15Five deserves credit. Long before continuous feedback was a category, they built a company on a simple ritual: fifteen minutes for the employee to write, five minutes for the manager to read, every week. If you're comparing them with Relay, you've already accepted the premise we share: annual surveys are too slow, and rhythm beats depth.
So the choice comes down to one structural difference, and it's a big one.
15Five's check-in is signed. Relay's is anonymous.
What a named check-in can and can't do
A named weekly check-in is a management tool. It creates a documented conversation between an employee and their manager: priorities, blockers, wins, requests for help. Done well, it makes one-on-ones sharper and keeps work visible. 15Five layers engagement surveys and performance features around that core.
But a named check-in has a ceiling, and the ceiling is the relationship itself. The topics people most need to raise are the ones hardest to sign: my manager is the problem, the restructure has broken this team, I'm interviewing elsewhere. Nobody types that into a form their boss reads on Friday with their name attached.
So the named channel fills with what's safe to say, and the unsafe stuff, the stuff that predicts resignations and team failure, stays silent. The manager who senses tension still has no language and no data for it.
What anonymity unlocks
Relay's check-in takes 30 seconds, arrives over SMS, WhatsApp, email, Slack or Teams, and is anonymised before it reaches any dashboard. Minimum response thresholds protect small teams. We cannot identify individual respondents even if asked, because the product is architected that way on purpose.
That changes what people say. Negative sentiment stops being career-risky and starts being incredibly valuable information. A team willing to tell you things are hard is a team that trusts the process. Silence is the danger, and named tools breed a specific kind of silence: the polite kind.
Leaders then get a Monday summary built to be read in five minutes: themes, sentiment movement, response rates, unresolved issues. Not a form to mark. A prompt to act.
Different loops, different owners
15Five closes its loop one-to-one: manager reads, manager replies. That's valuable for task-level friction, and no anonymous tool replaces a good one-on-one.
Relay closes the loop publicly. Feedback surfaces as themes, leadership responds to the team, every week, even when the response is "we don't have an answer yet, but we heard you". Listening and responding are the same act. When it happens in the open, trust compounds. When response rates dip, that's a trust signal, and the fix is to close the loop better, not to chase people with reminders.
You might not have to choose
Plenty of organisations run both models: a one-on-one ritual for work management, and an anonymous weekly pulse for truth. What you shouldn't do is mistake one for the other. A signed check-in will never tell you what people won't sign. An anonymous check-in will never replace a manager who shows up for their team.
If the gap in your organisation is honest signal, start there. The Relay Method explains why we built for that gap and nothing else.
Try Relay free for 30 days, no credit card required. Five minutes to set up. Then watch what people say when their name isn't on it.