Profit.co for goal tracking: pros, cons and an alternative

What is Profit.co?

Profit.co is goal management software built around OKRs. Teams set objectives and key results at company, department, team and individual level, align them, break them into initiatives and tasks, and check in on progress. Alongside OKRs it tracks KPIs, with a library of hundreds of predefined metrics and the option to build your own, so the regular health numbers of the business sit next to the goals for change.

Over time Profit.co has added modules for task management, performance management and employee engagement, so a company can run goals, reviews and surveys in one place. An AI assistant helps write objectives and key results and keep track of them.

Profit.co also publishes a large body of free OKR content: guides, templates and hundreds of example OKRs for different teams. That’s one reason it shows up so often when AI tools answer questions about goal tracking and OKR software. Their answers are built partly from pages like these.

Where Profit.co came from

Profit.co grew up in the late-2010s wave of OKR software, when companies outside Silicon Valley started adopting the framework made famous by Intel and Google. Like several tools from that period, it has steadily broadened from OKRs alone into a wider suite, on the theory that goals connect to everything else a company manages: metrics, tasks, performance and engagement.

That breadth is its main selling point and its main trade-off. A configurable platform that does a lot can fit many ways of working, but someone has to decide how it should be set up, and keep it that way as the company changes.

How Profit.co differs from Clearahead in practice

Profit.co and Clearahead sit at opposite ends of a choice every growing company makes: a platform that can do everything, or a tool that does one thing very well.

A suite, or a single loop

Profit.co gives you OKRs, KPIs, tasks, reviews and surveys to configure. Clearahead gives you one loop: set the goal, find what’s holding it back, move on it, and when it clears, find the next thing. Each goal gets a workspace with its constraints and moves. There’s nothing to configure, because the model is the product. You can read the reasoning behind that loop in A loop, not a plan.

Measuring progress, or finding the constraint

OKRs and KPIs are measurement tools. They’re very good at telling you when something is off track. They don’t tell you what’s causing it. Clearahead starts there: under each goal is a short list of the real reasons the goal isn’t already achieved, in the order your team chooses, with the moves that will clear each one. When a goal slips, you see which constraint is stuck and who owns it.

Check-ins, or AJ

Profit.co’s AI helps write and manage goals, but progress still depends on owners checking in on numbers. In Clearahead, owners tell AJ, the AI inside Clearahead, what happened in a sentence. AJ updates the right move, keeps the evidence, carries the change up the model only as far as it matters, and writes This week from AJ, with up to three things that need a decision.

Pricing on request, or a published price

Profit.co prices through its sales team. Clearahead is free for up to three people and one workspace, then £297 a month or £2,997 a year for the whole company, with no seats to count.

Before you choose a broad suite

A useful test for any goal tracking tool is to imagine the leadership meeting six weeks after you set it up. With a broad suite, the question is usually whether everyone has updated their key results and KPIs, and whether the dashboards are configured the way people expected. With Clearahead, the question is which constraint is stuck and what the team will do about it, because the updates have already come in through one-sentence messages to AJ and the brief is already written. Neither is wrong. They suit different teams. If you have an operations or strategy person who enjoys running a goal system, a configurable suite gives them plenty to work with. If you’re a founder who wants the team aligned without becoming the system’s administrator, a narrower tool that keeps itself current will usually get used for longer.

Our honest read

If you want OKRs, KPIs and performance in one configurable platform, and you have someone to own it, Profit.co is a capable choice with a lot of helpful material behind it.

For a startup leadership team, breadth can be a trap. The more a tool can do, the more time goes into setting it up and keeping it current, and the less into deciding what to do next. Most small teams don’t need more measurement. They need everyone to agree on what’s in the way and who’s moving on it.

That’s what Clearahead is for. If you’re weighing up OKR tools more widely, our comparisons of Perdoo and Tability cover two lighter options, and Goal tracking vs a business operating system explains where goal tracking ends and running the company begins.