Overview

Which Virtual Office Is Best For Your Remote Team?

SoWork and Kumospace: two digital office apps. Both tackling remote work engagement, productivity, and bringing back those oh-so-missed 'water cooler' moments.

SoWork is a remote work powerhouse, driving team performance and seamlessly integrating team bonding throughout the workdays.

While Kumospace is a simple virtual office with the basic tools to meet remotely.

Which one is best for your team?

Spontaneous Conversations Between Meetings

This is the core value both Kumospace and SoWork are built around. In both apps, remote teams get their place back and work beside each other, quite literally.

They can see who's in the office, walk up to available teammates, grab a teammate after a meeting to clarify a project's next steps, or join in on a conversation they'd never have known about if it had happened on Zoom.

After this, the two apps differ substantially.

In SoWork, video tiles and active screenshare pop onto your screen as soon as you walk up to someone. In Kumospace, you need to activate the video view after walking up to someone.

SoWork has different meeting types to suit all of your office needs. You can walk up to connect for spontaneous meetings, and enter the meeting purpose so others can join in if they're interested.

Want more privacy? Invite someone to a private meeting. SoWork also allows you to create a themed Meeting Zone where everyone connects as soon as they enter the zone. All hands meetings, pomodoro sprints, or deep work zones.

Kumospace does not offer these different types of meetings. Instead, you are either available, focusing, or unavailable. And if you're available, you're only able to have spontaneous, open meetings. The purpose of these meetings cannot be shared with others who might want to join in.

SoWork also helps teammates feel connected to the 'office pulse'. Notable moments they missed while away help teammates feel connected, regardless of being absent, and drive conversations.

Customization

Kumospace and SoWork differ across 3 major areas when it comes to customization:

• Customization of your avatar
• Immersion of the office maps
• Functionality customization

Avatar Customization

There are no avatars in Kumospace. You are a square that moves around the office and, when people get close to you, your video tile will be what represents you.

This means the only way to express yourself is to have your video on. Which, as remote workers know, is exhausting all of the time.

SoWork takes a different approach. In SoWork, both the artwork and the options allow you to customize your avatar to look like you - or, anything you want. The combinations are so visually appealing and unique, over time people become associated with their avatars.

For your team, this means they're able to express themselves beyond their video. Audio-only meetings are still engaging and feel human, without the need for always being 'on'.

And, because of SoWork's realism, they're able to display logos to create company-branded clothes. There's a reason we give teammates swag, right! We know how company-branded clothing drives a feeling of pride and connectedness - to the team, culture, and overall org.

Immersion of the Office Maps

SoWork took an immersive, life-like approach to the Art. And it has implications on how engaged your team feels - to the office, each other, and ultimately their work.

With more life-like, detailed Art, SoWork is able to display items of cultural significance - team pictures, images of company milestones - in a way that Kumospace can't. Teammates in SoWork can leave gifts, celebrate, express their company pride.. in ways that just aren't possible elsewhere.

In SoWork, desks are optional, and many teammates opt for beach chairs, bean bags, or swings instead. With pre-made templates available for easy customizing. New teammates get to decorate their office on their first day, and clear it out on their last.

Photos of family, drawings of pets, home country flags. SoWork's work spots focus more on individual expression.

When teammates express excitement, camaraderie, accomplishments - does it feel real? This matters, particularly in remote settings where bringing real, life-like moments into the culture is a constant challenge.

Functionality Customization

Kumospace has an extensive library of objects that you can add to your office. However, these items are only for look and feel. At this time, they do not come with functionality options that help your team work better (or smarter), together.

In contrast, SoWork allows you to add functionality to the immersive furniture you add to your office.

For example, you can create a pomodoro zone. When teammates enter the pomorodo zone, they can start a productivity sprint together. When someone else joins, they'll see the active sprint. When the sprint is done, an alert sounds and the team can take a break together and celebrate their productivity!

This coworking realism and immersion has been linked to deeper remote team engagement. And we all know the impact engagement has on employee happiness, retention, and business costs.

Productive Meeting Tools

Not much needs to be said here. If you're looking to save your team time and energy by making meetings more productive, SoWork is your product.

SoWork has extensive tools for productive meetings - both scheduled and spontaneous. Including multi-screenshare, insights and AI-powered tools, which we'll touch on in #4.

Kumospace is very basic when it comes to meeting productivity tools. You can meet in one way, you can record a meeting, and that's about it.

AI-powered, Time-Saving Tools

Remote teams have an advantage: their office is digital. Which means their office can, in theory, take advantage of technology and help teams be smarter, faster, and more productive than possible in the old physical office.

SoWork is the first 'smart' digital office on the market.

SoWork packages up team data into actionable insights. Like letting you know when it's been a long time since you last chatted with your closest teammates, and encouraging a coffee catch-up.

SoWork also has an AI-powered 'office assistant', Sophia Bot. Sophia basically roams around the digital office helping teams save time.

One of her most popular capabilities is the ability to automate meeting busy work and make meetings far more productive.

She takes meeting notes, summarizes the main themes and takeaways, and provides action-items for next steps.

If public, these notes are then published to the whole company. Teammates save a ton of time catching up on what they missed.

And the 'meeting about the meeting because you couldn't be at the meeting' meeting is cut out of the calendar. Thank god.

Kumospace does not currently have any smart office functionality.

Team Engagement

SoWork approaches engagement and bonding through the lens of team performance. Teammates can engage in real-time by chatting above their head, without breaking someone's deep work. Meetings can be celebrated using emojis, without interrupting the flow.

Teammates can give each other gifts to recognize their work achievements or cultural impact.

Kumospace does not have any engagement tools beyond the basic value that all virtual offices have.

Integrations

Your remote office needs to play nice with the other apps in your tech stack. And both SoWork and Kumospace have integrations to do just that.

Both apps have Slack and Google Calendar integrations. Both products are always adding new integrations to help teammates fit their virtual office into their workflow.

SoWork integrates with your Google Calendar and pulls these events into your SoWork office. It uses this information to help you focus - showing you just your next few events (and not the entire cluster that is your whole calendar). And by giving you notifications when a new event is starting in 10 minutes.

Pricing

Let's dig into SoWork and Kumospace pricing.

Both Kumospace and SoWork have free and paid tiers. The most important difference is what's in the free tier.

Kumospace's pricing model limits free offices to 5 teammates. Once you're over 5 people (guests included), you need to pay for every teammate at $20/person/month for their business plan.

As far we know, Kumospace's business plan is the most expensive virtual office plan out there.

SoWork allows teams to have unlimited teammates in their free plan. So unlike Kumospace, you will not need to pay for everyone as soon as you have 6+ teammates in one office.

Instead, they limit functionality. SoWork has 3 plans:

• Free - the biggest restrictions are audio-only meetings, a 30-minute meeting limit, no meeting AI, and no meeting recordings
• Basic ($6/person/month) - this removes the 30-minute meeting limit, and has full video/audio meetings. It's for teams that aren't ready for premium features but want to pay to get rid of the 30-minute meeting restriction and audio-only.
• Premium ($15/person/month or $13/person/annually) - this is the no limits, full feature access plan (meeting recording, Zapier integrations, AI tools, etc.)

Every new office in SoWork starts on a 3 week premium trial, and then team admins are able to decide which plan they want to use once the trial has ended.

SoWork also offers 'visitor passes' for all paid plans, so you can have visitors come to the office for free. Think interviewee, board meeting, a customer. SoWork also offers discounts on annual plans, for teams > 100 people, etc.

Customer Support

SoWork prioritizes fast, high touch customer support. They are available on all common channels, and usually respond in minutes, most days of the week.

They're available in a few unconventional ways, too. Like you can walk straight into their full-time office and talk to the founders.

Kumospace customer support channels are more traditional, and require filling out a form or setting up a meeting with a sales or support rep.

Both products have help center sites, where how-to guides cover almost every feature in their digital offices.

Onboarding

A big question on leadership's mind when adding 'virtual office' to the tech stack is: how do I move my team in?

SoWork leverages the Sophia Bot here - the AI Office Assistant. When new teammates land in a SoWork office, they're greeted by their own Sophia Bot.

She steps them through onboarding tutorials, to get them familiar with the most important capabilities.

SoWork's live chat can also be used to get a SoWork teammate to swing by your office and help - usually with minimal notice.

Only in Kumospace's $20 USD/person/month plan can you to access customer support for onboarding.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, Kumospace vs SoWork comes down to the product priorities.

Kumospace is a very basic, paired down virtual office. It has the basics you need to have open, spontaneous meetings with your team, feel present with each other, and chat in between scheduled meetings.

SoWork, on the other hand, has all of the basics and everything your remote team needs to transform into a bonded, engaged, productivity powerhouse.

The best product for you depends on your remote team's unique needs.

Want to give SoWork a try? Start a free premium office trial here, or swing by our office to see one in action 🚀