InterGuard is employee monitoring software that you can use to track the activities of your team members. This stealth monitoring application running on employees’ computers, tablets, and phones relays information back to the server, detailing everything from sent emails to visited web pages.
In our InterGuard evaluation, we investigate whether this tool can help a business increase productivity, secure sensitive data, and prove compliance with data privacy laws.
- Our guide to the best employee monitoring software
Plans and pricing
InterGuard has a relatively complex pricing structure. First, you have the choice between a cloud-hosted service and an on-premise installation. You’ll need an SQL server and to contact InterGuard for full pricing details if you’d like to install the software on your premises.
InterGuard’s main cloud-hosted plan is paid annually and has a minimum of two users. If you buy between two and 10 licenses, PC/Mac monitoring costs $156/license/year, Chromebook monitoring costs $60/license/year, and Android/iOS monitoring costs $150/license/year. If you buy between 11 and 25 licenses of each different type of monitoring, there’s a discount of between 10-50%. You must contact the sales team for a quote if you plan on buying more than 25 licenses. You can also choose to pay two years in advance for a 15% discount.
Several upgrades cost extra. Geolocation support is $19/year and web blocking costs $15/year. An Enterprise package for PC ($15.60/year) adds file tracking, print monitoring, and download tracking. Endpoint Lockdown ($60/year) helps you monitor and control a laptop if it’s been lost or stolen. Data Loss Prevention ($133/year) blocks sensitive data sent by email, filled into web forms, or saved to removable media. Do note that these are all separate add-ons for Mac and PC, so if you want them to work on both Macs and PCs, you must buy them both.
There’s a monthly payment plan option, but it feels like an afterthought. If you pay monthly, you can only monitor Windows and Mac computers, so if you need Chromebook, Android, iPhone, or iPad monitoring, you’ll need an annual plan instead. You also can’t buy the various add-ons, like geolocation and web blocking, if you choose the monthly payment plan, and the price per user is more than double the price of the annual plan.
How it works
InterGuard has an online test drive and a 14-day trial that doesn’t require a credit card. During the free trial, the monitoring software will not work in Stealth mode, so users will be aware that it is running.
It’s possible to deploy the monitoring software remotely on computers using InterGuard’s NetDeploy tool, but the easiest way to install the software is by being at the physical location of the endpoint that you want to monitor and downloading the installer from the InterGuard Dashboard. Before installation, you’ll need to add an exclusion for the software to your antivirus program.
Features and services
Once the monitoring program is installed, you’ll typically use the InterGuard web interface to organize employees into groups, decide what you want to record, create alert word categories, and set up automated reports.
The InterGuard dashboard has six customizable views of your employees’ productivity data. The Chart view is a high-level overview with over 60 chart types that help you spot trends or issues. The User view shows you the team’s workday and who is being the most productive. You can view screenshots of each user’s screen. The Data view is a filterable log of all recorded data, and the Search view allows you to find any activity, perhaps in the case of an investigation.
You can create alerts based on rules that you create, and assign them different levels of risk. For example, you could consider the use of a peer-to-peer file-sharing program a high risk and opt to receive an alert in the Alert Log if any employee starts one up. Using the Reports and Notifications wizard, you can get your choice of reports emailed to you daily or weekly.
Support and customer care
InterGuard has a small knowledge base with around 30 articles. Most of these are guides on how to get anti-virus software programs to ignore the stealth monitoring application. But all the articles are long, detailed, and accompanied by clear screenshots and useful videos.
Customer support is available via email Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM EST. The 24/7 live chat support can be accessed within the application. InterGuard specifies that live chat support is only able to help with the most basic account issues. We sent a few emails to InterGuard technical support and received helpful replies within four hours, which is reasonably quick.
The competition
InterGuard may be a pioneer of employee behavior monitoring, but we find Teramind easier to use due to its more modern interface. Teramind also has better templates for automation out of the box; we found that InterGuard’s Alert Word system was prone to flagging false positives when employees visited innocuous websites.
ActivTrak is another top tool for employee monitoring with a stealth agent that runs in the background. At $7.20/user/month, it’s about half the price of InterGuard yet includes all the same salient features for monitoring employees on PCs, Macs, and Chromebooks.
Final verdict
InterGuard is a powerful employee monitoring tool that’s extremely customizable. It has strong keyword tracking and can generate a wealth of reports on your employees’ activities. That said, its interface is somewhat clunky, and its stealth employee monitoring agent takes time to set up, particularly if you run antivirus software.
We recommend InterGuard if you’re interested in monitoring a range of different types of devices. While most employee monitoring software focuses on Windows and Mac, InterGuard has monitoring agents for Android and iOS too, potentially making it a more comprehensive solution for your needs.
- Our guide to the best employee monitoring software
