As its name suggests, Culture Amp is a platform with the aim of helping you build a thriving workplace culture. Let’s look at what makes it an effective solution, and whether or not you’d be better off going with one of several Culture Amp alternatives.

The organizational cultures people work under can do a lot to either help or hinder them. Senior leadership, HR and management together are responsible for cultivating a strong workplace culture that supports employees and enables them to succeed. To do this, you’ll need a comprehensive suite of tools to track engagement, and facilitate learning and development.

The state and impact of workplace culture

Your workplace culture is a set of ideals unique to your business. It affects both official and informal rules and standards for the work being done, as well as how people should treat one another. Clearly, it’s very important. Unfortunately, the rate at which employees connect with their company culture is pitifully low.

According to Gallup, only 20% of people feel connected to their employer’s workplace culture. This is a recipe for burnout, turnover and disengagement. If you don’t believe us, let’s look at what Gallup’s findings say about businesses with thriving work cultures where employees do feel connected.

Employees who report a strong sense of connection to their organizational culture are:

  • 4x as likely to be engaged at work.
  • 5.8x as likely to strongly agree they’d recommend their place of work to another.
  • 62% less likely to regularly feel burned out at work.
  • 43% less likely to be passively or actively seeking new employment.

To improve workplace culture, you need to give employees a voice. You recognize and reward their successes, and provide opportunities for development. To make all this happen, HR needs the right tools like Culture Amp or its alternatives.

About Culture Amp

Before we start exploring alternatives to Culture Amp, let’s talk about the subject of today’s article. Didier Elzinga founded Culture Amp in 2009. Today, it’s one of the biggest culture analytics companies in the world.

Culture Amp’s service is an employee experience platform which, like many of its competitors, uses continuous feedback to drive performance and engagement.

Core features

Culture Amp’s employee experience platform is broken up into three modules, Engage, Perform and Develop. Between them, they provide the following core features:

  • Engagement metrics and surveys: Culture Amp offers more than 40 customizable survey templates for engagement, belonging, onboarding and employee exits. Their engagement tools also include:
    • Retention insights
    • Focus areas
    • AI analytics
    • Benchmarking data from over 1 billion survey responses
  • Continuous performance management tools: Culture Amp enables ongoing 360 feedback with templates, smart suggestions and embedded coaching functionality for managers. Other related functions include:
    • Goals and OKRs
    • Reviews and calibrations
    • 1:1s
    • Shoutouts for recognition
  • Scalable employee development planning: A framework for employee development, with the following features:
    • Career paths with role descriptions and skills requirements
    • Personalized growth plans with trackable goals
    • L&D dashboard for key data and insights
    • Competencies to help employees understand skills requirements
  • The Skills Coach: While technically part of Culture Amp’s employee development module, the Skills Coach is included with all subscriptions to their services. This tool delivers daily “micro-learnings” designed to help managers to develop their leadership skills.

Strengths and selling points

Alternatives to Culture Amp will have to compete with the platform’s rich ecosystem of features. It’s a popular choice thanks to these major selling points:

  • Science-backed with benchmarking: Culture Amp has created their survey templates based on psychology insights, as well as people and data science. On top of that, as noted, Culture Amp’s workplace benchmarking insights are based on nearly 1.4 billion survey answers from over 8,000 organizations.
  • Dedication to the employee experience: You can tell a lot about HR and people management software providers based on what they prioritize. As an employee experience platform first and foremost, Culture Amp gives you the tools to learn about your people and improve their working lives.
  • Continuous feedback and performance management: Feedback is most effective when it’s timely. With Culture Amp, anyone from employees to managers and beyond can offer instant feedback and recognition at the point of impact.
  • A high level of industry recognition: As a high-profile service provider with some big name clients, Culture Amp has a reputation for being a very effective, highly scalable people management solution.

Limitations and drawbacks

Of course, it should go without saying that there are areas for improvement. That’s why you need to consider alternatives to Culture Amp, after all. Here are its major limitations as a platform:

  • Skills Coach prioritizes manager development: Culture Amp’s Skills Coach is a decent training tool with its daily micro-learning. Unfortunately, these are mainly useful for managers. Despite Culture Amp’s emphasis on the employee experience, they don’t provide them with any native training resources. Instead, you’ll need to integrate external content libraries.
  • Unclear AI features: Culture Amp certainly has AI features, like their engagement analytics. Beyond that, it’s hard to say what role AI plays in their platform or to what extent. Many Culture Amp alternatives provide clearly defined AI features like sentiment analysis, personalized recommendations and virtual assistants.
  • Opaque pricing: Although Culture Amp bundles its modules together under their Full Platform deal, it’s unclear what the savings might be or what the modules would cost individually. Beyond that, there’s also “custom” enterprise pricing, which is nice and vague.
  • Awkward UI and user permissions: With its wide array of continuous feedback and engagement monitoring tools, Culture Amp doesn’t exactly have the simplest interface in the world. Navigation can be confusing and time-consuming, while even simple stuff for users can be complicated to manage behind-the-scenes.

Best fit and pricing

Culture Amp provides plenty of tools to support teams and businesses of any size. Unfortunately, since its level of affordability is unclear, it’s not a firm recommendation for small companies with strict budget limitations.

Even so, Culture Amp is a highly successful service provider. Some of their most impressive clients include McDonald’s, Chobani, Nasdaq, and Warby Parker. Here’s a brief overview of their available price scale:

  • Individual modules ($): Engage, Perform and Develop. Any subscription also includes certain core features like the Skills Coach, shoutouts, SSO, and HRIS integration. The price points for individual modules aren’t available outside of direct quotes.
  • The full platform ($$): This bundle discounts the three modules. In theory, this provides you with the full Culture Amp experience.
  • Custom enterprise pricing ($$$): Organizations over a certain size will need custom pricing. This is likely to accommodate the demand of hosting so many users.
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1. Zensai’s Human Success Platform

At Zensai, we take a holistic approach to learning, engagement and performance, as reflected in the three modules which make up our Human Success Platform. Rather than separating these critical aspects of people management, we bring them together into one fully centralized platform.

Zensai logo  Culture Amp alternative

Core features of this Culture Amp alternative

While other alternatives to Culture Amp offer wide ranges of features, the Human Success Platform has more than enough to compete. Here’s a rundown of our core features including summaries of our modules:

  • Single Sign-On via Microsoft Teams: No matter which module you’re using in Zensai’s platform, you’ll access it the same way: Through Microsoft Teams. SSO offers the best blend of security and convenience for employees, as they can use their existing Microsoft 365 account logins for minimal disruption.
  • Learn365: Our dedicated learning management system supports employees with personalized learning plans, AI-assisted course creation tools, and some of the world’s largest content libraries through Content365. It also includes numerous features to automate course admin to minimize headaches for your HR team.
  • Engage365: Our engagement module provides a real-time image of engagement in your business. It houses our employee check-in system, a framework for manager feedback and coaching, and AI-powered sentiment analysis reports. Our employee check-ins provide a source of regular progress updates, as well as an opportunity to ask your people about any number of engagement-related issues.
  • Perform365: Last but not least, Perform365 provides a system for easy performance review management, flexible goal-setting with SMART Goals or OKRs, 1:1s and 360 feedback functionality. HR can also use Perform365 to think long-term, with talent mapping and succession planning.

Strengths and selling points of this Culture Amp alternative

The Human Success Platform’s agility and ease-of-use help it stand out from other Culture Amp alternatives. Here are its main strengths and selling points:

  • Built into Microsoft 365: A lot of alternatives to Culture Amp offer some level of Microsoft integration, but none like Zensai. Ours is the only HR and people management solution fully built to work with Microsoft 365.

    As noted, you use Microsoft Teams to access our platform. On top of that, The Human Success Platform is fully compatible with Viva, SharePoint, and the typical Microsoft tools like Excel, Word and PowerPoint.
  • Automates people management admin: Each module in the Human Success Platform includes features to streamline and automate key workflows. Learn365 automates aspects of course management like enrollment, grading, and AI-personalized content recommendations.

    Engage365 uses AI to conduct analytics and reporting, so that HR can focus on enacting actionable insights. And, finally, Perform365 helps managers by automating prep for performance conversations, and delivering performance insights at the click of a button.
  • Fully supports employee L&D: Culture Amp and some of its alternatives focus on managerial development above all else. We at Zensai, on the other hand, believe learning should be equally accessible across your whole business.

    That’s why we give you everything from AI-assisted course building to vast content libraries for upskilling your people in any number of areas.
  • Clearly defined AI features: The Human Success Platform has plenty of AI functionality, from features we’ve already mentioned like sentiment analysis and course creation, to Orbie, our AI virtual learning assistant.

    These functions are succinctly explained online, so that you can properly understand what we offer before you commit to a demo appointment.

Best fit and pricing of this Culture Amp alternative

Zensai’s Human Success Platform is a great option for businesses of any size, from the tiniest startup to the largest enterprise. Everything is fully scalable, from our LMS to our employee check-ins. Our customers include Wirral University, Nelson Mullins, and the global IT services company, Insentra.

Although quotes for individual modules are available, Zensai also has tiered pricing plans for the full Human Success Platform, which offer great flexibility.

  • Grow Basic ($): As noted, Grow Basic gives you access to Learn365, Engage365 and Perform365. It also gives you our Success Basic support plan to get you up and running.
  • Grow Plus ($$): The three modules and our Success Plus plan, which adds automation and analytics functionalities.
  • Grow Premium ($$$): The three modules and our Success Premium support plan. This gives you access to our team of technical experts to help customize and refine your experience.

2. 15Five

Whereas Zensai focuses most on learning and development, 15Five emphasizes performance management. It’s also another on the list of 15Five alternatives with clear AI implementation. Let’s look at what it has to offer.

Core features of this Culture Amp alternative

15Five offers four modules to its services, three of which have a lot in common with many Culture Amp alternatives including Zensai:

  • Centralized dashboard for HR metrics
  • Engage, which provides surveys, benchmarking, impact modeling and visualization tools
  • Perform, which provides performance review templates, scheduling and management
  • Transform, for manager development with options for live group and 1:1 coaching

Strengths and selling points of this Culture Amp alternative

While 15Five may not have quite the same level of name recognition as Culture Amp, 15Five has strong enough selling points to be a contender:

  • Great support for manager development: 15Five’s Transform module is a dedicated manager training solution. It allows for training customization, flow-of-work learning, and has options for live group and 1:1 coaching.
  • Succinct survey insights: AI-synthesized feedback insights give HR the broad strokes for any engagement surveys they run. That way, you can start thinking of action plans before you even go through the survey in full.
  • Comprehensive and efficient performance management: Set review cycles in as little as fifteen minutes, ensure holistic feedback by taking it from multiple sources, and integrate with major HRIS systems like BambooHR, Salesforce and Paylocity.
  • Strong analytics and action planning: 15Five allows you to compare the results of your engagement surveys against over 600,000 benchmark surveys, while their predictive impact AI establishes the most pressing engagement issues. This paves the way for solid, forward-thinking action planning.

Limitations and drawbacks of this Culture Amp alternative

While we certainly appreciate everything 15Five has to offer, it has a few major limitations worth considering:

  • Poor customer support: Some 15Five users online complain that they’ve had difficulties with customer support, both for addressing service issues and making changes to an existing subscription.
  • No support for employee development: As good as the Transform module is, it doesn’t directly benefit regular employees. To really improve work culture, you need people management tools which support L&D on all levels of your business.
  • Important features locked behind paywalls: A lot of important 15Five features are either gated behind specific modules, or require a total platform subscription like their AI features.
  • Lacks full sentiment analysis: 15Five’s survey summaries are definitely handy in a pinch, but they lack the depth of full sentiment analysis reporting. Unfortunately, when it comes to understanding your employees, the devil’s in the details.

Best fit and pricing of this Culture Amp alternative

Although their online pricing transparency makes them worth considering for small businesses, 15Five positions itself as a mid-market solution. Its major customers include HubSpot, Udemy and Pendo.

Let’s cut to the chase and go over 15Five’s price structure and what each option includes:

  • Engage ($):
    • Employee engagement surveys
    • Predictive impact model
    • Analytics including AI insights, heat maps, breakdowns and action planning
  • Perform ($$):
    • Performance reviews
    • Goals and OKRs
    • Core platform including check-ins, feedback, recognition, etc
  • The Total Package ($$$):
    • Everything in Engage and Perform
    • 15Five AI
    • HR outcomes dashboard
    • Manager effectiveness indicator
    • Limited Transform access
    • DPAs and security questionnaires
  • Transform ($$-$$$):
    • The basic Copilot and Content package (content library, AI manager assistant, custom learning plans, etc).
    • The much more expensive Live Group and 1:1 Coaching package (also includes Copilot and Content).
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3. Lattice

Lattice has a greater emphasis on simplicity and usability than some other Culture Amp alternatives. Like many of its competitors, however, Lattice still enables continuous feedback and performance management to improve your company culture.

Core features of this Culture Amp alternative

Although it’s one of the simpler platforms on this list, Lattice still has a range of useful features to consider, such as:

  • Continuous feedback and performance management with a simple UI
  • Goals and OKRs with integrations for Jira and Salesforce
  • Engagement tracking with surveys, eNPS, benchmarking and AI analytics
  • Lattice Grow for supporting employee learning and development
  • Lattice AI, which offers a growing number of useful features

Strengths and selling points of this Culture Amp alternative

Lattice’s surface-level simplicity belies a complexity that makes it extremely scalable. Its biggest strengths and selling points include:

  • Being highly user-friendly: Lattice provides a nice, clean UI that’s easy to use. It also has some nice streamlining features like performance review templates and AI feedback summaries.
  • Varied and growing AI functionality: Lattice’s current AI features include:
    • Engagement survey analytics and insights
    • Feedback summaries and performance insights
    • AI-generated onboarding videos
    • Feedback writing assistance
    • Recommended growth plans
    • Team health monitoring

On top of that, they have new AI features in development, like the upcoming Lattice AI assistant.

  • Pricing transparency: Unlike some alternatives to Culture Amp, Lattice has the exact price points for its services available on its website. This makes it easy for budget-conscious HR leaders to decide whether assessing the platform is worth their time.
  • Great analytics and reporting functions: With its AI analytics and respectable range of survey tools, Lattice is a great platform for providing real-time insights. It also has analytics for DEIB, program adoption, and team analytics.

Limitations and drawbacks of this Culture Amp alternative

Like most alternatives to Culture Amp, Lattice has areas for improvement despite its stellar performance so far. The platform’s main drawbacks include the following:

  • Newer features can be buggy: Overall, Lattice’s development over time is a great selling point. The downside, however, is that new features may be especially prone to technical issues, which could prove disruptive.
  • Supports learning but lacks content: Lattice Grow gives you everything you need to plan, track and support employee learning and development, except native content options. This means you’ll have to rely on external content integrations for course materials.
  • Lacks options for platform customization: While it may be a relatively small concern, Lattice lacks features for customizing the platform with your organization’s branding.
  • Limited Microsoft integration: Lattice has Microsoft Teams integration, but pulls users into the Lattice platform for various functions. It also has a couple of other Microsoft integrations, but lacks SharePoint and Viva compatibility.

Best fit and pricing of this Culture Amp alternative

Lattice’s flexible price structure and its overall versatility as a platform make it a great people management tool for businesses of all sizes. Their customers include Linktree, Webflow, Olo, and Vantage West.

Here’s the gist of Lattice’s pricing structure:

  • Core HRIS ($):
    • Employee records
    • Workflows
    • Report builder (early bird pricing)
    • Onboarding
  • Foundations for Talent Management ($$):
    • Performance reviews
    • Talent reviews
    • Feedback
    • Praise
    • 1:1s
    • Goals and OKRs
    • Updates
  • Paid add-ons ($$$): The add-ons and the modules they attach to.
    • Engagement module (Talent Management)
    • Grow module (Talent Management)
    • Compensation module (Talent Management)
    • Payroll functionality (Core HRIS, early access)
    • Time tracking (Core HRIS, coming soon)
alternatives to Culture Amp

4. Leapsome

Last up, we have Leapsome. It’s another continuous feedback and performance management platform with more AI features than you can shake a stick at. Leapsome is another big name on this list, so let’s see what it has to offer.

Core features of this Culture Amp alternative

Leapsome’s admirable selection of core features includes:

  • AI-assisted performance review builder with templates
  • OKRs or SMART goals to suit your needs
  • Core HR tools like documentation and workflow automation
  • Leapsome Academy for manager development

Strengths and selling points of this Culture Amp alternative

As one of the more well-known Culture Amp alternatives, it shouldn’t be surprising that Leapsome has plenty of selling points on display:

  • Native HRIS plus integrations: While many alternatives to Culture Amp rely on external integrations over native HRIS functionality, Leapsome has both. The in-built functionality may still be in early access, its dozens of HRIS integrations should have you covered.
  • Plenty of AI features: Leapsome’s AI features include:
    • AI-assisted goals and OKRs
    • Surveys and sentiment analysis powered by AI
    • Fast-track competency frameworks for generating career paths
  • Another industry leader: Leapsome’s high levels of name recognition and popularity are a great guarantee of its quality as a people management platform. It also means top talent may already have experience using the system.
  • Excellent customer service: Leapsome has a reputation for delivering great customer service and support with a highly engaging product team ready to guide new customers.

Limitations and drawbacks of this Culture Amp alternative

Leapsome is another strong competitor on the list of alternatives to Culture Amp. Unfortunately, it’s not perfect, with the following limitations:

  • Only has basic Microsoft Teams integration: For all its 50+ software integrations, their only Microsoft integration is for Teams. Both Zensai and Lattice outperform it in this regard.
  • Complex UI design: Although its individual tools are great, Leapsome’s UI is quite cumbersome, which slows navigation and may frustrate users.
  • Lacks pricing transparency: With several core features, seven modules and four add-ons, there’s a lot to potentially pay for with Leapsome. Unfortunately, there’s no price structure displayed, nor any indication as to which modules might be more or less expensive.
  • Another option lacking customization: Like some other alternatives to Culture Amp, Leapsome doesn’t offer options for customizing its platform with branded colors or imagery.

Best fit and pricing of this Culture Amp alternative

Leapsome’s complexity combined with opaque pricing means we’d have a hard time recommending it to small businesses, especially ones with small budgets. That said, its features offer the right level of scalability for medium to large organizations. Some of these companies include Spotify, Learnerbly, and PayFit.

While we can’t say much about Leapsome’s pricing, here are its core functions, individual modules and paid add-ons:

  • Core platform ($):
    • Instant feedback
    • Meetings
    • Leapsome AI
    • Competency frameworks
    • Q&A boards
  • Individual modules ($$):
    • Core HR
    • Reviews
    • Goals
    • Learning
    • Surveys
    • Time tracking
    • Compensation
  • Additional add-ons ($$$):
    • DATEV integration
    • Whistleblowing
    • Learning content
    • Compensation benchmarks
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The most important features for workplace culture

Now that we’ve gone over the various alternatives to culture amp, let’s look at what HR and people management tools need to really improve your company culture.

Channels for employee feedback

Performance management feedback from managers to employees is one thing. Feedback from employees to managers or HR is another entirely. Employee feedback gives your people a voice, which allows them to at least play a small role in shaping your workplace culture.

When employees feel like they contribute to your work culture, they’re more likely to feel a sense of stake and ownership of it. Employee feedback, like what you’d get from regular check-ins, lets employees raise concerns, highlight obstacles, and generally get the support they need.

Real support for employee learning and development

Too many alternatives to Culture Amp just don’t have adequate support for learning and development. Whether it’s due to a greater focus on managers, or a simple lack of in-built content options, you need more from your HR tools.

The best value for investment comes from platforms which not only supply frameworks for learning and development, but also provide access to content and exercise materials for course crafting.

Comprehensive analytics and reporting

You’ll find that a lot of HR tools are made or broken by the quality of their analytics and reporting. Most providers use AI to support analytics, but they do it in different ways to varying degrees of success.

Platforms like Zensai and Leapsome leverage sentiment analysis, whereas platforms like 15Five make do with basic AI summaries. If you need more depth from your data-driven engagement insights, for example, you should choose your platform accordingly.

Real-time AI analytics provide a moving picture of your workplace culture instead of a snapshot in time. This helps HR to understand the full context behind any shift work culture or employee engagement.

Test out your options

So, there you have it. We’ve talked about Culture Amp, explored various Culture Amp alternatives, and highlighted some key features to look for. But there’s one more for you to bear in mind.

While their options may vary, plenty of HR and people management software providers will schedule demo appointments where a representative will walk you through the platform. This is great for getting a firsthand look at what it looks like in action.

In fact, at Zensai, we offer demo appointments that cover any aspect of our Human Success Platform. So, reach out and schedule one with us today!

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