OKR Software Guide

Free alternatives for smaller teams ( < 50): Google Sheets, Office 365 or Airtable

It is absolutely o.k. to start with these free options. Once you are a smaller organisation with less than 50 employees or a team, you can easily handle your OKRs with xls/ Google Sheets. Or you use it as an interim solution to get a feeling in order to make a better decision what you think is important from a software tool perspective. Even if you have made the decision to go with a tool, it's usually easier for your employees to draft their first sets within excel and then transfer the final OKR sets into the software - just to minimise complexity in the starting phase. Go get our free, simple and proven...

How-to-OKR template for xls/ Office 356/ Google Sheets.

Worth a look is Airtable with its SaaS approach on spreadsheets and databases. Free with essential features, super flexible and great to work across teams. They also provide a solid OKR base template to start with, however this will require some learning effort for teams to use it. 

Perdoo, Quantive and Tability also provide interesting free versions to start with a limited number of users or basic functionality. 

Asana's OKR functionality is called "Goals" and is built-in seamlessly within the application. It allows you to plan OKRs based on a certain cadence, apply owners for Objectives and Key Results and link Asana projects or tasks for OKR contributions. The setup is pretty flexible, so that you are also able to use confidence levels within your OKR setup. It pretty much delivers everything you would expect from a modern OKR tool and will - most likely - be most interesting for existing Asana Users. Again, make sure that people understand the difference between projects, tasks and OKRs. If this is a given, this is indeed a great seamless solution for goals aka OKRs and the execution through to-do's and projects.

If you run a business where the majority of data, intelligence and automation is managed through Salesforce, then you'd like to keep everything under one roof. Axy OKR is a native Salesforce App which allows you to manage OKRs within Salesforce. While many other tools offer API connections, Axy is a native App solution with automated updates on progress and deadlines related to Salesforce metrics. OKRify or Oboard are also native App solution for Salesforce with a nice, user-friendly hub to create and manage OKRs. It also covers OKR owners, automatic progress updates, confidence levels and a heat map for managers to know where to dive in and coach. 

This pretty widespread collaboration & agile software development suite is definitely suitable to manage OKRs (also if you just use the Confluence part). Every team is actually using a separate confluence page to manage and track their OKRs. You can also use our free OKR template and rebuild it as Confluence page template for teams. Experts use the "Exerpt-Include Macro" to link e.g. Team-OKRs to Department- or Company OKRs. In case you also use Jira, you can link Key Results with Jira-Tasks. So, in case you have Confluence in place already, it is indeed a good choice to go for it first and give it a try to handle OKRs through a template and a page structure per team. There is also an unsupported Team Playbook available which might be a good start to create your perfect template within Confluence. But there are also app integrated options like Upraise or Oboard which works seamlessly within your suite and offers full OKR tool functionalities.   

These tools are originally made for task-, workflow-, collaboration- or project management. As one part of the mindset change with OKRs is to go from tasks to results. Using a „task-based“ software might not be supportive to this mindset change and you should plan for an extra-detailed training and quality checks around OKRs. When employees understand that the tasks describe options what we do and the OKR part describes why and what the expected result is, then it is actually a nice setup. Especially in terms of collaboration these tools can be a boost. Another advantage is that you don't need to add and train just another software platform, if you run one of these tools already.

Within Monday you are able to use Monday Spaces for OKR setting and management. However we think it is not quite as integrated as Asana is doing it with their Goals feature. There are plenty of template and really good examples for OKRs within Notion. A bit more manual work though to transition from quarter to quarter, but depending on the used template this can be really good OKR solutions. 

With Microsoft Viva Goals there is now a fully integrated OKR Solution within the Microsoft Suite. The features and functionalities come from an acquisition of an OKR specialist - so the way you are able to set, manage, track and align OKRs are on a very high standard. When MS Teams is your main business and collaboration suite, then you still have the option to go for some OKR specialist tools, like Mooncamp who manage to integrate MS Teams really nice and offering more flexibility to adjust the tool to your needs. 

Trello is one of the examples where the OKR part requires quite some manual setup following your OKR cadence. This might be still o.k. for the start, but won't add any value on the long term. In case you want to go for Trello to track your OKRs, you should be using the following logic. (btw. Trello is now part of Atlassian)

• One board equals one business unit or „OKR owner“
• One list equals one objective
• One card equals one Key Result
• Use labels to indicate confidence level and/ or to track progress of a Key Result
• Never copy a board, list or card
• Ignore watch
• Never archive
• You can link cards about tasks with OKR cards to assign contributions to Key Results
• Provide an OKR template with a „read me“ documentation

The "OKR specialists": e.g.   Perdoo, Quantive, Zokri,  Workboard, Workpath, Weekdone, Profit,  Mooncamp, tability.io

Here the focus is on managing goals with OKRs in an organisation. Main differences between these tools are UI, usability, the ability to link tasks to OKRs and the ability to integrate other software you are using in your work environment (e.g. Slack, Jira, GoogleAnalytics, Salesforce ect...).

Quantive (formerly known as Gtmhub) is focussing a lot on these integrations with other software you're using in your organisation, allowing to automatically update Key Result progress which is great for your weekly check-ins. They call it „data driven OKRs“. Furthermore the tool provides great flexibility to align almost anything. O's to KR's, KR's to multiple O's...cool, but this requires also quite some discipline. Great connection and visualisation of strategy and it's execution. All-in-all a very solid and professional OKR tool.

Perdoo also offers lots of integrations. They bring in a clear focus on handling OKRs, KPIs and individual initiatives seamlessly within one platform all contributing to your company's northstar or ultimate goal. A solid, proven and robust tool. Check out their free version to run a real quarter or pilot with their software.

Weekdone has made quite some changes recently resulting in a nice integration of OKRs with individual contributions, weekly check-ins, progress reports and recognition. 

Zokri just recently released a great update and now allows you to cascade from your Mission, Vision, and Purpose through to your KPIs, and then your OKRs. The new check-in and team meeting workflows that focus on surfacing what's holding people back and finding a resolution look great. These workflows also include Initiatives that can be projects and tasks in tools like Asana, Trello and Jira. Because culture, wellbeing and personal development are key to OKR performance, ZOKRI also offers the ability to define and align your culture, monitor wellbeing, and create and manage Personal Development Plans that can result in Personal OKRs being set.

Mooncamp, a german-based startup, with a solid debut. Offering great MS teams integration, huge flexibility to add properties, initiative layers, customise questions for OKR check-ins, management dashboards and many more. That way the tool easily adapts to the way, you perform OKRs in your organisation. It's all self-serviced and self-explaining, so you will do all the customisations yourself. German clients will appreciate the fact that they are GDPR compliant and host all data in Germany. 

tability.io, from Australia is going an interesting way to cover the whole process from OKR definition, integrating OKRs into meetings and conversations and getting stuff done through tasks, contributing to OKRs. The built-in (Miro-style) whiteboard facilitates to define OKRs as a team. The way the tool supports meaningful and continuous conversations through check-ins is great and the way they connect tasks to OKRs makes a lot sense. 

Profit originally comes out of a software company with many years of CRM experience. There is a SaaS version, an app and the possibility to run Profit within your own IT environment! Their approach is really solid and is able to take new users by the hand proposing all sorts of metrics for different departments. From an OKR methodology point of view really convincing giving you all the freedom on the one hand, but guiding you step-by-step through alignment, delegation, dependencies and transparency of goals on the other hand.

Features like usability and progress visualisation/ gamification aspects are very subjective ones, so best advice is to look into the different tools and ask for a demo. Features like aligning Key Results or connecting your longterm strategies across departments and quarterly OKRs and visualising this easily, is something crucial from a methodology perspective, but in the end also a bit subjective. So go and check out the guiding questions at the end and apply for a demo with tool you'd like to put on your shortlist.

The "OKR & performance management" tools: e.g.  Lattice, Reflektive, Upraise, Leapsome, Betterworks, 7Geese, 15five, Small Improvements, GroSum, Fitbots, Weekly10, FlowyTeam, Clear Review, Hirebook

Having conducted many OKR implementations, we see the need for organisations to combine a full blown OKR software tool with the ability to do continuous feedback loops and take these as one component for performance reviews or handling performance reviews with the same platform. This absolutely makes sense although OKRs are not supposed to be a performance management tool. There should never be a direct connection between OKRs, its achievement and compensation or bonus. However it's an excellent source to do continuous feedback loops with your direct reports. It's great to listen to the pulse of your organisation. The blended results of these ongoing and regular feedback loops might then be an indicator for a later 360 degree performance evaluation. An interesting feature some players in this category are offering is the ability to do regular Pulse surveys or engagement surveys with employees which is great because many outcome based OKRs actually target effects at employee level and many organisations can't measure this easily. 

Knowing that the word „performance management“ can have various interpretations out there, these simple questions can help to identify whether this cluster might be relevant for you: 

• how do you handle performance management today and will OKRs be „disruptive“ to your current approach or will you still be able to handle it properly with OKRs?
• do you anyway plan to reorganise the way you do performance management, feedback and conversations or do you have no real and structured approach in place today? 

Clear advice is to go and check out the free versions or apply for a demo. Good to stay flexible is a pricing model based on packages which most suppliers offer, e.g. you could start with the OKR part and then add 360 degree feedbacks. Btw most of these tools offer full Jira integration - actually Upraise is a Jira add-on, but offers only basic functionality and usability compared to the other tools in this segment. Worth mentioning in this segment for smaller and medium sized companies is Small Improvements or Leapsome. Based on the functionality you will recognise that some of these players originally come from the HR side of life ( e.g. Leapsome) and others started their concept from OKRs. Interesting to look at is Small Improvements, GroSum and Reflektive who are actually going more into the HR direction with People Management, Performance Reviews, 360 degree feedbacks, 1:1 Meetings/ Check-Ins and OKRs. Reflektive is even adding a functionality around simple and quick Pulse Surveys with employees which is great data for OKRs. 15five is now also in this position, as they recently acquired a company specialised on engagement surveys and is now also offering those alongside with 360 degree feedback loops. GroSum is offering an optional package around performance management and compensation budgeting and payouts. Hirebook even goes further, covering and supporting all the way from Strategy Development, OKR Management, Performance Management, Continuous conversations to handling tasks. 

Compared to other players out there, Betterworks (and possibly Reflektive and 15five) are more of a solution for large companies  or enterprises.