You Can't Buy Glint Without Letting Microsoft In

Two products, two ways to buy. On the left, a platform that stands on its own. On the right, one you can only reach through a frame someone else built. - YesPress illustration

Two software companies set out to answer the same small, awkward question: how do the people who work here actually feel? They both built surveys. They both built dashboards that turn a mood into a metric. They both promised managers a tidy loop of ask, learn, act, repeat. And then, somewhere along the way, they stopped being the same kind of thing. One is still a company you can buy from. The other is a checkbox inside a subscription you probably already pay.

That is the real Culture Amp versus Glint comparison, and it has almost nothing to do with which one has the prettier heatmap. The feature lists overlap so heavily that a buyer flipping between two demo decks could be forgiven for shrugging. The difference that matters shows up earlier, at the moment you try to sign a contract. With Culture Amp, you sign one. With Glint, first there is a checklist.

The checklist nobody puts on the demo slide

Glint is no longer sold as Glint. It is Viva Glint, part of Microsoft Viva, the employee-experience layer that sits on top of Microsoft 365. You cannot buy it the way you would buy a normal SaaS tool - name your seat count, hand over a card, get a login. To run Viva Glint you need an existing Microsoft 365 tenant, a Viva license, a minimum of fifty seats, and a Microsoft 365 Global Administrator with the keys to register the service before the first survey ever leaves the building.

None of that is a bug. It is not Microsoft being slow to build a checkout page. The gate is the point. Every requirement on that list is another reason you are already inside the Microsoft tent, and another reason it would be inconvenient to leave. Viva Glint is a genuinely good engagement tool. It is also, structurally, a reason to keep renewing something much larger than an engagement tool.

The survey is commoditized. The distribution is the product.

Two origin stories, one fork

Culture Amp was started in 2009 in Melbourne, Australia, by Didier Elzinga, Jon Williams and Rod Hamilton. Not Silicon Valley - Richmond, a suburb of Melbourne, which is still where the company keeps its head office. Over the following decade it raised roughly $269 million, and in 2021 a $100 million Series F pushed its valuation to about $1.5 billion. It bolted performance reviews and development plans onto the survey business, so the pitch became less "measure engagement" and more "run the whole employee lifecycle in one place." Through all of it, the company stayed independent and, crucially, independently purchasable.

Glint took the other road. Founded in 2013 in Redwood City by Jim Barnett, Goutham Kurra and Leo Riester, it built a reputation on fast pulse surveys and real-time sentiment before those were table stakes. It raised around $80 million. Then, in 2018, LinkedIn - already owned by Microsoft - acquired it for a reported $400 million, roughly double its last private valuation. For a while Glint lived under LinkedIn. In 2023 it moved again, this time into Microsoft Viva, where it was rebranded Viva Glint and wired into Viva Insights.

So the two products did not diverge because one got better at surveys. They diverged because one was bought by a company whose entire advantage is the software you already run every day. Once that happened, the most valuable thing Glint could be was not a standalone winner in the engagement category. It was a feature that made Microsoft 365 a little stickier.

What you can actually do with each

Strip away the strategy for a second, because a buyer still has a job to do. Both platforms cover the same core work. You launch engagement and pulse surveys. You watch sentiment move over time. You slice results by team, tenure, location and manager. You hand managers their own results and a nudge to actually do something with them - the "closed loop" both companies like to talk about. Both lean on AI now to turn a pile of free-text comments into themes a human can read in a meeting.

Where they part is the shape of the surrounding kit. Culture Amp reaches past engagement into performance management and employee development, which suits a company that wants one system for surveys, reviews and growth plans and does not want to care what email provider it uses. Viva Glint is strongest when you are already living in Microsoft 365, because it drops feedback and follow-up into the tools people have open all day, and its Copilot help is included with a standard Viva license rather than sold as a separate add-on.

There is also a quieter difference in who each product is really built to please. Culture Amp has spent years courting HR leaders directly, publishing benchmarks and running its own community events, because it has to be chosen by the people who care about engagement for its own sake. Viva Glint inherits a different buyer. In a lot of organizations the person who signs off on Microsoft 365 is not the head of people at all - it is IT and procurement, negotiating a suite renewal where Viva is one line among many. That changes what "winning the deal" even means. Culture Amp wins a room full of HR skeptics. Viva Glint wins by being already on the invoice.

It matters for the teams who were on Glint before any of this. Customers who bought the original, standalone Glint did not choose a Microsoft product - they chose a scrappy pulse-survey company. Over two moves, first into LinkedIn and then into Viva, the thing they bought became something you can only keep if you keep paying for the ecosystem around it. Nobody sent them a bill for that shift. It arrived as a rebrand and an integration, and one day the standalone option they signed up for was simply not on the menu anymore.

The lesson worth stealing

If you build software, Glint is a case study you can lift directly. The company did not win the engagement category on merit alone and then get bought as a trophy. It got far more valuable the moment its product could be turned into a reason not to churn off a platform. A survey tool is easy to switch away from. A survey tool that only exists because you pay for Viva, which only makes sense because you pay for Microsoft 365, is not. The moat was never the questionnaire. It was the licensing around it.

Being independently purchasable is a feature customers only notice once it's gone.

Culture Amp is the counter-example, and it is a real business decision, not a moral high ground. Staying standalone means you have to keep winning the deal on its own terms, every renewal, against buyers who could just use the thing bundled into a suite they already own. That is harder. It is also the reason a company can pick Culture Amp without first auditing which email vendor it married. Independence is a cost the seller carries so the buyer does not have to.

The uncomfortable part for founders is that both strategies work. Glint's outcome - acquired for a reported $400 million, then folded into a suite - is a good outcome by any honest measure. The founders got a big exit and their product now reaches a scale a standalone startup rarely touches. Culture Amp's outcome, a roughly $1.5 billion valuation while staying independent, is a good outcome too. What the pair really shows is that the exit shapes the product long after the deal closes. Sell to a platform and your software gets pulled toward whatever makes the platform stickier. Stay independent and your software stays a thing people opt into. Neither is free.

So which one should you buy

Honest answer: it depends less on the software than on the sentence you would have to say out loud to justify it. If your company already runs on Microsoft 365 and the idea of one more vendor makes your procurement team sigh, Viva Glint slides into what you own, and the fifty-seat floor is a rounding error at your size. If you want a best-of-breed engagement and development platform that does not assume anything about the rest of your stack, Culture Amp is the one you can actually buy by itself.

Just do not mistake the two decisions for the same decision. Comparing feature grids will tell you they are close. Comparing the way you buy them will tell you they are not close at all - and the way you buy a thing is the part you live with long after the demo heatmaps fade.