Effective October 27, 2025, Microsoft announced a licensing change that affects two Viva products – Viva Glint and Viva Pulse. As of this date, a Viva Glint license automatically includes Viva Pulse, removing the need to purchase Viva Pulse separately. This update simplifies how organizations get these tools and reflects their close integration. Previously, Viva Glint and Viva Pulse were sold as separate User Subscription Licenses (User SLs) or as part of the Microsoft Viva Suite bundle. Now, one license covers both. This change enables companies to easily use Viva Pulse alongside Viva Glint without extra licensing. It also means management teams can follow up a company-wide Viva Glint survey with targeted team surveys in Viva Pulse more seamlessly.
What is Viva Glint and Viva Pulse
Microsoft Viva is Microsoft’s Employee Experience Platform (EXP) – a suite of tools to improve employee engagement, learning, wellbeing, and productivity. Viva Glint and Viva Pulse are two complementary offerings within this EXP:
- Viva Glint: A company-wide employee engagement survey tool. It helps organizations measure and understand overall employee satisfaction and feedback across the entire company. Leaders and HR can use Viva Glint to send broad surveys, analyze the results for trends (like strengths and areas for improvement), and then plan strategic changes to improve workplace culture and performance. Viva Glint often runs periodic engagement surveys and requires some administrative setup to target all employees.
- Viva Pulse: A team-level employee feedback tool for quick, confidential check-ins. It allows managers and team leaders to gauge their team’s sentiment via brief, anonymous surveys, typically delivered through Microsoft Teams or the web. The focus is on day-to-day or project-based feedback. Viva Pulse results are confidential (individual responses are not identifiable), giving managers honest insights along with suggestions to improve team well-being, collaboration, and productivity. It’s a self-service tool, meaning a manager can create and send a Pulse survey on their own when needed.
In essence, Viva Glint provides a big-picture view of employee engagement at the organizational level, while Viva Pulse provides immediate, granular feedback at the team level. They work in tandem to help companies listen to employees and act on feedback continuously.
Key Features
- Anonymous Team Surveys (Viva Pulse): Managers can create quick surveys to collect anonymous feedback from their team members. Questions can be customized or chosen from templates, and responses remain confidential. This encourages open, honest input on team morale, work conditions, or specific initiatives. Results are delivered with simple visuals and recommended actions so leaders can respond to concerns or ideas promptly.
- Organization-Wide Engagement Insights (Viva Glint): HR leaders and executives can use Viva Glint to run comprehensive engagement surveys across the company. Viva Glint analyzes the data to highlight trends, such as overall engagement scores, strengths, and problem areas. It often provides dashboards and analytics that help in understanding workforce sentiment on a larger scale. These insights guide leadership in making informed strategic decisions (for example, company-wide initiatives to improve employee satisfaction or retention).
- Integrated Feedback Loop: Because Viva Glint and Viva Pulse are now closely integrated, organizations can combine their strengths. For example, after an organization conducts a broad Viva Glint survey, managers can immediately follow up with a targeted Viva Pulse survey for their own teams. This integration means the broad findings from Viva Glint can lead to focused questions in Viva Pulse, creating a continuous feedback loop. Managers get suggested Pulse questions based on Glint results, so they can dive deeper into any issue revealed. Overall, this leads to more focused and actionable feedback, ensuring that high-level survey results translate into concrete team-level improvements.
Licensing
From a licensing perspective, this change simplifies deployment of the two tools. In the past, customers had to license Viva Glint and Viva Pulse separately (each user needed a license for Glint and another for Pulse, unless they owned the whole Viva Suite). Now, purchasing Viva Glint automatically gives the licensed user rights to Viva Pulse as well. In practical terms, if you have a Viva Glint license for an employee, that employee can use Viva Pulse without any additional purchase. There is no need to buy a standalone Viva Pulse license for users who are covered by Viva Glint.
This licensing inclusion applies whether Viva Glint is acquired standalone or as part of the Viva Suite. It eliminates duplicate licensing costs and simplifies management – you only need to manage the Viva Glint license assignment, and Viva Pulse capabilities become available to those users.
Note: Microsoft did introduce Viva Pulse as a standalone product in 2024 for those who might only want Pulse, but for any Viva Glint customers, Pulse is now bundled in automatically.
Expert advice: We at SCHNEIDER IT MANAGEMENT recommend reviewing your current Viva licensing in light of this change. You may find cost savings since a single license now covers both feedback tools. Ensure that your Viva Glint licenses are correctly assigned to all users who need to run Pulse surveys. If you’re unsure how this impacts your agreement or you have questions about the best licensing option for your organization, we are happy to help with expert guidance. This change is designed to be beneficial, and we can assist in making the transition smooth and cost-effective for you.
More information
For further details on this licensing change and the Viva Glint/Pulse integration, please refer to the original announcement: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/viva_glint_blog/spotlight-on%E2%80%A6-volume-1-edition-1-october-2025/4461491.
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