vs

Why Ace is better than Culture Amp as a talent management system for developer teams

Ace is a talent management system built for Engineering managers and their developers

57
%

of developers quit in the 1st year facing bad management or lack of career growth.

90
%

of Engineering manager’s responsibilities include people management.

85
%

of managers have ZERO engineering management skills

Why Engineering managers are better people managers for developers than HRs

HR Manager vs Engineering Manager

People

Hiring and Interview developer

HR Manager

HR manager can do the initial screening of candidates to see culture fit and experienced tech recruiters can qualify the initial skill fit.

Engineering Manager

Engineering manager defines the required skill set, interviews, and finally hires a developer.

People
Coding

Onboarding developer

HR Manager

HR manager onboards developers to the company's wide processes and procedures.

Engineering Manager

Engineering manager onboards developer to a role, team and product.

People
Coding

Problems with developer productivity

HR Manager

HR manager doesn’t understand work of developers, so she/he can't notice problems with developer productivity until a performance review.

Engineering Manager

Engineering manager is a developer. She/he can notice when other developers are not productive.

People
Coding

Improve developer productivity

HR Manager

HR manager can’t continuously improve productivity of developers, because she/he doesn’t understand real work and the reason of productivity, such as legacy code, lack of skills, etc.

Engineering Manager

Engineering manager can identify problems that are caused by working experience of developers, such as the lack of skills needed for career progression, work with legacy code, lack of mentorship, etc.

People
Coding

Problems with developer motivation

HR Manager

HR manager can identify problems with motivation that are not caused by working experience of developers, such as personal problems, conflicts at work, salary, etc.

Engineering Manager

Engineering manager can identify problems that are caused by working experience of developers, such as the lack of skills needed for career progression, work with legacy code, lack of mentorship, etc.

People

Improve developer motivation

HR Manager

HR manager can help with motivation problems caused by personal problems, conflicts at work, salary, etc.

Engineering Manager

Engineering manager can help with motivation problems caused by the lack of skills needed for career progression, work with legacy code, lack of mentorship, etc.

People

Problems with developer's hard skills

HR Manager

HR manager can notice a lack of hard skills based on a skill review performed by developers.

Engineering Manager

Engineering manager can notice a lack of hard skills based on weekly interaction with developers and intervene faster to mentor them.

People

Problems with developer's soft skills

HR Manager

HR manager can notice a lack of soft skills based on one-to-ones with developers, however HR manager lacks context of a developer's day-to-day routine.

Engineering Manager

Engineering manager can notice a lack of soft skills based on one-to-ones with developers, and is involved into context of a developer's day-to-day routine.

People

Train and Improve skills of developers

HR Manager

HR manager can provide general training on the company's culture or soft skills improvement.

Engineering Manager

Engineering manager can provide developers with personal mentorship based on skill gaps, working tasks, and desired career promotion.

People

Career progressions and promotions of developers

HR Manager

HR manager can notice problems with promotion based on feedback from developers or a performance review, however HR manager lacks context about skills and projects of developers.

Engineering Manager

Engineering manager can notice problems with promotion based on weekly interaction with developers and intervene faster to mentor developers for the promotion.

Whose and What problem does Ace solve vs Culture Amp

Tool Category

Ace

EngOps Tool

CultureAmp

People Ops Tool

Primary User Persona

Ace

CTO, Engineering manager

CultureAmp

HR Manager

Problem

Ace

I don’t know how to mentor and improve performance of developers.

CultureAmp

I don’t understand “who” our employees are and "what they do" in the company.

Value

Ace

Use Ace Growth Framework to mentor and improve performance of developers with insights and recommendations.

CultureAmp

Use Culture Amp to organize and visualize information about people performance, motivation and learning.

How Ace Solutions are different from Culture Amp

Ace vs Culture Amp

Tool Category

Ace

EngOps Tool

Culture Amp

People Ops Tool

Career progression and promotions

Ace

Ace provides skill matrices with skills, levels, and career paths for 100+ developer, design, and product roles.

Culture Amp

In PeopleOps tools like Culture Amp, you have general career path templates for all roles. You have one engineering skill matrix, while in tech companies, you need separate ones for each tech stack.

Developer Mentorship

Ace

Ace connects the work of developers (in Jira and Git) with skills that they need to grow to get a promotion, so Engineering managers run mentor sessions and create a personal growth plan being aware of developers' work and the desired career progression level.

Culture Amp

In PeopleOps tools, Developer Mentorship is not working for 2 reasons. First, it's not aligned with developers' real work in Jira and Git. Secondly, it's not connected to role-specific skill matrices like Python or Nodejs.

Developer productivity and motivation

Ace

Ace provides automatic insights about developer productivity, motivation and skill gaps, as well as gives recommendations on how to run one-to-ones and grow the skills of developers.

Culture Amp

In PeopleOps tools, developer productivity is based on surveys and feedback that is created and managed by the HR team, while it's still an Engineering manager's job to interpret reasons and create personal growth plans to improve productivity.

Why Ace is more simple to implement than Culture Amp

Ace vs Culture Amp

Tool Category

Ace

EngOps Tool

Culture Amp

People Ops Tool

Career progression and promotions

Ace

Ace provides skill matrices with skills, levels, and career paths for 100+ developer, design, and product roles, hence you select the template and customize it saving up to 60% of the time.

Culture Amp

In PeopleOps tools like Culture Amp, you have general career path templates for all roles, hence you need to create skill matrices from scratch.

Developer Mentorship

Ace

Ace connects the work of developers (in Jira and Git) with skills that developers need to grow to get a promotion, hence Engineering managers can run mentor sessions and create personal growth plans easily importing the last Pull Requests from Gitlab and seeing the exact skill gaps developer needs to fill up.

Culture Amp

In PeopleOps tools like Culture Amp, development goals are not aligned with a developer's real work in Jira and Git and are not connected to role-specific skill matrices like Python or Node.js, hence to provide Developer Mentorship, Engineering managers have to spend a lot of time to collect this information manually.

Developer productivity and motivation

Ace

Ace provides automatic insights about developer productivity, motivation and skill gaps, as well as gives recommendations on how to run one-to-ones and grow skills of developers, hence Engineering managers can automate Engineering management without sacrificing personalization.

Culture Amp

In PeopleOps tools like Culture Amp, developer productivity is based on surveys and feedback that is created and managed by the HR team, while it's still an Engineering manager's job to interpret reasons and create personal growth plans to improve productivity, hence Engineering managers still need a lot of time to do the management job almost manually, and highlight the problems with performance.

Ace vs Culture Amp

Feature Comparison

#
Features
Ace
Culture Amp
1
Career progression and promotions
1.1
Career paths
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
1.2
Skill matrix templates
Vectorly
100+ templates for tech roles
Culture Amp
-
1.3
Career position match calculation
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
1.4
Cross-cycle analytics
Vectorly
Culture Amp
1.5
Internal hiring opportunity
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
1.6
Review automations
Vectorly
Culture Amp
2
Developer Mentorship
2.1
Skill gap report
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
2.2
Personal Growth Plans based on skill gaps and career progression goals
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
2.3
Career path grades with skill requirements
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
2.4
Internal mentor recommendations for skill gaps
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
2.5
Knowledge base recommendations for skill gaps
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
2.6
Gitlab integration
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
2.7
Jira integration
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
2.8
Asana integration
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
2.9
Dynamic progress calculation
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
3
Developer productivity and motivation
3.1
Feedback & Praise
Vectorly
Culture Amp
3.2
Competency-based feedback
Vectorly
Culture Amp
3.3
Work-based productivity and motivation recommendations
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
3.4
1-to-1 meeting agenda recommendations based on working activity
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
3.5
Pulse & Engagement surveys
Vectorly
Culture Amp
3.6
Individual, team & company OKRs
Vectorly
Culture Amp
3.7
Jira integration
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
3.8
Activity feed
Vectorly
Culture Amp
3.9
Dynamic progress calculation
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
3.10
Goal tree
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
3.11
Team meetings
Vectorly
Culture Amp
-
4
Developer Mentorship
4.1
Multi-language support
Vectorly
Culture Amp