Kinetry vs 15Five
15Five and Kinetry solve overlapping problems in structurally different ways. This page says where 15Five is stronger, where the two genuinely differ, and what each claim is based on — checked against public materials on August 13, 2026.
15Five is a performance-management platform organized around manager effectiveness: check-ins, OKRs, engagement surveys with included industry benchmarks, a certified human-coach network, and — since June 2026 — an AI 'Agents and Context Layer' that passively reads signals from Slack, Teams, calendars, Jira, and Asana to brief managers continuously.
Said first, because a comparison that skips this isn't one.
- • Compliance: SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 with a public trust center. Kinetry holds neither today.
- • Integrations: HRIS connectors (Rippling added July 2026), SSO and SCIM provisioning, plus the work-system integrations feeding its context layer. Kinetry has none yet.
- • Benchmarks and social proof: industry engagement benchmarks included at the $4 tier, and a G2 profile with roughly 2,000 reviews (third-party count, Aug 2026). Kinetry's cross-company benchmarking is gated until enough companies join, and it has no third-party reviews yet.
- • Human coaching: a certified coach network with live 1:1 and group sessions — a real service layer Kinetry doesn't offer.
The structural differences
The June 2026 Context Layer reads signals from connected work tools passively and generates AI briefs — a continuous narrative, never a score.
Measurement is deliberate and authored: every score comes from a named rater who chose it, on the record, every cycle. Kinetry reads no calendars or messages — the difference is the design, not a missing feature.
Check-ins, reviews, and surveys are configurable per customer; there is no fixed recurring behavior instrument scored per person.
The same 24 defined behaviors, every person, every cycle — which is what makes month-over-month movement comparable and attribution computable.
Managers, peers, and self, inside the org. There is no scored single-outside-advisor mode.
360 mode or a single outside advisor as the sole recurring scorer — the consultant-run mode.
The HR Outcomes Dashboard connects programs to aggregate business metrics, its Predictive Impact Model forecasts how much an action should move engagement, and action plans support before/after survey comparison — aggregate and prospective. No person-level join from a kept commitment to a specific score's later movement.
The Kept-Commitment Method, computed every cycle transition, floors and limits published.
As of August 2026, 15Five publishes three tiers, all billed annually: Engage $4, Perform $11, and Total Platform $16 per user/month, plus add-ons (live coaching at $399/credit, Kona meeting assistant, compensation). No monthly billing is published; no free tier — a 14-day trial instead.
Kinetry: free for a leader plus 5 rated people, then $12/rated person/mo (Team, no seat minimum) or $19 (Business, 10-seat minimum), billed truly monthly — raters are always free. Full detail on the pricing page.
- • June 9, 2026: the Agents & Context Layer launch reframed 15Five's category toward 'continuous performance signal' — passive and unscored, which is precisely the scoring contrast this page describes.
- • July 2026: Rippling HRIS connector, coaching-scheduler expansion into EMEA/APAC, analytics export improvements.
- • Teams using 15Five for check-ins and OKRs keep them; Kinetry adds the scored behavior layer and the attribution loop underneath — or replaces the review-season scramble for a small team that mainly wants measurement.
- • The free tier (leader + 5 rated people) means the instrument can prove itself on one team before touching the 15Five contract at renewal.
The wider review this page sits on: in July, 2026 Kinetry reviewed 23 comparable products claim by claim from their public documentation. As of that dated review, none of the 23 offered a recurring single-assessor mode; none offered in-product commitment attribution connecting kept commitments to later score movement (the Kept-Commitment Method) — four had partial elements; and only one offered true month-to-month billing. The full archived table is at How Kinetry compares.
15Five and every other product named on this page are their owners' trademarks, used here only to identify them; Kinetry is not affiliated with or endorsed by 15Five. Claims about 15Five are based on its public materials as of the dates above and can go stale; if we got something wrong, tell us and we'll fix it. Sources checked: 15five.com/pricing · trust.15five.com · g2.com/products/15five (review figures, third-party) · 15five.com/products/15five-ai · businesswire.com (15Five Agents & Context Layer, 2026-06-09) · success.15five.com (What's New).