Leapsome

Leapsome was founded in 2016 in Berlin by Jenny von Podewils and Kajetan von Armansperg with a clear mission: to make work fulfilling for everyone. Since then, the company has grown into one of Europe's leading people enablement platforms, serving over 1,500 companies globally -- including Spotify, Unity, Monday.com, Babbel, and Northvolt. Leapsome combines performance management, employee engagement, goal tracking (OKRs), continuous feedback, learning, compensation management, and meeting tools into a single integrated platform. This positions it as a strong European alternative to US-based tools like Lattice, Culture Amp, 15Five, and BambooHR.

What sets Leapsome apart from traditional HR software is its focus on what the company calls "people enablement" -- the ongoing processes that help employees develop their skills, stay engaged, and perform at their best. Rather than digitizing administrative tasks like payroll and time tracking (which tools like Personio or Factorial handle), Leapsome addresses the strategic side of human resources: How do you create a culture of continuous improvement? How do you ensure managers have meaningful conversations with their teams? How do you measure and improve employee engagement before people leave? Leapsome provides the tools to answer these questions systematically.

Performance Reviews and 360-Degree Feedback

Leapsome's performance review module is one of the most flexible on the market. Organizations can design custom review cycles that match their culture -- from traditional annual reviews to quarterly check-ins or continuous peer feedback. The platform supports 360-degree reviews where employees receive feedback from managers, peers, direct reports, and even external stakeholders. Review templates are customizable, with options for competency-based assessments, qualitative open-ended questions, and quantitative rating scales. The calibration feature helps managers align their evaluations across teams, reducing bias and ensuring fairness.

What distinguishes Leapsome's approach is the emphasis on development-oriented reviews rather than purely evaluative ones. The platform encourages forward-looking questions ("What should this person focus on developing?") alongside backward-looking assessments ("How did this person perform?"). Review results can be linked directly to development plans and learning paths, closing the loop between feedback and growth. Automation handles the administrative burden: reminders, escalations, and deadline tracking ensure review cycles complete on time without constant HR intervention.

Goals and OKR Management

Leapsome provides robust goal-setting and OKR (Objectives and Key Results) management that aligns individual contributions with company strategy. The goal tree visualization shows how individual objectives cascade from team and company-level goals, making the connection between daily work and organizational priorities visible. OKRs can be set at company, department, team, and individual levels, with progress tracking, check-in reminders, and automatic rollup calculations.

The platform supports multiple goal-setting methodologies beyond OKRs, including SMART goals and KPI-based targets. Goals integrate tightly with performance reviews, meaning that goal achievement data flows directly into review conversations. This integration eliminates the common problem of goals being set in one system and evaluated in another, with data manually transferred between them. Real-time dashboards provide managers and HR leaders visibility into goal progress across the organization.

Employee Engagement Surveys

Leapsome's engagement survey module draws on organizational psychology research to measure the drivers of employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention. The platform offers science-backed survey templates covering engagement, eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score), DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), onboarding, exit, and custom topics. Pulse surveys can be scheduled at regular intervals (weekly, biweekly, monthly) to track engagement trends over time, while full engagement surveys provide deep dives into organizational health.

The analytics engine segments survey results by department, team, location, tenure, and other demographic dimensions, helping HR leaders identify pockets of disengagement. Heatmaps visualize which engagement drivers score highest and lowest across the organization. Benchmarking data allows companies to compare their results against industry averages. Critically, the platform supports anonymous responses with configurable anonymity thresholds, ensuring employees feel safe providing honest feedback -- particularly important in European work cultures that value employee privacy and works council requirements.

Continuous Feedback and Praise

Beyond formal review cycles, Leapsome enables continuous feedback through a lightweight system that allows any employee to give or request feedback at any time. The instant feedback feature supports both structured feedback (using predefined competency frameworks) and freeform feedback. A dedicated "Praise" feature enables public or private recognition, which can be tied to company values and shared in Slack or Microsoft Teams channels. This continuous feedback culture replaces the outdated model of annual reviews as the only formal feedback mechanism.

Managers can view a timeline of all feedback received by each team member, creating a comprehensive picture that informs performance conversations. The feedback data, combined with goal progress and engagement survey results, gives managers a holistic view of each employee's experience and development needs. For employees, the platform provides a personal dashboard showing received feedback, goal progress, and upcoming review deadlines.

Learning and Development

Leapsome's learning module allows organizations to build competency frameworks, create learning paths, and track development progress. Competency frameworks define the skills and behaviors expected at each career level, providing transparency about what growth looks like within the organization. Learning paths link specific courses, readings, mentoring activities, and projects to competency gaps identified through performance reviews or self-assessments.

The platform integrates with external learning management systems (LMS) and content providers, so organizations can leverage existing training investments while using Leapsome to track completion and tie learning activities to development goals. For growing companies that are building their first structured development programs, Leapsome provides templates and best practices based on organizational psychology research.

1:1 Meetings and Meeting Management

Leapsome recognizes that the manager-employee relationship is the single most important factor in employee engagement and retention. The 1:1 meeting module provides structured templates, shared agendas, action item tracking, and talking point suggestions to help managers have more productive conversations with their reports. Meeting notes are stored in one place, creating a continuous record of discussions, commitments, and development conversations.

The platform suggests talking points based on recent feedback, goal progress, and engagement signals, ensuring that 1:1 meetings address the most relevant topics rather than becoming status update sessions. Action items from meetings can be tracked and followed up in subsequent sessions. For organizations scaling rapidly, this structured approach to 1:1s helps new managers develop effective coaching habits.

Compensation Management

Leapsome's compensation module provides tools for structured compensation reviews, salary benchmarking, and pay equity analysis. HR teams can create compensation review cycles tied to performance outcomes, ensuring that pay decisions are data-driven and connected to actual contributions. The platform supports salary bands, promotion workflows, and budget allocation tracking. Pay equity dashboards help organizations identify and address gender and diversity pay gaps -- an increasingly important concern for European companies subject to the EU Pay Transparency Directive.

AI-Powered Features

Leapsome has introduced AI capabilities across the platform, including AI-generated review summaries that condense lengthy 360-degree feedback into actionable insights, AI-assisted goal writing that helps employees create clear and measurable objectives, and sentiment analysis for engagement survey open-text responses. These AI features are designed to reduce administrative burden and surface insights that might be missed in manual analysis, while keeping humans in the loop for all decisions.

Integrations and Technical Architecture

Leapsome integrates with the tools organizations already use: HRIS systems (Personio, BambooHR, Workday, HiBob, SAP SuccessFactors), communication tools (Slack, Microsoft Teams), SSO providers (Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace), and calendar systems. The platform also provides a REST API for custom integrations. Data synchronization with HRIS systems ensures that employee records, reporting structures, and department assignments stay current without manual updates.

As a SaaS platform, Leapsome handles hosting, security, and updates. The company is ISO 27001 certified and SOC 2 Type II compliant, and hosts data on European servers. For German companies with works council requirements, Leapsome provides works council agreements templates and configurable data access controls that support co-determination requirements.

Pricing and Value

Leapsome operates on a modular pricing model starting from approximately EUR 8 per employee per month, with the exact price depending on which modules are selected and the number of employees. Organizations can start with one or two modules (e.g., performance reviews and engagement surveys) and add others as needed. A 14-day free trial allows teams to evaluate the platform before committing. Custom enterprise pricing is available for larger organizations requiring dedicated support, custom integrations, or advanced security configurations.

Who Should Choose Leapsome

Leapsome is best suited for mid-size to enterprise companies (50 to 5,000+ employees) that want to move beyond administrative HR and build a data-driven people development culture. It is particularly strong for European companies that need GDPR-compliant processing of sensitive employee performance and engagement data, organizations implementing or maturing their OKR and continuous feedback practices, and companies where the HR team wants to demonstrate measurable impact on engagement, retention, and performance. Teams looking for basic HR administration (payroll, time tracking, absence management) should look at Personio or Factorial instead, as Leapsome focuses on the strategic people enablement layer.