Every Viva Goals Alternative, Ranked by Someone Who Actually Built Viva Goals

I spent three years at Microsoft building Viva Goals. Our team — the same team that built Ally.io before Microsoft acquired us — designed the goal cascading architecture, debated the integration trade-offs, and watched adoption patterns across thousands of enterprise deployments. I know exactly what Viva Goals could do, what it couldn't, and the specific constraints that kept it from going further.

When I evaluate the alternatives, I'm not comparing feature lists from a review site. I'm comparing them against what I know from the inside — which limitations were deliberate design decisions and which were ceilings we couldn't break through inside the Microsoft ecosystem.

Here's my honest ranking.

What Viva Goals Actually Got Right

Before I rank the alternatives, I owe you the honest post-mortem — because understanding what you're leaving helps you evaluate what you're choosing.

Viva Goals had three genuine strengths. First, the Microsoft 365 integration depth was unmatched. If your organization lived inside Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint, goal tracking felt native — not bolted on. Second, the Copilot AI layer for M365-native users provided goal summarization and progress narratives that actually saved time during business review cycles. Third, the cascading model was architecturally sound. When it worked, a CEO could change a top-level priority and the cascade adjusted cleanly down through every level.

But Viva Goals had a ceiling we couldn't break through, and it's the same ceiling that led Microsoft to retire the product in December 2025. Adoption numbers told the story: teams launched strong, but by month three, update rates collapsed. The product required manual goal updates in a world where work happened in Jira, Salesforce, Slack, and a dozen other tools that Viva Goals never deeply connected to. The Microsoft ecosystem integration was a strength and a limitation simultaneously — if your operational tools lived outside M365, you were copying and pasting status updates into a goal tracker that had no idea what was happening in your actual work.

That manual update burden is the single most important factor in evaluating what comes next. It's also the reason I'm now at Rhythms, building what I always wanted Viva Goals to become — a platform that runs the execution layer instead of just tracking goals inside it.

The One Question That Matters in Every OKR Tool Evaluation

Seventy-two percent of companies fail to achieve more than half of their strategic objectives despite implementing OKRs (nextagile.ai, 2026). Teams that maintain weekly updates are over 40% more likely to hit their goals (Sara Lobkovich, 2026). The differentiator is not the goal-setting framework. It's the update mechanism.

The question that should drive every tool evaluation: will your team actually use this tool in month three?

Tools that reduce the update burden — by connecting directly to where work happens — survive past the first quarter. Tools that relocate the update obligation to a new interface follow the same adoption curve Viva Goals did. That distinction shapes every ranking below.

The Quick Answer

The best Viva Goals alternative depends on what you actually needed it for. If you need OKR cascading with an AI execution layer and deep connectivity to the tools where work happens, Rhythms is the closest successor — built by the same team, designed to go further. If you need strategy visualization with roadmapping, Cascade is worth evaluating. If you need goal-setting embedded in performance management, Lattice covers that ground. The mistake most teams make in this migration is choosing based on feature parity rather than on what they actually need next.

The Full Comparison: Six Tools, Ranked for Operators Who Need More Than Tracking

Here's my honest assessment, ranked for the person I built Viva Goals for: a Chief of Staff or VP of Strategy Ops at a scaling SaaS company who needs the operational layer to work, not just the goal-tracking interface to look good.

Rhythms

Full disclosure: this is where I work. But the reason I'm here is the same reason I'm qualified to write this ranking.

Where Rhythms goes beyond Viva Goals is the execution layer. Viva Goals tracked goals. Rhythms runs the operational process that keeps goals alive. When an engineering team closes a Jira epic, the OKR that epic ladders into updates automatically — no one touches a goal tracker. When a sales team moves pipeline in Salesforce, revenue targets adjust in real time. We built Rhythms' Goals & Alignment to eliminate the manual update burden that caused Viva Goals adoption to collapse after the first quarter. The human shifts from data gatherer to quality reviewer.

That shift matters most in the week before a business review. At Microsoft, I watched Chiefs of Staff spend four to six hours assembling a status deck from disconnected tools. With Rhythms' Reviews, the business review generates itself from live data — the CoS spends 35 minutes reviewing and adding the judgment layer, not six hours collecting numbers.

Where Rhythms is not the right fit: If your entire workflow lives inside Teams and SharePoint and you need goal tracking embedded natively in that ecosystem, Rhythms connects to M365 but doesn't replicate the depth of the Teams-native experience Viva Goals offered. That's an honest trade-off. What you gain is connectivity to everything else.

Cascade

Cascade is genuinely strong at strategy visualization. If your primary need is mapping a strategic hierarchy — seeing how initiatives connect to pillars connect to company-level objectives — the visual planning tools are well-designed and the roadmapping features are more developed than most OKR-focused platforms.

Where Cascade falls short for the operators I built Viva Goals for: it's a strategy mapping tool, not an execution engine. You can build a beautiful strategic hierarchy, but the goals in that hierarchy still require manual updates. If your team struggled with update completion at Viva Goals, Cascade gives you a different interface to struggle with it in — not a structural fix.

Best for: Organizations where strategy visualization and planning alignment is the primary need. VP of Strategy roles that spend more time in planning cycles than operational execution.

Lattice

Lattice approaches goals from the performance management side — goal-setting as a component of employee development, not as a standalone operational system. If you need OKRs embedded in your performance review cycle, with 1:1 tracking, career development, and compensation alignment all in one platform, Lattice does that integration well.

The limitation is scope. Lattice goals are designed for the HR and People Ops workflow — not for the operational cadence a Chief of Staff or VP of Strategy Ops runs. Business reviews, cross-functional execution tracking, board-level reporting — those aren't Lattice's design center. If you're evaluating Viva Goals replacements because your CEO needs an execution dashboard, Lattice is solving a different problem than the one you have.

Best for: People Ops and HR leaders who need goal-setting woven into performance management. Not ideal for strategy operations teams running the execution layer.

Quantive

Quantive (formerly Gtmhub) brings a consulting-informed methodology to goal-setting — their OKR framework documentation is thorough, and the platform offers strong reporting and analytics on goal health. If you've run three OKR cycles and your problem is methodology, not infrastructure, Quantive's structure helps.

The trade-off: when your VP of Sales asks for a live view of how pipeline connects to the quarterly revenue OKR, Quantive gives you a report built from the last time someone manually updated the goal. The integration layer functions but doesn't eliminate the data-gathering step. For a quarterly review happening next Tuesday, that means someone is still spending their Sunday reconciling Salesforce data with goal status by hand.

Best for: Organizations that want a proven OKR consulting methodology built into their software and have teams disciplined enough to maintain manual update cadences quarter after quarter.

Workboard

Workboard targets large enterprises with OKR programs at scale. Their coaching layer — helping organizations design and run OKR programs — is a differentiator most competitors don't offer. If you're a 5,000-person company launching OKRs for the first time, Workboard's combination of platform and services addresses the change management challenge that pure software never will.

The caveat: Workboard's enterprise positioning means you're looking at a six-to-eight-week implementation cycle, a dedicated OKR program manager on your side, and a price point that assumes a formal OKR center of excellence. For mid-market SaaS companies where the Chief of Staff is the entire OKR program — not a department of specialists — the overhead may not match the operational reality. The tool is powerful; the organizational commitment it assumes may be more than a 400-person company can justify.

Best for: Large enterprises (2,000+ employees) launching or scaling formal OKR programs with dedicated resources and budget for implementation services.

Asana Goals

Asana Goals is a goals feature inside a project management tool — and it's important to name that distinction honestly. If your team already lives in Asana for task and project management, adding goals creates a single workspace where daily work and quarterly goals coexist. The connection between tasks and objectives is native, which reduces some of the update burden.

The limitation: Asana is a project management tool with a goals layer, not a goal-setting platform with an execution layer. The cascading model is simpler than what Viva Goals offered. And if your operational tools extend beyond Asana — if work happens in Jira, Salesforce, and Slack — the goal tracking only sees what's inside Asana's walls.

Best for: Teams already running daily work in Asana who want lightweight goal tracking without adding another tool.

Who Should Choose Rhythms — and Who Shouldn't

I'm not going to claim Rhythms is the right tool for everyone. It's not.

Rhythms is built for operators running scaling SaaS companies who need the execution layer, not just the tracking layer. If you're a Chief of Staff who spent two hours every week chasing status updates for the business review, and you want that process to run itself — that's what we built. If you're a VP of Strategy Ops who needs Radar surfacing off-track initiatives on day three instead of day thirty, so you're not the last person to learn that a critical initiative is slipping — that's the specific problem Rhythms' architecture solves.

If your primary need is performance management with a goals module, choose Lattice. If your primary need is strategy visualization, evaluate Cascade. If you need enterprise OKR consulting, talk to Workboard. Those are honest recommendations from someone who has spent a decade in this space.

But if you are the person who holds the operational threads — the one who makes strategy happen across disconnected tools and disconnected teams — Rhythms is the product I wish I'd had when I was doing that job at Microsoft.

How to Make the Migration Without Losing Your Update Cadence

The biggest risk in any Viva Goals migration isn't data loss — most platforms accept CSV imports, and Viva Goals offered standard export formats. The real risk is behavioral. Your team built an update habit inside Viva Goals. When you move to a new tool, that habit resets to zero.

Three things protect you:

First, export your goal data before it disappears. Viva Goals offered CSV and PowerPoint exports — use them. Historical goal data has strategic value even after the platform is gone.

Second, choose your replacement based on what reduces the update burden, not what looks most like what you had. Feature parity is a trap. The question is: does this new tool connect to where my work actually happens? If yes, you have a structural advantage over what Viva Goals offered. If no, you're paying for a new interface around the same problem.

Third, plan for the habit reset. Run a daily 15-minute integration standup for the first two weeks — not to discuss goals, but to verify that data is flowing from your connected tools into the new platform. Assign one person per team to confirm their Jira, Salesforce, or Slack integration is live and updating correctly. The difference between a successful migration and a failed one is usually whether the integrations were working before the first check-in cycle, not whether the goal hierarchy was perfectly imported.

Only 26% of employees understand how their work connects to company goals (Happily.ai, 2026). The migration is a chance to fix that — not just to replace a tool, but to build the bridge between daily work and company strategy that Viva Goals always intended but never quite delivered.

Frequently Asked Questions About Viva Goals Alternatives

Is Microsoft Viva Goals being discontinued?

Yes. Microsoft retired Viva Goals on December 31, 2025, following a feature freeze that began in December 2024. Microsoft stated that adoption across the Viva Suite customer base didn't reach the scale needed to justify continued investment. There is no replacement product within the Microsoft ecosystem — Microsoft has encouraged customers to evaluate third-party OKR tools and export their data.

What is the best Viva Goals alternative for a SaaS company?

For scaling SaaS companies that need more than goal tracking — automated execution, live data integration from product and revenue tools, and AI-generated business reviews — Rhythms is the strongest fit. It was built by the same team that created Ally.io and Viva Goals, and goes beyond tracking to run the operational layer. Rhythms' Reviews auto-generates business reviews from live data across connected tools, shifting the Chief of Staff from building the deck to reviewing it. For companies that only need goals integrated into performance management, Lattice covers that more simply.

How difficult is it to migrate from Viva Goals to a new OKR tool?

Goal data migration is straightforward — most platforms accept CSV imports, and Viva Goals offered standard export formats. The harder migration is behavioral: teams that built update habits inside Viva Goals' Teams-native interface need to develop new habits in the replacement tool. The platforms with the highest post-migration adoption rates are those that connect to where work already happens, reducing the update burden rather than relocating it to a different screen.

Does any Viva Goals alternative have the same Microsoft 365 integration depth?

No alternative replicates the depth of Viva Goals' Teams-native experience — that integration was built on Microsoft's own infrastructure, and it's an honest loss for organizations where Teams was the primary workflow surface. For teams where the Teams integration was convenient rather than mission-critical, the alternatives compensate with broader native integrations. We designed Rhythms' Playbooks to connect across 200-plus tools precisely because we knew from building Viva Goals that limiting connectivity to one ecosystem was the biggest constraint on real-world adoption.

If you're ready to see what comes after Viva Goals, try Rhythms for free at rhythms.ai.