivity in a way that a company manager can easily understand. In this regard iMonitorSoft only advertises that it can be used for employee productivity but KnowIT actually delivers on this promise. By this we mean that iMonitorSoft has no actual features that a company manager could use to see how productive their employees are being. There is no way to set applications or websites as productive or unproductive and no overall easy to understand productivity score for each employee either.
This is why we cannot recommend iMonitorSoft to be used as an employee monitoring in the same way that we can recommend KnowIT. KnowIT does actually have features designed to allow companies to monitor their employee’s productivity and delivers the key insights in an easy to understand productivity score along with scheduled and daily productivity email reports for all employees. Therefore when it comes to productivity we can confidently say that is an area that iMonitorSoft doesn’t excel in when compared against KnowIT.
Attendance
iMonitorSoft has no attendance monitoring features so we cannot recommend it to companies who need to monitor their employee’s attendance. It doesn’t even log when the computer is locked or unlocked.
KnowIT on the other hand gives you complete control over the attendance monitoring of employees in your company. It does this by allowing you to set company or employee work schedules, complete with break time allowance, which is used to calculate the number of hours each employee works each day. This is calculated as an overall attendance score for each employee that is easy to understand. KnowIT also helps you calculate when employees work extra hours or arrive at work late or leave early and daily and scheduled email attendance reports means each employee and respective manager knows exactly what their performance is at all times.
Reporting
iMonitorSoft doesn’t offer a great range of reporting options. There are no email reports that can be set up or scheduled. Similarly the reports that are included are basic and are in tabular format only. They only cover how long the software has been running on the employee’s machine and how long it has been idle or when it was last stopped or started. This is something of a cheap way to provide reports for what iMonitorSoft may define as productivity but it is not an accurate way of doing this and so we cannot count reporting as a feature.
In contrast KnowIT provides a daily productivity report and attendance report that is emailed to the manager and optionally the employee. This allows for complete employee self-policing and ensures that managers are also informed at all times about what their employees are up to.
Other Features
iMonitorSoft comes with a wide range of computer monitoring features, nearly as many as KnowIT. These range from logging keystrokes to tracking the clipboard and print jobs. However iMonitorSoft itself looks like outdated software, even just by looking at how it looks and performs. This is confirmed further when you look at their webmail and chat monitoring is for older and non-existent software which means that iMonitorSoft is somewhat out of date in that regard.
On the other hand, unlike iMonitorSoft, KnowIT is more modern software. Not only does it have key employee monitoring features that companies need to effectively monitor their employee’s productivity and attendance but it also has key computer monitoring features as well to give an overall more rounded employee monitoring package. Not only does it capture general computer usage of the employee but it also provides employers with the tools to monitor each employee effectively. This is something that iMonitorSoft does not offer and is not designed to do.
Conclusion
They both advertise that they can be used to monitor employee’s but only one actually delivers on this promise and gets the job done well. Not only is iMonitorSoft significantly more expensive than KnowIT but it doesn’t offer the specific employee monitoring features that companies need. iMonitorSoft is actually more suited to general computer monitoring only.
Whilst 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 cheaper than iMonitorSoft which makes it the better choice overall.