Culture Amp Alternatives

Culture Amp can be helpful for managing employee experience, engagement and building an intentional culture. Pando is better for creating employee-centric business impact, driving continuous career progression, and enabling equitable and inclusive performance. Pando's real-time performance model provides the structure and transparency that both talent and management need for true growth and business impact.

Discover why Pando is one of the top Culture Amp alternatives for organizations seeking to move away from a cyclical review model and toward competency-based frameworks that encourage incremental development and allow a real-time pulse on talent.

What is Culture Amp?

‍

Culture Amp is an all-in-one platform with tools for engagement, performance, and development. Unlike many alternatives, CultureAmp focuses less on enabling continuous career progression and more on creating workplace culture through engagement surveys and insights.

Culture Amp was founded in 2009 as a platform for employee analytics and surveys. It's a values-driven organization and a B Corp company that partners with other certified businesses to drive social and environmental impact.

While it's available as a complete suite of employee experience tools, Culture Amp offers each module (Engage, Perform, Develop) separately. All options are priced per user per year—meaning an annual plan is required.

Why should you trust us?

Plenty of content analyzes employee experience platforms and compares Culture Amp competitors. We'd like to introduce you to who Pando is and show why you can trust our take.

Founded by Barbra Gago, Pando aims to democratize career progression so every organization can build a high impact best place to work. Our real-time performance and development software is the first of its kind, designed to increase employee lifetime value via integrated and actionable goals and career frameworks.

Before founding Pando, Barbra brought both Culture Amp and Greenhouse to market. She was also CMO at visual workspace platform Miro.

Barbra is known as a hyper-growth operator and "future of work" brand and product builder.  As CEO of Pando, she is on a mission to give employees ownership over their performance and development.

Our customer list says a lot about the business impact our platform creates. Organizations like Oyster, Doist, and Sendoso already trust Pando to stand up performance optimization programs.

5 Culture Amp Alternatives

Culture Amp can be a valuable choice for some organizations with a heavy focus on driving insights through employee surveying. But if you're in the market for a performance and development solution that creates impact, is less focused on review cycles, and meaningfully connects employees to expectations, consider these Culture Amp competitors instead.

1. Pando

‍

Pando is an always-on performance platform. It uses a continuous career progression model to set the stage for incremental development over time. This approach allows real-time insights on talent and eliminates the need for review cycles.

Unlike many Culture Amp competitors, Pando connects employees to business impact expectations. As a result, Pando consistently optimizes the value from every employee compounding impact. With its competency-based frameworks, Pando also improves transparency, reducing bias and consistently calibrating every employee throughout the year.

Why choose Pando over Culture Amp?

If you value real-time performance optimization and continuous competency-based feedback over Culture Amp's cyclical, general questions-based cyclical reviews (which can lead to misalignment and inequity), Pando is a better solution. Let's compare the two platforms side by side.

‍

Performance

Pando offers several options for managers to evaluate individual contributor (IC) performance. Managers can complete 360, 180, or ongoing assessments to calibrate at any time.

Because Pando offers continuous competency-based assessments, cyclical reviews aren't necessary, but are always an option. This structured model also addresses bias and subjectivity, allowing for an inclusive and fair performance culture.

In addition to creating transparency, this approach optimizes the impact of every employee while enabling them to improve proficiency incrementally, targeting higher Employee Lifetime Value.

In contrast, Culture Amp uses an approach that centers on performance reviews, micro-learnings, and OKR tracking that is prioritized cyclically.

Feedback

With Pando's templates, managers can give structured feedback that's immediately actionable. The platform's feedback is designed to clarify expectations and encourage development, which can increase the impact of each employee.

Managers and ICs can also schedule career syncs for continuous, structured conversations while simultaneously measuring employee sentiment through a pulse survey.

Unlike Pando, Culture Amp takes a cyclical approach resulting in managers and colleagues often providing delayed feedback that's less relevant and more biased.

Development

Pando's career frameworks are the basis for transparent, structured career progression and professional development. In fact, rubrics are embedded in Pando’s features, including goals, feedback, and assessments.

Pando’s rubrics include built-in leveling and detailed role-based competencies to enable transparent career paths. This results in career frameworks that consistently coach employees and guide continuous progression.

Culture Amp has a module for companies to add-in their existing career frameworks but does not provide best-practice competencies or support and competencies aren't necessarily integrated throughout the platform leading to them being used sparingly as a reference point instead of an integrated coaching and calibration tool.

Analytics

Pando's analytics provide the real-time insights you would expect from a platform that focuses on continuous career progression and incremental development. Admins can track goals and achievements while charting competencies across the organization.

Culture Amp provides engagement and retention analytics that can help managers make data-driven decisions. However, they provide a cyclical view rather than offering real-time insights, and this data is generally used only for promotions and comp adjustments.

Support

New users shouldn't have to navigate aligning their internal programs with a new platform alone.  That's why Pando experts work with customers to establish a high impact development and performance program through the lens of their career frameworks.

Providing this level of support achieves two goals. It increases buy-in across the organization and reduces bias and inaccuracies.

In contrast, Culture Amp encourages users to customize and build their rubrics independently.

Case studies

Pando worked with Oyster to create role-based competencies, reward frameworks, and a continuous feedback system for a team of 600+ people distributed across 70+ countries. Oyster generated 1,605+ pieces of feedback over a 6-month period, eliminating work related to annual reviews and allowing leadership to enable continuous progression.

In addition, Pando worked with Rewind to make the organization's development process more equitable. Using Pando's iterative growth and role-based competencies, Rewind established transparent promotion and recognition frameworks that give employees visibility into timelines and requirements for leveling up.

Pando pros

Pando focuses on continuous feedback and incremental development over time. As a result, it provides real-time insights and eliminates the need for performance review cycles.

To create clear leveling and transparent frameworks, Pando uses rubrics to define competencies. This transparency helps establish a culture of psychological safety, which drives better performance.

Pando also connects business results to individual performance. This approach aligns employees with business impact expectations to accelerate performance.

Pando cons

Pando isn’t a generalized all-in-one solution. It doesn't have an HRIS, or engagement surveys. However, the platform does integrate with tools that handle these tasks, making it an integral part of your performance management tech stack.

2. Engagedly

‍

Engagedly is a talent management suite with AI-powered tools for improving employee engagement, performance, and development. It supports performance reviews, OKR tracking, skill assessments, employee surveys, and coaching. Engagedly also has a learning experience platform that's helpful for creating tailored learning prompts and resources.

Why choose Engagedly over Culture Amp?

Compared to Culture Amp, Engagedly offers much more advanced automations and AI. The platform's Marissa AI tech provides automated feedback suggestions, kudos, and summaries—which can be helpful for ambitious yet time-strapped teams.

Where Engagedly falls short

Like Culture Amp, Engagedly is also built around tracking OKRs and streamlining performance reviews. If you're looking to move away from this structure and toward an employee-centric model, Engagedly isn't the best choice.

3. Officevibe

‍

Officevibe is an employee experience platform designed to enable long-lasting engagement and performance mainly focused on employee engagement surveys and traditional performance reviews. It offers a full suite of performance tools like reviews and OKR tracking as well as engagement tools like pulse surveys and eNPS scores. The platform also cultivates culture with features like peer-to-peer employee recognition.

Why choose Officevibe over Culture Amp?

Both platforms focus on creating a positive workplace culture. However, Officevibe's recognition module is a key part of the platform, and its coaching tools can help managers improve their employee development skills. Leaders looking to create a culture of recognition are likely to prefer Officevibe.

Where Officevibe falls short

Officevibe has limited flexibility, especially with 1:1 meetings. It also provides limited analytics for smaller teams, making it a better choice for larger teams.

‍

4. Qualtrics XM

‍

Qualtrics XM is an experience management platform for people teams. The platform has three modules—Engage, Lifecycle, and Analytics—for overseeing engagement, performance, and business impact. It's designed to align talent with organizational goals through analytics and surveys.

Why choose Qualtrics XM over Culture Amp?

As part of the larger Qualtrics ecosystem, the people management platform can integrate with the customer experience platform to provide more nuanced insights. Organizations looking for a complete solution to improve people and customer metrics are likely to prefer Qualtrics XM.

When measuring employee feedback and sentiment, Qualtrics XM also considers a much wider range of signals. Along with embedded pulse surveys, the platform uses listening tools to pull in data from external channels.

Where Qualtrics XM falls short

Qualtrics XM doesn't offer the L&D resources or growth tools that Culture Amp provides. Because it doesn't emphasize employee development, Qualtrics XM is less ideal for enabling career growth.

‍

5. Lattice

‍

Lattice is an all-in-one people management platform that oversees engagement, performance, development, and compensation. It uses a general and cyclical performance review model, and has modules for OKRs, feedback, 1:1s and surveys for engagement.

Why choose Lattice over Culture Amp?

People managers looking for an all-in-one employee management suite will find Lattice much more comprehensive than Culture Amp. Along with its compensation benchmarking tool, Lattice recently announced an HRIS suite, which will make it an all-in-one human resources and talent management solution.

Where Lattice falls short

Lattice uses a cyclical performance performance model with open-ended feedback. It's far from the best option for managers looking for a tool with real-time performance optimization, continuous career progression or competency-based development. 

Who is Culture Amp for?

Culture Amp is geared toward organizations implementing substantial change. It's designed to align employee goals with evolving workforce, technology, or organizational models.

The platform is also for organizations seeking to improve employee retention by championing diversity and inclusion. As a B Corp, Culture Amp offers discounts to other certified companies.

Who isn't Culture Amp for?

Culture Amp isn't a great choice for managers who want actionable insights that they can use to improve employee engagement. Users share disappointment with accessing engagement data and providing transparency around goals. In contrast, Pando connects employees to business impact expectations, which provides greater clarity. 

Culture Amp is also far from the best choice for teams seeking a solution that evolves with them, based on their feedback. Users express concern with the lack of customization, which can force time-consuming workarounds. In contrast, Pando users report delight with the speed at which their requests are implemented into the platform.

People managers who prefer hands-on support over self-service knowledge bases probably won't be happy with Culture Amp either. Reviewers report receiving limited assistance with complex issues, causing additional stress during high-pressure periods—such as while completing performance reviews.

The Right Culture Amp Alternative For Your Business

If Culture Amp isn't ideal for your team, Pando is a smart solution to consider. With our real-time performance model, you can implement continuous career progression. As a result, you can enable employee-centric business impact while reducing bias and democratizing career growth.

Ready to see it in action? Request a Pando demo to learn how our platform can align your team with employee-centric business impact.