The 5 Best OKR Software Options on the Market Right Now

Did you have a height chart on the wall when you were young? At a certain age, kids’ only real goal in life is to grow taller – and to do so as quickly as humanly possible. And those wall charts? They’re a great way to track the progress of that particularly lofty aim. 

In fact, in a way, they’re kind of like the first OKR tool you interact with. The objective? Grow (preferably in a way that somehow outpaces your siblings). Key result? Higher and higher marks on that chart. Initiatives? Keep eating those greens, kid.

But if you’re reading this, then we’re assuming – unless you’re some kind of child genius product manager – that you’re not 9 years old. This probably means your OKRs are a bit different these days. And that, in turn, means that wall charts and marks on a wall no longer cut the mustard when it comes to tracking and reporting on your progress.

All of which is a pretty roundabout way of saying: welcome to an article all about the best OKR software tools.

In this article, we’ll be working our way through the following:

• What is an OKR anyway?
• OKRs vs KPIs
• Why are OKRs important?
• What to look for in an OKR tool
• The 5 best OKR software tools

What is an OKR anyway?

An OKR, which stands for ‘Objectives and Key Results’, is an important kind of goal-setting framework for business leaders. Using OKRs, product managers, department heads, and managers can set clear aims for the future of the business and outline how they’ll get there.

Even though the acronym only defines two principle ingredients, there are often said to be three parts to the OKR framework: objectives, key results, and initiatives. So let’s look at each one in turn:

Objectives

What is it you’re trying to achieve? Is it to become the number-one product in your category? Or maybe it’s a more granular goal, like driving more people to your product page. You’ll likely have several business objectives at any one time – attainable and ambitious – and OKRs are how you formalize them.

Key results

These are the measurable data points you track to determine whether or not you’ve hit your goals. So if your goal is to become the number one product in your category, your key results might include things like ‘achieve 10,000 downloads per month’, ‘reach a top-10 app store chart position’, and ‘net 50 customer referrals per month’. 

Initiatives

This is the methodology that’ll help you tick off those key results and, in turn, achieve your objectives. If your goal is to drive people to your product page, for example, your initiatives would probably involve a mix of ad campaigns, email and content marketing, and organic social activity. 

OKRs vs KPIs

At their simplest, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and OKRs are both methods businesses can use to keep track of performance. But what can makes OKRs a more appealing prospect is that they wrap performance monitoring up in a bit of much-needed context, and provide a way to ladder achievements up towards a goal. 

So, while KPIs can tell you how a certain metric is performing, they don’t really tell you what that means, or what you should do next. OKRs, on the other hand, align teams on a clear direction of travel. 

What’s important is to understand how one fits into the other: KPIs are metrics, while OKRs are a framework that uses those metrics to determine success. Or, in other words: KPIs are one of the building blocks of OKRs.

To take an earlier example: if your OKR is to become the number one software product in your category, and one of your key results is to achieve 10,000 downloads per month, then you’ll be monitoring a KPI (downloads) to know if you’ve hit that goal. 

Without the OKR in place, your KPI is just tracking how download figures go up and down month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter, without rhyme or reason.

Why are OKRs important?

It’s pretty hard to incentivize change if you don’t clearly lay out your goals – and even harder if you don’t figure out how to achieve them. OKRs are ambition drivers; the framework gives teams something to shoot for. 

Here are three reasons why the OKR framework matters: 

1. OKRs galvanize teams

Setting a clear set of objectives is a great way to align teams on a common purpose. Without that vision, people end up just ticking along – often in siloes – plugging away at nothing in particular. 

2. OKRs provide focus

Those objectives also provide much-needed focus. It’s all too easy to cast the net too wide in terms of what success looks like, and that often results in scattershot strategies aimed at solving too many problems at once. OKRs help you shoot towards a few clear-cut aims.

3. OKRs push growth

The OKR framework is all about plotting a course to a better version of your business, which means they’re a great way to stop teams and companies from treading water. At least one of your OKRs should be as lofty as you can make it.

What to look for to find the best OKR software tool

Looking for your dream OKR-enabler? Keep an eye out for software with these three key facets:

1. Easy to update

No matter how smart or flashy, OKR tools can’t inherently know the progress of any of your goals, so you’ll want to choose something that people don’t hate updating. The simpler it is to add progress updates and data sources, the better.

2. Relevant data

Think about how much data you need to track. For most key results, some kind of data will naturally form the basis of how you determine success – so data visualization that tells a story is always a plus. But don’t get wowed by an overflow of data. Sometimes less is more; especially if you don’t want to end up having to work hard to sort the signal from the noise. 

3. Outcomes, not output

Remember that a KPI is an output; it’s a blank bit of data that speaks to a larger purpose. OKRs, on the other hand, are all about outcomes – so we’d advise looking for an OKR software solution that’ll help you learn from successes and failures instead of just posting rising or falling statistics. 

The 5 best OKR software tools

1. Perdoo

In a nutshell:

Perdoo is a lightweight but focused tool that brings KPIs and OKRs into one place and helps keep teams on track with reminders and check-ins on a regular basis. One cool feature here is that integrations with Slack and Teams let managers share progress and wins as and when OKR inroads are made. That’s alongside coaching options from the Perdoo team that can help businesses of all sizes get up and running with the OKR framework. 

From the site:

“Align everyone with the strategy. Focus teams on what matters. Engage employees to achieve goals and feel their best.”

Pricing:

Four tiers, from free up to $17 per user, per month 

2. Mirro

In a nutshell:

Billed as ‘performance management software for agile teams’, Mirro is part HR suite and part OKR platform that makes it easy to set up OKRs at an organizational, team, or individual level, and assign staff members for each one. It’s simple to update progress on each task, and that progress feeds into customizable dashboards that shine a light on progress by goal, with live leaderboards that can help teams and departments enjoy a bit of light competition.

From the site:

“High-growth companies may struggle with keeping their teams aligned with both collective and individual goals. Mirro simplifies this process by empowering people to take ownership, be autonomous, and be open about sharing their progress.”

Pricing:

$7-$9 per user, per month

3. Unlock:OKR

In a nutshell:

The Unlock:OKR team boasts 25 years of experience in the biz, and has used that know-how to create a software platform that’s incredibly focussed on that goal. The suite here is “designed to improve adoption of OKR, nothing more and nothing less,” which means an incredibly tight, lightweight tool that aligns teams and stakeholders on OKRs from both a bottom-up and top-down approach. That means egalitarian OKR input and reporting, with clear alignment. As with some of the other providers in this list, Unlock:OKR also offers coaching services to help teams adopt OKR best practices.

From the site:

“We believe OKR software should be light, almost invisible, enabling you to embrace the OKR framework in the flow of work.”

Pricing:

$6 per user, per month

4. Quantive Results

In a nutshell:

Previously known as Koan (before it was wrapped into the Quantive branding), this is a robust OKR offering that makes it easy to create and stick to OKRs as a team, while also reporting on live progress in a streamlined, visual way. Okrs can be set up using a variety of templates, but there are also custom fields for inputting the vectors and requirements that work best for your teams. Quantive Results boasts Adobe, Ubisoft, and TomTom among some of its big-hitter users. 

From the site:

“Quantive Results enables companies to improve what matters and stay ahead of the competition by connecting your organization’s data and people to a shared mission with a strategy execution platform.”

Pricing:

$18 per user, per month, with enterprise pricing on request

5. ProdPad

We’d obviously be remiss if we didn’t talk about ProdPad here. But not just because we’re extremely biased: moreover, ProdPad is the only OKR software package designed specifically for product managers. Product management is at the heart of every feature and tool we make, so our OKR integration has been built to keep things clean and efficient, without losing any core functionality.

OKRs in ProdPad can be designed at the product level or the product portfolio level – it’s up to you. Whatever the case, they’re built into your home page, with their own tab and easy management.

Setting up new objectives is easy, and – because we’re huge fans of labeling things in threes – you’ll always be able to see at a glance whether things are on track, behind, or at risk.

At its core, Prodpad is a product roadmapping platform, so we’ve ensured that OKRs can be assigned directly to roadmap initiatives and that they pull through dynamically to the Now-Next-Later sections of your roadmap (hello again, threes).

Importantly, we think it’s vital to track success through the lens of outcomes, rather than outputs. That means that instead of ditching all your data the second a target’s been hit, you can use ProdPad’s ‘Completed’ OKR section to track the success or failure of a particular initiative – and use that as a learning tool. There’s a space there for logging what worked, what didn’t, and the overall outcome for each OKR.

All told, we think the OKR integration built into ProdPad is pretty slick. But then we would, wouldn’t we?

Pricing:

Try for free, then plans from $24 per editor, per month

Honorable mention: Google Docs

If you’re just getting started and need something a bit more no-frills, maybe Google can get you off the ground.

Author John Doerr and the experts over at Measure What Matters have great little templates for both Google Docs and Google Sheets, which can help you map out your OKRs in a no-nonsense, completely free way.

Obviously, you’ll lose the interconnectivity and roadmap integrations that you get with dedicated software solutions like ProdPad, but for smaller businesses and people brand new to the world of OKRs, you could do far worse.

Learn the basics with a free OKR E-Course

We’ve got a brilliant little E-Course on OKRs if you’re interested?

With five lessons sent straight to your inbox over the span of five days, you can imbibe everything you need to know about OKRs at a pace that suits you. 

Across those five lessons you’ll learn:

1. The fundamentals of OKRs, how they work with roadmaps, and how they compare to KPIs
2. How to set OKRs, manage execution, and understand how often they should be reviewed
3. How to communicate OKRs, manage their visibility, and create an OKRs Champion
4. How to manage OKRs in larger organizations, consider company and team level OKRs, and best practices around measuring success
5. What makes a good OKR (and a bad one!) – and how to avoid the common pitfalls

It’s totally free and will arm you with the tools you’ll need to design OKRs that will actually impact your product’s future. Click here to get started.