Best OKR Software: Two of Them Don’t Exist

Q: Is OKR software worth buying?

In two cases. When cascading objectives across several layers genuinely breaks down by spreadsheet, and when an external audience such as a board needs standard reporting on a fixed cadence. Otherwise the constraint is the practice rather than the tool.

Stagnation Slaughters. Strategy Saves. Speed Scales.

The criteria first, because a review without them is a preference. I am assessing these platforms on implementation effort, adoption, reporting quality, integration and price, plus one more that belongs on every list and appears on none: whether the vendor will still exist in three years. That last criterion is not theoretical here. Two of the products most frequently named in comparison articles have been retired or absorbed since 2025, and the buyers who chose them did so using grids that had no column for it.

What happened to this category?

It consolidated, and two of the platforms most commonly recommended no longer exist. Microsoft retired Viva Goals at the end of 2025 with no successor. WorkBoard acquired Quantive in May 2025, and Quantive had already absorbed Koan three years earlier.

The sequence is worth following because of what it did to buyers. Microsoft acquired Ally.io in 2021, reportedly for around sixty million dollars, and rebranded it as Viva Goals inside the Viva suite. Feature development stopped in December 2024. The product was retired on 31 December 2025, with customers advised to export their data and choose another vendor, and no replacement offered anywhere in Microsoft’s portfolio.

Separately, Gtmhub acquired Koan in 2022 and discontinued the standalone product. Gtmhub became Quantive. WorkBoard acquired Quantive in May 2025, and quantive.com now redirects to workboard.com.

Run those two threads together and count the migrations. A team that bought Ally.io has moved twice in four years. A team that bought Koan and followed each recommended path has moved three times. In both cases every individual decision was defensible on the information available, and the information available contained nothing about vendor trajectory.

There is a second-order effect for anyone shortlisting now. WorkBoard and Quantive were the two enterprise options most often presented as alternatives to each other, and they are one company. A buyer who compared them in early 2026 on the strength of a feature grid was choosing between two products from a single vendor without being told.

A team that bought Koan and followed each recommended migration path has moved three times in four years. Every individual decision was defensible on the information available, and the information available contained nothing about vendor trajectory.

What should you actually evaluate on?

Six things, and the sixth is the one no comparison grid holds. Implementation effort, adoption, reporting, integration and price are the standard five. Vendor trajectory is the sixth, and it is the only one that predicted what actually happened to buyers here.

The first five are well covered elsewhere and I will not pretend to add much. Implementation effort varies from a weekend to a quarter. Adoption is the one that decides the outcome and is mostly a function of whether leadership uses the thing. Reporting quality is the most common source of regret. Integration matters in proportion to how much of your data already lives somewhere else.

The sixth deserves its own method because it is answerable and almost nobody asks. Four questions, all of which a vendor can answer and some of which they will not.

Who owns you? Independent, private equity backed, or a line inside a larger suite. A product that is a feature of somebody else’s platform can be retired for reasons that have nothing to do with its customers, which is precisely what happened to Viva Goals.

What has this company acquired, and what happened to those products? An acquirer with a record of winding down what it buys tells you what happens if they buy your vendor next.

What is the contractual position if you are acquired or discontinued? Ask for data export commitments and notice periods in writing. Microsoft gave roughly a year of notice and export tooling, which is better than many would.

How old is the company and who funded it? A venture-backed platform that raised heavily several years ago is under pressure to exit, and an exit is frequently a migration for you.

What survives, and who does each suit?

Sorting by fit rather than rank, because I cannot assess quality from outside. WorkBoard for enterprise scale, Perdoo and Profit.co and Mooncamp for mid-market, Lattice where the requirement is people-led, and lightweight tools where a small team wants tracking rather than a system.

Treat this as a map rather than a ranking. I have not run these platforms, the published comparisons are written mostly by competitors, and quality assessments from outside are the thing article after article in this series has refused to fake.

WorkBoard is the consolidated enterprise incumbent, now holding Quantive’s customer base as well. It is the closest to feature parity for anybody leaving Viva Goals, it is credible at large scale, and it does not publish enterprise pricing. Reported entry figures sit near nine dollars per user per month with enterprise tiers estimated at several times that, which should be treated as directional rather than as a quote.

Perdoo, Profit.co and Mooncamp are the names that recur for mid-sized organisations wanting capability without enterprise setup. Perdoo and Profit.co both publish free tiers that cap on seats rather than crippling features, which makes a genuine pilot possible.

Lattice is a performance management platform with OKR tracking attached rather than a dedicated OKR tool. That is the right answer if your requirement is people-led, combining engagement and reviews with light goal tracking, and the wrong one if you want deep strategic execution.

Lightweight options exist for small teams and are frequently the honest answer under about thirty people. Weekdone covers three users free. Several tools in this tier changed their free plans recently, so verify before relying on a comparison table.

Where does the pricing mislead?

In the floors rather than the rates. Seat minimums and contract floors decide what you can actually buy more reliably than the per-user figure everybody compares, and at least one widely quoted entry price is for a tier that does not include objectives.

Three specific traps, all reported rather than quoted, and all worth confirming against a current proposal.

Seat and contract floors. Perdoo is reported to require ten paid licences. Lattice is reported at roughly four thousand dollars a year and Leapsome around six thousand, regardless of team size. For a twenty-person company the annual floor matters far more than the headline per-seat rate, and it is the number least likely to appear in a comparison table.

Tiers that exclude the thing you are buying. The 15Five figure that appears in many comparison tables is its engagement tier, which does not include objectives; the tier with goals is reported at a considerably higher rate. Check which tier the quoted price refers to before comparing anything.

Unpublished enterprise pricing. Neither of the leading enterprise options publishes rates. Every figure you will see for them is an estimate from an aggregator, which is useful for order of magnitude and useless for budgeting.

The honest position on all of this: I have written elsewhere on this site about what transformation software costs as a category, and everything here should be verified against a live quote before it reaches a budget.

What if you are migrating right now?

Move less than you think. A forced migration is the only moment anybody is permitted to delete goal history, and most of what sits in a retiring platform is several years of objectives nobody has read since the quarter they were written.

Thousands of teams are in this position because of one vendor decision, and the instinct is to reproduce what existed. That instinct is expensive twice: once in the migration effort and again in carrying the clutter into the new tool.

Export everything, import selectively. Take the full data export because it costs nothing and you cannot get it later. Then import only the current cycle and the objectives that are genuinely still live. Archive the rest somewhere cheap and searchable. If anybody needs a 2023 key result, it is in a spreadsheet, and in three years nobody will have asked.

Do not rebuild the configuration. The custom fields, the tags and the reporting views in the old platform accumulated to solve problems that may no longer exist, and several of them existed to work around that product’s limitations. Start with the new tool’s defaults and add only what somebody asks for twice.

Use the gap to re-ask what the objectives should be. A migration forces every objective to be looked at by a human, which is the only time that reliably happens. That is worth more than the tooling decision, and it is free.

One thing to establish before you sign anywhere: the export rights and notice period in the new contract. Everybody currently migrating is doing so because a previous vendor’s commitments ran out, and the cheapest lesson available from this episode is to read that clause before the next one does.

Is software ever the constraint?

Twice. When the organization is large enough that cascading objectives by spreadsheet genuinely breaks down, and when reporting has to reach an audience outside the team, such as a board or an investor, on a fixed cadence nobody wants to assemble by hand.

Both are real and both are narrower than the market implies.

The cascading case arrives somewhere above a few hundred people with several layers, where the work of keeping objectives aligned across departments becomes a job rather than a task. Below that threshold a shared document and a disciplined weekly meeting do the same work, and a platform mostly adds an administrative surface.

The external reporting case is more common and less discussed. If a board or a private equity sponsor requires a standard progress view every month, assembling it manually consumes real senior time and introduces errors, and a platform that generates it automatically pays for itself on that basis alone. Notice that this is a reporting requirement rather than an execution one, which means the software is solving somebody else’s problem, legitimately.

Everywhere else, software is not the constraint. The constraint is whether the leadership team sets a small number of the right objectives and reviews them honestly, and no platform has ever caused that to happen. I have written elsewhere that OKRs fail most often because a stretch miss gets punished, and there is no configuration setting for that.

Who should this article send away?

Companies whose leadership will not use it themselves. An OKR platform that the executive team does not enter becomes a reporting obligation for everybody below them, which is worse than a spreadsheet because it costs money and signals that the practice is for other people.

The test before you buy: ask each member of the leadership team whether they will personally update their own objectives, weekly, in the tool. Not whether they support it. Whether they will type into it. If two of six say no, you are buying compliance software for the layer beneath them.

A second group worth naming: companies that do not yet have an OKR practice to put into software. A platform will not teach you to write objectives, and installing one before the practice exists produces an expensive record of badly written goals. Run two quarters on a shared document first, and buy the tool when the document becomes the bottleneck.

Where to go instead, and some of it beats every platform here. A shared spreadsheet plus a weekly meeting outperforms any tool below roughly a hundred people, costs nothing and fails visibly, which is an underrated property. If the requirement is board reporting rather than execution, your finance function may already produce most of it. And if you want the methodology rather than the tooling, the primary texts on objectives and key results will do more for your practice than any vendor’s onboarding, which is designed to teach their product rather than the method.

Where does this break down?

Almost every source here is a vendor comparing itself to rivals. They are reliable on acquisition dates, which are checkable and costly to misstate, and interested in every conclusion drawn from them, not least which platform you should pick instead.

That shapes what I have used them for. Dates, ownership changes and retirement notices are matters of record and I have taken them as such. Rankings, quadrants and verdicts from the same sources I have not used at all, because a comparison published by a competitor is marketing with a table in it.

Three further limits. Every price here is reported or estimated rather than quoted, and two of the most relevant vendors publish nothing, so treat the figures as order of magnitude only. I have not run any of these platforms, which means the fit descriptions are drawn from documentation and from what recurs across sources rather than from use. And this category is moving fast enough that the consolidation section will age; anything published about OKR software before 2026 should be checked for whether the products still exist.

One thing worth admitting about my own position. I advocate an improvement cadence considerably faster than the quarterly rhythm every one of these platforms is built around, which means the tooling I would want does not really exist in this category, and a reader should know that my interest in this software is limited for reasons that have nothing to do with its quality.

Ask each member of the leadership team whether they will personally type into the tool every week. Not whether they support it. If two of six say no, you are buying compliance software for the layer beneath them.

What I sell, and what I don’t

I don’t sell consulting. My employment contract doesn’t allow it, so there is no engagement waiting at the end of this article and no proposal coming. Two things here are commercial: I speak for a fee, and I sell books. Everything else, including the audit, is free, and it stays free because it has to be. If you are shortlisting and want the vendor trajectory questions run against your finalists, ask at my contact page.

About the Stagnation Assassin

Todd Hagopian is a Fortune 500 transformation executive who has generated $3B in shareholder value across Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, Whirlpool, and JBT Marel, where he serves as Global VP of Product Strategy and Marketing. Known as The Stagnation Assassin, he is the author of two published books, The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox and Stagnation Assassin: The Anti-Consultant Manifesto. His blog is published in 15+ languages and read by operators worldwide. Bring him to your stage via his speaking page or connect with him on LinkedIn.

The talk version of this asks how many people in the room have migrated goal-tracking software in the last three years, and then asks what their original comparison table had to say about it. Formats and fee are on my speaking page.

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