15Five measures how the week felt. Not whether work moved.
Strong manager and engagement rituals, with goal progress reported as sentiment. Vindaris derives progress from the tasks themselves.
Last reviewed August 2026
15Five is a performance and engagement platform built around weekly check-ins, recognition, and 1-on-1s, with an objectives module on top. Vindaris is intelligent strategy execution software: strategy, goals and KPIs mapped down to every project and task, with the Work Graph flagging execution risks before they show up in an update. 15Five tells you how the team feels and what people reported; Vindaris tells you what the work is doing.
Excellent manager rituals, measuring a different thing.
15Five is built around the weekly check-in, one-to-ones, recognition and engagement. As a manager cadence it works, and teams genuinely fill it in.
15Five's weekly check-in is the product: people write their plans and priorities, managers read and respond, and recognition and 1-on-1s sit on top. It is genuinely good for engagement and for keeping managers close to their teams. The objectives module rides on the same loop, which means a goal's status is whatever the owner reported in this week's check-in - a sentence written under time pressure, not the state of the work.
When objective progress is self-reported in a weekly check-in, it tracks sentiment more than delivery. An owner writes that things are on track because that is how it feels, while the tasks that would prove it live in Jira, Asana, Planner, or a spreadsheet that 15Five never sees. The check-in is a great conversation. It is a poor source of truth for whether the strategy is moving.
In 15Five, an objective's status is a weekly self-report. It captures how the owner feels the work is going, not what the work is doing. When check-ins are rushed or skipped - and across a busy quarter they always are - the objective picture drifts from reality, and nobody can tell when it started.
What teams consistently praised
- Strong weekly manager and engagement rituals.
- High completion rates on check-ins.
- Good one-to-one and recognition flows.
- Useful signal on morale and manager quality.
Where teams hit the limit
- Goal progress is self-reported alongside sentiment.
- No link between a goal and the delivery work under it.
- Execution reporting is thin for operators.
- Positive sentiment can mask a stalled initiative.
Engagement data is not execution data.
- Goals live beside engagement, not above delivery.
- Progress is reported alongside how the week felt.
- Integrations serve HR systems more than delivery tools.
- Dashboards show what people reported, which is not what happened.
- Good morale can coexist with a stalled quarter.
- Objectives sit on the work, not beside the engagement survey.
- Progress needs no self-report, so the check-in stops carrying two jobs.
- Risk is flagged from task movement, not inferred from sentiment.
- Keep 15Five for people development; run execution somewhere it can be measured.
- Any framework: OKRs, KPIs, EOS Rocks, OGSM, or a hybrid.
15Five models the conversation. It does not model the work.
15Five is built around the employee and the manager relationship, and its objects reflect that: the check-in, the 1-on-1, the review, the pulse. Objectives are attached to a person inside that structure, which is why they behave like a development artefact rather than an execution one.
| Object | 15Five | Vindaris |
|---|---|---|
| Central object | The weekly check-in from an individual | The task and its connection to a goal |
| Where an objective lives | On the employee record, inside the review cycle | On the goal graph, above the work delivering it |
| Progress source | The number the person types in their check-in | Task state in the connected work tools |
| Sentiment | First-class, and genuinely well done | Not modelled. Read the work instead |
| Cross-team goals | Awkward, because the model is per-person | Native, with one owner and explicit contributors |
The consequence shows up on any goal that more than one team touches. In a per-person model, a shared objective becomes several people's objectives, each reporting separately, and nobody holds the whole. Vindaris keeps one owner and models the contributors explicitly, so the goal has a single status derived from all the work under it rather than an average of self-reports.
Five views that keep strategy and execution in sync.
See every goal connected to the work moving it.
Drag and drop your alignment structure. Roll up work progress, KPIs and goals without enforcing any framework syntax.
Alignment Canvas →
Spot risk while there is still time to fix it.
Run heatmaps across teams, goals, KPIs and projects. Save views and get notified when risk levels change, from task movement rather than a reported number.
Combine tasks and projects across your systems.
Sync HubSpot, MS Planner, Google Tasks, Asana and more into one view. Bidirectional sync keeps everything current while teams stay in their own tools.
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Everyone knows exactly what matters most.
A clear view of each person's goals, KPIs, projects and tasks. Start the week focused on what is due.
Run reports the way management needs them.
Rank teams, spot risks, compare KPIs to work. AI summaries push updates to Slack, Teams and email.
Keep the check-in. Move the goals somewhere they are observed.
This is usually not a replacement. 15Five does performance and engagement well, and those are jobs Vindaris does not do. What moves is the objectives module.
15Five exports objectives and key results with their owners and current values. Bring the file in as-is. Owners map to Vindaris users, so accountability carries over on the first import.
Connect Jira, Asana, Planner, HubSpot or Google, whichever your teams actually ship in. This is the layer 15Five has no view of, and it is the whole reason the objectives felt disconnected from the work.
Objectives that were duplicated across several people so each could check in on their part collapse into a single goal with one owner and named contributors. This usually reduces the objective count noticeably and makes the list readable again.
The 15Five check-in keeps its people-development purpose: how the week went, where support is needed, what to talk about in the 1-on-1. It stops being the place where execution status is manufactured, which is what made it feel like admin.
Free forever for up to 5 people. No credit card required.
Start free Book a demo No credit card requiredVindaris vs 15Five, feature by feature.
15Five wins on manager rituals. This table compares what each product knows about the work beneath the goal.
| Feature | Vindaris | 15Five |
|---|---|---|
| How progress is measured | Read from task-level work and Slack context in the tools your team already uses. | Self-reported in the weekly check-in; a sentence or confidence rating. |
| Goal frameworks supported | Framework-agnostic: OKR, KPI, EOS Rocks, OGSM, SMART, Balanced Scorecard, or hybrid. | OKRs in a module on top of the check-in loop. |
| Connection to real work | Native work layer with bidirectional sync to HubSpot, Planner, Google, Jira, Asana. | No native work layer; the tasks behind objectives live in other tools. |
| Risk detection | Automatic execution-risk flags from task movement, focus and pace against plan. | Depends on the owner flagging it in their weekly write-up. |
| Status reporting | Live views and AI risk summaries pushed to Slack, Teams, and email. | Weekly check-in dashboards, engagement scores, 1-on-1 notes. |
| Capacity and bandwidth | Built-in bandwidth and capacity planning. | Not covered. |
| Ownership model | Single-owner accountability enforced structurally. | Objective owner linked to the employee profile. |
| Free plan | Free forever, including 2 integrations and up to 5 people. | No free tier; per-user pricing bundled with check-in and performance features. |
| Best fit | Teams that need goal status derived from work, not weekly self-reports. | Companies that want weekly engagement check-ins with lightweight OKRs. |
The category as a whole is compared in the best strategy execution software guide, and the argument underneath it is set out in the strategy execution gap whitepaper.
An HR suite seat, or an execution seat.
15Five prices per employee as part of a people-management suite, usually bundled across engagement, performance and objectives. The comparison is not like for like, which is itself the point: you are paying an HR platform rate for a goals module.
| Plan | 15Five | Vindaris |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | No free tier. | Free forever. Up to 5 people, 2 integrations, all core features. |
| Entry paid plan | Per-employee monthly pricing across bundled people-management modules. | Connect, EUR 10 per user per month. All integrations, unlimited sync. |
| Upper plan | Higher tiers add performance, engagement and analytics, not a work layer. | Pro, EUR 20 per user per month. Unlimited users in one organization. |
| Published pricing | Partially. Entry rates are published; full configurations are quoted. | Yes, on the website. No quote required to evaluate. |
| Minimum commitment | Typically annual, priced across the whole employee base. | None. No seat minimum, no annual term, no setup fee. |
Vindaris is free forever for up to 5 people, then EUR 10 per user per month, and it is priced for the people who run execution rather than for headcount.
Best for individual contributors, small teams or startups. No credit card required.
- All features (incl. Alignment Canvas, My Priorities, Heatmap, Data Studio & Task Board)
- Set up 2 integrations of your choice
- Invite up to 4 additional members
- 5 ad-hoc AI risk summaries per month
Best for teams, small agencies, or departmental and team management.
- All in Free
- All integrations, unlimited sync
- Unlimited AI risk summaries & alignment suggestions - ad-hoc and scheduled
- Up to 10 users within one organization
Best for multiple teams, exec teams, Chiefs of Staff, departmental leadership or full-org deployments.
- All in Connect
- Unlimited users within one organization
- Direct human support email, 24h response time
- Human-led onboarding support
Common questions, answered
What is the difference between 15Five and Vindaris?
Does Vindaris replace 15Five's weekly check-ins?
Why is objective progress in 15Five unreliable for execution?
Can I migrate from 15Five to Vindaris?
Free resources for this topic
A template you can download, a playbook to run, and the thinking behind both. No email required.
Or start with the full picture: strategy execution software that connects your plan to the work delivering it.
Moving execution out of 15Five is a choice. Repeating its architecture is optional.
Free forever for up to 5 people. No credit card required.
