Every competitor in the category has now published a "Viva Goals alternative" article. Almost all of them are the same article: their OKR product, reframed as your migration path.
We don't think that's the lesson.
What Viva Goals actually proved
Viva Goals was well-funded, well-distributed, and embedded inside Microsoft 365. If "OKR tracking inside the tool everyone already uses" were the answer, it would have won. It didn't — and Microsoft made the unusual choice of sunsetting it with no direct replacement and openly directing customers to third-party tools.
The conclusion most vendors don't want to draw: the abstraction was wrong. Tracking OKRs in one place while the work that should move them lives in Jira, HubSpot, Planner, Notion, and Slack doesn't fix the strategy-execution gap. It documents it.
What should replace it
Not another OKR tracker. A system where the goal and the work that's meant to move it live in the same place, with traceable lines between them. Concretely, that means three things your next tool should do natively:
- Own the work layer, or at least structure it. If your goal tool depends entirely on an integration to know whether work is happening, the integration is the product.
- Trace effort to outcome at the item level. Not "this team is aligned to that objective" — "this work item is meant to move that KR, and here's whether it did."
- Make risk a live attribute of the goal, not a separate register a Chief of Staff maintains by hand.
The migration question to ask vendors
Forget feature matrices. Ask one question: Can you show me, on a Monday morning, every piece of in-flight work that is currently meant to move my top three goals — and the ones that aren't moving any?
If the demo answer involves "and then we integrate with…", you're buying Viva Goals again with a different logo.