Pulse is not for
Compliance over visibility
If your biggest people-ops problem is producing audit trails for a regulator, you need a compliance product. Pulse is built for the moment of pain that comes after — the IC who can't show their year.
Honest comparison
We don't compete with
other tools.
We compete with the pattern of invisibility — the shared doc nobody opens, the kudos that scrolls off, the review that fits a year into a textarea. Whichever HR app your company pays for, that gap is still there. Pulse fills it. Below: eight shapes the problem takes, and what we ship instead.
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#01
Standup ritual
The pattern today
A six-person commute to a video call where one person talks. Nobody remembers what was said by Friday, and the artefact (if any) is a Notion page nobody opens twice.
What Pulse ships
Status Log: three written lines per person, public team feed, ⌘⏎ to publish. Six minutes once instead of thirty minutes daily.
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#02
Recognition
The pattern today
A #kudos Slack channel that gets six messages a month, scrolls off in a week, and contributes zero to the conversation in performance review season.
What Pulse ships
Kudos with a one-line reason, a tag (craft, kindness, impact), and a coin. Lives inside Growth, feeds the Recognition factor on the Employee Score, survives the year.
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#03
Performance review
The pattern today
A textarea asking an IC to summarise twelve months in a paragraph. They scroll through Slack the night before, screenshot, submit, lose.
What Pulse ships
A growth trail built from what the IC actually did — status log entries, kudos received, achievements unlocked, skill paths progressed. The review writes itself from artefacts they own.
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#04
Engagement survey
The pattern today
A 32-question quarterly survey, results in a slide deck that lands in everyone's inbox eight weeks later. Action items: zero.
What Pulse ships
Anonymous weekly Pulse vibe heatmap, embedded inside Status Log. Shows only when three or more people answer. No 32-question form, no eight-week lag.
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#05
1:1 prep
The pattern today
A shared doc both parties open ten minutes before the meeting. Half-written agenda, no record of what was discussed last time, no idea what's changed since.
What Pulse ships
The IC walks in with their Status Log of the week, their kudos volume, their workload check-in trend. The manager walks in having read the same. The hour is for the work, not the catch-up.
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#06
Workload visibility
The pattern today
The manager guesses. The IC says they're fine. Two weeks later someone burns out and the team learns the answer in a 1:1.
What Pulse ships
One-tap weekly check-in — light, balanced, heavy, overloaded. Eight-week sparkline. Manager sees the trend, not the individual answers.
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#07
Time off
The pattern today
An approval workflow nobody understands, a balance the IC has to calculate themselves, and a 'pending' state that sits for three days.
What Pulse ships
Personal leave journal. The IC logs it, it's logged. No approval queue, no pending state. Balance is visible to them alone.
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#08
Onboarding
The pattern today
A shared drive with twelve folders. The new hire opens four, gets confused, asks the same five questions every new hire has asked for three years.
What Pulse ships
Out of scope on purpose. Onboarding workflows belong in the tool built for them — Pulse runs alongside the HRIS, not in place of it. See §3 below for what we don't ship.
Where we're a bad fit
Honest losses.
No apologies.
Pulse is narrow on purpose. If one of the patterns below describes your situation, we're the wrong choice — and the right move is to keep using what you have.
Pulse is not for
Formal performance management
Pulse doesn't run calibration cycles, doesn't ship 360 review templates, doesn't model OKR cascades down a six-level org chart. If those are the rituals your organisation runs on, you'll be happier with a tool built for them.
Pulse is not for
All-in-one HRIS replacement
We've parked payroll, time tracking, recruiting, documents, and project allocation on purpose. If you want one vendor for all of HR, we're explicitly not it. Pulse runs alongside your HRIS, not in place of it.
Pulse is not for
Sales-led procurement
There's no enterprise tier with extra features, no demo gate, no quarterly business review. The OSS is the whole product. If your buying process requires a sales call before you try the thing, that's a process mismatch.
The one-line decision.
If your best work disappears into a Slack thread three weeks after you ship it, and you're tired of reconstructing your year from screenshots — Pulse is the workspace built for that. Open source. Self-host in 90 seconds. The demo is the sales call.
Open the demo Make your work
impossible to miss.
Self-host the open source on your own infra in 90 seconds, or pay us to run it. No demo gate. No enterprise tier with extra features. Export everything in a click — always.