Skip to main content
InviziPoll
Get Started

Is 15Five Anonymous? What the Help Center Actually Says

Verdict: no, and 15Five says so itself. 15Five engagement surveys are confidential, not anonymous. Its own help documentation states plainly:

Verdict: no, and 15Five says so itself. 15Five engagement surveys are confidential, not anonymous. Its own help documentation states plainly:

Confidential is not the same as anonymous.

That's a more candid line than most of this category publishes, and it's the right place to start. Responses are associated with employee accounts inside 15Five so that results can be grouped and segmented. Reporting rules, not architecture, are what keep your individual answer away from your manager.

Facts on this page verified 2026-08-16 against 15Five's own help center. Vendor documentation changes; check the linked sources before relying on this.

What 15Five says it does

Four statements from 15Five's documentation, which are worth holding together because each one qualifies the others:

  1. Responses are linked to accounts. Engagement survey responses are associated with employee accounts within 15Five, for grouping and segmentation.
  2. No individual response is surfaced. 15Five states that no individual responses are identified, and that nobody in the organization can see how a specific person responded to any survey statement.
  3. Admins see participation in aggregate. During a live campaign, admins can view group-level response rates, but not individual participation status.
  4. Results are withheld below a threshold. Group results aren't displayed until the confidentiality threshold is met.

Points 1 and 2 are both true at the same time, and that's precisely what "confidential" means: the link exists, and policy plus product controls keep people from following it.

The threshold, and who can move it

This is the part worth reading closely if you're on a small team.

Setting15Five's documented behaviour
Default threshold5 respondents
Can it be lowered?Yes, to 4 or 3
Who can lower it?Engagement Admins and Organization Admins
15Five's own warningLowering it increases the risk of respondents being identified in small groups
Can it change mid-campaign?No. It must be set before the campaign launches

15Five recommends keeping the threshold at 5, and describes the smaller values as an option rather than a recommendation. Two things follow for a respondent:

  • The number is a setting at your company, not a constant. Someone chose 5, 4, or 3. You're entitled to ask which.
  • It's locked once the campaign starts. That's genuinely good design: the guarantee you were given at launch can't be quietly lowered after you answer.

What an employee can check before answering

None of this requires trusting a marketing page:

  1. Did you have to sign in? If you reached the survey through your 15Five account, the response is attributable in the system. That's the model working as documented, not a fault.
  2. Ask what the threshold is set to. "Is our confidentiality threshold 5, 4, or 3?" is a specific, answerable question, and HR either knows or can find out in feature settings.
  3. Count your reporting group. If your team is 6 people and the threshold is 3, two colleagues declining to answer changes the arithmetic more than you might expect. See anonymity thresholds on small teams.
  4. Watch free text hardest. Thresholds protect scores. They don't protect a writing style, a specific grievance only three people know about, or a date you mention in passing.
  5. Ask who holds admin roles. The threshold is only as protective as the list of people who can change it before the next campaign.

Is confidential good enough?

Often, yes. For a quarterly engagement pulse about workload and manager support, a documented threshold and a vendor willing to write "confidential is not the same as anonymous" on its own help pages is a reasonable arrangement, and 15Five's candour here is better than the category norm.

It stops being good enough when the topic is one where being identified carries real consequence: harassment, a safety concern, financial irregularity, whether you would leave, or how you would vote on something contested. On those questions people don't answer a confidential system honestly, and a low response rate on the sensitive items is the signal that they didn't.

For the vocabulary, see confidential vs anonymous. For a general test you can apply to any tool, see how to tell if an employee survey is anonymous and is your employee survey actually anonymous?.

What architectural anonymity looks like instead

Founder disclosure: I built InviziPoll, so weigh this accordingly.

The alternative model isn't a better setting. It's removing the link entirely: responses encrypted in the respondent's browser, servers storing ciphertext only, so individual answers aren't readable by the vendor. Admin results unlock at three or more responses, demographic cohorts need five, open-text verbatims appear only past the unlock, and responses carry no timestamps, which removes the ordering signal that otherwise lets someone line answers up against a roster.

That's a narrower product than 15Five. It has no reviews, no check-ins, no OKRs. If those are why you bought 15Five, this isn't a swap. Side-by-side detail: InviziPoll vs 15Five, the wider set on the alternatives hub, and the architecture on security.

FAQ

Is 15Five anonymous? No. 15Five documents its engagement surveys as confidential, and states that confidential is not the same as anonymous. Responses are associated with employee accounts for grouping and segmentation.

Can my manager see my individual 15Five answers? 15Five states that no one in the organization can see how a specific person responded to a survey statement, and that results are withheld until the confidentiality threshold is met.

What's 15Five's minimum group size? The default is 5 respondents. Engagement Admins and Organization Admins can lower it to 4 or 3 before a campaign launches, and 15Five warns that this increases identification risk in small groups.

Can the threshold change after I answer? No. 15Five states the confidentiality threshold can't be changed for an active campaign.

Should I write sensitive details in free text? Treat open text as the weakest point in any confidential system. Thresholds protect numbers better than they protect a distinctive story.

Sources

This article describes vendor documentation as published on the date above. It is general information, not legal advice.

Keep reading