The Best OKR Software for Scaling SaaS — From Someone Who Built Viva Goals

I spent the last six years building OKR tools. First Ally.io, which we sold to Microsoft. Then Viva Goals, which Microsoft retired at the end of 2025. I know where these tools break because I was in the room when we designed the generation that came before them — and in the room when we watched organizations with the best intentions still end up with a goal tracker that nobody opened by February.

What follows is the comparison I'd give if a VP Ops asked me honestly: which OKR tool should we actually use? Not a feature matrix. Not a G2 aggregate. An evaluation of what actually matters for a scaling company — from the specific angle of having built two of these platforms and watched them get used (and abandoned) at scale.

The Best OKR Software for Scaling Companies — The Short Answer

The best OKR software for a scaling SaaS company depends on one question: do you need goal tracking, or do you need the operational layer that connects goals to the work that actually gets done? Tools built for goal tracking are easier to set up and work well for the first year. They struggle when the company grows past 200 people and the cascade needs to update in real time as priorities shift. The operational layer tools — those that connect directly to Jira, Salesforce, Slack, and the tools where work actually happens — are harder to set up but eliminate the "OKR washing" problem that kills most implementations in year two.

Who This Comparison Is — and Isn't — For

If you're running a 30-person team and need a lightweight way to track quarterly goals, you don't need this comparison. Spreadsheets will work. So will any of the tools below. The cost of switching is low; the stakes are low.

This comparison is for operators at companies roughly 200 to 2,000 people where OKRs have already failed once. Where the Q1 rollout went fine, March got chaotic, and by May nobody could tell you with confidence which priorities were still active. Where the Chief of Staff or VP Ops is spending two hours a week chasing update status across teams who are using the OKR tool differently than intended, or not at all.

The failure mode at this scale is not "we didn't set goals." It's "we set goals, and then the company changed, and the cascade didn't, and nobody noticed until the quarterly review." That's the problem worth solving. That's what this comparison is about.

The Only Question That Matters in an OKR Evaluation

Ask any OKR vendor what happens if nobody updates.

Most platforms will give you a diplomatic answer about engagement features, reminder emails, or dashboard nudges. Because at a 500-person company, three weeks into Q2, when the sales team is focused on closing and the engineering team is in a sprint, nobody is opening a separate tool to type in a progress update. The tool that relies on humans to remember to update it will have a 40% completion rate by month three — which is roughly what organizations report across OKR software that requires manual input.

The platforms worth evaluating for a scaling company are the ones that pull update data automatically from the tools where work actually happens. When an engineer closes a Jira ticket, it moves a key result. When a sales rep updates Salesforce, it advances a revenue goal. The human doesn't have to do anything extra. Progress happens as a byproduct of doing the work.

This single capability separates the tools that work from the tools that look good in demos.

The Tools, Evaluated on What Actually Matters

Rhythms

Full disclosure: this is the tool we built after Viva Goals. I'll be direct about both what it does and what it doesn't.

Rhythms is not an OKR tracker — it's the operational layer that runs the OKR cadence automatically. Goals & Alignment handles cascading in real time: a CEO changes a top-line priority, and every downstream objective and key result updates automatically. No re-communication tour. No Slack thread asking "has anyone updated the Q2 priorities yet?"

Playbooks runs check-ins on your defined cadence — weekly, biweekly, quarterly — pulling live data from Jira, Salesforce, Slack, HubSpot, and 200+ other connected tools. The Chief of Staff doesn't chase updates before the review; the system surfaces them.

Radar surfaces off-track initiatives on day three, not day thirty. This is the capability that changes how a Chief of Staff experiences her week. The early warning is automatic, which means the conversation happens before the problem becomes a crisis.

Reviews auto-generates business review decks from live data. Monthly, quarterly, whatever cadence you run — the deck builds itself from the systems where work actually lives. The first time a review writes itself, something shifts in how you understand what your job is supposed to be.

What Rhythms is not: if your team needs a standalone goal-tracking tool that operates independently of your operational stack, it will feel like more than you need. It's designed to integrate deeply — which means setup takes longer than a lightweight tracker. The ROI is real (purpose-built OKR platforms generate a 1:88 return versus 1:25 for spreadsheets, per a 2026 benchmark across 330 organizations), but the integration work is upfront and real.

Best for: Scaling SaaS companies, 200–2,000 people, where the Chief of Staff or VP Ops is currently the human holding all the threads. Companies migrating from Viva Goals will find the transition particularly natural — the design philosophy is a direct continuation.

Mooncamp

Mooncamp is one of the cleaner goal-tracking tools in the market. The interface is well-designed, the cascade visualization is genuinely good, and setup is fast. For a team that wants to start running OKRs without a long integration project, it's a credible choice.

Where it works well: Teams under 150 people where the goal-setting infrastructure is the gap, not the execution layer. Mooncamp gives you the structure without significant technical lift.

Where it struggles: Manual update dependency. Mooncamp relies on users updating goal progress directly in the platform. At 50 people this is manageable. At 500 people, in Q2, it isn't. Teams report the familiar drop-off pattern: strong adoption in Q1, declining update frequency by Q2, partial abandonment by the time the quarterly review comes around.

Best for: Early-stage teams standing up OKRs for the first time. Companies at the "we need structure" stage, not the "we've already failed at OKRs and need to understand why" stage.

Lattice Goals

Lattice's strength is the integration with its broader performance management suite. If you're running compensation reviews, performance cycles, and employee development through Lattice, keeping goals in the same platform reduces context switching and makes the connection between goals and performance conversations more legible.

Where it works well: HR-led organizations where the OKR program lives inside the people operations function.

Where it struggles: Lattice Goals is built for the HR buyer, and a VP Ops will feel that within a week of using it. The cascade mechanism works, but there's no native connection to Jira or Salesforce — which means if an engineer ships a feature that moves a product goal, someone still has to manually update the Lattice record. For a team running engineering cadences in Jira, that gap generates the same manual overhead you were trying to eliminate.

Best for: Mid-market companies where OKR ownership sits in HR or People Ops and where the goal system needs to connect to performance management more than to engineering and revenue tooling.

Cascade

Cascade has excellent strategy mapping features. If your primary need is visualizing a complex strategic hierarchy — multiple frameworks, business units with different planning cycles, enterprise-wide strategy that needs to be communicated through a large org — it's genuinely capable.

Where it works well: Enterprise organizations with complex strategy visualization needs. Cascade's ability to represent multi-framework strategic architectures is real and well-built.

Where it struggles: Like most tools in this category, Cascade's execution layer relies on manual inputs. The strategy is visible; the execution tracking is only as current as the humans updating it. For scaling SaaS companies that need execution data to flow automatically, Cascade requires the same discipline maintenance as its peers.

Best for: Enterprise organizations where strategy visualization and communication — not operational execution tracking — is the primary gap.

Spreadsheets

Worth including because, for a specific stage of company, a well-structured Google Sheet beats a poorly implemented SaaS platform every time. Purpose-built platforms return 1:88 versus 1:25 for spreadsheets — but only when they're actually being used. A spreadsheet that everyone updates beats a platform that nobody opens.

Where it works well: Under 50 people. Before you've defined your OKR structure well enough to know what you actually need from software.

Where it breaks: Above 50 people, cascade maintenance in a spreadsheet becomes a real cost. When a priority shifts, someone has to manually update every connected row. At 200 people with three levels of cascade, that someone is the Chief of Staff, on a Sunday.

The Recommendation, Straight

If you are running a scaling SaaS company and your OKR program has already failed once — and most have — the question is not whether to use OKR software. It's whether to use a tracking tool or an execution layer.

Tracking tools solve the Q1 problem. Execution layers solve the Q2–Q4 problem.

Organizations that use AI for the full OKR cycle — goal setting, tracking, reviews — fail on missed goals at a 14% rate. Organizations using AI only for goal-writing fail at 35% (2026 OKR Intelligence Report). That gap is not about the software itself. It's about whether the system maintains the cadence automatically or depends on humans to remember to do it.

For a Chief of Staff at a 500-person SaaS company who is currently the human API — the person who collects the data, maintains the cascade, chases the updates, and builds the quarterly review — the right tool is not another tracker. It's a system that eliminates the human-operated middleware.

If that's your situation, Rhythms is what I'd recommend. Not because we built it — but because of the specific reason we built it: we'd already built the best OKR tracker in the market, watched it get adopted at scale, and then watched organizations still end up with the same execution gap. The tracking wasn't the problem. The gap between where goals live and where work actually happens — that's the problem.

After spending six years building these tools, the thing I know that I didn't know at the start is this: the software is almost never why OKR programs fail. They fail because the organization kept needing a human to hold the whole thing together, and eventually that human ran out of capacity or left. The best OKR software is the one that removes the human from the maintenance loop entirely — not to replace them, but to free them for the work that actually requires judgment.

That's the question I'd ask before signing any contract: if every person responsible for updating this system took a two-week vacation at the same time, what would the cascade look like when they came back? The answer will tell you whether you're buying a tool or an operating layer.

If you're still the person holding the whole thing together, try Rhythms for free at rhythms.ai.

Frequently Asked Questions

What OKR software should we use after Viva Goals retired?

Viva Goals was retired by Microsoft on December 31, 2025. The most natural successor — particularly for organizations built around Viva Goals' design philosophy — is Rhythms, which was built by the same team. The transition is intentional: Rhythms extends what Viva Goals did into a full operational execution layer, connecting goal tracking to automated check-ins, reviews, and early warning signals that Viva Goals didn't cover. Organizations migrating from Viva Goals should expect a similar goal cascade model with significantly deeper integration into operational tooling.

What's the difference between an OKR tool and a business orchestration platform?

An OKR tool tracks goals and measures progress. A business orchestration platform runs the entire operational cadence — check-ins, reviews, cascade updates, early warning on off-track initiatives — automatically and from connected systems. The distinction matters at scale. An OKR tool requires humans to maintain it; a business orchestration platform maintains itself from live data. Rhythms is built as the latter: goals are set, and then the system manages the cadence, not the Chief of Staff.

How does OKR software scale when a company grows from 200 to 2,000 people?

The three things that break first as companies scale: manual update frequency drops (the tool stops reflecting reality), cascade maintenance becomes a full-time job (every priority shift requires a manual re-cascade), and check-in compliance collapses (no one has time to type updates into a separate platform). The platforms that scale best are those that pull update data automatically from connected systems — so progress reflects what's actually happening without requiring any additional input from teams. If your OKR platform doesn't integrate directly with Jira, Salesforce, and Slack, plan for significant manual overhead as you grow past 200 people.

Is Rhythms the same as an OKR tool?

No. Rhythms includes OKR-style goal cascading through its Goals & Alignment pillar, but the platform extends well beyond goal tracking. Playbooks runs operational cadences automatically. Radar surfaces off-track initiatives before they become problems. Reviews auto-generates business review decks from live system data. The goal of Rhythms is to eliminate the coordination layer — the status chasing, update collection, and deck-building — that consumes up to 70% of management time. OKR tracking is one component of that, not the whole.

How do I choose between OKR tools for a scaling company?

Ask one question of each vendor: what happens if nobody updates? If the answer involves reminders, nudges, or counting on users to log into the platform, the tool will experience adoption decay by Q2. The tools worth evaluating for a scaling company are those that pull progress data automatically from the systems where work actually happens — so update compliance is no longer a behavior you have to manage. Beyond that, evaluate based on cascade sophistication (does a top-level priority change propagate automatically?), review automation (does the platform help you prepare for reviews, or just track goals?), and the quality of the early warning system (when does the platform tell you something is off-track?).