Windmill vs Culture Amp: Which Platform to Choose?
Compare Windmill and Culture Amp for performance management and employee engagement. See how AI automation compares to survey-driven insights and benchmarking.
Windmill and Culture Amp take different approaches to workplace performance. Culture Amp is an employee experience platform built around engagement surveys and benchmarking. Windmill is an AI-native platform that automates reviews, feedback, and coaching through conversational AI.
The choice: do you want to measure employee sentiment through surveys, or automate performance management work?
What Is Windmill?
Windmill is an AI-powered platform that eliminates performance management overhead through automation. Windmill’s AI assistant Windy handles reviews, feedback, and coaching through conversations in Slack and Teams.
Windy syncs data from 20+ tools (GitHub, Jira, Salesforce, Asana) to understand what employees are working on automatically.
Key features: AI assistant runs reviews via conversation, automatic data sync from 20+ tools, AI-powered 1:1s with generated agendas, continuous feedback collection, review automation from self-reviews to calibration, goal tracking with at-risk alerts, setup under an hour.
What Is Culture Amp?
Culture Amp is an employee experience platform that measures and improves engagement, performance, and culture. The platform centers on surveys backed by research and benchmarking data from 25+ million employees across 6,500+ companies.
Key features: Engagement surveys with research-backed templates, benchmarking against industry data, performance reviews (self, peer, upward, manager), goal setting, AI-powered insights (comment summaries, heat maps), 1:1 templates, analytics dashboards, development tools.
Key Differences
Philosophy
Windmill does the work of performance management for you. Windy autonomously conducts reviews, gathers feedback, prepares agendas, and tracks goals. The AI replaces administrative overhead.
Culture Amp measures employee experience and provides insights for decision-making. It excels at gathering sentiment through surveys and comparing results to industry benchmarks. You analyze the insights and take action.
The distinction: Windmill eliminates admin work. Culture Amp illuminates organizational health but doesn’t reduce time spent on reviews.
Performance Reviews
Windmill cuts review time from 3+ hours to 6 minutes:
- Windy chats with employees throughout the period, gathering context. Self-reviews are 80% complete by review time.
- Windy interviews peer nominees with follow-up questions for detailed feedback.
- Managers get comprehensive drafts combining self-reviews, peer feedback, and data from integrated tools.
- Calibration dashboard highlights gaps and flags discussion areas.
Result: 86% cycle time savings, 6 hours saved per person.
Culture Amp offers unified review cycles with templates and feedback summaries. The process remains largely manual—managers still gather context, write assessments, and complete reviews. Users note “complex survey setup requires significant time investment.”
Data Sources
Windmill syncs from 20+ tools (GitHub, Jira, Salesforce, Notion). Pull requests, tickets, tasks, and deals automatically feed into performance context. Conversational AI adds qualitative insights.
Culture Amp gathers data through surveys backed by research. While it integrates with HRIS systems for employee data, it doesn’t connect to work tools. Insights come from what employees report, not actual work output.
Key difference: Windmill knows what employees are doing. Culture Amp knows how they feel about it.
Feedback Collection
Windmill gathers feedback continuously through natural conversations in Slack/Teams. Lightweight, in-the-flow interactions achieve high response rates. Managers get weekly recaps with flagged issues for proactive intervention.
Culture Amp uses scheduled surveys (engagement, pulse, lifecycle) with validated questions and benchmarking. Surveys are periodic (quarterly, annually), creating gaps. Survey fatigue can affect response rates.
AI Approach
Windmill’s AI does the work—writes reviews, gathers data, conducts interviews, and synthesizes insights autonomously using conversational AI.
Culture Amp’s AI assists with analysis—comment summaries, heat maps, data queries, and upcoming AI Coach for insights. It’s assistive, not autonomous.
The distinction: Windmill’s AI replaces work. Culture Amp’s AI enhances analysis.
Implementation
Windmill: Under an hour to implement. Connect integrations, invite team, launch first review in 5 minutes. “Plug and play” setup.
Culture Amp: More involved. Configure surveys, set up HRIS integrations, train admins, communicate rollout. Users note “complex survey setup requiring significant time investment.”
Pricing
Windmill: Flat-rate pricing
- $500/month (under 100 employees)
- $1,000/month (101-250)
- $2,000/month (250-500)
- Enterprise (500+)
Culture Amp: $9-14 per employee per month
- $10,000-45,000 annually depending on size
- Example: $27,000/year for 200 employees vs Windmill’s $12,000/year
Analytics
Windmill: Actionable insights on review completion, calibration gaps, goal progress, feedback frequency. AI surfaces what matters without custom reports.
Culture Amp: Industry-leading analytics backed by 1.3 billion data points. Compare engagement scores, turnover risk, and cultural metrics against similar companies. Invaluable for long-term people strategy.
When to Choose Windmill
Choose Windmill for:
- Performance management that runs itself through autonomous AI
- Major time savings (86% cycle time reduction, 6 hours saved per person)
- Data-driven reviews that pull context from work tools automatically
- Continuous feedback gathered conversationally in Slack/Teams
- Zero friction—everything happens where you work
- Simple, affordable flat-rate pricing ($500-2,000/month)
- Quick implementation (under an hour)
Ideal for tech companies, startups, and modern organizations (20-500+ employees) wanting performance management that enhances productivity.
When to Choose Culture Amp
Choose Culture Amp for:
- Comprehensive employee experience platform (engagement, performance, culture)
- Research-backed survey templates from organizational psychology
- Industry benchmarking against 25+ million employees across 6,500+ companies
- Deep analytics for organizational health and trends
- Structured workflows for HR teams managing multiple survey programs
- People science expertise for talent strategy
Best for mid-sized to large organizations (500+ employees) with dedicated HR teams needing comprehensive employee experience insights.
The Bottom Line
Culture Amp measures employee experience. It excels at gathering sentiment data, providing research-backed insights, and benchmarking against industry standards. However, it doesn’t eliminate performance management work—managers still spend hours writing reviews and gathering feedback.
Windmill executes performance management. It doesn’t measure culture or provide benchmarks. Instead, it eliminates 86% of admin overhead by having AI do the work autonomously.
Decision framework:
- Measure organizational health? → Culture Amp
- Eliminate performance management overhead? → Windmill
- Limited budget, need immediate ROI? → Windmill
- Dedicated HR team for experience strategy? → Culture Amp
- Want continuous, automated performance management? → Windmill
Ready to cut review time by 86%? Try Windmill and experience performance management when AI does the work.