The short answer. Deepest statistics, if you have an analyst to run them: Qualtrics. Comparison against the market: Culture Amp. People data tied to turnover and performance ratings in one dashboard: 15Five. Goal alignment: Betterworks. Performance and engagement in one mid-market system: Lattice. Knowing what one named person needs: Attuned, the only one of the six that hands a manager each person’s own motivator profile.
We make one of these products, so read the table rather than our adjectives. Capabilities are our reading of each vendor’s published documentation, linked under the table, and Attuned scores No on the first two criteria. We have not compared price, HRIS integrations or implementation time; those vary too much by contract and company size to put in a grid.
| Can it… | 15Five | Betterworks | Culture Amp | Lattice | Qualtrics | Attuned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Runs surveys, reviews and goalsDoes it run the engagement survey, the review cycle and goal-setting, including the admin? | ●Yes | ●Yes | ●Yes | ●Yes | ●Yes | ○No |
| External benchmarkCan you compare your result against a large dataset outside your own company? | ◕1Partly | ●Yes | ●Yes | ●Yes | ●Yes | ○No |
| Says what to changeDoes it recommend an action, or only report that a score moved? | ●Yes | ◕2Partly | ◕3Partly | ◕4Partly | ◕5Partly | ●Yes |
| Reaches the manager directlyCan the person who has to act read it themselves, without HR running an analysis first? | ●Yes | ◕6Partly | ◕7Partly | ●Yes | ◕8Partly | ●Yes |
| Tells you what one named person needsCan it tell a manager what a specific named employee needs, rather than only what a team’s aggregate score is? | ◕9Partly | ○No | ○No | ○No | ○No | ●Yes |
● Yes ◕ Partly, for the reason numbered beside it ○ No, meaning the product does not attempt it, which is not the same as attempting it badly.
115Five benchmarks some outcome metrics, not the full survey set. 2Betterworks nudges fire on goal events rather than on people. 3Culture Amp suggests action plans; HR configures and assigns them. 4Lattice summarises open-text into themes; choosing the action is yours. 5Qualtrics surfaces drivers; turning them into an action is the analyst’s job. 6Betterworks gives managers goal views; the engagement analysis sits with HR. 7Culture Amp has manager dashboards; the driver analysis does not reach them. 8Qualtrics ships manager dashboards, once an admin has configured the hierarchies and permissions behind them. 915Five check-in and 1:1 data is per person; engagement scores are aggregated.
Columns alphabetical, ours last. Sources: 15Five · Betterworks · Culture Amp · Lattice · Qualtrics · Attuned. Read September 2026.
Each one gets the same three lines: what it is best at, what it actually does, and where it falls short.
People data tied to turnover and performance ratings in one place.
The HR Outcomes Dashboard joins HRIS, performance, engagement and compensation data, and the Manager Effectiveness Indicator gives you a number for how good each manager is. Organised around weekly check-ins and 1:1s.
Where it falls short The Manager Effectiveness Indicator is a score about the manager, delivered to HR. It is not a tool the manager uses.
The strongest goal analytics of the six.
Visier-powered benchmarks, nudges inside the app when a goal stalls or a check-in is missed, and the ability to correlate learning and coaching data against performance and retention to show which programmes moved retention.
Where it falls short A person whose problem is not goal-shaped, a relationship, a workload, a pay grievance, does not show up in it at all.
The strongest benchmarking, by a distance.
Benchmarks drawn from more than a billion survey responses, by their count, and fifteen years of research behind the question bank. It converts a low-scoring question into a suggested action and assigns it to a named owner.
Where it falls short The action plans still need HR to configure and assign them. A manager cannot self-serve one.
The one system a three-person HR team can run.
Performance and engagement in a single workflow, AI summaries that turn open-text comments into themes, Mercer-powered external benchmarks, and an HRIS report builder that combines people data with review and engagement results.
Where it falls short The trade-off is depth: the engagement analytics will not do driver analysis the way Qualtrics does.
The deepest analysis of the six.
Key Drivers analysis for what moves engagement, Text iQ for themes and sentiment in open text, and Stats iQ as a separate statistical workbench for the analyst. If you run several survey programmes at once, from onboarding surveys to exit interviews, across thousands of people, none of the other five comes close.
Where it falls short It is an instrument for an analyst. The output lands with a people-analytics function, not with the manager who has to act on it, and the cost and setup assume that function exists.
The only one that hands a manager each person’s own motivator profile.
It measures each person against eleven motivators (autonomy, feedback, financial needs, status and seven others), shows the manager where their own assumptions differ from what the person reported, and tells them which motivator is going unmet. A report for one employee reads, in effect: “Autonomy is Priya’s strongest motivator and the one going unmet. Give her the result to own and stop reviewing her drafts before they go out.”
Where it falls short The motivator profile is per person, but the ongoing motivation-satisfaction tracking is anonymised and aggregated to team level, exactly as the other five are: it is not a per-person engagement feed. It is also not a survey platform, has no external benchmark against a third-party dataset, and does no goal management or review workflow. If you need any of those, one of the five above is the right purchase.
Pick by the question your board asks, not by feature count.
| You have a people-analytics function | Qualtrics. Buy the deepest instrument you can staff, and budget the analyst as part of the price. |
|---|---|
| Your board asks how you compare | Culture Amp. |
| You need one system, mid-market | 15Five if manager effectiveness is the priority, Lattice if the review workflow is. |
| Your problem is alignment | Betterworks. |
| You have a score you cannot act on | Keep the survey you run. Add Attuned to find out which people the score is about. |
| You are comparing us against one tool you already run | Separate pages for Lattice, Perceptyx, TINYpulse and Predictive Index. |
Qualtrics has the deepest statistical engine, with driver analysis and text analytics, and is the strongest choice if you have an analyst to run it. Culture Amp has the strongest benchmarking, drawn from more than a billion survey responses by their count. 15Five is best at tying people data to turnover and performance ratings in one dashboard. Attuned is the only one of the six that gives a manager each person’s own motivator profile, rather than a team score alone.
It depends which data you mean, and Attuned holds two kinds. The motivator profile is deliberately not anonymous: each person completes the assessment, sees their own report, and their manager sees the same report, because the point is a conversation rather than a score. There is no version the manager holds that the employee does not, and nothing is inferred from behaviour or pulled out of other systems. The ongoing motivation-satisfaction tracking is separate and is anonymised at team level, as it is in the other five. If you have a works council or operate under a strict anonymity policy, raise this before you shortlist anything.
“Team engagement fell 0.4” is a score. “Priya's autonomy need is unmet, so stop reviewing her drafts” is an action. Most engagement analytics produce the first and leave the manager to invent the second.
15Five, on balance, if coaching is the goal. Its HR Outcomes Dashboard connects HRIS, performance, engagement and compensation data and includes a Manager Effectiveness Indicator, and the product is organised around weekly check-ins. Culture Amp is the stronger measurement and benchmarking instrument, so some organisations run one of each.
Usually not. Qualtrics earns its cost when you are running complex, multi-programme research across a large organisation and have someone whose job is to analyse it. For a company that wants to know why one team is struggling, it is more than the question needs.
If you need enterprise survey infrastructure, benchmark comparison against a large external dataset, OKR or goal management, or a performance review workflow, Attuned does none of those and one of the other five will serve you better.
In the companies we work with, the usual pattern is one measurement and benchmarking system of record, often Culture Amp or Qualtrics, alongside a per-person tool such as Attuned. The mistake is buying two tools that both report aggregate scores and expecting the second to answer the questions the first could not.
Attuned’s own column, above. Two no, three yes.
Thirty minutes, no slides. We will show you what a per-person motivator report looks like for a team like yours, and what a two-week pilot on that team would produce. If the honest answer is that you need one of the other five, we will say so.
Book a call with Casey Wahl, founder