Work Examiner

Work Examiner (which begins at $60 per license for the Standard edition) is capable, on-premises employee monitoring software with comprehensive tracking capabilities across the full range of actions, activities, and data that make up a user's workday. But there are easier to use cloud-based tools out there, and Work Examiner is neither as powerful a customized surveillance command center as Editors' Choice Teramind nor does it provide the level of productivity metrics and user behavior analytics as Editors' Choice ActivTrak. However, for businesses looking for straightforward, on-premises monitoring that picks up the full range of employee activity, Work Examiner is a worthy choice.

Pricing and Setup

As stated earlier, Work Examiner begins at $60 per license for the Standard edition, but priced with volume discounts depending on the number of clients you need to monitor. Unlike most of the tools in this review roundup, Work Examiner prices not by recurring Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) subscription but by perpetual license. As with StaffCop Enterprise , which also offers software licensing, Work Examiner's per-client license is a one-time expense.

The product comes in two primary editions: Standard and Professional. Work Examiner Standard is geared toward small to midsize businesses (SMBs) and includes real-time monitoring, application and website reports, screenshots, keystroke logging, and tracking of chats, emails, files, searches, uploads/downloads, and print jobs. You also get app and website filters and scheduled reports. Pricing for the Standard edition begins at $60 per license for 1-2 users and then scales to $45 per license for 3-24 users, $40 per license for 25-49 users, $30 per license for 50-99 users, and $25 per license for 100-149 users. Above 150 users is priced by custom quote.

Work Examiner Professional offers unlimited remote console usage, the ability to create a hierarchical organizational structure integrated with Active Directory (AD), and security management. The pricing is a bit more expensive but also scales down based on volume. Pricing begins at $60 per license for 1-19 users, $45 per license for 20-49 users, $43 per license for 50-99 users, $40 per license for 100-199 users, and $37 per license for 200-299 users. The company recommends the Standard edition for organizations monitoring 20 computers or less, and Professional for scaling up into the thousands.

As with Veriato 360 , Work Examiner is deployed completely on-premises and does not offer a cloud-based option. EfficientLabs LLC, the company that owns the software, does offer a separate, cloud-based product called Controlio that also includes video recording (which Work Examiner does not include) but that's an entirely separate product designed for home users and small businesses.

Work Examiner's Standard edition can be installed on-premises by using the Firebird Structured Query Language (SQL) database, while the Professional edition requires full-blown Microsoft SQL Server. We tested Work Examiner Standard, through which I was able to start a free 30-day trial and download both the server and client software directly onto my Windows 10 ( at Amazon) test machine. I first deployed the admin console, which opened a quick installation wizard that took me through a few customization options, including checking boxes for the data sources I wanted to monitor (keystrokes, chats, emails, etc.). I then completed my installation and opened the Work Examiner Standard window within a few minutes without much hassle.

Installing the client-side agent (for monitoring employee machines) took a bit more manual effort. Clicking the Home button opened a pop-up window that prompted me to install clients but the install path was not automatically populated. I had to find my test computer's device information and enter it manually to add it to the active clients list to kick off a quick agent install. However, once entered, the install only took a minute and I immediately saw monitoring data from my test device populating the admin console once I hit the Refresh button. The monitoring agents are completely incognito to the employee and you can't switch visibility on and off as you can with Teramind. Overall, the install was not nearly as simple as that of ActivTrak (Free at ActivTrak) or Teramind but it required less manual hassle than did InterGuard (8.00 Per User Per Month at InterGuard) or Veriato 360.

Employee Monitoring

The Work Examiner admin console is far from being the most intuitive user interface (UI) tested in this review roundup. But it's easy to navigate and puts all of the primary monitoring tools and data vectors at your fingertips. Once you've installed the client-side agents and monitoring data begins flowing in, the first thing you see is the Dashboard Quick View. This is an extremely basic, widget-based reporting dashboard that by default shows the top 10 activities, categories, users, and websites, tracked in basic bar graphs. The entire dashboard is customizable by timeframe, users, or layout but only by opening the customization pane rather than offering full drag-and-drop functionality.

There are a few other interactive graphical views that break down user activity, including the Summary and Activities tabs. The Summary tab is a bar graph view of a single user or group's activity during a particular timeframe, with an activity log below it that shows active and total time. The Activities tab essentially provides the same information, except it sorts actions, apps, and websites into categories broken down by active and inactive time to calculate productivity. All of these are perfectly acceptable at-a-glance views, but the data visualizations and metrics offered leave a lot to be desired compared to what you'll find in ActivTrak, Teramind, Veriato 360, or even in a time tracker with productivity reporting such as Desktime Pro (7.00 Per Month. Pricing Scales Based on User Volume at DeskTime) .

Aside from the dashboards, the bulk of Work Examiner's monitoring tools and reports are available from the left-hand menu which breaks down data into tabs for Attendance (for basic clock-in/out time tracking), Categories, Chats and IMs, Downloads and Uploads, Emails, File Usage, Keystrokes, Online Search, Printing, Screenshots, and Users & PCs. The Users & PCs tab is where much of Work Examiner's most unique monitoring features exist. From there, I was able to click directly into my test computer's activity, pressing the Surveillance button at the top of the screen to launch a real-time monitoring window. The window shows the employee's live screen (which can be automatically or manually refreshed) and tabs to view currently active processes and open websites. I could also click the Activity Report button to take me back to the Activities tab for that user.

There's also a Detailed Applications tab that breaks down user activity in more granular detail, with an activity log showing the user and computer involved, what application they opened, the file name, start and end times, active and total time, and a link to a screenshot of that activity. I was also able to sort the data in this tab between apps, windows, websites, and any blocked websites. The level of monitoring detail here is deeper than in Desktime Pro or time trackers such as Hubstaff and VeriClock (30-Day Free Trial at VeriClock) . But Work Examiner can't drill down nearly as far into the full context of a user's actions as can StaffCop Enterprise or Teramind.

That said, Work Examiner isn't lacking in any core employee monitoring vectors. The Keystrokes tab shows detailed, timestamped entries of the exact order that keys were pressed on an employee's keyboard. The Emails tab records all emails from Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo whereas the Chats & IMs tab pulls in messages from Facebook, Skype, and a number of other chat clients—all linked to screenshots for visual evidence of a particular employee activity. Work Examiner also runs full file reports on any files created or moved on the machine, uploaded and downloaded files, and any print jobs, including an attached PDF file of whatever document was printed.

The online search capabilities are useful as well, with Work Examiner running online search reports with a Searched Keywords summary and user-by-user reports that show what was searched across Bing, Google, and other search engines, with associated screenshots. One key feature that's missing, however, is holistic keyword tracking across all of these data types. Unlike ActivTrak and Veriato 360, Work Examiner doesn't have keyword monitoring across the full range of chats, emails, keystrokes, etc., regardless of context. There's also no optical character recognition (OCR) on captured screens and documents to identify keywords simply from an image, as Teramind does.

There is some automation and more advanced alerting available in the form of app and website filter rules. To customize all of this, there is a small management menu beneath the Monitoring tabs to configure client options, website and app filter rules, scheduled reports, and to customize your app and website categories.

The most important tools here are the web and app filter rules, which are also where you configure automated triggers and keyword alerts. This is arguably the most advanced area of the platform, in which I could create filters to block apps or websites during certain hours, redirect queries related to specific keywords, and trigger alert emails or automated messages for specific users or machines. InterGuard, StaffCop Enterprise, and Teramind (60.00 Per Month for Up to 5 Users for the Starter Edition at Teramind) all have more complex automated workflows you can set up and alerting that isn't as hidden, but Work Examiner packs a lot of complexity into its website and app filter rules.

Email reports, on the other hand, are pretty simple. On the Schedule tab, I was able to create new reports to be sent on particular days and times, either sent via email or published to a specific folder on your network. Work Examiner lets you pull in any of the data types or metrics it collects, be it activity summaries, detailed app and website views, attendance, searches, or categories.

It's also pretty simple to configure the categories and to change the category of an app or site. Work Examiner includes an impressive selection of default categories and subcategories. For instance, under the Entertainment category, there are subcategories for Aggressive, Gambling, Games, and Humor & Comedy. Other high-level categories include Business, News and Opinion, Shopping, and Social Networking. One UI improvement we'd like to see—aside from a more responsive UI and cloud deployment options—is drag-and-drop functionality when configuring settings and customizing categories rather than an endless array of menus and manual options.

No-Frills Employee Oversight

Work Examiner isn't the flashiest or most powerful employee monitoring software available. However, its on-premises perpetual licensing model for pricing and deployment fills a need for businesses that want to keep their monitoring software hosted on local servers and would rather buy the product license outright than pay recurring subscription costs.

The user experience (UX) is drab and dated but the monitored data sources are comprehensive and there's plenty of automation and customization to be found. While it's not as powerful or intuitive as Editors' Choice Teramind and it can't match the "Google Analytics for your office" productivity value of Editors' Choice ActivTrak, Work Examiner does get the job done.

Best Employee Monitoring Software Picks

• More Employee Monitoring Software Reviews
• More from EfficientLab LLC