Zensai (Perform365) for goal tracking: pros, cons and an alternative

What is Zensai?

Zensai calls itself a human success platform. In plain terms, it’s a suite of people software built to run inside Microsoft 365. There are three products: Learn365 for training and courses, Engage365 for engagement and recognition, and Perform365 for performance management, which is where goals and OKRs live. Zensai sells them as three editions. Grow covers learning with an AI tutor, Scale adds performance reviews, OKRs, goals, 1:1s, check-ins and 360 feedback, and Transform adds engagement and an organisation-wide “Human Success Score”.

The defining feature is where it runs. Zensai is built natively into Microsoft 365, so people set goals, check in, hold 1:1s and complete reviews inside Microsoft Teams, with content in SharePoint and assistance through Copilot. It reads your organisation chart from Microsoft Entra ID and connects to more than 80 HR systems, including Workday and SAP. For a company that already lives in Teams all day, that means nobody has to learn or log in to another tool.

Goals in Perform365 are flexible. You can run OKRs, SMART goals, KPIs or your own framework, at personal, team, department and company level, and align each goal to a parent. With AI switched on by an admin, Perform365 suggests goals and key results based on the role and the goal above. Development goals can link straight to courses in Learn365, and goals, check-ins, recognition and feedback all feed the AI-drafted review summaries managers see at review time. Zensai is careful to say its AI doesn’t score, rate or rank people.

Where Zensai came from

Zensai started in Denmark in 2009, and its best-known product began life as LMS365, a learning management system built into SharePoint and later Teams. By its own account it now has more than 250 employees, over 2,000 customers and about 60 partners, and its launch announcement in 2024 put its reach at more than two million users in over 60 countries. Logos on its site include the NHS, Maersk Container Industry and Blue Water Shipping.

The performance side came from an acquisition. In August 2023, LMS365 bought Weekly10, a performance and check-in tool from Wrexham in Wales, whose performance product became Perform365. The same year the company renamed itself Zensai, with LMS365 becoming Learn365, and in April 2024 it launched the three products as a single platform under chief executive Rasmus Holst.

Goals became more important for Zensai when Microsoft wound down Viva Goals, its own OKR tool inside Teams. Microsoft stopped adding features in December 2024 and retired Viva Goals at the end of 2025. Many companies that ran OKRs in Teams needed somewhere to go, and Zensai offered an assisted migration into Perform365. That’s one reason it now appears when people ask AI tools for goal tracking or OKR software for Microsoft 365.

How Zensai differs from Clearahead in practice

Zensai and Clearahead both let a company set goals and track them. They’re built for different buyers, sit in different places in the working week, and answer different questions.

An HR suite, or a leadership tool

Zensai is bought and run by HR, people and learning teams. Goals are one part of a system for developing people: they connect to courses, check-ins and reviews, and the suite is judged on whether people grow and stay. Clearahead is bought by founders, CEOs, COOs and heads of department, and it does one job: keep the leadership team aligned on the company’s goals and moving on what’s in the way. It’s the tool the leadership team opens to decide what to do this week, not the one HR opens at review time.

Individual targets, or the company’s goals

In a performance suite, goals cascade from the company down to every person and come back up at review time. That’s useful for development, but it changes how people write and report them. A goal that will be discussed in your review tends to be safe, and a goal that’s slipping tends to stay green until it can’t. In Clearahead, each goal belongs to the company and gets its own workspace: grow revenue, launch the product, close the round. Heads of department own the constraints, their teams own the moves, and nobody’s pay rides on the colour. That makes it easier to say what’s really stuck.

On track, or in the way

Perform365 shows progress on goals and key results, with check-ins and AI summaries around them. That tells you whether a goal is on track. When it isn’t, it can’t tell you why. Clearahead is built around that second question. Each goal has a short list of the constraints holding it back, in the order your team chooses, and each constraint has the moves that will clear it, each with one owner. When a goal slips, you can see exactly what’s in the way and who is on it. We explain the thinking in Remove constraints, don’t add initiatives.

AI that helps write goals, or AI that runs the loop

Zensai’s AI helps at specific moments: suggesting goals and key results, drafting review summaries from a year of check-ins, coaching managers on feedback and tutoring learners. AJ, the AI inside Clearahead, is the product. Owners tell AJ what happened in a sentence. AJ updates the move, keeps the evidence, carries the change up the model only as far as it matters, challenges assumptions that look shaky, suggests next moves and writes This week from AJ, with the wins and up to three things that need a decision. Nobody has to fill in a check-in form.

Inside Teams, or alongside it

If your company spends its day in Microsoft Teams, Zensai’s biggest advantage is real: goals sit where the conversations already are. Clearahead is its own web app and works the same whether you use Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or both. The leadership team opens it, AJ emails the weekly brief, and advisers and the board can follow along as Viewers without needing a Microsoft licence or a seat.

Quoted per user, or one price for the company

Zensai prices by edition and number of users, and asks you to request a quote. 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 per-seat charges. You can invite every head of department, every owner, your board and your advisers without counting.

What Clearahead doesn’t do

Clearahead has no learning management, courses, engagement surveys, recognition, 360 feedback or performance reviews. If you need those, especially inside Teams, Zensai is a sensible choice and Clearahead won’t replace it.

If you’re replacing Viva Goals

It’s worth asking what Viva Goals was really doing for you before you choose. If it held OKRs for hundreds of people across many teams, and HR wants them tied to reviews, Perform365 is close to like-for-like and keeps everything in Teams. If it mostly held the leadership team’s handful of company goals, and the hard part was always working out why they were slipping, you may not need an HR suite at all. That’s the job Clearahead is built for. Our article on goal tracking vs a business operating system walks through the choice.

Our honest read

Zensai is a good product for a particular kind of company: a Microsoft-first organisation with an HR or learning team that wants learning, engagement, performance and goals in one place, inside Teams. If that’s you, and especially if you’re moving off Viva Goals, it deserves a place on your shortlist. Don’t switch away from it if it’s working.

Where it’s a weaker fit is a leadership team that wants to stay aligned on a few company goals and move faster on what’s in the way. A performance suite measures people against goals; it doesn’t find the constraint behind a slipping goal or help a leadership team agree what to do about it. That work needs a shared, ordered view of what’s in the way, kept apart from anyone’s review so people are honest about it.

Clearahead is built for that. It suits leadership teams at AI-native startups and companies of up to a couple of hundred people moving to AI, who want everyone aligned on the goals and the constraints behind them, with AJ doing the admin. Many companies that run an HR suite keep it for their people and run the company’s goals in Clearahead. For other options, see our roundup of goal tracking software for startup leadership teams, our comparisons of Perdoo and LutherOne, or read how Clearahead works as goal tracking software.