Gloat

What works in your favour

Three things work in your favour as a buyer.

Where it stops, and the company behind it

Before a multi-year contract, weigh the company as well as the product. In March 2026 Gloat cut staff. The Israeli business daily Globes, citing unnamed sources, put the cut at 20% and reported that some customers had not renewed the talent marketplace and that operating losses were widening, with the cuts falling mainly on staff outside the new products Gloat is concentrating on. Gloat said fewer people left than Globes reported, without giving a number, and that it continues to support and invest in the marketplace while it expands into AI agents.

By then Gloat had about 100 employees, most of them in Israel, down from 300 in April 2023, when it cut 12% of its staff. Its total funding is about $186m, and it has announced no funding round since a $90m Series D in June 2022.

Beyond the company, the product has four limits of its own.

Ask for access to Gloat’s help centre during the evaluation, because it is open only to customers and your team will want to see how the product is set up before you sign.

Who it suits

There are four situations in which Gloat makes sense.

What it costs, and what leaving involves

Gloat does not publish a price, and no public contract gives a figure to compare a quote with.

What Gloat does publish is how it sells. It offers packages, services you can add one at a time, and adoption help. In the Skills in Motion and Agile Workforce packages, Career Planning, Opportunity Hub and Microsoft Teams cost extra. Changing the HR system Gloat connects to is a separate service that Gloat scopes and tests, with no price given, and the Copilot assistant works only for people who hold Microsoft 365 Copilot licences, which are a separate cost.

Gloat’s service agreement commits to at least 99.5% availability in any calendar month, with eight hours set aside on one Sunday each month for maintenance, and support runs in weekday office hours in Central European, US Eastern and Melbourne time. If you need support outside those hours, ask for it in the contract.

Gloat sets no minimum company size and says it has supported organisations of all sizes, and the smallest company in its case studies is Ford Otosan, with 4,200 employees. If you employ fewer people than that, ask Gloat for a customer reference nearer your size before you invest time in a demo.

Leaving has costs of its own, even though Data Direct copies your data out. Taking data out through the connection your IT team would use needs an access key and permission from your Gloat representative, and standard access is capped at 1,000 data requests a day and 100 an hour unless Gloat agrees to more, so getting your data out that way depends on Gloat’s cooperation. After a contract ends, Gloat normally keeps personal data for up to three months, so run the export before the contract runs out.

Gloat names no standard skills framework that its skills map to, such as the European Union’s ESCO, the US government’s O*NET, Lightcast’s library or SFIA for digital skills, so the version of your skills data that moves most easily to another supplier is the one held under your own skills list. If you choose Gloat, load your own list from the start, so that every skill can be read back under your names as well as Gloat’s.

What to ask on the demo

1. Which of your agents add skills from people’s work at a customer today, which tools do they read, such as code, project and collaboration tools, and where does our data processing agreement cover that?
2. At a live customer, what share of the skills on profiles came from HR records, from employees’ own entries or CVs, from manager ratings, and from your agents?
3. How is one person’s skill level set: by their own or their manager’s rating, from their CV, or both? Show us the working for one employee.
4. Which customer, how many people and what date sit behind the 94% profile accuracy figure, and who took part in the manager calibration sessions it was measured against?
5. Your service agreement commits to 99.5% availability a month and support in weekday office hours. Can our contract include support outside those hours?
6. Will our employees’ data help train your model or shape recommendations for other customers? Can we opt out, and what happens to it when we leave?
7. When we leave, what will a full export contain, in what format and at what cost, and will it include skills with the suggested ones marked, ratings, job architecture and our own skills lists?
8. Globes reported in March 2026 that some customers were not renewing your talent marketplace. Can we speak to two customers who renewed in 2025 or 2026, one of them as close to our size as you have?
9. Which of the items marked as extra cost, such as Career Planning and Opportunity Hub, would we need for what you are showing us?

Alternatives to Gloat, including buying nothing

For internal mobility, the closest alternatives to Gloat are Eightfold and Fuel50. For skills worked out from people’s work, the alternatives are TechWolf and Microsoft People Skills, and if you run Workday, SAP or Oracle, look first at that vendor’s own skills module: Workday Skills Cloud, SAP Talent Intelligence Hub or Oracle Dynamic Skills. Holding off on any purchase is a fourth route.

If you run Workday, SAP or Oracle, look first at what that vendor already sells for skills and for HR agents, and check the licence before you treat that route as free: the SuccessFactors feature that works out employees’ skills needs a separately purchased AI units licence.

If internal mobility is the job, put Gloat next to Eightfold and Fuel50. Eightfold’s talent marketplace offers employees “a living hub of jobs, projects, gigs, and mentors”, much as Gloat’s does, and Fuel50, like Gloat, supplies its own skills library and lets you adopt it, bring your own, or combine the two. None of the three differs from the others in a way that settles the choice, so choose on how each connects to your HR system, what each will put in the contract, and how each answers the questions you would put to Gloat.

If working skills out from people’s work is the main reason you are looking, compare Gloat with TechWolf and Microsoft People Skills, which our guide groups as the products built for that. For the skills you agree are critical, TechWolf keeps a level for each employee as well as for each job, on a scale of five levels by default, adjustable from three to eight, where a person’s level in Gloat comes from an optional 0 to 5 rating or from their CV. On size, the smallest customer TechWolf names in a case study has about 5,000 people, so ask it for a reference near your size too.

If your people already hold Microsoft 365 Copilot licences, for Gloat’s assistant or anything else, Microsoft People Skills comes with them for $0 extra, so far. People Skills works out skills from Microsoft 365 only, and Microsoft says it is not designed for promotion or pay decisions, but it will show you what your own systems already know before you sign with anyone.

The last option is to buy nothing yet. Gloat’s profiles start from your job data and from what people and their managers add, so if your job data is patchy and few people keep a profile up to date, putting that in order comes before any of these products can help. If what you mainly need is for employees to see internal openings and put themselves forward, check whether your HR system already does enough of that. The market guide sets out when that work, and no purchase, is the right answer.