Wouldn’t it be nice to have a platform where you can discuss work issues with other professionals from your industry or even coworkers from the company where you’re employed, without having to give away your true identity?
That’s what Fishbowl and Blind are all about. Fishbowl and Blind are professional anonymous networking platforms that allow employees to ask questions about their companies and industries, connect with other professionals who work similar jobs, and network – without revealing who they are.
Which platform should you join, though? Both Fishbowl and Blind have their pros and cons, but which one is better for anonymous networking?
In this article, I will be comparing the two platforms to give you a better idea of which one is better suited for you.
The short version: Fishbowl wins when it comes to the user experience, but Blind is better if you are worried about privacy and job safety. I recommend trying both out and seeing which one you like better.
Read on to see my full in-depth comparison of these two platforms!
Platform Overview
Fishbowl
Fishbowl was founded in 2017, according to its LinkedIn page, and it became more popular as remote work became more widespread and people needed new ways to communicate with others in their industries.
The app, which is available for mobile and the web, is centered around “bowls,” which is basically how Fishbowl refers to its groups/communities. A bowl might be focused on a specific company like Uber or a specific industry.
There are also communities that allow people to connect over certain topics or ask questions related to salaries, interviews, and more. For example, if you are wondering whether you are getting a good salary, you can hop onto Fishbowl and ask others what they are earning while working in the same position.
If you are scheduled to be interviewed by a certain company or for a certain position, you can speak with others who have been successfully hired after going through similar interviews and get tips from them on how to succeed.
Blind
Blind is an anonymous networking app that was founded in 2013. It has tens of thousands of employees from many companies, including large ones.
It allows employees to connect with each other, air their grievances, and discuss salaries, job problems, and more.
Popular companies on Blind include Uber, Meta (Facebook), Reddit, Amazon, Walmart, and many other large tech companies. All employees must be verified through a work email, so you can’t just sign up if you drive for Uber, for example – you must actually work there as an employee and not as a contractor.
Due to the popularity of both Fishbowl and Blind, companies have started using them too, to learn about employee concerns – concerns that workers might otherwise be fearful of talking about in public or if they had to reveal their identities.
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User Experience
Fishbowl
When you sign up to Fishbowl, you will need to verify that you work with a specific company. You can change this later if you switch jobs.
Verification can be done with a work email or with your LinkedIn profile.
Another option is signing up as a student for a student account using your .edu email address.
Finally, if you are a freelancer or just want to browse the site, you can do so by signing up with your regular Gmail or LinkedIn account. You can select your industry and job title, which will appear when you post.
However, you will be limited – for example, while you may be able to follow certain company bowls, you won’t be able to post in them unless you verify your identity and show you are actually employed there. You can still join open groups and request to join communities that require prior approval before joining.
Once on Fishbowl, you can view new posts in your feed. You can comment on posts, like them, and share them, just like on Facebook.
Examples of company bowls include the Coforge and EY Consulting communities, which both have around 1,000 members each. Examples of industry specific communities include the computer science and corporate banking communities.
There are also groups that focus on more specific use cases. For example, there are communities for:
- Teacher memes
- Crazy customer stories
- Job referrals
- Depression/anxiety talk
- Toronto
There are threads that discuss certain topics, such as interview expectations for certain positions or salary discussions. Finally, there are threads that discuss specific questions users have.
Most of those posts focus on career-related questions, although some veer more into personal issues. For example, in this post, the poster asked if it was normal for her boyfriend to go to a strip club without telling or asking her.
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Blind
Signing up to Blind requires a work email for full access. The only other option you have is to sign up with a personal email account, but it will give you limited read-only access; you won’t be able to use the site fully.
In read-only mode, you also won’t be able to access company channels or compare salaries. It’s still worth it, though, because you can browse industry related posts and see what others are saying about salaries, job experiences at certain companies, and a lot more.
When you do sign up, you will be able to choose industries and topics you want to follow. Then, you will be taken to the home screen.
There, you can browse popular posts or head to industry-specific groups to browse posts there. You can comment and reply, but only if you verified your work email address.
The interface is clean and simple, but I liked Fishbowl’s interface a lot better. Fishbowl is a lot more intuitive, and it feels more like Facebook and like a social media platform in general, while Blind feels more like a web forum than a social media site.
Anonymous Networking Features
Fishbowl
Fishbowl is not anonymous in the sense that you can sign up without giving away your personal information. You do have to sign up with your work email or your LinkedIn profile, and Fishbowl will take up to a few days to verify your position at the company.
However, it is anonymous in the sense that you control the personal information people see about you when you post. You don’t have to reveal all your information when you post; you can decide to only let people see which company you work at or what your position is.
Even if you sign up as a freelancer, for example, you can choose to post as “a writer” instead of using your name. When you post, you will see your posting options at the bottom; simply select how you want to appear.
You can also control your default posting profile at the top of your screen or in your profile. There are three options:
- Your full name
- Your job title
- The company you work at
I signed up to Fishbowl as a freelancer, and while it initially gave me the option to post anonymously as “a writer,” it quickly changed it to giving me the option to post as “a Chief Executive Officer” or as someone working at “Level Equity.”
I found it a bit strange that it chose those positions randomly, as I definitely did not input that information myself; I don’t know if that was a bug or a feature.
Another downside, though, is that you have to be careful about how you are posting and commenting as threads. If you are not careful, you might accidentally post using your full name.
Finally, while you can post anonymously on Fishbowl, I wouldn’t say that it’s best for complete privacy. Employees at Fishbowl can still see who you are, and if you sign up with your LinkedIn profile, they will also be able to see that.
Blind
Blind is superior when it comes to privacy. There is no option to sign up with your LinkedIn account.
You do have to provide a work or personal email address, but that email address is hashed and encrypted. Your actual account will be stored separately from your email address, which will be used only to verify your work position.
In other words, your account activity on Blind – anything you post – is untraceable to your email address.
Employees at Blind can’t even reset your password for you using your email address due to the patented encryption technology that it uses. That means you are completely safe when using Blind, without having to worry about leaks or hacks that could reveal your private information.
In addition to your activity not being connected to your email, Blind doesn’t even send a confirmation email after signing up. It is only used to send a verification code, which you must enter to verify your account.
You can choose to be anonymous on Fishbowl, but on Blind, you don’t even need to. You are not even allowed to register using your real name, and your email address will be encrypted so your activity is entirely untraceable.
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Community and Engagement
Fishbowl
FIshbowl hasn’t been around as long as Blind, but it has managed to attract a sizable user base from employees of companies of all sizes.
According to Fishbowl’s homepage, over 40% of employees from companies like Apple, Netflix, Google, Chase, and many other major companies are on Fishbowl. This is based on internal Fishbowl data, which shows how many people from each company are on Fishbowl, compared with publicly available data about the employee counts of these different companies.
Fishbowl is a very lively site, and there are tons of communities available. Even if you don’t find a community centered around your company, you can find one focusing on your industry.
The groups on Fishbowl have a lot of members! Here are some examples of different bowls and the number of members they have (approximately):
- Staying Healthy – 128,000 members
- Federal, Government, and Public Sector – 32,000 members
- Work From Home Freelancers – 36,000 members
- New York City – 52,000 members
- Career Pivot – 145,000 members
- Startups and Entrepreneurship – 249,000 members
Actual engagement varies. Some posts get zero or just one comment, while others get 10+ or even dozens of comments, as you can see in the following screenshot.
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Engagement does vary based on community, as some communities are livelier and more active than others.
Fishbowl posts can vary in length and depth as well. Some are small rants or observations, while other posts encourage in-depth discussions of career advice and other topics.
Blind
Blind has a very active community, and the posts attract a lot of engagement. According to its Google Play description, it has over seven million employees from over 300,000 companies, including over 80% of employees from Uber, 70% of employees from Amazon and Apple, and 60% of employees from Meta and Microsoft.
The posts in the Ask Blinders section, which is an all-topics Q&A section (sort of like r/AskReddit), tend to get between five and 30 comments in just a few hours. One Ask Me Anything by a recruiter for FAANG companies got over 100 comments in just a few days.
The depth of the discussions, though, vary greatly. Some posts have comments that consist of just random short remarks and emojis, while others have more in-depth engagement.
Overall, I’d say it’s pretty equal to Fishbowl in terms of having an active community.
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Professional Insights and Resources
Fishbowl
Fishbowl offers plenty of professional insights and resources in the numerous discussions. You can browse the questions regarding salaries or interview prep or ask your own.
The main value you will get from Fishbowl is networking and discussions with other employees, both from within your company and from other companies. Think of it as Facebook or Reddit but for professionals only, with the option to be anonymous when you want to discuss sensitive topics.
Blind
Blind provides a lot of excellent resources as well. There are groups for different companies and industries, including tech, but there are also more general groups, such as Housing, Investments & Money, and Work Visa.
However, Blind also has other resources that will be useful to you as a professional. There is a salary comparison tool, for example, which allows you to compare your salary to those of verified Blind account owners who have the same job titles.
Blind even has a job board with curated job postings from top companies in different sectors. You can filter the job listings on the job board to find positions that are work from home, for example.
There are professional resources for employers as well. Talent by Blind is a recruitment assistance service that helps recruiters from companies source the best talent in the industry via the Blind network.
Recruiters can either find talent via the Blind job marketplace or opt for the white glove concierge recruitment service, which involves no upfront payments – companies only need to pay once they successfully hire.
Blind also has something called Company Insights, which allows companies to take advantage of the anonymity of Blind and listen in on conversations from their employees. Companies can learn about hot topics of discussion amongst their workers, view polls, and see top keywords that their employees are interested in.
Privacy and Security
Fishbowl
Fishbowl provides anonymity, but it could do better in terms of privacy and security. According to one Reddit poster, someone at Fishbowl viewed their LinkedIn profile.
That shows that Fishbowl employees can see quite a bit of information about you, even if that information is hidden from your employers. The fact that you sign up with your real name is another downside.
Blind
Blind is better when it comes to privacy and security due to the nature of the platform and the signup process. Your email address is only linked to your account for the verification code; it is not linked to any further activity you do on the platform.
For both FIshbowl and Blind, however, you have to make sure that your employer is not monitoring your work email accounts, or they will see that you signed up for an account.
The difference is that with Blind, there is nothing they can do about it. They can’t reset your Blind password using your email address, so they will never see your account activity on Blind without knowing your Blind password.
When using either Fishbowl or Blind, make sure you don’t reveal any personal information while posting. There are things that may be able to identify you – for example, if you work at a small company and reveal a very specific story that happened to you, people from that company may immediately know what it is you.
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Reviews and Feedback
Fishbowl
Fishbowl has surprisingly different ratings on the Google Play and iOS app stores.
On the Apple App Store, it has a rating of 4.6 stars, which is pretty good. However, there were many reviews complaining about the reporting process.
Apparently, it’s really easy to report someone’s comments, and the app automatically bans people too easily based on these reports. The moderation team is not very responsive, according to some reviewers, and not efficient at their jobs.
On the Google Play Store, though, the app has a poor rating of just 2.6 stars, which is pretty bad. The complaints mostly centered around:
- A buggy app and poor user experience
- Excessive notifications
- Too many pop-ups
- Too many hurdles for signing up
I loved the web app, though, and I found it incredibly easy to use. My main concerns are the potential privacy issues with using the site, but you can be careful with what you share.
On other third-party sites, it was hard to track review ratings, because a lot of people were mixing up the Fishbowl networking app with Fishbowl.com and Fishbowlinventory.com (all totally different software tools).
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Blind
Blind has pretty good reviews. On the iOS app store, it has an average rating of 4.2 stars.
The reviews are mostly positive. Most of the negative reviews seem to center around the fact that the app is only available in the US and South Korea.
On the Google Play Store, it has an average rating of 3.8 stars, which isn’t the best but still a lot better than Fishbowl’s rating on Google Play. Most of the negative reviews focus on issues such as:
- Repetitive content asking about total compensation
- Buggy app that sometimes crashes or doesn’t work
- Getting banned due to others flagging your content for no good reason
- Not being able to use on a rooted device
Overall, Blind has slightly better reviews on average, when considering both Google Play and the Apple App Store.
If you find any of the mobile apps buggy, though, you can always opt to use the desktop versions on your computer. That way, you won’t have to deal with potential crashes or bugs.
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Conclusion
Both apps are great, and there’s no reason you can’t use both. In terms of the user interface and user experience, I personally recommend Fishbowl.
It’s more intuitive and feels more like a social platform than a forum, and I also find that it’s easier to navigate and find groups that meet your needs.
Another thing going for Fishbowl is that even if you sign up without a work email, you can still post and comment in many communities. You have no commenting capabilities at all on Blind if you sign up with a personal email address.
That makes Fishbowl superior for freelancers and jobseekers.
The downside is that Blind is better for privacy than Fishbowl, but by being careful with what you post, you can avoid a lot of problems.
Ultimately, though, it’s up to your preferences. For example, your company might have a larger presence on Blind, with very few employees on Fishbowl; for others, it might be the opposite.
Also, there’s no reason you can’t join both platforms. It will give you access to even more insights, and you’ll be able to join even more discussions about topics you care about.
