A Workpath alternative without a one-year minimum

Multi-business-unit governance and the enterprise compliance surface. If you need ISO 27001 on the vendor, separate operating models per division, and an HR-adjacent performance layer next to the objectives, Workpath is built for that and we are not.

Its integration set covers the enterprise standards — MS Teams, Power BI, Jira, Azure DevOps — and third-party directories list an available API, though we did not find public developer documentation on their site to characterise it precisely, so we will not pretend to know its shape.

The modular model means the capability you want may be assembled from several purchases: objectives in one module, the initiatives that deliver them in another, the indicators that measure them in a third. That is flexible if you have a procurement process to run and a subset of needs. It is friction if what you want is the whole loop, because the whole loop is the point of hoshin: a vision, the annual objectives that serve it, the initiatives that deliver them, the indicators that prove it, and the correlations tying them together.

We ship one thing. The X-Matrix with its four quadrants, the correlations, the completeness score, the review cadences, the idea inbox and the MCP server — all of it, on the free tier, with no module to add and no minimum term. There is no Analyst licence to upgrade to in order to get the analysis: the analysis is the score, and the score is in the free product.

On AI specifically, Workpath sells capability in tiers of skills. We took the opposite position: the agent is the interface, so metering it would be metering the product itself. Bring your own assistant — your Claude, your Cursor — and it drives hoshin.app through MCP with your rights and your audit trail.

• Workpath: modules (KPIs, Goals, Initiatives, Resources) × licence types (Viewer, Standard, Analyst) × AI skill tiers, one-year minimum contract (their pricing page, July 2026).
• hoshin.app: one product, free tier, no minimum term, agent access included, MIT-licensed MCP server in the official registry.

OKR platforms model alignment: objectives cascading through an organization, each with key results and owners. The X-Matrix models deployment differently — it forces the links between adjacent quadrants to be explicit and rated, and then judges the result.

Five metrics, out of 100: coverage, correlation density, orphan elements, complete chains from vision down to a KPI, and the balance between leading and lagging indicators. A leadership team that is measuring only outcomes and no process indicators will be told so by name, every week, whether it wants to hear it or not. Alignment tells you the objectives are connected; the score tells you whether the connection means anything.

Workpath is a hosted European enterprise platform with the compliance apparatus that implies. We offer that too — EU hosting, strict per-organization isolation, an audit trail, and no use of your data for model training — but we also offer something a hosted platform structurally cannot: a sovereign local mode where the same 14 tools and the same score run against plain JSON files on your own machine, with no account and no network. The code is MIT, so you can read it before you trust it.

And you can find out today. A published free tier, and a public read-only demo matrix your own AI client can query with a token we publish openly. No one-year commitment to discover whether a strategy tool fits how your committee actually works.