Best Gallup Q12 and Viva Glint Alternatives When Employees Don't Trust 'Confidential' Surveys
Gallup Q12 and Microsoft Viva Glint link every invite to an HRIS profile. Compare 6 alternatives by what the vendor can read, minimum group rules, and cost.
Short answer
HRIS-linked vs. zero-knowledgeBoth Gallup Access (Q12) and Microsoft Viva Glint are confidential rather than anonymous: every employee receives a unique link tied to their HRIS record so scores can roll up by manager and department. If your employees are holding back—or pasting "is Gallup anonymous" and "is Viva Glint anonymous" into Google before answering—the right alternative depends on whether you want another HRIS-attributed engagement suite (Culture Amp, Workday Peakon, Lattice, Perceptyx) or a zero-knowledge anonymous survey tool (InviziPoll) where no link between person and answer exists anywhere in the database.
- Gallup Q12 floor
- 4 responses (10 for comments)
- Viva Glint floor
- 5 responses (10 for comments)
- Culture Amp / Perceptyx
- Confidential (HRIS-linked)
- Peakon / Lattice
- 3-reply minimum & export flags
- InviziPoll model
- Zero-knowledge E2EE (ciphertext only)
For HR and team leads
Switch this survey to cryptographic anonymity in 30 seconds
Import the form you already have. Answers get sealed on each person's device from the first response.
For employees
Asked to take a survey at work?
Check your survey in eight questionsWhatever the tool, your comments are the easiest way to be recognized. Leave out projects, dates and anything only you would know.
Wish it worked like this? Tell us where you work. We'll reach out to whoever runs it, and they'll never know who asked.
Or send HR a note yourself. It'll come from you, so only if that feels safe.Hi, thanks for running this survey. I want to answer honestly, and I'd feel more comfortable if responses couldn't be linked back to anyone, even by accident. Would you consider a tool like InviziPoll, which encrypts answers on our devices before they're sent? Happy to share more if it helps.
✓What we say about each vendor below was last verified on 2026-11-08 against each platform's public documentation.
The #1 reason employees don't answer Gallup Q12 or Viva Glint honestly isn't the questions—it's the unique tracking token sitting at the end of their invitation link.
01Why teams look for a Gallup Q12 or Viva Glint alternative
HR and People Ops leaders usually start comparing alternatives to Gallup Q12 or Microsoft Viva Glint for one of four reasons:
- Employees don't buy the "confidential vs. anonymous" distinction: Telling an engineering or legal team "Yes, your link is tied to your employee ID, but our dashboard hides groups under 5" results in polite 4-out-of-5 scores and blank comment boxes.
- Rigid question sets or heavy enterprise rollouts: Gallup strongly encourages keeping the core 12 questions unchanged for benchmarking, and Viva Glint requires Microsoft 365 / Entra ID attribute wiring that can feel heavy when you just need a candid 6-question check-in after a reorg.
- Small-team exposure: Gallup's standard numeric reporting floor is 4 respondents (one lower than the industry-standard 5), and manager dashboards that update as responses arrive can still expose outliers on 5- to 8-person teams.
- AI comment processing concerns: Enterprise suites increasingly pipe open-text employee comments into cloud LLMs to generate manager summaries—creating a new privacy objection for cautious staff.
026 Gallup Q12 & Viva Glint alternatives compared by what they can actually read
| Platform | Anonymity architecture | Numeric score floor | Comment floor & handling | Can the vendor or an export link person to answer? | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| InviziPoll (our product) | Zero-knowledge browser E2EE (X25519 + ML-KEM-768) | 5 default (min 3) + 3-response reserve pool while open (8 for first view) | Shuffled, undated; topics-only option + on-device prose check + local browser AI summaries | No. responses stores only id, poll_id, encrypted_blob. Blind signatures sever invite links. | High-candor pulses, baselines, post-layoff checks, upward reviews, standing exit pools |
| Gallup Access (Q12) | Confidential (unique access code per employee) | 4 respondents | 10 respondents (verbatim comments) | Yes (held by Gallup for hierarchy rollup and longitudinal tracking) | Organizations committed to the standardized Q12 benchmark and Gallup coaching |
| Microsoft Viva Glint | Confidential (tied to Microsoft 365 / HRIS attributes) | 5 respondents | 10 respondents by default (verbatim + cloud AI summaries) | Yes (linked in Glint database; configurable raw export permissions) | Large Microsoft 365 enterprises wanting deep Entra ID / Viva suite integration |
| Culture Amp | Confidential (unique link tied to HRIS profile) | 5 respondents (locked at launch) | Configurable per survey; onboarding & exit surveys identifiable by default | Yes (held by Culture Amp for cohort slicing and multi-wave comparisons) | Mid-market & enterprise HR teams wanting benchmarks + performance management |
| Workday Peakon | Confidential (native Workday identity link) | 3 respondents (minimum selectable option) | Verbatim comments without name; optional Survey Answer Export with email/ID | Yes (and company analysts can pull identifiable exports if Survey Answer Export is enabled) | Workday HCM customers running continuous automated listening |
| Lattice | Configurable (Anonymous vs. Identifiable) | 5 default (editable from 3 to 10, even after launch) | Verbatim comments; optional individual-response export keeps manager & department | Yes (server holds plaintext; onboarding & exit surveys are always identifiable) | Teams already using Lattice for OKRs, 1, and performance reviews |
| Perceptyx | Confidential (HRIS-linked personal invites) | 5 respondents (typical) | 10 respondents (typical) | Yes (held by Perceptyx for multi-layer hierarchy reporting) | Fortune 1000 enterprises needing custom consulting and complex lifecycle surveys |
03Can you run a Q12-style engagement baseline without linking answers to employee profiles?
The usual argument from confidential survey vendors is: "We have to link every response to the employee's HRIS record, otherwise we can't stop people from voting twice or break results down by department."
That used to be true twenty years ago. Today, cryptographic blind signatures solve both problems without storing a person-to-answer link:
- One response per employee without linking the ballot: When you invite your roster in InviziPoll, the employee's browser blinds their ballot before our server signs it. Our server can verify that the employee is eligible and mark their invite as used—so reminders only go to people who haven't finished—while being mathematically unable to tell which encrypted response row came from which invite.
- Department and tenure breakdowns without cross-tab leaks: Coarse roster tags (like Department or Location) are evaluated only once, after the poll closes, across the entire family of cuts together. Every cut requires at least 5 respondents, and any two cuts that differ by 1 to 4 respondents are automatically withheld so a manager can never subtract two charts to isolate one person.
- Drafting and scheduling with AI—without feeding answers to a cloud model: You can draft or adapt your quarterly baseline in our builder (or connect Claude or ChatGPT over MCP), check every question for bias and small-cohort risk, and review every edit in History—while employee responses stay encrypted in the browser.
04How most teams switch (or pair InviziPoll alongside Gallup / Glint)
You don't have to rip out an enterprise HRIS contract on day one to fix a candor problem:
- Option A: Replace the low-trust annual survey with a semi-annual baseline + quarterly encrypted pulses. Run a 15-question baseline twice a year and a 5-question pulse in the off-quarters. See Anonymous pulse surveys vs. annual engagement surveys.
- Option B: Keep your annual HRIS census, and use InviziPoll for the surveys where employees fear retaliation. Use zero-knowledge polling for post-reorg check-ins, upward manager/executive reviews, M&A pulses, standing exit pools, and two-way speak-up channels.
Compare the architectures side by side on InviziPoll vs. Gallup, InviziPoll vs. Viva Glint, InviziPoll vs. Workday Peakon, InviziPoll vs. Culture Amp, and InviziPoll vs. Lattice.
Test InviziPoll alongside your current survey tool with a 14-day free trial—no credit card required.
Run a zero-knowledge pulsePaste your Gallup, Glint, or pulse questions into our free Anonymous Survey Checker to spot small-team re-identification risks.
FAQQuestions people ask
Both platforms issue unique invitation links (or require SSO login) tied to each employee's HRIS profile so they can group scores by manager, department, and tenure without asking demographic questions inside the form. Because the vendor's database holds the link between the employee and their answers, both vendors accurately classify their surveys as confidential rather than anonymous.
If your requirement is architectural anonymity—where neither your HR admins nor the survey vendor can ever link a response to an employee—InviziPoll encrypts responses in the respondent's browser, stores ciphertext only (id, poll_id, encrypted_blob), uses blind signatures for roster invites, and releases results only in randomized batches with a 3-response reserve pool.
Yes. Using cryptographic blind signatures, InviziPoll records whether an invited employee has redeemed their credential (so reminders only go to people who haven't answered yet) without creating any link between that credential and the encrypted response row.
In InviziPoll, open-text comments are decrypted locally inside the admin's browser after a release batch unlocks. If you want an AI theme summary, on-device AI summaries download a compact open-source model directly to your browser and summarize the comments on your machine—so no response text ever leaves your device.
InviziPoll team
Published Nov 8, 2026 · 8 min read