The Quiet Challenger in HR Software
Lattice built its reputation on performance management software that HR teams genuinely wanted to use – clean dashboards, goal tracking, and employee engagement tools wrapped in a product that felt less like enterprise software and more like something from a consumer app studio. For years, that positioning kept it ahead of a crowded field. But a Berlin-born platform called Leapsome has been closing the distance in ways that Lattice’s own customers are starting to notice.
Leapsome launched with a clear thesis: performance reviews, OKRs, employee learning, and engagement surveys should live in one place, not four separate tools stitched together with integrations. That argument is not new. What is new is how well Leapsome has executed it – and how many mid-market HR buyers are now treating it as a real alternative rather than a backup option.
What Leapsome Is Actually Selling
The platform combines performance reviews, 360-degree feedback, compensation management, learning paths, and engagement surveys into a single product layer. Where Lattice charges separately for several of these modules, Leapsome has positioned its pricing to appeal to companies tired of modular billing. For a 200-person company that wants all of these capabilities, the total cost comparison can swing meaningfully in Leapsome’s direction.
There is also a design argument. Leapsome has invested heavily in its user interface, particularly the manager experience – the dashboards that people leads and team managers actually open on a weekly basis. HR software often fails not because the features are missing but because the people who are supposed to use it stop logging in after onboarding. Leapsome’s product team has reportedly treated manager adoption as a primary metric, not an afterthought.
The platform’s AI layer, which it has been building out over the past two years, adds automated review summaries, goal-setting suggestions, and sentiment analysis on engagement survey responses. These are not cosmetic additions. When a manager is staring at 15 open performance review forms, an AI-generated summary of each employee’s feedback history is a real time-saver. Lattice has its own AI features, but Leapsome has moved faster on integrating them directly into the review workflow rather than treating them as a sidebar.
Where Lattice Is Feeling the Pressure
Lattice’s 2023 attempt to introduce an “AI employees” feature – essentially allowing companies to add AI agents as formal HR records within the platform – generated significant backlash from its customer base and was walked back. The episode signaled a tension inside the company between product innovation and the trust its core users had placed in it as a people-first platform. That trust is not easy to rebuild quickly, and the timing created an opening.
Leapsome did not create this opening, but it has been ready to step into it. A growing number of HR buyers shopping for Lattice alternatives in 2024 have included Leapsome on their shortlists – not just alongside competitors like Betterworks or Culture Amp, but often ahead of them. The platform’s European roots have also worked in its favor as more companies with distributed teams and GDPR obligations look for tools built with data compliance as a foundation rather than a retrofit.
The Mid-Market Battleground
The companies where this competition is sharpest are in the 150 to 1,500 employee range – large enough to need structured performance infrastructure, small enough that they feel every dollar of SaaS spend. Lattice has historically owned this segment by offering a product that felt premium without requiring enterprise procurement cycles. Leapsome is now making the same promise at a price point that opens negotiations.
What makes this dynamic particularly interesting is that Leapsome is not just competing on cost. Its learning and development module, which sits inside the same platform and allows managers to assign skill-building content tied directly to performance review outcomes, creates a workflow that Lattice does not currently match. An employee underperforms in a review, and the manager can immediately attach a learning path inside the same tool. That closed loop has become a selling point in HR circles where “development culture” is increasingly a retention argument, not just an HR talking point.
Leapsome has also been expanding its compensation management features – a category that has historically been owned by standalone tools like Pave or Radford data sets. Bringing comp planning into the same platform where reviews happen means that the link between performance outcomes and pay decisions is visible and traceable rather than managed across spreadsheets and separate software. For HR teams trying to defend their compensation decisions to employees or boards, that audit trail has real value.
Lattice is not standing still. It has continued to invest in its product, and its customer base remains large enough that scale itself is an advantage – a bigger network of integrations, a larger library of benchmark data, more customer success resources. But the conversation in HR buyer forums and People Ops Slack communities has shifted. Leapsome is no longer the platform people mention when they want a European alternative. It is the platform people mention when they want a better alternative. That is a different kind of problem for Lattice to manage.
Leapsome closed a $60 million Series A in 2022, led by Insight Partners, and has used that capital to build aggressively in the North American market. Its sales motion targets mid-market HR teams directly, often with proof-of-concept trials that let buyers run a performance cycle before committing. For a category where switching costs are real – you are moving employee data, review history, and goal frameworks – that trial approach reduces the friction of even considering a change. And reducing friction is exactly what you need when you are asking a company to walk away from a platform it has already trained its managers on.
