Lattice Alternatives: Best Performance Management Tools
Lattice is a great tool for holistic people management, and Pando is an alternative that’s best at driving bottom up, employee-centric business impact while focusing on structured career development. Pando enables real-time performance optimization with a transparent and equitable approach that today’s talent wants and the competency-based frameworks managers need to actually grow their teams.
Learn why Pando is one of the top Lattice alternatives for companies looking to shift away from annual performance reviews to an agile or continuous performance management approach that helps to optimize the impact of every single employee.
What is Lattice?
Lattice is an all-in-one platform that includes employee surveys, objectives and key results (OKRs), performance reviews, add-on career matrices and a new HRIS.
Where it started: Lattice was founded in 2015 as an OKR platform for automating and scaling organizational goals. The deepest and most advanced aspects of this all-in-one platform is around goals tracking and OKRs.
You’ll see that each “all-in-one” platform has their speciality area, which is important to consider as you’re deciding which platform is best for you. Lattice’s deepest feature set would be goals. Performance, surveys, and HRIS features were all later additional feature sets added to the platform later on.
It’s a robust platform that prices each module separately and per employee per month. While a comprehensive option, each performance platform offers unique alignment to your organizational goals and Lattice is an all-in-one but used primarily during performance review cycles once or twice a year.
Why should you trust us?
Pando is a platform that is built by people-tech leaders who have spent their career working with HR, Operational and Executive leaders building and designing people programs from recruiting to engagement coming from companies like CultureAmp and Greenhouse. We want to be upfront about who Pando is and why we have the perspective we have on this ever-changing and strategic space.
Founded by Barbra Gago, Pando is breaking down the barriers to human growth and striving to build a best place to work and help other organizations do the same. Ours is the first real-time performance and development software that drives increased employee lifetime value by creating structure and setting expectations through transparent career frameworks.
Barbra brought both Culture Amp and Greenhouse to market within her career and was most recently, bringing Miro, the future of work product to market as CMO. She has deep knowledge of building and scaling teams and years experience working with people teams at the most innovative companies on the planet.
With deep expertise as a hyper-growth operator and builder of "future of work" products, communities, and brands, Barbra is now focusing her efforts to democratize people performance and development as the CEO and founder of Pando.
Future-forward people leaders from companies like Oyster, Sendoso, and Doist trust Pando to build programs for performance optimization.
Top Lattice Alternatives
Most of the performance tools have overlapping features and solve similar problems. Lattice is well known and well adopted but depending on your company’s main pain points, goals and objectives, each platform can offer a unique solution that is best suited for your needs. Continue reading to learn about the key differentiators from each of the top performance platforms and discover the best fit for your organization.
1. Pando
What is Pando?
Pando is a performance platform that enables continuous career progression. It uses a real-time performance model that centers on connecting employees to business impact expectations, incremental development over time, improved employee engagement, and greater transparency across the board.
Where it started: Pando is the only platform to start with performance. It’s hyper-focused on creating clarity and transparency for employees and managers around how employees can drive the biggest impact.
Unlike many other performance management tools, Pando is employee-driven. And with its transparent competency-based frameworks, it’s designed to reduce rater bias and eliminate time-consuming annual reviews.
Why choose Pando over Lattice?
If you value continuous career progression and real-time performance management over Lattice’s cyclical approach, Pando is a better solution. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two platforms.
Performance
Lattice focuses on cyclical performance reviews, while Pando has built a continuous process for structured career development and live performance calibration. What does that mean exactly?
Pando’s approach provides a real-time pulse on talent. Managers and individual contributors (ICs) alike can see where they stand or request structured feedback or performance assessments at any time.
The result? Pando enables a less time-consuming performance review process. Our continuous development and performance model proactively addresses and reduces gender, recency, and rater bias, allowing for less subjective performance reviews and development programs.
Pando aims to provide transparency into role-based expectations. In addition to reducing bias, our competency-based model also limits inaccuracies in performance assessments reducing the need for time-consuming performance calibrations.
This allows the business to holistically increase the value employees provide, and optimize performance year round. It also increases the proficiency of their skillsets iteratively increasing the overall impact they can have throughout the year—a measure called Employee Lifetime Value.
Rather than using a continuous process, Lattice takes a more traditional, cyclical approach. The Lattice performance management model uses a company-wide, general questions-based approach that doesn’t allow for role-based frameworks or real-time assessments against performance.
Feedback
With Pando, managers can provide continuous competency-based feedback as well as skills assessment. The platform’s feedback and career syncs are designed to be highly actionable, and contextualize uniquely for each individual which has two main benefits:
- It encourages employee development and increases employee impact over time.
- It makes both feedback and performance reviews less subjective—and less unfair.
Unlike Pando, Lattice performance reviews follow cycles. As a result, managers end up providing cyclical, open-ended feedback that isn’t nearly as actionable or timely and it’s utilized much post-review period.
Development
Career frameworks are integrated throughout Pando’s features. Using this competency-based model for feedback, goals, and achievements enables both employees and managers to more effectively focus on the right areas to increase an employee’s impact on the business.
Think of them as actionable roadmaps, designed to continuously coach every employee in the most relevant way. They increase the accuracy of performance ratings, employee impact, and drive employee engagement through clarity and transparency.
In contrast, Lattice gives employees access to static career frameworks. Which are accessible but aren’t necessarily integrated into performance evaluations, discussions or goals.
Analytics
Because Pando enables continuous career progression, the platform’s analytics also provide a real-time view on talent. Managers can get actionable insights across departments to ensure strategic alignment and business agility.
Lattice’s cyclical approach carries over to its analytics. The platform provides a cyclical view on talent, which doesn’t translate to real-time insights.
Pando is also the only platform to give critical insight into skills across the organization so companies can easily identify skills gaps and opportunities.
Support
Choosing a performance platform is challenging enough. Implementation and support (or lack thereof) can add an entirely new layer of complexity.
Pando aims to simplify the setup process and give customers the tools they need to succeed. With each implementation, Pando supports customers with bespoke career frameworks and consults through every step of the roll out process.
We’ve found that this is an important step to help create the right structure as the foundation to your performance program to reduce bias and subjectivity in performance evaluations. It also establishes a strong basis for a successful development and performance for your people.
The standard support that Lattice provides isn’t as hands-on, they provide no consulting as part of onboarding. Instead, Lattice customers are responsible for building their own frameworks but Lattice does have a lot of on-demand tools and resources available.
Case studies
Pando helped Oyster retain a fully distributed team of 600+ people across 70+ countries. Over a 6-month period, Oyster generated 1,600+ pieces of feedback, helping managers streamline reviews and focus on continuous progression instead.
In addition, Pando helped Rewind move away from an ad-hoc promotion process that had created inequity. With Pando’s role-based competency frameworks, Rewind was able to establish iterative and more frequent steps for career development.
Pros
Pando focuses on continuous feedback, evaluation, and career progression. As a result, it’s much more effective at providing real-time insights into your people’s competencies, performance, and development.
With Pando, managers have several options for evaluating ICs, including assessments, feedback, and career syncs; these can be triggered by the manager or the individuals themselves. By using these options, you can check-in on performance at any time instead of relying on annual reviews.
Pando uses rubrics to define levels and competencies for ICs and managers. This framework provides a consistent structure for each role. It builds transparency, creates a culture of psychological safety, and allows employees to set realistic career goals.
By enabling employees to embrace continuous progression, Pando gives everyone more control over career growth.
Cons
Pando isn’t an all-in-one solution that provides an HRIS or engagement surveys. However, the platform does integrate with solutions for HRIS, SSO, and internal communications.
Why? Our core focus has always been on iterative, on-going and agile employee performance and–measuring impact through goals and growth through competencies so companies can optimize employee performance in real-time.
2. Culture Amp
What is Culture Amp?
Culture Amp is an employee experience platform that focuses on defining and cultivating company culture. It offers performance, engagement, development, and retention tools.
Where it started: Culture Amp started as an engagement platform and out of all the performance platforms has the deepest and most advanced tools and analytics around engagement surveys.
Overtime Culture Amp has added additional features like performance, goal tracking, 1:1s, and feedback. It’s important to note that the performance module within Culture Amp is not a native toolset and came from an acquisition they made of Zugata in 2019.
Why choose Culture Amp over Lattice?
Culture Amp is missing some features that Lattice either already has or has announced (i.e., compensation and HRIS). Although it isn’t as fully featured, Culture Amp is loved for its deep capabilities around engagement, surveys and analytics.
Pros
Culture Amp has deep expertise around employee engagement metrics and drivers. Built in benchmarking tools help organizations compare themselves to “best in class” companies. Their expertise in surveys helps organizations develop deep insights around what drives employee engagement.
Cons
Similar to many other Lattice competitors, Culture Amp uses a traditional performance management review model. The user-experience for performance is not ideal, and there is little interconnectedness between engagement, goals and performance for users.
3. 15Five
What is 15Five?
15Five is a performance solution that focuses on business impact through continuous feedback. It targets three key areas: employee performance, engagement, and retention.
Where did it start: 15Five got its start as a continuous feedback tool providing a simple structure to help managers and employees have better development conversations and weekly 1-1s.
While the platform now has performance cycles, goals and career pathing, its deepest differentiation is around feedback itself. That said, feedback in 15Five is not explicitly tied to an employee’s level or standard set of competencies. Unlike other platforms in this category, 15Five also offers a coaching product for employees and managers.
Why choose 15Five over Lattice?
Lattice has far more capabilities, but a longer feature list doesn’t necessarily mean a better solution. 15Five is a much simpler platform that supports several pain points for HR leaders around engagement and feedback. It’s also faster and easier to use, which may make it more likely for teams to implement fully.
Pros
15Five isn’t an all-in-one performance review platform, making it less robust than Lattice. However, 15Five does integrate with the compensation and HRIS tools you already use, making it easy to add to an existing tech stack and is strong on continuous feedback and coaching features.
Cons
Like many Lattice alternatives, 15Five focuses on cyclical performance reviews. If you’re looking for a platform that supports continuous career progression and on-going performance with real-time insights, 15Five won’t meet your needs.
4. Leapsome
What is Leapsome?
Leapsome positions itself as an intelligent people enablement platform that focuses on employee productivity, engagement, and development. It aims to create culture around your mission, increase retention, and cultivate talent while also providing compensation management.
Where did it start: Leapsome also started with OKRs and feedback, similar to Lattice, and has modeled itself off of Lattice as well. The company was founded in Berlin and is primarily a European-based organization.
Why choose Leapsome over Lattice?
Unlike Lattice, Leapsome has additional features such as AI (bots), a learning management system and onboarding tools. It’s growing rapidly and adding lots of new features.
Pros
Leapsome’s integrations regularly receive high marks. Although the platform doesn’t have built-in HRIS, SSO, or communication features, it integrates with popular tools in each category. It also has an LMS and onboarding capabilities which other performance platforms don’t have.
Cons
Although Leapsome offers customizable dashboards, the platform’s workflows aren’t known for being very flexible. The user interface (UI) can be buggy and challenging to learn—making the dedicated success manager essential. Also, with the rapid addition of new features, the depth of each feature set is more superficial leaving users wanting for more value.
Who is Lattice for?
Lattice is designed for mid-market users in tech, IT, finance, and marketing and advertising (companies up to 1,000 employees only).
Because it’s an all-in-one platform, Lattice is ideal for HR, people, and operations managers seeking a comprehensive performance platform with the traditional approach to performance reviews and goals alignment.
Organizations that use all the modules may see sufficient ROI from the platform, however, most organizations only see usage spikes around performance review cycles so you may not get the value you expect—or even have a need to use the platform at all outside mandated periods, as the review below suggests.
Because it’s a relatively complex platform, it’s best for tech savvy users who can handle a steep learning curve. Lattice’s UI isn’t highly rated and can be confusing to navigate.
Because the platform’s standard support doesn’t assist users with career frameworks, it’s best for organizations that already have detailed career level documentation but either way, it won’t be integrated into discussions or performance reviews in a meaningful way. Setting up levels and frameworks can be time consuming.
Who isn’t Lattice for?
While it’s a decent choice for mid-market users, Lattice isn’t ideal for small businesses or enterprises. Not only is the platform likely too robust and unwieldy for small businesses, but its per-module pricing isn’t the best fit for those that can’t tap into volume discounts.
Organizations that want to tailor the platform’s workflows or access frequent support probably won’t be happy with Lattice. The company’s support can be slow to respond, and the platform doesn’t offer many customization options.
While Lattice does release new features somewhat regularly, the platform doesn’t always ship on time or prioritize features that end users truly want. As the review below suggests, roadmap delays can be frustrating for users.
A much newer and more agile platform, Pando has the ability to ship features quickly and listen to users working closely with them to shape the platform. As a result, customers tend to feel heard and become more invested in the platform as it evolves with their needs.
The Right Lattice Alternative For Your Business
If Lattice isn’t for you, Pando is a smart alternative to consider. With our competency-based performance management, you can focus on continuous development and real-time talent insights while reducing bias, increasing transparency, and empowering your people with fair, equitable and always on performance.
Curious how it would work for your team? Request a Pando demo to see the platform in action.
