The 7 best OKR tools to keep your team on track

Every product manager understands how important setting objectives and key results (OKRs) is. This goal-setting framework helps align projects, establish milestones, motivate employees, and keep stakeholders in the know. But creating and managing practical OKRs is easier said than done, unless you have the right tools to help.

Many tools could be generalized as “OKR software,” but the best OKR tools don’t just serve one purpose—they’re comprehensive and flexible.

The 7 best OKR tools

1. Airtable

2. Jira Align

3. Monday.com

4. Asana

5. Productboard

6. ClickUp

7. Profit OKR and Task Management

To help you decide which OKR tool is right for your organization, we’ve compiled a list of software that global companies rely on to keep their teams on track. We believe Airtable is a great platform for this use-case, but we wanted to provide a clear-eyed evaluation of what else is out there. So we researched and tested each option—here’s a look at the best OKR tools available.

How to choose the best OKR software

Finding the right OKR tool can be difficult for many reasons. It’s a broad category, encompassing goal setting and tracking with multifaceted approaches and functionalities. Still, the best OKR software should include the following features:

• OKR tracking and visibility: Your OKR platform should offer several ways for stakeholders to see how teams are tracking toward their high-level objectives and shorter-term milestones. Do you care more about data visualization or sub-tasks? Do you want a timeline view or Gantt view? Questions like these are a helpful way to narrow down which OKR tools can best help you support your teams.

• Project prioritization: There will always be projects that are more important than others. The best OKR solutions enable teams to customize algorithms for ranking projects by priority, choosing relevant factors (such as effort level and cost), and deciding how heavily to weigh them. 

• Reporting: Stakeholders need an easy way to visualize progress. Comprehensive OKR solutions should offer reporting features that show how you’re tracking toward your goals and which areas need improvement.

• Workflow support: Your OKR solution should integrate seamlessly with the other tools your organization uses. Ideally, you’ll use one solution that meets several of your organization’s needs—project management, OKR setting and tracking, KPI reporting, etc. Look for options that incorporate live syncing, so all of your teams stay informed as projects are updated and completed.

Many stellar OKR tools offer additional, valuable features, like the ability to recognize and promote strong work by individuals. You ultimately need to choose a solution that best fits your team’s unique needs.

1. Airtable

Airtable is a connected apps platform. It’s become increasingly popular among marketing and product teams that crave flexibility in their workflows. It enables teams to create their own tailored OKR solutions. Airtable is extremely customizable, which enables project managers to set goals, prioritize projects, create product roadmaps, generate reports, and more.

As a flexible relational database, Airtable enables all of your teams—product operations, marketing, UX research, you name it—to link projects together and visualize how they are tracking toward organizational goals. Because flexibility is at the heart of Airtable, it can serve as a powerful OKR tool and also adapt to numerous other use cases. For enterprise organizations fighting tool sprawl, this adaptability makes Airtable an enticing option.

Here are some specific features that make Airtable stand out:

• Data sync: When a team member updates a field, the update is immediately registered and synced across the entire base. That means project managers can see OKR progress updates in real time.

• Drag-and-drop interface designer: Airtable’s drag-and-drop interface designer makes it easy to create custom dashboards that present all relevant OKR data in shareable, elegant, and interactive views.

• Flexible data model: Not all OKRs are equal. You’ll want to weigh some factors more heavily than others in order to choose which projects to prioritize. Airtable enables you to create your own formulas that you can use for any purpose—like prioritizing your projects. For example, you could use project fields like ROI and time to execute as variables in a formula that outputs a “prioritization score,” helping your teams focus on projects that warrant the most attention.

• Scale to 250,000 records: Airtable supports up to 100,000 items per table and 250,000 items per base with our Enterprise plan. This makes it possible to account for a huge number of projects, tasks, and dependencies when considering OKRs.

Reviews:

• G2: 4.6 stars; ‎2,114 reviews

• Capterra: 4.7 stars; ‎1,754 reviews

2. Jira Align

Jira Align is an enterprise-facing solution in Atlassian’s agile project management suite. While it’s primarily built for teams that use agile methodology, any large organization can use it for project tracking, OKR planning, reporting, and internal team communication. Since Jira Align is a part of a greater suite of tools that natively integrate with one another, the most effective way to maintain smooth workflows with Jira Align is to use other Jira tools with it.

The following features make Jira Align stand out:

• Visualization options: Jira Align offers many ways to visualize OKRs, projects, and teams, at high and granular levels. For example, you can look at overarching dashboards showing what percentage of an objective has been reached, or you can look at team- and backlog-level insights.

• Risk identification and management: The platform intelligently identifies a project’s risk level based on the factors you outline. This makes it far more likely that project managers will identify threats to OKRs early on.

Reviews:

• G2: 4.1 stars; ‎12 reviews

• Capterra: 4.8 stars; ‎8 reviews

Note: As an enterprise-facing solution with a relatively narrow use case, Jira Align has fewer reviews than many competing tools. Due to this smaller sample of reviewers, star ratings may not accurately encapsulate user sentiment.

3. Monday.com

The project-management platform Monday.com enables teams to track their objectives and map projects to them. Just create a board for your OKRs with tables representing each of your objectives, then add related projects as “items” under your objectives, pulling in relevant project information from other boards using the platform’s “Connect boards” feature. Monday.com even offers an OKR template to help you get started. Overall, it’s a relatively rigid and task-focused platform, which makes OKR management pretty straightforward.

Unfortunately, Monday.com can only capture 20,000 items (compared to Airtable’s 100,000), making it better suited to smaller organizations.

Monday.com’s notable features include:

• Drag-and-drop dashboard: Monday.com boasts a color-coordinated, straightforward interface with drag-and-drop capabilities that make it relatively easy to use for those new to project management.

• Connect boards: The platform enables you to add columns to your board that connect directly to other boards, pulling relevant data from those boards into a unified OKR table view.

• “Workload” view: You can only hit your key results if your team members are properly resourced, meaning neither under- nor over-worked. Monday.com’s “Workload” view provides a clear look into your team members’ schedules, making it easy to shift around projects and for their owners to hit milestones and track toward objectives.

Reviews:

• G2: 4.6 stars; 2,111 reviews

• Capterra: 4.7 stars; 1,750 reviews

4. Asana

Much like Monday.com, Asana is a project-management platform with powerful OKR capabilities. The platform is designed to help teams collaborate to accomplish goals through sprints, task automation, and deadline mapping. While Asana’s custom view-saving capabilities are limited, it offers some unique features, such as milestone setting, that make it popular for OKR management.

Here are some features that contribute to Asana’s rank among the best OKR tools:

• Goal and milestone setting: While all OKR tools offer goal setting, Asana has a unique milestone feature that allows you to identify certain tasks as milestones. This makes it easy for teams and leadership to visualize when a group of connected tasks is complete.

• Real-time monitoring: When a project is updated in Asana, the change is registered across the entire project and can be seen by all stakeholders. This makes real-time OKR tracking (and bandwidth tracking) transparent.

• Custom fields: Rather than only offering pre-set options for fields in a project like assignee, due date, and priority, Asana allows teams to create their own custom fields. These are fields you can plug into any project with original names, descriptions, and data types. For example, teams could create a field called “Stage” and create drop-down options with custom names for project stages (e.g., “Drafted,” “Submitted,” or “Assigned.”)

Reviews:

• G2: 4.3 stars; ‎9,252 reviews

• Capterra: 4.5 stars; ‎11,930 reviews

5. Productboard

Productboard is a product management system used to support product dev teams. The company uses customer feedback to inform how it should adjust the platform’s features. With Productboard’s objectives board, teams can create nested objectives as well as key results. Teams can then score features based on how well they support each objective.

On the flipside, Productboard can feel very opinionated in part to its rigid data structure. It can be difficult to adapt to a product team’s unique way of working.

Here’s what makes Productboard stand out as an OKR tool:

• Feature scoring and prioritization: The platform uses a wide range of metrics, including user impact and effort level to rank features. This system makes it easy to identify and prioritize the features that have the highest ROI are key to accomplishing your OKRs.

• Progress tracking: Productboard provides visibility into feature development, making it easy to spot bottlenecks and inefficiencies that hinder progress.

Reviews:

• G2: 4.3 stars; ‎215 reviews

• Capterra: 4.7 stars; ‎140 reviews

6. ClickUp

ClickUp is a productivity and OKR tool that allows you to set goals and assign tasks to those goals. Like other OKR tools, you can configure task priority level, assign tasks to specific teams, and monitor how teams are tracking toward your goals.

Here are some areas where ClickUp shines:

• Goal and target setting and tracking: ClickUp was built to be an OKR tool, so OKRs are very easy to configure and track. The company also offers OKR templates to help you get started.

• Advanced agile features: The platform has built-in sprint templates, scrum dashboards, and other agile tools that help teams break down goals and targets into bite-sized tasks and align on objectives. 

That said, ClickUp employs a decidedly overwhelming interface, which can feel both distracting and difficult to navigate. This may be especially challenging for teams during their initial onboarding.

Reviews:

• G2: 4.7 stars; ‎6,586 reviews

• Capterra: 4.7; ‎3,632 reviews

7. Profit.co OKR and Task Management

Profit.co is a platform specifically designed for OKR tracking, for both executive leadership and smaller teams within the org. It displays OKRs in a hierarchy, allowing teams to create “sub key results” to further break down goals. As a point solution, it’s important to make sure your existing tools integrate with it before introducing it to your workflows.

Here’s what makes Profit.co stand out as an OKR tool:

• Large OKR template library: Few other OKR tools offer the quantity of OKR templates that Profit.co offers. You can either build upon these templates or start fresh and create your own fully custom templates.

• Point-based recognition system: If your employees are motivated by recognition, Profit.co offers a unique feature that enables managers to reward employees for their progress using a point system.

Reviews:

• G2: 4.7 stars; ‎263 reviews

• Capterra: 4.8 stars; ‎157 reviews

OKR tool FAQ

Here are some answers to common questions about OKRs and the tools that help you set and manage them.

What are OKRs?

OKRs stands for objectives and key results. They’re a way for teams to set goals that align to the organization’s broad objectives. 

What is OKR software?

OKR software is any digital tool that helps teams set, track, manage, and measure their OKRs. These programs help users (including project managers) visualize how they’re progressing toward company goals, communicate with other team members, identify areas for improvement, and fine-tune strategy.

What is an OKR vs. KPI?

A KPI just measures high-level performance, whereas an OKR helps identify what specifically needs to be completed or changed to reach more tangible goals. OKRs drive performance by helping small teams align to the company’s big goals, ensuring that everyone is moving in the same direction.

Whether you’re looking for a hyper-focused point solution like Productboard, a user-friendly and task-oriented software like Monday.com, or a robust and intuitive app building platform like Airtable, there’s an OKR tool for every team.