Firstup

Firstup

Firstup, Inc. · Productivity

Firstup is an intelligent workforce communication platform that delivers personalized employee campaigns across email, mobile, intranet, and digital signage for organizations with deskless workforces.

Interface preview of Firstup

About Firstup

What Is Firstup

Firstup is an employee communication platform built for companies that need to reach every worker, including the frontline staff who never sit at a desk. It grew out of SocialChorus, a company founded in 2008, which merged with Dynamic Signal and took the Firstup name in October 2020. The platform brings consumer-style campaign automation to internal communications: you build an audience, publish once, and the system delivers the message through email, a mobile app, an employee intranet, and even digital signage in break rooms.

The core problem it solves is reach. Most internal comms tools assume everyone has a laptop and reads email on time. Firstup assumes the opposite. It targets employees by role, location, tenure, and behavior, then retargets anyone who missed a message or skipped a required action. That matters for safety notices, compliance training, and shift updates that fall apart when workers never see them.

The biggest limitation is that Firstup is an enterprise purchase. There are no self-serve plans and no public per-seat pricing. You talk to sales, get a quote, and usually need an IT team to wire up your HR systems. Small teams and individual communicators are priced out of the box.

Getting Started

  1. Contact Firstup sales to scope your workforce size, channels, and the employee systems you plan to connect.
  2. Connect your data sources so Firstup can build employee profiles, usually through an HRIS, Active Directory, REST APIs, SCIM, or flat file transfer.
  3. Build your first audience in the Audience Builder by combining attributes like department, location, and role.
  4. Create a campaign in Creator Studio, then choose the channels where it should appear, such as email, mobile app, intranet, or digital signage.
  5. Publish once, then monitor engagement in the dashboards and let retargeting follow up with anyone who did not engage.

Product Information

A quick look at Firstup's pricing, supported platforms, and performance.

Free PlanNo
Paid PlansCustom quote (Essential, Professional, Premier)
PlatformWeb, iOS, Android, Email, Desktop, Digital Signage
DeveloperFirstup, Inc.
CategoryProductivity
Release DateOct 2008
Latest UpdatedSep 2025
Website Visits665K
Website Global Rank95.9K
API AvailabilityYes

Best for

The users, tasks, and scenarios where this tool fits best.

Users

  • Internal communications teams
  • HR and people operations leaders
  • Frontline and shift-based managers

Tasks

  • Reaching deskless and frontline workers
  • Automating onboarding and offboarding sequences
  • Tracking whether a message was actually seen

Scenarios

  • Rolling out a company-wide policy change
  • Translating announcements for a global workforce
  • Centralizing scattered tools into one hub

Key features

Audience Builder and Employee Profiles

Firstup builds a single profile for each employee by pulling attributes from your HRIS, directory, and other systems, then adds behavioral data on top. The Audience Builder combines those attributes and behaviors so you can segment precisely instead of guessing. The point is personalization that holds up at scale, where an office worker and a warehouse worker get different versions of the same announcement.

Intelligent Delivery and Retargeting

The platform picks the best channel and time for each employee based on behavioral data, rather than blasting every message everywhere. If someone misses a message or skips a required action, automated retargeting follows up on its own. For communicators, this means fewer manual follow-ups and less worry about a critical notice getting buried.

Creator Studio and AI Content Creator

Creator Studio gives you drag-and-drop editing and branded templates, so campaigns look consistent without a design team. The AI Content Creator suggests topics, titles, and descriptions and can adjust tone, which speeds up drafting. Brand Governance keeps those templates on-brand for teams that worry about off-message posts.

Journey Builder and Orchestration

Journey Builder is a no-code visual tool for designing sequenced communications with decision splits and automated triggers. You can branch people down different paths based on tenure, role, or location, and set counts-down for deadlines like security training. It replaces the spreadsheet-and-reminder routine with a flow that runs itself.

Multi-Channel Reach

Firstup delivers to email, a mobile app, an employee intranet, a web hub, and digital signage from one publish action. The mobile app is built mobile-first for deskless workers and supports offline access and push notifications. This is the feature that decides whether frontline staff actually receive the message.

Engagement Insights and AI Insights

Dashboards report on engagement with filters and custom views, and an executive summary dashboard turns the numbers into a narrative for leadership. AI Insights analyzes communication and feedback across channels to spot tone and sentiment trends. Direct data export lets you move engagement data into your own reporting tools.

Translations and Embedded Widgets

Campaigns can be translated into each employee's language across all channels, which matters for global companies. Embedded widgets push content into the tools employees already use, such as Microsoft Teams, so they engage without switching apps. User generated content lets employees submit their own posts to build community.

Pros and cons

Pros

  • Reaches deskless and frontline workers through mobile, push, and digital signage, the channels that actually get seen on a factory floor or in a store.
  • Automated retargeting follows up with employees who missed a message, which reduces manual chasing for compliance and safety notices.
  • Journey Builder and date triggers automate onboarding and policy sequences, so communicators stop rebuilding the same campaigns by hand.
  • REST APIs, SCIM, and flat file support make it possible to connect HR and directory systems for accurate employee profiles.
  • Campaign translation across channels keeps multilingual workforces on the same message.

Cons

  • No free plan and no public pricing, so you must talk to sales and get a quote before you know what it costs.
  • Setup leans on IT to connect HRIS and directory data, which puts the first campaign weeks away for teams without that support.
  • The full value sits in the higher tiers, since AI content, intelligent delivery, and journey orchestration aren't in the entry-level plan.
  • Advanced analytics and the intranet are add-ons, so the total price climbs past the base package for companies that want everything.

Frequently asked questions

Firstup is an employee communication platform that delivers personalized, scheduled messages to every worker across email, mobile, intranet, and digital signage. It is built for companies that need to reach frontline and deskless employees, not just office staff.