Best OKR software of 2023

An OKR software comparison and buyers guide

The information you need to create a shortlist to find the best OKR software for your company.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are the cornerstone of any successful business. When used properly, they can help you measure your progress and drive the results you need to reach your goals. But finding the right software to manage OKRs can be a daunting task. With so many options available, it’s hard to know which one is best for you and your team. That’s why we have compiled a list of the best OKR software tools out there. Read on to learn more about each one and find out which one is right for you.

What does OKR software need to do?

OKR software is designed to help companies set, track, and achieve their goals. It provides a simple and efficient way to manage OKRs, enabling companies to focus on their most important objectives and key results.

The key to OKR software selection is to realize that OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are one element amongst a wider set of elements. Together they form a Performance Management system.

If you only focus on the OKR and not the bigger picture, the chances are you will not unlock the benefits OKR bring as a leading goal setting framework.

OKR software features need to sit amongst other elements of a well-rounded performance management system

Mission & Vision – Everyone likes to know the mission they are dedicating themselves to and what the vision is.
Deliver Strategy – You will move the company towards achieving your Mission and Vision with a strategy. There’s a few ways of thinking about and coming up with a strategy. A good one is to create Strategic Pillars. These are also often called ‘Battlegrounds’.
Values – You values are foundational beliefs that will drive the actions of the individual, team, or organization e.g. Ambition, Hard-work, Innovation, Learning, Customer Obsession.
KPIs – KPIs help you create performance scorecards for the company, teams and sometimes individuals. KPIs are also sometimes used in Key Results. OKRs are not a replacement for KPIs, with best-practice company and team meetings having KPIs and OKRs on the agenda.
OKRs – OKRs are goals that describe the outcomes that when achieved will help you win your strategic battles via company goals (often annual), department and team goals, and individual goals (performance and developmental).
Initiatives – If OKRs are how you share measurable outcomes. Initiatives are how you will drive those outcomes. They can start life as an idea, eventually being completed. They might be a body of work as big as a project or a collection of tasks e.g. campaign, epic or a sprint.
Issues – Being able to share, assign and resolve issues as fast as possible is how OKRs and Initiative progress is optimized.
Priorities – Weekly priority sharing is a great way of ensuring teams are focused on the things that will make the greatest impact. By making them visible you are increasing rationality, reducing work selection biases, improving focus, and reducing the chances of employees working either too-much or the wrong things.

OKR software needs to guide best practices

Make great OKR creation easy – The quality of OKRs created can be variable. Average OKRs or too many OKRs lead to average outcomes. Which then begs the question – why bother? The best OKR Software support and guide employees to propose really well considered and socialized OKRs. Look for features that act as a guide and coach.

Collect, share and discuss OKR updates and make reporting really easy

Check-ins – OKR and Initiative check-ins are a scheduled update cycle where progress, confidence levels (Red, Amber green), issues and wins.
Meetings – the better your OKR meetings the faster you achieve your OKRs. Consistent agendas that cover topics like previous meeting actions, news and wins, KPI scorecards, OKR progress, issues, and priorities.
Reporting – Although OKR software provides a real-time status on OKR progress and KPIs, gathering the narrative that explains and challenges being faced as well as the good news is often needed as well. Gathering these written updates can be time-consuming and painful. Software should make the alerting, chasing and gathering really easy.

Don’t lose sight of your ‘why’?

OKRs are way more than a goal setting acronym. There’s a reason why we set and share goals. Great organizations are people driven and on a human level, OKRs are there to provide:

Clarity – clarity in which goals matter most and what comes with this clarity is purpose and even excitement.
Transparency – provide a level of transparency on how the company and other teams are doing. Something that is always wanted by employees but rarely provided. This means OKR tools must make it easy to navigate to see other teams OKRs.
Impact Visibility – link the work being done to the impact it is trying to make.

OKR software is there to provide a centralized place where your ‘why‘ is easily achieved. Spreadsheets and documents not only offer a fragmented system with the disadvantages that fragmentation bring, but they also don’t provide the friendly visual layer that improves understanding and creates higher levels of engagement. Documents also do not support or encourage the key processes outlined above.

To summarise what OKR software needs to do

Be One Element That’s Part Of A Wider Performance Improvement System – OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are the goal setting element of a wider strategy delivery and performance management system. Seeing and managing OKRs in isolation is going to lead to less alignment and impact.
Ensure The Framework Is Used Correctly – Having boxes where you can type Objectives and Key Results into is not enough and is the primary source of novice buyer confusion. The best OKR software needs to ensure great OKRs are committed to. The kind that when achieved will make a material difference.
Connect Tools & Become A Hub – OKR software needs to be able to be connected to other tools and data sources, be able to be customized to work the way teams want to work, and be easy to use with the training overhead to near zero. KPI, project and communications software connectivity is essential.
Communicate Brilliantly – Nudges, alerts and notifications need to support teams and individuals to work more effectively as a team and to ensure that OKRs are achieved.
Manage Adherence To Process – OKR tools need to ensure that goals are not set and forgotten and key stages in the OKR cycle are completed. As soon as they are, the benefits that might have occurred are put at risk.

Top 10 OKR software

The OKR Software category now has a number of vendors to choose from. Comparing OKR software platforms can be hard, especially if you’re new to OKR and don’t really know what you want and how to compare the different OKR solutions.

Ultimately there is no better way of seeing if an OKR software tool is the right one for you without knowing what you want and then experiencing the solution for yourself.

The suggested steps for buying OKR software are as follows:

Discover
Shortlist
Arrange demo and ask questions
Arrange access, invite stakeholders and experience fully
Evaluate solutions
Buy

Top 5 Vendor Comparison Table

Strategy Delivery

OKR Management

KPI Management

Performance Culture Management

Recognition & Reward

Employee Development

Customization & Configuration

#1 ZOKRI

ZOKRI is headquartered in the UK with coaching and customer success support in Europe and America. It’s the only non-VC backed and currently profitable OKR software company.

ZOKRI’s focus and success is based on non dumbing OKRs down, but understanding what helps companies use the OKR framework in a mature and successful way, and how to avoid common pitfalls with better features.

ZOKRI is modular, highly customizable, extendable and amazing value for money

ZOKRI has a number of USP’s, but what those that are new to the solution are usually surprised and delighted with are the configuration and customization options that are given to account administrators.

Depending on your initial requirements you might choose to set-up ZOKRI to be a lightweight OKR tool before extending to include more later, or open up more the full feature set to configure your perfect performance management system. This means that if you can extended ZOKRI to support more of your HR systems and processes.

All for the same cost as other OKR software vendors

Strategy Management
OKR Management
KPI Management
Culture Management
Anytime and 360 Feedback
Personal Development Planning
Appraisal Management
Incentive Plan Management

Plus companies often consolidate a number of tools down to ZOKRI e.g. recognition, personal development and appraisal management.

ZOKRI pricing is $12.50 per user per month with all features and integrations being accessible. Discounts on this prices are applied as user number grow.

Watch a quick demo ZOKRI here.

#2 Perdoo

Perdoo is a German OKR company. Like ZOKRI they offer both software and coaching. And like ZOKRI they also have KPI features that are often missing with other OKR platforms.

Another plus for Perdoo is that they have a Strategic Pillar alignment feature that for corporate planning and the use of OKR as a strategy delivery framework is important.

ZOKRI offers more features for KPI management and is more configurable in how Strategy is defined. For example, you can use Balanced Scorecard / OKR hybrids as well as Pillars.

Perdoo pricing is comparable to most OKR software vendors with users based pricing at between $9.50 and $17.00 per user per month.

#3 Betterworks

Betterworks is a US company that has chosen not to develop extensive OKR management capabilities in favor of investing in employee engagement survey features. As such there are key capabilities missing like Strategy and KPI management and reporting.

The OKR module costs $10 per user per month when billed quarterly. Employee engagement features are addition costs / bundles.

#4 Lattice

Lattice is a US company that has a hybrid between an OKR tool and HR. The OKR features are where the focus of the comparison is and perhaps because of the generalization of the tool, these are not as evolved as others.

Examples of the limitations are the integrations and KPI management features are really limited. Only when you mature your OKR use will you realize how much these would be missed.

The OKR module costs $8 per user per month. There is a minimum annual agreement of $4,000. All contracts billed annually.

#5 GTMHub

GTMHub is a UK headquartered OKR vendor that offers a good range of OKR features and customization options.

GTMHub does not offer Mission, Vision, Strategy modules and therefore Strategic reporting is not possible. OKR reporting like with all platforms is certainly available, as is the ability to track KPIs.

Their pricing is between $19.00 and $29.00 per user per month, with the $19.00 plan offering limited features and customization options.

#6 Workboard

Workboard is a US enterprise OKR vendor with all that operating at the large-enterprise end of the company spectrum brings, like the lack of pricing on the website.

Workboard has some great logos as customers so there is defiantly depth to the product. They also allow MBO to be used as an alternative to OKRs.

They look to have good OKR process management capabilities, which is essential when trying to manage OKRs at scale, across the globe.

We have not had the opportunity to try their solution and their place high up in the list is based on feature lists, company size and logo lists. If you are a huge enterprise, this should be on your shortlist.

#7 Heartpace

Heartpace is more of a HR tool than an OKR tool but some buyers want this so we’ve made them number seven in the list.

Their obvious weaknesses are around the lack of strategy, KPI and pro OKR features, their features here are really basic or not present.

Their strength comes from the people centric approach to performance management.

Heartpace pricing is from $7 per month per user, suggesting the price will be more if you buy all of their features and modules.

#8 Mooncamp

Mooncamp is relatively new entrant to the OKR tool space and makes a play on simplicity, which is true. It’s a simple to use OKR tool.

If you’re at the small end of the SMB spectrum e.g. 20 people, and only want OKR simple features this should be on the list. If you want strategy, KPIs, and performance management features then this is too limited.

The cost is €8 and possibly more if you want SSO and other enterprise features.

#9 Leapsome

Leapsome is another HR tools that offer features like performance reviews 360 feedback that later added OKR functionality. Like most HR tools that extended into OKRs later, there is not the feature depth of the specialist OKR vendors.

It’s this that actually makes ZOKRI interesting as ZOKRI was a specialist OKR tools with the depth and width of a specialist before adding HR modules. Ensuring the OKR first buyer is not compromising whilst giving other stakeholders the features they also need.

There are 5 modules to choose from and pricing is from $8 per module, so the cost could add up.

#10 Asana

Asana is a project and task management solution that has recently given teams the ability to add goals and then align their work with these goals / OKRs. We’ve spoken to a few Asana users and they described the features as ‘basic compared to other OKR software’ but if you’re an Asana user it might be what you want to do the job.

What a project tool will always lack is the strategic and cascading layers, in addition to the OKR management workflows of a specialist tool. they obviously do not have performance management features as well.

Asana is also one of the most expensive solutions with goals being part of there $25 per user per month plan.

Summary

OKR are a framework that when used correctly have a huge impact on the performance of a company and its teams. OKR software fulfils a number of key purposes, a key one is to ensure the company follows OKR best-practices at scale efficiently.

Because you are likely to keep your OKR software vendor for years not months, it’s important to choose the one that matches your current and forecasted future requirements. For example, if there’s a chance you’d like to extend your OKR software to cover individual performance management, choose a vendor that can give you these modules as well.