Best Performance Management Tool List
Here’s my shortlist of the best performance management software systems that I’ll cover in this article:
True performance management is much more than an annual performance review.
Rather, it should be a continuous process with regular check-ins between managers and their team members that lead to better feedback, coaching and, hopefully, improved performance and goal management.
Effective performance management requires work, but there are a number of tools available to help you with your performance management at the individual, team, and organizational levels.
Performance Management Tools: Comparison Criteria
Wondering what we look for when selecting the best performance management tools for review? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- User Interface (UI): Is it clean and attractive?
- Usability: Is it easy to learn and master? Does the company offer good tech support, user support, tutorials, and training?
- Features & Functionality:
- Review and Feedback - Are there pre-built employee evaluation templates to help with the review process? Is the employee performance review engaging and flexible? Are there employee recognition tools to positively call attention to top performance?
- Training & eLearning - Does the software have the means to create and implement training/eLearning courses for employees? Is content creation easy? Do any courses come with the software?
- Improvement Plans - Does the software have the capability to design and execute performance improvement plans? Does it offer templates with which to do so?
- Reporting and analytics - Are the reporting tools robust, customizable, flexible, and visually appealing? Can they be used to provide employees with relevant performance metrics?
- Integrations: Is it easy to connect with other tools? Are there any pre-built integrations?
- Value for $: How appropriate is the price for the features, capabilities, and use case? Is pricing clear, transparent, and flexible?
Overviews of the 10 Best Performance Management Tools
Keep reading to get a basic outline of each of the top performance management tools on this list. I will go over their strengths and weaknesses as well as general features and software pricing.
Trakstar
Best for connecting all the stages of the employee lifecycle
Trakstar is for organizations interested in comprehensive performance appraisal and employee engagement software that comes with an interface that’s easy on the eyes and looks quite like some of today’s social networking sites.
Trakstar helps your organization manage performance reviews, employee engagement surveys, 360-degree/multi-rater feedback, and goals across hundreds or thousands of employees. You can also build customized appraisal forms, set SMART goals, and create flexible workflow processes to meet the needs of your organization.
What Trakstar lacks in third-party integration support it makes up for in usability and UI. Trakstar is a streamlined performance management tool without all the fluff. They can accommodate SMBs and enterprises with their volume-discount pricing plan.
Trakstar integrates with Google Workspace, Okta, and OneLogin.
Pricing details and a free live demo are available upon request.
PerformYard
Best for customized performance review processes
PerformYard's performance management software provides flexible features for HR and a simple employee experience. HR teams will get the tools they need to build out any performance management strategy while employees get a streamlined experience so they can focus on quality feedback and effective performance discussions.
With PerformYard you can customize their software to fit the strategy that's right for your organization: 360s, project based reviews, ratings scales, continuous feedback, and/or cascading goals.
PerformYard provides a simple employee experience that facilitates feedback and quality conversations. PerformYard provides dedicated customer success managers for every customer to manage them from onboarding, to employee trainings, to ongoing support.
PerformYard integrates with most major HRIS/Payroll systems including ADP, BambooHR, Gusto, Rippling, UKG, Paycom, Workday, and Paylocity.
PerformYard costs from $5/user/month.
Primalogik
Best for collecting and analyzing 360 degree feedback
Primalogik’s employee performance management software includes a wide range of features that foster employee engagement and empower managers and their employees to reach their full potential. Through a combination of performance review assessments, 360-degree feedback, engagement surveys, employee goals and OKRs (objectives and key results), and instant feedback including 1:1 check-ins, Primalogik helps employees gain insight into their individual performance and uncover areas to make small improvements.
Their 360-degree feedback module makes it easy to solicit feedback from multiple sources. Admin users can select their own rating scales for their evaluation questionnaires, and determine the level of anonymity that will be applied to the feedback. Advanced features in this module include the option for managers and admin staff to launch feedback requests about their employees and solicit responses from specific co-workers, automatic reminders to provide feedback by a certain date, and real-time feedback tracking.
Once employee feedback is in the system, Primalogik has several tools to support deep analysis of the data. For example, their system allows managers to compare employees’ self-ratings side-by-side against other respondent's feedback. This helps identify any blindspots between where an employee believes they are, and what their co-workers have suggested. As well, their Comparison Mode allows admin users to benchmark each employee appraisal and compare them across their workforce — a useful way of identifying their overall top performers or spotting potential company-wide skill gaps.
Primalogik integrates with ADP, BambooHR, Google Workspace, Microsoft Azure, and Okta. Their performance management software is also available in Spanish or French.
Primalogik costs from $159/month for up to 25 users and offers a 30-day free trial or a free demo.
Leapsome
Best for employee development-oriented performance management
Leapsome is an all-in-one performance management and employee engagement tool that helps organizations enhance their management processes. Chosen by companies like Spotify, Northvolt, and Babbel, Leapsome enables a continuous cycle of performance management and personalized learning that powers the growth of your people and business.
Their 360-reviews are fully customizable and easy to set up. Highlights include anonymous/non-anonymous feedback, expert templates, skill frameworks, development paths, automations, and powerful analytics. Leapsome's OKRs & goals module helps you manage objectives at the company, team, or individual level. Thanks to its ease of use and intuitive visuals, the tool helps you connect the big picture to the tiny details using flexible metrics, easy visualization of dependencies and goal progress, and goal trees.
Leapsome's employee engagement surveys can identify engagement drivers and measure your employees‘ satisfaction over time. Whether through custom questions or Leapsome's expert templates, the tool helps you turn company sentiment into action. Key features include customizable questions, frequency, participants; segmentation by department, performance; and automated analytics.
Leapsome also offers meeting management to conduct effective 1-on-1s or team meetings with any employee in your organization, driven by a well-structured agenda and talking points.
Leapsome integrates with Personio, BambooHR, HiBob, Workday, Rippling, PayFit, ADP, Active Directory, SFTP Integrations, Slack, Jira, Microsoft Teams, calendar apps, and Single Sign-On (SSO).
Leapsome costs from $8/user/month (billed annually) and comes with a free 14-day trial as well as a free demo upon request.
Connecteam
Best for leveraging rewards & recognition tools to promote high performance
Connecteam is a workforce management solution designed to help you manage, communicate, and train your employees in one place, regardless of where they’re working from. The software is tailored for businesses and HR departments managing remote employees and deskless teams.
Connecteam provides you with the tools to create custom training courses that can be targeted at different HR process and performance requirements, including courses for onboarding new hires and training existing employees to help them develop new skills and knowledge that will be critical to their professional development. Connecteam can serve as a document management platform for your HR department. HR managers can leverage the platform to store employee data securely in the cloud and then use the user permissions function to control who, within the organization, will have access to those data.
In addition to the document management system, Connecteam is also equipped with tools for creating customized quizzes and surveys. Your HR manager can use custom surveys to check in on company culture and learn about the employee experience. The survey results can be used to improve workforce morale and employee retention. Surveys can be completely anonymous, or they can be configured to display results in real time. The custom employee quizzes, on the other hand, can help you identify opportunities for improvement as well as the training requirements of your staff members and teams.
Connecteam integrates with QuickBooks.
Connecteam offers three main modules: Operations, Communications, and HR & Skills. A free plan is available, plus a 14-day free trial.
ClearCompany
Best for simplifying and automating HR workflows
ClearCompany is an easy way to bring all of your employee performance review processes into a single, automated solution. ClearCompany's easy-to-use performance review software lets you quickly set up reviews, including custom scoring tables, weighted sections, and free-form responses.
ClearCompany's flat-rate pricing model allows you to send as many performance reviews as you need, as frequently as you need, without worrying about price.
ClearCompany is best for companies based in the U.S. and Canada.
ClearCompany integrates with tools for assessment tests, background checks, calendars, job postings, payroll and benefits, and SSO.
ClearCompany's flat-rate pricing model allows you to send as many performance reviews as you need, as frequently as possible, without worrying about price and customized pricing available upon request.
Motivosity
Best for publicly highlighting top performing employees
Motivosity is a cloud-based employee engagement, rewards, and recognition solution that helps small to large businesses track and reward top performance. Some of its core features include peer-to-peer social recognition, employee feedback capture, and employee evaluation tools, as well as monetary rewards and gift card management.
Motivosity makes recognizing top performance a publicly visible activity thanks to its built-in social recognition feed. HR teams and managers can celebrate staff achievements publicly through company-wide announcements and reward them with customizable awards, badges, or other types of rewards.
To dig deeper into employee morale and sentiment, HR departments and managers can take advantage of Motivosity's built-in question library, allowing them to create or customize employee feedback and pulse surveys with ease. The tool also allows them to compare historical performance data to measure progress.
Other helpful features include a built-in organizational chart tool to display employee profiles, relevant skills, and other details to all staff members. The software also comes with a well-designed mobile application for both Android and iOS devices too.
Motivosity integrates with 20+ popular software systems, including ADP Workforce Now, BambooHR, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Okta, Paylocity, Paychex, Rippling, SAP SuccessFactors, Slack, UKG Pro, Workday, Zenefits, and others.
Motivosity has four main products — Connect, Recognize, Lead, and Listen — that are priced separately, ranging between $2 to $5/user/month. You can also request a free demo through their website.
Insperity
Best performance management from an HCM software and service provider
Insperity is provides both a people management platform and services from a team of HR experts. The company's offerings include performance management and evaluations, recruitment and onboarding, and payroll processing, among other core HR functions.
Managers can set goals and track employee performance using the software. It can host employee job descriptions and facilitate performance reviews with custom questions and rating systems. Templates and trainings are available to support the performance evaluation process.
In addition to its evaluation capabilities, the software provides employee training. Virtual learning tools for things like workplace harassment prevention, effective communication, and leadership development are available through the system. It tracks user's progress to keep you up-to-date on each staff member's training completion timelines.
The software has a public API and API dashboard that can be used to configure custom integrations with your existing tech stack. Pricing is available upon request.
monday.com
Best for gathering performance management feedback via integrated forms
monday.com is marketing mainly as a workflow tool for scaling an organization, but they've also built in a number of HR features, and specifically, some features for performance management. It's not a pure HR tool but it's a useful tool with a lot of the basics.
Some of the features monday.com offers for performance management is the ability to make surveys, tests and quizzes, and send these to employees. It also has integrated forms in the software, which can be used for anything in your company, but it's especially useful in performance management to gather information about employee progress, opinions, and other types of employee feedback.
monday.com’s integrations include project management apps like Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Jira, GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Typeform and many more, accessible through a paid plan with Zapier.
monday.com costs from $8/user/month and offers a free trial.
iSpring Learn
Best for skill-based competency analysis
iSpring Learn is a learning management system with integrated tools for performance management. You can use Spring Learn to collect 360-degree feedback about each employee in the context of a performance appraisal. If any areas for improvement are uncovered, you can then use iSpring Learn to develop custom training courses, track employee progress, and measure the effectiveness of your learning programs.
iSpring's 360-degree feedback allows you to collect feedback anonymously from managers, direct reports, and peers, plus a self-assessment from the employee themselves too. You can also collect feedback from external customers as well, which is a useful feature for evaluating any customer-focused roles.
One key feature I really appreciate is their adjustable competency model that you can customize to measure the skills and attributes that matter for each individual role. They also have flexible survey settings, meaning you can switch one respondent with another one (for example, if someone happens to be on vacation or leave) without needing to restart your entire feedback collection workflow.
Other features include a competency summary and radar chart, tools to identify knowledge and skill gaps, customizable learning paths, goal-tracking, interactive assessments, learning gamification, and system-wide reporting in real-time. Managers can track course progress, test scores, and completion rates to identify areas where employees need more support. Their platform is also mobile-friendly too.
The software integrates with various popular business applications, making it a versatile solution for organizations of all sizes.
Need Expert Help Selecting The Right Performance & Appraisal Software?
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Best Performance Management Tools Summary
Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Trakstar Best for connecting all the stages of the employee lifecycle | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
2 | PerformYard Best for customized performance review processes | Free demo available | From $5-$10/user/month | Visit Website |
3 | Primalogik Best for collecting and analyzing 360 degree feedback | 30-day free trial | From $159/month for up to 25 users | Visit Website |
4 | Leapsome Best for employee development-oriented performance management | 14-day free trial | From $8/user/month | Visit Website |
5 | Connecteam Best for leveraging rewards & recognition tools to promote high performance | Free plan available | From $29/month (30 users) | Visit Website |
6 | ClearCompany Best for simplifying and automating HR workflows | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
7 | Motivosity Best for publicly highlighting top performing employees | Free demo available | From $2 to $5/user/month depending on product chosen | Visit Website |
8 | Insperity Best performance management from an HCM software and service provider | Not available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
9 | monday.com Best for gathering performance management feedback via integrated forms | 14-day free trial + freemium plan available | From $8/user/month (billed annually, min 3 seats) | Visit Website |
10 | iSpring Learn Best for skill-based competency analysis | 30-day free trial | From $2.87/user/month (billed annually) | Visit Website |
Other Performance Management Tools
Still haven’t found the right performance management tool for your team? Here are some performance management software options that didn’t make the top 10 list but still deserve a special mention. Check them out!
- GoCo
Best for automating performance review cycles and feedback reminders
- 15Five
Best overall performance management solution
- Mirro
Best for peer-to-peer recognition
- bob
Best for continuous feedback and deep HR analytics
- PeopleFluent
Best for scalability
- Betterworks
Best performance management for enterprises
- Kazoo
Best for employee growth plans
- Ascender HCM
Best personally-tailored development plans
- Teamflect
Best integration with Microsoft Teams
- ClickUp
Best for managing team performance via goals and weekly scorecards
Related Read: 10 Best Succession Planning Software To Develop Future Leaders In 2023
Performance Management FAQ
Here are some answers to frequently asked questions related to performance management processes and appraisal software.
What is a performance appraisal?
How much does a performance management system cost?
How do performance management tools work?
What are performance management techniques?
Additional Resources
Want more insights into the talent management process? Here are some other key resources to help you out:
- Performance software is often accentuated by OKR software (objectives and key results), so you know what to align goals around. Take a peek at our Top 10 OKR Software To Jumpstart Your Business.
- You can also find performance management modules in a lot of larger software suites designed for larger HR departments—check out our list of the 10 Best Talent Management Systems.
- Did you know that employee engagement is a huge factor in employee performance? Check out our list of the 10 Best Employee Engagement Software for a happy workplace.
Additional resources you'll want to read:
What Do You Think About These Performance Management Tools?
Have you tried out any employee performance evaluation vendors listed above? What performance management software company do you prefer during your day-to-day? Let us know in the comments.
If you're not quite ready to take the plunge on performance management software, here's something else we can help with: How To Optimize Your Performance Management.
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Related Read:
- 10 Best Talent Management Systems For HR In 2023
- Essential Performance Review Phrases And Best Practices
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