As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates 15Five 3/5 and Leapsome 3/5 in Talent Management. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 4 of the 6 judges pick 15Five and 2 pick Leapsome. 15Five scores higher on 5 of 7 criteria (Pricing transparency, HRIS sync, integrations & data portability, Performance reviews & calibration, plus 2 more). Leapsome scores higher on 2 of 7 criteria (Works council, visibility & AI disclosure and European sovereignty). Provenance — 15Five: Rest of world; Leapsome: EU-Made. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
The benches split rather than settle. 15Five's means lead on five criteria — performance reviews (7.3 to 6.7), goals and feedback (6.5 to 6.0), learning and development (6.3 to 6.0), integrations and portability (6.5 to 5.8) and pricing transparency (5.5 to 4.0) — and zero judges lean Leapsome on any of them. Leapsome leads on sovereignty (4.5 to 3.0) and codetermination and privacy (5.7 to 4.0), six judges leaning Leapsome on each with no ties. Weighted totals split too: the HR lead (6.4 to 6.0), the people analyst (6.7 to 6.0) and the skeptic (5.3 to 5.2) have 15Five ahead, while the works council (5.7 to 4.9) and the integrator (5.8 to 5.2) have Leapsome ahead; the SME owner's total shows no figure. Sovereignty attributes list Leapsome's data residency as EU only and jurisdiction as DE; 15Five's residency, jurisdiction and ownership as unknown; both carry US Cloud Act subprocess exposure.
Choose 15Five if
You need review cycles with auditable calibration — the 15Five verdict lists real-time calibration, a track-changes feed showing original versus calibrated scores, and rating-distribution reporting across managers, and four judges lean 15Five on performance reviews (7.3 to 6.7).
Your team depends on HRIS connections — the verdict lists sixteen named HRIS integrations with Okta and OneLogin provisioning, and integrations and portability leans 15Five four judges to zero (6.5 to 5.8).
You must budget before signing — 15Five publishes Perform at $11 and Engage at $4 per user per month, each billed annually, and pricing transparency leans 15Five six judges to zero (5.5 to 4.0).
You want succession planning in the same tool — the verdict lists a nine-box talent matrix with succession planning, within goals and feedback, where three judges lean 15Five (6.5 to 6.0).
Your priorities resemble the HR-lead and people-analyst weightings — those totals have 15Five ahead at 6.4 to 6.0 and 6.7 to 6.0.
Choose Leapsome if
You need EU-only data residency — the attributes list Leapsome's data residency as EU only and its legal-entity jurisdiction as DE, and sovereignty leans Leapsome six judges to zero (4.5 to 3.0).
Your works council scrutinizes codetermination and privacy — Leapsome leads 5.7 to 4.0 with six judges leaning its way, and the works-council judge totals 5.7 against 15Five's 4.9.
You require a published data processing agreement from a German-law entity — the Leapsome verdict credits Leapsome GmbH of Berlin, a published data processing agreement, and an EU/EEA-primary processing statement.
Your evaluation weights privacy and sovereignty heavily, as the integrator panel's does — that total has Leapsome ahead 5.8 to 5.2.
Your procurement calls for EU-made provenance — Leapsome is recorded as EU-made, from Leapsome GmbH in Berlin.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Managing Director
Runs a sixty-person company without a talent team and wants goals everyone can see, regular one-to-ones that actually happen, and a yearly conversation that is prepared rather than improvised. Has no patience for a suite that needs a consultant before the first review goes out.
15Five
This judge's pick
Leapsome
Criterion by criterion
Performance reviews & calibration
15Five
Self, manager, peer and upward input on a quarterly or semi-annual cycle, and calibration is genuinely built in: real-time score adjustments in session, a track-changes activity feed showing original versus calibrated scores, and rating-distribution reporting across managers. That covers the fairness work I need for a sixty-person company; the captured pages do not show employee sign-off or a stated rule for what the employee, manager and HR each see.
Leapsome
A shared competency framework guides the review questions, which is what I want instead of improvising criteria at year-end. What I found no public information on is employee sign-off or acknowledgement, rating-scale configuration, or a documented rule for who sees what in a review.
Goals, OKRs & continuous feedback
15Five
Fifteen-minute check-ins, one-to-ones where both sides add agenda items during the week, weighted OKRs tracked automatically, recognition, and feedback on request — the exact rhythm I want without a talent team. The AI pages say insights and reviews draw on the goals, one-to-one notes and check-ins already in the product, though I found no public information on goal-change history or private versus shared parts of one-to-one notes.
Leapsome
Goals sit at company, team and individual level with alignment and can be linked to reviews, one-to-ones run on structured agendas with talking points, and feedback plus praise — public company-wide or private, tied to values and competencies, sharing into Slack and Teams — is explicitly available when writing reviews, so the yearly conversation starts from a record rather than memory. The captured pages do not show goal dependencies or confidence tracking, logged goal history, a private-versus-shared split in one-to-one notes, or check-ins from Teams or Slack, so I stopped below the top band.
Learning, skills & succession
15Five
Development is more than a bullet: a nine-box talent matrix, succession planning and development plans under Growth Studio, competencies and skills mapping, career paths and plans, manager microlearnings, and a named LearnUpon LMS integration. I found no public information on skills-gap profiles against role requirements or on completion tracking for the learning content.
Leapsome
There is a real learning spine: an integrated LMS positioned for onboarding, manager development and compliance, the Leapsome Academy with ready-to-use management courses, a marketplace of pre-integrated providers, enrollment and completion analytics with quizzes assessing skill growth, and learning paths connected to goals, surveys, HRIS and reviews — plus a competency framework defining skills by level. What I found no public information on is talent reviews such as a nine-box, succession planning per key role, skills-gap analysis against role requirements, or internal mobility against open positions.
Works council, visibility & AI disclosure
15Five
The AI side is disclosed better than most: the agents are named with what they draw on, OpenAI is named as a sub-processor that may not train on the content, the terms prohibit using output for employment decisions, and the vendor states a human is always in the loop. What a works council asks me for — a minimum group size for anonymous results, access logging, retention configurable per data type, per-feature off-switches — I found no public information on beyond a general retention and deletion policy.
Leapsome
The AI disclosure is the strongest part: every AI feature is described by what it does, the admin can disable Leapsome AI at any time, AI output is a draft with no standing until a human accepts it, AI agents respect the permissions already set, and the AI terms explicitly rule out automated employment-related decisions without human review. Survey templates offer granular customization including anonymity settings. For the works-agreement side I found no public information on a minimum group size for anonymous results, access logging for review data, retention configurable per data type for review data, or documentation aimed at a works council.
HRIS sync, integrations & data portability
15Five
Sixteen named HRIS integrations from BambooHR to Workday behind an automatic-sync connector, Okta and OneLogin provisioning, Slack and Teams, Google Calendar, an API and SFTP, plus a documented export of evaluations, notes and performance data for HR records. One caution sits in the terms: account data may be permanently lost when a subscription ends, so I would export before any termination.
Leapsome
The Personio integration is documented in real detail — a Leapsome account created per new employee, job title, department and manager synced, teams and manager-to-direct-report reporting lines built automatically — alongside single sign-on, praise shared into Slack or Microsoft Teams, a claim of connecting more than 100 software systems, and custom API and SFTP integration help. Customers can download their data in CSV within thirty days of termination. The captured pages give no SCIM provisioning, no webhooks, no published API limits, no second named HRIS, and no bulk export of the complete review, goal and feedback history.
European sovereignty
15Five
A data processing agreement with standard contractual clauses exists, GDPR is acknowledged and an Irish supervisory authority is named, but the contracting entity is 15Five, Inc. under California law, transfers may store personal information in the United States or the United Kingdom, and the AI chain includes OpenAI. That reads as an American stack with European contractual wrapping, and I found no public statement of EU hosting.
Leapsome
Leapsome GmbH in Berlin is the contracting entity, registered at Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, under German law with Berlin courts, and a data processing agreement is referenced; the privacy policy states data is processed predominantly within the EU/EEA, with AWS and Google Cloud named only for the vendor's own website. The captured pages give no processing region for the AI provider OpenAI, the referenced subprocessor list was not among the pages I could read, and there is a New York office, so I cannot move this into the upper band.
Pricing transparency
15Five
Perform at $11 per user per month (billed annually) and Engage at $4 per user per month (billed annually) are published with their module contents, and manager coaching packages start at $49/month, so I can budget the core spend myself. The Compensation module and the total-platform price, minimum headcount and VAT treatment are not on the captured pricing pages, and everything is marked subject to change.
Leapsome
The pricing page gives real numbers for the HRIS tiers — 7 € per employee per month for the Basis package and 10 € for Pro — with monthly or annual billing, EUR, USD or GBP, a one-time 24,000 € accelerator programme shown as free for new HRIS customers signing by 31 December, and terms that spell out auto-renewal, non-refundable fees, no licence reductions and monthly licence true-ups. But the talent modules themselves — reviews, goals, surveys, learning — are only referenced as what makes the HRIS free, with no public price on the pages I read, and the learning page points to a personalised demo, so I cannot compute my annual cost for sixty people.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
15Five
Leapsome
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Ownership
Not determined
Not determined
Data residency
Not determined
Not determined
Subprocessors
US CLOUD Act reach
US CLOUD Act reach
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates both 3/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 4 of the 6 judges pick 15Five and 2 pick Leapsome. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is 15Five or Leapsome European?
15Five is not European by provenance (Rest of world). Leapsome is European (EU-Made). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.