Employee Ideas app alternative for Microsoft Teams companies

The Employee Ideas template covers the basics honestly. A manager sets up a campaign, which is a theme for grouping ideas, configures a submission form, and shares it in a channel. Employees submit ideas with supporting files, vote, and see a leaderboard. Managers review the campaign and pick the ideas they like. For a single team that wants a suggestion box inside Teams, that is a reasonable start and it costs nothing extra on most Microsoft 365 business plans.

The gaps show up at the point where a program starts to matter to leadership. There is no way to score ideas against the goals the company actually set this year, so the leaderboard rewards whoever is popular or posts early. Nothing detects that three people submitted the same idea in different words. There is no record of who moved an idea, when, and why it was turned down, which is the first thing an employee asks after a rejection. And there is no report you can hand a leadership team that ranks the ideas and says what to do next.

You can build all of that in Power Apps. The honest question is whether you want your company's idea program to depend on a custom app that one person on the IT team understands. If you are comparing that path with buying, the Employee Ideas Power App cost breakdown works through the licensing numbers. Teams that use Sideways 6 instead of the template can read the Sideways 6 alternative comparison.

Employee Ideas stores its data in Dataverse for Teams, the lightweight database that comes with Teams. Three of its rules, all from Microsoft's own admin documentation, matter for an idea program.

It is scoped to one team. Each team gets one environment, and access is restricted to the members of that team's Microsoft 365 group. Guests can run apps but only see the records they created. A company-wide program therefore means either one very large team or several separate environments with ideas split between them.

It has a hard storage cap. Each environment has 2 GB of combined database and file storage, and that limit cannot be extended. At 100 percent, existing apps keep working but nothing new can be installed in that team. Idea forms with attachments fill space faster than people expect.

It is deleted when it goes quiet. A Dataverse for Teams environment with no user activity is disabled after 90 days and deleted at 120 days, with a seven day recovery window. Only team owners get the warning emails. Many idea programs run a campaign each quarter, and a quiet summer is enough to put the ideas, votes and history at risk.

Microsoft's way out of all three is to upgrade the environment to full Dataverse. After the upgrade, any app running in it requires Power Platform licenses to access. At Microsoft's list price of $20.00 per user per month for Power Apps Premium, paid yearly, 150 people submitting ideas is $3,000 a month before anyone builds the missing features.

Brainstormer is built around the part the template leaves out, which is getting from a pile of ideas to a decision people can see. Each round starts as a challenge with a specific question, a description and a deadline. AI can suggest starter ideas so nobody faces an empty list, and it expands each two sentence submission into a problem, a solution, a first step and a measure of success.

You set three to six strategic goals for your company, and on Business and Enterprise you weight them. AI rates every idea on impact, cost, risk and strategic fit from 1 to 10, and the total is calculated from your goals and weights, so the ranking reflects this year's priorities rather than a popularity contest. Similar ideas are flagged and merged with every author and vote kept, and the rest are grouped into themes. The idea prioritization page explains the scoring in detail.

Ideas then move through seven stages, from submitted to implemented or rejected, and every change is logged with who made it, when and a note. At the end of a challenge you print or download a board report with the ranking, the themes and a recommendation. Business and Enterprise also export the decision trail as CSV.

Brainstormer is not a Microsoft Teams app. It runs in the browser, people join through an email invitation, and there is no single sign-on, no chat integration and no API. If your requirement is that employees submit ideas without ever leaving the Teams client, the template or a Teams-native enterprise platform is the better fit, and we would rather you know that before you buy.

What you get in return is no environment to govern, no storage cap per team, no inactivity deletion and no Power Apps licensing to model. The trade is one browser tab and one login for people who submit ideas a few times a quarter. Posting the challenge link in the Teams channel where people already talk gets you most of the same reach.

A clean switch takes an afternoon, not a project. Pick the one or two campaigns that are still active and turn each into a Brainstormer challenge with a sharper question than the campaign title. Write down your strategic goals and weights first, because they drive every score from then on. Invite the people who actually submitted in the last two campaigns, not the whole company on day one.

Carry over only the open ideas that someone still cares about, and let AI expand them so they are comparable with new submissions. Tell employees where their old ideas went and when they will hear back, which is exactly the reply the old leaderboard never gave. Once the first challenge closes and the board report goes to leadership, widen the invitation.

Plans are priced per company, not per user. Team covers up to 25 members for $1,788 a year, Business up to 150 members with weighted goals, the board report and the admin role for $4,788 a year, and Enterprise up to 1,000 members for $11,988 a year. See pricing for the full comparison, or try the demo challenge on the homepage before you create an account.