A BetterUp alternative for organizations that run their own coaching

It is only honest to say this plainly. BetterUp's strength is scale and supply: a large, curated network of external coaches across many countries and specialisms, on demand. If your requirement is "give us access to vetted external coaches worldwide and handle the sourcing", a coach-network vendor like BetterUp is built for that and Exantur is not. Exantur assumes you bring the coaches; it gives you the platform to run them well.

There is real value in that supply model for the right buyer. If you need to offer coaching to thousands of employees across regions and languages tomorrow, and you have no coaching capacity of your own, sourcing and vetting that many coaches yourself is a serious undertaking that a marketplace removes. If that is your situation, take BetterUp seriously and do not let the rest of this page talk you out of the thing it does best.

Exantur is for organizations that already have coaching capacity, internal L&D coaches, an external coaching business you contract directly, or your own coaching firm, and want to run it on their own platform. The coach relationships are yours, not intermediated by a vendor, and you keep and control your own data with row-level security, MFA and a DPA. You are not renting access to a network; you are running your own program on infrastructure you control.

That ownership has practical consequences beyond principle. Because Exantur is not a marketplace, it takes no commission on the coaching that happens through it, unlike a coach-marketplace model where a share of each engagement flows to the vendor. Your coaches remain your coaches, the client data remains under your control as the data controller, and the economics of the program stay inside your organization rather than being clipped by an intermediary.

Underneath, Exantur is a real coaching platform: sessions, structured notes, goals, accountability and between-session check-ins, inside programs. On top of that sit the enterprise pieces an organization needs, 360-degree feedback with coach-defined competency frameworks, and a sponsor ROI dashboard with engagement analytics, cohort trending and CSV or PDF export. Sponsor reporting is k-anonymous: any cohort under five people is suppressed, so measurement never exposes an individual.

This depth is what an owned program needs and a marketplace often abstracts away. Coach-private notes stay separate from anything the coachee sees, goals carry both coach and coachee ratings with a dated history, and assessments such as a DISC-style profile and the Wheel of Life sit alongside the session work. The result is that the actual practice of coaching, not just its administration, runs inside one EU-hosted system that you and your coaches control.

For all the difference in model, the two products meet on the things a sponsoring organization cares about most: structured programs, measurable outcomes, a professional experience for the coachee, and reporting that respects confidentiality. Both let you offer coaching as a real, governed program rather than an unmanaged scattering of conversations, and both take data protection seriously enough to offer a DPA.

So if your shortlist is these two, the overlap means either can give employees a credible coaching experience. The decision turns on the parts that do not overlap: who supplies the coaches, who owns the relationships and the data, whether there is a marketplace commission, and whether pricing is published or negotiated. Those are the axes this page is really about.

Choose BetterUp if your core need is a supplied global network of external coaches at scale and you do not have or want your own coaching capacity. Choose Exantur if you already have coaches, or intend to, and want to run the program yourself, keep the coach relationships and data in-house, avoid a marketplace commission, and host in the EU under the GDPR with transparent, published pricing. A concrete test: ask who you want to own the coach relationship a year from now. If the honest answer is "us", Exantur is built for that; if it is "a vendor who handles all of it", a network model fits better.

It is also worth being clear about scope. Exantur is not HIPAA-certified and its DISC-style profile is not a certified psychometric, so it is positioned for professional and workplace coaching rather than clinical use. Within that scope, procurement, IT and compliance tend to find it straightforward to evaluate precisely because the price is visible and the data stays yours.

Because the models differ, this is less a data migration than a program transition. The usual path is to stand up your own coach roster in Exantur, assign coaches to coachees, and recreate your program structures, note categories and check-in cadences as templates before onboarding cohorts. Where you hold participant and outcome data, export it and bring it across; where BetterUp held the coach relationships, you are re-establishing them as your own, which is the point of the move.

Most organizations run a pilot cohort on Exantur first, prove the workflow and the reporting, then scale. Because pricing is published and the data is EU-hosted from the start, there is no long negotiation or hosting-terms review to clear before you can begin, which tends to make the transition faster to get off the ground than a fresh enterprise procurement.