OKR Software Comparison

The Best Microsoft Viva Goals Alternative for OKR Management in 2026

The appeal of Viva Goals is obvious: if you're already paying for Microsoft 365, it's "included." But "included" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Getting Viva Goals actually running requires IT admin time, AAD configuration, and a Teams rollout. And the AI features that make it interesting — Copilot — cost $30/user/month on top of your M365 license. Let's look at what you actually get.

Updated May 2026 · Okiar vs Microsoft Viva Goals

Okiar vs Microsoft Viva Goals: feature comparison

The "it's included" problem

Microsoft's position is that Viva Goals comes with M365 Enterprise, so the marginal cost is zero. That's technically accurate. But the hidden cost is the implementation. A typical Viva Goals deployment for a 100-person team involves an IT admin spending 2–3 days on Azure AD group configuration, Teams app pinning, and organizational hierarchy setup. For a startup, that's a significant project.

Then there's the AI question. The Copilot features that make check-ins faster — the ones that help you generate updates and surface insights — require a separate Microsoft 365 Copilot license at $30/user/month. For a 50-person team that wants the AI-first experience, that's $18,000/year in add-ons before anything else. Okiar's AI is built into the base product.

When Viva Goals is the right answer

There are real scenarios where Viva Goals wins this comparison, and it's worth being honest about them.

If your organization runs entirely in Microsoft Teams — every meeting, every message, every collaboration surface — having OKR check-ins appear in Teams notifications and being updatable from a Teams tab is a genuine workflow advantage. Users don't have to leave the environment they live in.

Azure Active Directory integration means user provisioning and deprovisioning is automatic. When someone joins your company, their Viva Goals account appears without anyone manually adding them. When they leave, access revokes immediately. Okiar doesn't have this yet — user management is manual.

Power BI connectivity lets analytics teams pull OKR data into existing dashboards without building an integration. For data-heavy organizations that already use BI tooling, that's valuable.

Where the OKR execution gap shows

Viva Goals was built to fit inside an enterprise workflow, not to maximize OKR execution quality. The check-in process is still largely form-based. There's no voice input. The "at risk" and "on track" status labels are manually set — no AI reads your check-in velocity and tells you where you'll land.

Teams that care most about the quality of goal execution — how fast do teams check in, do projections surface risk early, do blockers get flagged automatically — find that Viva Goals covers the basics but doesn't push the process forward. It's a compliance surface as much as an execution tool.

Typical switch pattern

The teams that move from Viva Goals to Okiar usually share the same story: check-in rates were low (often under 40%), managers couldn't tell which KRs were actually at risk until week 10, and the setup overhead had made customizing the process difficult. They wanted faster feedback loops and less administrative overhead.

If that sounds like your situation, the switch is straightforward — Okiar takes under 10 minutes to set up from scratch.