Alternative to Meta's Workplace
Meta shut Workplace down. Here is what Blastack does and what it doesn't.
We are smaller and we do less. Before we tell you what we do handle, here is the full list of what you lose, because that is the part that decides whether it is worth reading on.
What happened
Two years' notice
The dates are public and worth having to hand if anybody at your company is still counting on getting something back out of it.
- 14 May 2024
Meta announces the shutdown
Workplace is being withdrawn and customers are told to migrate or download their data. For a lot of companies it was the first time they had thought about what happens when the intranet supplier decides it is no longer interested in that business.
- 1 September 2025
Read-only
The site goes read-only and the mobile apps and Workchat stop working. From that point there is no posting: only reading and exporting.
- 31 May 2026
Final shutdown
The access and data export window closes. Anybody who didn't download theirs before that date hasn't got it.
No dressing it up
What Blastack doesn't do and Workplace did
Workplace was a product from an enormous company, with an enormous team behind it. Six things you had that you are not going to find here.
We don't import your Workplace
There is no importer. Not for posts, not for groups, not for people, not for the files you downloaded before the shutdown. If you still have that export, keep it wherever it is: in Blastack you start clean.
Single sign-on isn't in the base fee
It exists — OpenID Connect with Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace or Okta, and SCIM 2.0 for automatic joiners and leavers — but it is a separate module at two cents per person per month, not something that comes switched on the way it did in Workplace. And OIDC only: if your IT team works in SAML 2.0, that we don't speak.
There is no catalogue of ready-made integrations
Nothing that connects to your HR system, to SharePoint, or to whatever else you had hanging off Workplace.
There is no machine translation
Workplace translated posts on the fly, which in a multilingual workforce is half the tool. Blastack translates nothing.
There is no app in the app stores
You use it from the browser and pin it to the home screen. It is not in the App Store or Google Play, and we send no email to employees.
There is no live video and no cross-company groups
No broadcasts to the whole workforce, and no shared spaces with suppliers or customers. Blastack points inwards, at one company.
If you need three of those six, we are not your option and it is better to know now. There are bigger alternatives that do have them, and we'll name them by email so you don't have to go looking.
In return
What it does solve
Workplace was designed for an office company that communicates in groups. Blastack is designed for a company with most of its people on a factory floor, in a shop or in a van. That difference is everything underneath.
- Reaches the people with no work email, with a code and their own phone
- Reach measured per announcement, by department
- Documents with a named read receipt, with date and time
- Anonymous surveys, with the anonymity built into the database
- Review queue: staff propose and a manager approves
- Our own servers in the European Union, with no transfers outside the EEA
- An Article 28 data processing agreement under the GDPR
- Published price: €1 per person per month, with a calculator on the site
The question we always get
And what if you shut down in two years?
It is the right question and we haven't got an answer that closes it. We are a small team and a young company: nobody can promise you it will be here for ever, and whoever promises you that is lying.
What we can put in writing is how you get out. The contract sets thirty days of access after termination to retrieve your information, and final deletion — backups included — within a further thirty days at most. The data sits on servers in the European Union and it is yours, not ours.
And the awkward part: today there is no 'export everything' button. You download from inside the tool, and a full export has to be asked for. It is on the roadmap, with no date committed.
How you move across
Five steps, and not one of them automatic
There is no assisted migration and no tool that does it for you. The upside of that, small but real: you throw away whatever nobody was using.
- 1
Dig out whatever you have of the export
If somebody downloaded the Workplace archive before the shutdown, go and find it. It can't be imported here, but whatever genuinely has to be kept — procedures, policies, manuals — gets uploaded again by hand as documents, which is four folders and an afternoon.
- 2
Keep only the groups people really used
A two-year-old Workplace has fifty groups and eight of them were in use. When you set the communities up, recreate those eight. Recreating all fifty is the quickest way to have the new tool born empty.
- 3
Sign people up with codes, not with lists
One code per site or per department, with up to five hundred uses each. People sign in with their personal email from their phone. It is cruder than Workplace's automatic provisioning and, with a workforce that has no work email, it works better.
- 4
Start with one site
Fifteen days with one plant or one branch before opening it to everybody. If you launch to the whole company at once again and nobody opens it, getting their attention a third time is hard.
- 5
Look at the number
The percentage of people who have seen the first announcements, broken down by division. It is the figure Workplace never gave you in a comparable form, and the one that decides whether the tool stays.
Try it on one site before deciding for the whole company
Fifteen days, no card. And if you would rather tell us first — what you had set up in Workplace and how much of it you genuinely need — email us and we'll tell you straight whether this is any use to you.