.jpeg)
Comparing Hives.co and Fabrico? These are very different tools with some overlap in the idea management space, but designed for different organisational contexts and problems.
Hives.co is an idea management platform focused on collecting and managing employee suggestions. Fabrico is primarily an AI-driven tool for continuous improvement and Kaizen, designed to identify improvement opportunities from operations and factory floor data.
If you're genuinely comparing these two, you're probably running a manufacturing or industrial organisation and deciding whether to invest in capturing ideas from your workforce or identifying improvement opportunities from your operations data.
Quick summary
Hives.co collects ideas directly from your team and organises them through structured challenges and evaluation workflows. The assumption behind Hives.co is that your employees know what can be improved, and you want a system to capture these insights and close the loop from suggestion to decision.
Fabrico uses AI to identify continuous improvement opportunities by analyzing operations and process data. The assumption behind Fabrico is that your business generates data that, when analyzed with AI, reveals improvement opportunities your team might not see without help. Fabrico also includes a Kaizen component to manage improvement projects.
These aren't mutually exclusive. Many organisations use both: employee ideas collected via idea management and AI-generated improvement opportunities identified via operations analysis.
Core differences
| Approach | Hives.co | Fabrico |
|---|---|---|
| Core method | Structured idea collection from employees | AI-driven identification of improvement opportunities from data |
| Primary data source | Employee knowledge and perspective | Operations and process data |
| Use case | Capture employee suggestions for CI programmes | Identify improvement opportunities in production/operations |
| Easy implementation | Quick to set up (weeks) | Requires operations data integration |
| Team involvement | Broad participation (all employees) | Focused on operations/engineering teams |
Data requirements
Hives.co doesn't require your organisation to provide operations data. It works with your team's collective knowledge. You write a challenge ("What ideas do you have for reducing packaging waste?"), your team submits ideas, and management reviews them.
Fabrico is data-driven. To work, it needs access to your operations data (production metrics, process logs, quality data, etc.). This is a higher data integration requirement than Hives.co, but it's also the source of Fabrico's value: identifying improvement opportunities that wouldn't be visible through crowdsourcing alone.
Deployment speed
Hives.co can be fully operational within 2-4 weeks of purchase. You set up a challenge, invite your team, and start receiving submissions.
Fabrico requires a more substantial implementation period (typically 2-3 months) to integrate with your data sources and configure AI analysis. The payoff is that it can identify improvement opportunities at scale.
Pricing
Hives.co pricing is published: €695/month (Core), €1,495/month (Pro), €1,995/month (Enterprise). It's a per-organisation cost, not based on volume of ideas or operations metrics processed.
Fabrico's pricing is not publicly available and requires a sales consultation. Typically, AI-driven CI tools are priced based on scope of operations data and use cases.
When to choose Hives.co
- You want to unlock ideas and suggestions from your entire workforce
- You have manufacturing or service teams with operations knowledge worth capturing
- You want fast deployment without complex data integration
- You need a structured process for idea evaluation and decision-making
- You're building a culture of continuous improvement and want employee engagement
When to choose Fabrico
- You have substantial operations data and want AI to identify improvement opportunities
- You're looking for optimisation opportunities employees might not see
- You have a technical team (operations, engineering) that can handle AI-generated insights
- You have implementation bandwidth for data integration
- You run large-scale operations and need data-driven identification of improvements
The best approach?
Many leading manufacturing organisations use both. They run Hives.co to capture employee ideas and use Fabrico (or similar tools) to identify data-driven improvement opportunities. The two approaches are complementary.
If you're evaluating continuous improvement tools, consider whether you're trying to solve an engagement/idea capture problem (Hives.co) or an opportunity identification problem (Fabrico), or both.
Want to see how Hives.co works? Book a 20-minute demo.
.webp)
