Culture Amp for goal tracking: pros, cons and an alternative
Culture Amp measures how people feel and how they perform. Clearahead tracks the company’s goals and what’s holding them back, with AI keeping it current
The short answer
Culture Amp is an employee experience platform from Melbourne, best known for engagement surveys, with performance management, development and AI coaching alongside. Goals exist inside its performance tools, but they’re there to support reviews and development. Clearahead is goal tracking software for the company: each goal, the constraints holding it back and the moves that clear them, kept current by AJ, its AI. If you want to understand and improve how your people feel and perform, Culture Amp is one of the best. If you want the leadership team aligned on what’s in the way of the company’s goals, use Clearahead.
Weighing up other options too? See Lattice alternatives compared.
What is Culture Amp?
Culture Amp is an employee experience platform. It’s best known for engagement surveys: well-designed questionnaires, backed by people science, that tell a company how its employees feel about their work, their managers and the company, with benchmarks against similar organisations. Around the surveys sit performance management, including reviews, feedback and goals, development tools, analytics that link engagement to performance and retention, and AI coaching for managers and employees.
Goals in Culture Amp live inside performance and development. People set and track goals that feed into their reviews and growth conversations. That’s useful for managing people, but it isn’t the same job as tracking the company’s own goals.
Culture Amp comes up in AI answers about Lattice alternatives because it overlaps with Lattice on performance and engagement. It’s a people platform first, and a very good one. LutherOne, from Prague, takes a similar engagement-first approach.
Where Culture Amp came from
Didier Elzinga, Doug English, Rod Hamilton and Jon Williams founded Culture Amp in Melbourne in 2009. It began with engagement surveys and grew into one of the best-known names in employee experience, serving thousands of companies and millions of employees, with offices in the US, the UK and Germany.
Along the way it added performance management, partly through acquiring Zugata in 2019, and people analytics through Orgnostic in 2024. In 2025 it launched an AI coach. Its centre of gravity is still the same: helping people teams understand and improve the experience of working at a company.
Culture Amp pros and cons
What Culture Amp does well, and where it struggles.
Where Culture Amp shines
- Market-leading engagement surveys, backed by people science and benchmarks.
- Performance reviews, feedback and development in the same platform.
- Strong analytics that link engagement, performance and retention.
- AI coaching to help managers and employees.
- Trusted by thousands of companies worldwide.
Where Culture Amp struggles
- Built for people teams; company goal tracking isn’t its focus.
- Goals mainly support reviews and development, not company priorities.
- Surveys tell you how people feel, not what’s holding the goal back.
- Per-employee pricing by module.
- A lot of platform if what you need is leadership alignment.
Culture Amp vs Clearahead: side by side
| Culture Amp | Clearahead | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | An employee experience platform: engagement, performance, development and AI coaching | AI goal tracking software for the company: goals, constraints and the moves that clear them |
| Who it’s built for | People and HR teams, and managers | Founders, leadership teams and the people who own the work |
| The question it answers | How engaged are our people, and how are they performing? | What is holding each goal back, and who is clearing it? |
| Goals | Individual and team goals inside performance and development | The company’s goals, one per workspace, worked on by everyone |
| Keeping it current | Surveys on a schedule; goal updates by owners | Owners tell AJ in a sentence; AJ updates the model and writes a weekly brief |
| People features | Surveys, reviews, feedback, development, coaching, analytics | None. Owners on every move and three roles in the app |
| Cost | Per employee, by module; priced on request | Free for up to 3 people and 1 workspace; £297/month or £2,997/year for the whole company |
How Culture Amp differs from Clearahead in practice
Culture Amp and Clearahead answer different questions, and it’s worth being clear about which one you’re asking.
How people feel, or what’s in the way
Culture Amp tells you how engaged your people are and how they’re performing. Those are important questions, and a disengaged team will struggle to hit any goal. But a goal usually slips for a specific reason: no repeatable way to qualify leads, a founder who’s the only one who can close, onboarding that loses new customers in the first week. Clearahead is built to find and fix those. Each goal has a short, ordered list of the constraints holding it back and the moves that clear them, each with one owner.
A survey cycle, or as the work moves
Surveys run on a schedule, quarterly or a few times a year, and the insight arrives after the fact. Clearahead updates as the work moves. Owners tell AJ, the AI inside Clearahead, what happened in a sentence, and AJ updates the model, keeps the evidence and writes This week from AJ, with the wins and up to three things that need a decision.
The people team, or the leadership team
Culture Amp is run by HR and people teams, who turn insights into action plans. Clearahead is run by the leadership team and the people who own the work. Heads of department own the constraints, their teams own the moves, and the board and advisers follow along as Viewers. We’ve written about why that whole-company view matters in Built for the whole company.
What Clearahead doesn’t do
Clearahead has no engagement surveys, reviews, feedback, development plans or people analytics. If you need those, Culture Amp is one of the best, and Clearahead won’t replace it.
Running Culture Amp and Clearahead together
The two tools answer questions a leadership team needs answered at different speeds. Culture Amp, a few times a year, tells you how people feel about their work, their managers and the company, and where the risks to engagement and retention are. Clearahead, every week, tells you what’s holding each company goal back, who is moving on it and what needs a decision. Sometimes the answers connect. If a survey shows a team is overloaded, you may find the same team owns three stuck moves in Clearahead, and the fix is to put the constraints in a stricter order and drop some work. Keeping the two separate means each stays honest: survey responses stay confidential, and the goal picture stays about the work rather than about people.
Should you choose Culture Amp or Clearahead?
Choose Culture Amp if
- You want to measure and improve engagement with proper surveys and benchmarks.
- You want performance reviews and development connected to engagement data.
- You have a people team that will act on the insights.
- Retention and culture are your biggest risks.
Choose Clearahead if
- Your challenge is a company goal that keeps slipping.
- You want the leadership team agreeing on what’s in the way and who’s moving on it.
- You want a picture that updates as the work moves, not on a survey cycle.
- You don’t have a people team yet, or don’t need a full HR platform.
- You want one price for the whole company.
Our honest read
Culture Amp and Clearahead aren’t competitors. If you want to understand and improve how your people feel and perform, Culture Amp is a leading choice, and nothing in Clearahead does that job.
Where companies come unstuck is expecting a people platform to align the leadership team on the company’s goals. Engagement scores can tell you a team is frustrated; they can’t give you a shared, ordered list of what’s holding the goal back and who’s moving on it.
Use each for what it’s good at. If you’re still choosing a people platform, our Lattice alternatives roundup covers Culture Amp alongside Leapsome, 15Five and others. If your problem is alignment on company goals, Clearahead is free for up to three people.
Questions about Culture Amp
What is Culture Amp?
Culture Amp is an employee experience platform founded in Melbourne in 2009 by Didier Elzinga, Doug English, Rod Hamilton and Jon Williams. It’s best known for engagement surveys and also offers performance management, development and AI coaching.
Does Culture Amp do goal tracking?
Culture Amp includes goals as part of its performance tools, so people can set and track goals that feed into reviews and development. It isn’t designed as goal tracking software for running a company’s priorities.
Is Clearahead an alternative to Culture Amp?
No, not really. Clearahead has no surveys, reviews or development tools. It’s goal tracking for the company, and works alongside Culture Amp: one tells you how your people feel, the other what’s in the way of your goals.
Can engagement surveys tell you why a goal is slipping?
Sometimes indirectly, if the cause is morale or workload. More often the cause is a specific constraint, like no repeatable way to qualify leads, that only shows up when you ask what’s in the way of the goal itself.