How to read the Forrester Wave if you're a communicator
The Q2 2026 Forrester Wave for Intranet Platforms dropped on April 9. If you're subscribed to even one vendor newsletter, you've seen the announcements. Every company that placed well has sent you some version of "we're proud to be recognized."
That's fine. That's what vendors do.
What's less fine is when communicators treat those announcements as a purchasing guide. The Forrester Wave is a useful document. It just wasn't written for you.
Here's how to read it.
What the Wave measures (and who it was built for)
Forrester evaluated 13 intranet platform vendors across 28 criteria: 21 for current offering and 7 for strategy. The scoring covers things like AI-enabled search, content governance, application integrations, frontline worker support, and roadmap credibility.
The report is designed, in Forrester's own words, for "enterprise leaders across internal communications, HR, and IT who are responsible for delivering modern digital workplace experiences."
Notice who's first on that list. Notice who's second.
IC sits alongside IT and HR in this audience, but the criteria weighting reflects a broad enterprise technology buyer, not a communicator specifically. The analyst sets the weights based on their view of what the market needs. There's no version of this report that prioritizes what a communicator publishing to 8,000 employees would weight most.
This isn’t a criticism. It's context worth having before you forward the graphic to your leadership team.
What "Leader" means
Four vendors placed as Leaders in Q2 2026: Simpplr, Workvivo, Unily, and LumApps. Six placed as Strong Performers. Three as Contenders.
A Leader designation means a vendor scored well across Forrester's weighted criteria, as evaluated by the analyst. That's genuinely meaningful. It reflects real investment, real customer interviews, and a rigorous process.
It does not mean the platform is the best fit for your organization. It does not mean your employees will find it easy to use. It does not mean it fits a 500-person company without a dedicated IT team.
Here's something most vendor announcements won't tell you: Forrester explicitly says the report is "a starting point only." They provide an interactive tool for subscribers to adjust the criteria weightings to match their own priorities. Almost nobody uses it. Almost everyone just looks at the graphic.
The graphic is the least useful part for communicators.
The finding you should pay attention to
Buried in the analyst's summary is the most honest thing in the entire report: AI is everywhere on these platforms, and most customers aren't using it.
Of the 35 reference customers Forrester interviewed, only 17 were using their vendor's AI in any meaningful way. That's basically a coin flip, two to three years into vendors making AI their primary value proposition.
This matters if you're being sold on AI features during a demo. The demos are real. The adoption rates are apparently not matching the ambition. Ask any vendor you're evaluating what percentage of their customers are actively using AI features, and how that's being measured. That's a more useful question than anything the Wave graphic tells you.
How to use the report
If you have access to the full report (we do but can’t share it here), don't start with the graphic.
Go to the individual vendor scorecards. Find the criteria that map to what you do: internal communications delivery, content authoring, audience targeting, employee-facing UX, analytics for communicators. See what each vendor scored specifically there.
Some vendors scored perfectly in areas like internal communications and employee listening. Others scored high in developer resources and enterprise security. Both groups can show up in the same tier of the graphic. Those are very different tools for very different buyers.
If you don't have a Forrester subscription, the next best move is reading each vendor's own announcement. They're not objective, but they do tell you what criteria they scored highest in. That gives you a rough map of where their product excels.
Links to vendor announcements we've confirmed are at the bottom of this post.
One question to add to every vendor conversation
The Wave graphic places vendors on two axes: current offering (vertical) and strategy (horizontal). Strategy scores carry significant analyst opinion about where a vendor is headed.
A vendor high on current offering is strong today. A vendor far to the right on strategy is credible about where they're going. The best vendors for your organization might not be the ones highest on both axes. They're the ones whose strengths align with what your employees need.
One more thing worth knowing before you use this report: Microsoft declined to participate in the full evaluation. Forrester still scored and placed them using public information and independent research, which is within their methodology. But it means Microsoft's placement in the Strong Performers tier is based on a different evidence base than every other vendor. Take that for what it’s worth.
So after you've looked at the scorecard: ask any vendor you're evaluating what their current customers say about the experience from the employee side, not the admin side. Reference customer quotes in Waves are vetted by vendors. Ask for unfiltered G2 reviews or independent communities instead.
The 13 vendors evaluated
Here's the complete list from the Q2 2026 report, organized by tier. This alphabetic list was pulled together through vendor interviews if there wasn’t a public announcement. Where a vendor published a public announcement, we've linked to it. For those that didn't, we've linked to their website.
Leaders
Strong Performers
Contenders
The Forrester analyst's own summary of the report is available here. Access to the full report requires a Forrester subscription - but many of the vendors listed above offer complimentary copies through their websites. If you want to read the full thing, that's often the fastest path.
If any of these vendors have published announcements we haven't linked to, send them our way and we'll update the list.
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.