Simply Stakeholders vs Tractivity: Which is best for stakeholder engagement in Ireland?

In this section, we provide a head-to-head comparison of Simply Stakeholders vs Tractivity: the leading stakeholder management system. We explore how each software addresses the unique stakeholder management requirements of Irish organisations, including compliance and security, user experience, support, communication management, data analysis, and more.

1.  Track stakeholder complaints and issues

Tractivity provides a comprehensive stakeholder engagement platform designed to meet the accountability, transparency, and reporting standards expected across Irish government, public sector, and regulated industries. Its Enquiry and Commitment Tracking module ensures every agreement, mitigation, action, or regulatory obligation is formally logged, assigned, and monitored through to completion, with set reminders that prevent delays or missed follow-ups.

A detailed Engagement and Issues Timeline creates a permanent, auditable record of every interaction, concern, and decision, supporting compliance, Freedom of Information requests under the FOI Act 2014, scrutiny panels, and internal governance reviews. Tractivity's powerful reporting suite enables Irish teams to quickly generate clear, evidence-based reports for Oireachtas committee briefings, public consultations, regulatory submissions, and senior leadership updates, ensuring that complex engagement activity can be communicated with accuracy and confidence.

Simply Stakeholders includes a basic Grievance Management module for logging, categorising, and resolving complaints. However, its audit capabilities are limited when compared with Tractivity. Tractivity is built for public sector governance, offering comprehensive, system-wide activity logging that tracks every engagement, across every topic, project, policy area, and decision-making process. This level of traceability aligns with the audit, compliance, and transparency standards required in Irish government IT environments.

2. Communication & Outreach

When it comes to communication outreach, Tractivity provides a fully integrated, end-to-end suite of tools, whereas Simply Stakeholders relies more heavily on external systems and integrations to deliver equivalent functionality.

Tractivity includes native modules for newsletters, event management, and stakeholder communications, all designed to work seamlessly within the platform. It's built-in newsletter tool allows teams to create, send, and track communications without exporting data or relying on third-party email systems. The event management module goes further, offering automated RSVP tracking, attendance management, and direct integration with Microsoft Teams, enabling organisations to schedule and manage meetings with internal leaders or community stakeholders in just a few clicks.

Because these capabilities are native to Tractivity, Irish organisations avoid the complexity of APIs, data transfers, and external communication platforms. This not only reduces operational overhead and add-on costs but also protects data sovereignty, ensuring sensitive stakeholder information always remains securely within the system and within Europe under EU GDPR-aligned arrangements.

By contrast, Simply Stakeholders offers basic communication tools but typically requires integrations for more advanced outreach, such as event workflows, calendar management, or richer communication campaigns. This introduces additional steps, external dependencies, and potential risks around data handling and compliance under DPC oversight.

3. Security, permissions and governance

Security is a critical requirement for Irish government bodies and large organisations, and Tractivity delivers enterprise-grade protection trusted across the UK and EU public sector. With comprehensive user activity logging, Single Sign-On (SSO) and MFA support, and highly granular role-based access control (RBAC), Tractivity enables secure collaboration across departments while allowing controlled access for contractors or third-party partners without risking accidental data exposure or relying on unvetted external integrations. Its security posture is reinforced through continuous penetration testing, hosting in secure European data centres, and full alignment with ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus certification standards.

Simply Stakeholders meets baseline security expectations through SOC 2 accreditation and standard encryption, but its security model is less extensive. It lacks the deeper integration options, advanced authentication controls, and fine-grained permission structures that Irish government-grade systems typically require. Additionally, its reliance on external tools for communication, event workflows, and certain operational functions introduces more touchpoints where data must move between systems, creating additional overhead, potential compliance considerations under DPC oversight, and a broader surface area for risk.

In comparison, Tractivity's fully integrated architecture keeps sensitive stakeholder data within a single secure environment, held within Europe, offering a level of protection and governance that Simply Stakeholders does not currently match.

4. Platform Accessibility compliance

Tractivity supports Irish organisations in managing and engaging stakeholders while meeting the compliance and accessibility standards expected in the public sector. Although the platform interface operates in English, Tractivity allows Irish organisations to publish stakeholder-facing content, including surveys, newsletters, event invitations and consultation materials, in Irish (Gaeilge) alongside the English version. This works the same way as Welsh-language support: organisations add Irish-language content within the platform for outbound communications, while the platform interface itself operates in English. This supports the Official Languages Act 2003 (as amended by the Official Languages (Amendment) Act 2021), which sets statutory requirements on Irish public bodies for the provision of services through Irish. The same multilingual flexibility can also be extended to other languages where needed.

Alongside this, Tractivity provides a fully accessible design that meets WCAG 2.2 Level A standards today, with WCAG 2.2 Level AA compliance planned for release in 2026. The European Union (Accessibility of Websites and Mobile Applications of Public Sector Bodies) Regulations 2020 (S.I. 358/2020) require Irish public sector bodies to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, making accessibility a procurement-critical consideration. Tractivity ensures that all stakeholder interactions, from surveys to newsletters to event invitations, are delivered in a way that is inclusive and accessible to every user.

The platform is suitable for national, regional and local government bodies in Ireland, including local authorities, the HSE, semi-state organisations, and regulated bodies of all sizes. Tractivity is fully EU GDPR compliant under DPC oversight, simplifying the management of email opt-ins, privacy preferences and government-aligned stakeholder communications, while keeping all data securely contained within a single system.

Furthermore, all data is securely stored in secure European data centres with flexible regional options to ensure compliance with Irish data sovereignty requirements. The software itself holds ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus certifications, underscoring its robust commitment to security and best practices.

Simply Stakeholders meets basic compliance expectations, offering GDPR-aligned data handling, privacy controls and hosting within Microsoft Azure data centres. However, it does not currently support WCAG-level accessibility, which is a mandatory requirement for Irish public sector organisations under S.I. 358/2020, nor does it provide outbound multilingual communications support, including Irish (Gaeilge). Both features are standard within Tractivity, making it the more inclusive, future-ready and compliance-aligned choice for Irish organisations with diverse stakeholder groups and statutory communication obligations.

5. AI data privacy and model training

Tractivity takes a security-first approach to AI, offering tools designed to enhance stakeholder engagement workflows without compromising data protection. Its AI Sentiment tool analyses communications in real time, identifying positive, negative or neutral sentiment, while the AI Summarise tool condenses lengthy engagement notes into clear, decision-ready insights that help teams work more efficiently.

Simply Stakeholders also incorporates AI within its platform, including sentiment analysis and AI-generated summaries of engagement records. However, Irish organisations may wish to carry out additional due diligence around data governance. Simply Stakeholders does not publicly clarify whether customer data is used to train its AI models or how sensitive stakeholder information is processed within its AI pipeline. For Irish public sector teams handling personally identifiable information and confidential consultation records under DPC oversight, this is an important point to raise directly with their sales or technical team before proceeding.

Tractivity, by contrast, follows a privacy-first model. Customer data is never used to train AI models, ensuring that stakeholder information, engagement records and organisational data remain fully confidential and isolated within each customer environment. This approach gives Irish organisations confidence that their data stays protected, always controlled and compliant with EU GDPR.

6. Reporting and deep analysis

Tractivity provides one of the most comprehensive reporting ecosystems available in stakeholder management software. Irish organisations gain immediate access to a pre-built library of more than 150 reports, covering everything from issue trends and stakeholder sentiment to engagement activity, consultation outcomes and stakeholder mapping. Every report can be exported in all common formats, making it easy to share insights across teams, committees and leadership groups.

Beyond the extensive report library, Tractivity enables organisations to unlock far deeper analysis through its integration with Microsoft Power BI. Clients can access their full raw dataset and design custom dashboards, charts and data tables tailored to their specific reporting needs. Data analysts can work directly within the platform's environment, giving teams the ability to interrogate any aspect of their engagement activity and generate new insights that go far beyond standard reporting. These dashboards can be shared with colleagues, expanding what is possible in terms of data visibility, strategic planning and evidence-based decision making.

This combination of ready-to-use reporting and advanced analytical capability ensures that Irish organisations can move from data collection to meaningful insight with ease, supporting everything from operational reporting to high-level governance and policy development, including evidence packs for Oireachtas committees and Public Spending Code business cases.

Simply Stakeholders offers a range of standard reports and dashboards that cover core engagement activity. These tools provide useful visibility into interactions, sentiment and stakeholder records, and they support basic export options for sharing information internally.

However, when compared with Tractivity, several important differences become clear. Simply Stakeholders does not offer the same breadth of pre-built reports, nor does it provide the same depth of analytical capability. Its reporting is more limited in scope, and it does not include an equivalent integration that allows organisations to access and analyse their full raw dataset in a tool as powerful as Microsoft Power BI.

This means Irish organisations using Simply Stakeholders may find it harder to produce complex dashboards, cross-departmental insights or detailed analysis required for public sector reporting, consultation evidence under Project Ireland 2040, or strategic decision making. Tractivity's combination of an extensive report library, flexible exports and advanced Power BI integration gives it a significant advantage for organisations that rely on robust, data-driven insight.

7. Customer support, onboarding and ongoing development

When comparing Tractivity and Simply Stakeholders in terms of customer support, Tractivity offers far more than software delivery. Every Irish organisation receives a dedicated customer success experience supported by specialists with deep expertise in stakeholder engagement and consultation. The team includes certified practitioners through the UK Consultation Institute, bringing practical knowledge of engagement best practice, regulatory compliance and data governance. This means Irish organisations across government, semi-state bodies and the private sector benefit from guided, hands-on onboarding, usually completed within a matter of weeks, along with ongoing support that blends technical assistance with strategic advice.

A key advantage for Irish organisations is that Tractivity's entire technical and client support team is based within the UK and EU region. Support is available during Irish working hours, allowing real-time responses, immediate troubleshooting and rapid implementation of changes. Tractivity also hosts regular events and workshops where clients can meet other users, share experiences and contribute directly to the development of new features.

Customers also have access to an extensive knowledge hub containing past webinars, guidance articles and answers to common questions about Tractivity's features and functionality.

Simply Stakeholders provides onboarding and customer success support focused on initial setup, and its team serves clients across its target industries. The difference lies in sector-specific depth. Tractivity's customer success team includes certified practitioners with direct experience advising public bodies and regulated organisations on consultation strategy, EU and Irish compliance requirements and data governance. This level of expertise can be particularly valuable for Irish teams navigating complex public sector engagement for the first time.

Another important distinction is location. Simply Stakeholders is primarily based in Australia, with most of its client success and all of its technical team operating in that time zone. For Irish organisations, this can result in slower response times and reduced real-time support, as technical actions cannot be implemented immediately in the way Tractivity can deliver.

Tractivity believes that hands-on technical and client support is one of the most critical elements of a successful subscription. If a team is not supported properly and guided through adoption, even the most feature-rich platform will struggle to deliver value. This is where Tractivity consistently stands out.

8. Transparent pricing for subscriptions

When it comes to pricing transparency and overall value, Tractivity stands out clearly from Simply Stakeholders. Tractivity offers a single, all-inclusive subscription priced from €10,995 per year, which provides access to every module, feature, integration and all future upgrades. There are no hidden extras, no add-on charges and no restrictions on storage, communication volume or the amount of time you spend with your dedicated client success manager, based within your Irish or EU working time zone.

Everything your Irish organisation needs for effective stakeholder engagement is included as standard, from surveys and newsletters to event management, webinars and advanced reporting. This approach lets you replace fragmented or siloed communication tools with Tractivity's fully integrated platform, without worrying about additional licensing or unexpected costs later. Transparent pricing also supports Public Spending Code business case requirements for Irish public sector projects.

In contrast, Simply Stakeholders does not publish clear pricing. Instead, it states that costs depend on the plan selected, leaving potential customers without a starting point and making it difficult to understand the true investment required. Several core elements, such as a dedicated account manager, API access, basic service SLAs, and quarterly account reviews, are available only on their highest tier. This lack of transparency can create uncertainty early in the buying process, and with their team based primarily in Australia, Irish organisations will also experience delays in support and implementation.

Beyond pricing clarity, Tractivity is recognised for high user adoption, strong retention and significant time savings. Reports that once took days can now be produced in seconds, allowing teams to focus on meaningful engagement and informed decision-making. The combination of transparent pricing and measurable efficiency gives customers confidence not only in the cost but in the return on investment from day one.

Tractivity: the better choice over Simply Stakeholders for Ireland

Tractivity stands out as the stronger and more complete stakeholder engagement platform for Irish organisations because it delivers everything they need in one secure, compliant and fully integrated system. It combines powerful communication tools, an extensive library of more than 150 ready-made reports, advanced analytics through Microsoft Power BI, multilingual outbound communications support including Irish (Gaeilge), WCAG 2.2 accessible design, EU GDPR compliance under DPC oversight, European data residency through secure European data centres, and a single all-inclusive subscription with no hidden costs. Every feature, from surveys and newsletters to event management, sentiment analysis and stakeholder mapping, is built directly into the platform, ensuring organisations can manage all engagement activity without relying on external tools, add-ons or complex integrations.

In comparison, Simply Stakeholders offers useful core functionality but lacks the depth, breadth and compliance readiness required by many Irish public sector organisations. Its reporting is more limited, its pricing is less transparent, it does not currently support WCAG accessibility (a mandatory requirement under S.I. 358/2020) or built-in multilingual communication, including Irish, and its support team operates primarily from Australia, reducing real-time assistance for Irish clients.

Tractivity's UK and EU-based customer success team, certified consultation expertise, hands-on onboarding and existing Irish client base (including the Institute of Banking in Dublin) ensure rapid adoption and long-term value. Together, these strengths make Tractivity a future-ready and dependable choice for Irish organisations that need a comprehensive, compliant and insight-driven stakeholder engagement platform.