vs

Why Ace is better than Uplevel 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 has the knowledge and skills to create a skill matrix and career paths, though lacks a framework to deploy their knowledge.

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 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 Uplevel

Ace vs Uplevel

Tool Category

Ace

EngOps Tool

Uplevel

DevOps Tool

Primary User Persona

Ace

CTO, Engineering manager

Uplevel

CTO, Engineering manager

Problem

Ace

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

Uplevel

We don’t know why we deploy code so slow or don’t understand where we have problems in our code base.

Value

Ace

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

Uplevel

Visualized Git with highlighted production bottlenecks.

How Ace Solutions are different from Uplevel

Ace vs Uplevel

Tool Category

Ace

EngOps Tool

Uplevel

DevOps Tool

Career progression and promotions

Ace

Ace connects the work of developers (in Jira and Git) with skills that they need to grow to get a promotion and provides skill matrices with skills, levels, and career paths for 100+ developer, design, and product roles.

Uplevel

In Dev analytics tools like Uplevel, developer productivity is not connected with career progressions of developers, that undermines the basis of developer motivation.

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.

Uplevel

In Dev analytics tools like Uplevel, developer productivity issues aren't connected with the role's specific skill gaps of developers (e.g Python or Node.js), so you usually know that there's a problem with developer performance, but you can't identify or fill the skill gaps to improve it.

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 that you can scale across your team and automate your engineering culture.

Uplevel

In Dev analytics tools like Uplevel, you get analytics about developer productivity, however Engineering managers still need to analyze this data and create recommendations for developers manually rather than eliminate or preserve productivity patterns across the team automatically with insight and recommendations.

Why Ace is more simple to implement than Uplevel

Ace vs Faros.ai

Tool Category

Ace

EngOps Tool

Uplevel

DevOps Tool

Career progression and promotions

Ace

Ace connects the work of developers (in Jira and Git) with skills that they need to get a promotion and provides skill matrices with skills, levels and career paths for 100+ developer, design and product roles. Hence Engineering managers can run mentor sessions and create personal growth plans by easily importing the last Pull Requests from Gitlab and use a skill matrix template to see the exact skill gaps a developer needs to fill up to get a promotion

Uplevel

In Dev analytics tools like Uplevel, developer productivity is not connected with career progressions of developers, hence you need to create skill matrices from scratch and keep them separately.

Developer Mentorship

Ace

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

Uplevel

In Dev analytics tools like Uplevel, developer productivity issues aren't connected with a role's specific skill gaps of developers (e.g. Python or Node.js), hence to provide Developer Mentorship, Engineering managers have to spend a lot of time to manually associate productivity issues with developer's skill gaps.

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, hence you can automate Engineering management across your teams and automate your engineering culture.

Uplevel

In Dev analytics tools like Uplevel, you get analytics about developer productivity, however Engineering managers have to analyze this data and create recommendations for developers, hence Engineering managers still need a lot of time to do all management almost manually.

Ace vs Uplevel

Feature Comparison

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