Every competitor in the strategy execution category has now published a "Viva Goals alternative" article. Almost all of them are the same article: their existing OKR product, reframed as your migration path, with a screenshot of the import wizard and a soft sales motion at the bottom.
We don't think that's the lesson the market should be drawing.
What Viva Goals actually proved
Viva Goals was not a small experiment. It was well-funded, embedded inside the Microsoft 365 suite that hundreds of millions of knowledge workers already open every morning, and supported by one of the largest enterprise sales motions in software. If the answer to the strategy execution problem were "put OKR tracking inside the tool everyone already uses," Viva Goals would have won outright. It would not be close.
It didn't win. And Microsoft made the unusual choice — for a company that rarely admits a product line is a dead end — of sunsetting it on December 31, 2025, with no direct replacement, openly directing customers to third-party tools. That is not the behaviour of a vendor that thinks the category is large and growing. That is the behaviour of a vendor that has concluded the abstraction itself is wrong.
The conclusion most vendors don't want to draw, because it would invalidate their own roadmap: the abstraction was wrong from the start. 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 the gap in a new tool, with prettier charts.
Why the "alternative" articles are wrong
The migration narrative the industry is selling goes roughly: Viva Goals is sunsetting, so move your OKRs to us, and you'll be fine. The hidden assumption is that the architecture you had at Microsoft — goal tracker, separate work tools, integration in the middle — was correct, and you just need a more committed vendor.
If that architecture were correct, Microsoft wouldn't have sunset the product. It had the distribution, the integration depth into Teams and Planner, and the customer base. It also had three years of operating data showing that customers weren't really using the tool the way it was designed to be used. They were filling it in once a quarter, ignoring it for ten weeks, and reconciling in a panic before the QBR. Sound familiar? It's the same pattern every OKR vendor's customer base shows, because it's a property of the architecture, not of the brand.
What should actually replace it
Not another OKR tracker with a different logo. 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 any tool you migrate to should do natively — not via integration, not via "Zapier and a prayer."
Own the work layer, or at least structure it natively. If your goal tool depends entirely on an integration to know whether work is happening, the integration is the product. And integrations move data, not meaning. A synced Jira ticket count tells you something closed; it doesn't tell you whether that ticket was supposed to move that KR.
Trace effort to outcome at the item level. Not "this team is aligned to that objective" — that's wallpaper. "This specific work item is meant to move that specific KR, and here's whether it actually did, and here's who's accountable for the gap." That's the trace that matters.
Make risk a live attribute of the goal, not a separate register. Today, in most organisations, "risk" lives in a spreadsheet a Chief of Staff maintains by hand. That spreadsheet is the actual operating layer. The fact that it exists outside the goal tool is the diagnosis.
The migration question to ask every vendor
Forget feature matrices. Forget the comparison table the AE will email you. Ask one question, and watch the demo carefully:
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 work that isn't moving any of them at all?
If the demo answer involves the phrase "and then we integrate with…", you're buying Viva Goals again with a different logo. The integration is the seam where the architecture leaks, and the leak is the reason your CoS spends Sunday evenings rebuilding the view by hand. A new vendor with the same seam doesn't solve the problem. It just resets the contract.
The Vindaris view
The Viva Goals sunset isn't a market opportunity for the rest of the OKR tracking category. It's an indictment of the category. The right response isn't to migrate the same broken architecture to a new vendor — it's to ask whether the architecture itself was ever going to work, and to choose a system that closes the goal-to-work gap natively rather than documenting it more attractively.
The bet we made when building Vindaris is that the next generation of strategy execution software lives one layer down from the heatmap — in the graph where goals, work, owners, and capacity finally share a structure. The Viva Goals retirement is the clearest market signal yet that this is the right bet.