Nestor

Nestor sells skills management alongside performance reviews, 360 feedback, internal job postings and learning recommendations, as modules you choose between. Its AI drafts role profiles and level descriptions, suggests skills and matches people to roles and learning, while each person’s skill level comes from ratings: the employee rates themselves, the manager confirms the rating and colleagues endorse it. Nestor prices each plan by quote after a demo.

By Ashish Manchanda Published 16 Sep 2026 Last updated 16 Sep 2026
In one line

A skills matrix with performance reviews, 360 feedback and a talent marketplace built around it, where each person’s level comes from ratings by the employee, their manager and their colleagues.

Buy it if

You want skills, performance reviews and 360 feedback in one product, you have no skills framework and want help drafting one, and your managers will confirm their teams’ ratings.

Do not buy it if

You want skills worked out from the work people do without anyone rating them, you need levels proven by a test, or your purchasing rules favour a large, well-funded supplier.

Price

Nestor prices each of its three plans by quote after a demo, and describes them as usually for up to 150 users, 150 to 500 users, and 500 or more.

How it works

How a skill gets onto someone’s profile

Nestor is sold as modules: you choose the features you want, build a plan and get a quote. Orange, for example, uses four of them: AI Skills Management, Skills-Driven Performance Management, Talent & Opportunity Marketplace and Talent Development. Nestor also sells help getting ready for the EU pay transparency rules, starting from the job titles in your HR system and turning them into a consistent, skills-based structure of roles.

For the skills themselves, Nestor comes with a ready-made library of more than 20,000 skills and competencies with descriptions and more than 14,000 mapped occupations, covering more than 15 industries. You can use the library for ideas or let Nestor’s AI map it onto your job structure. Each role then lists the skills it needs, with a recommended level for each career stage. The AI suggests the skills for each role, scores every skill against a role with its reasoning, and writes level descriptions from beginner to advanced for any skill in your framework. It also suggests skills emerging in the market and advises on keeping the library current. All of that describes roles and the framework rather than individual people.

A person’s own skill level is set by people. Nestor offers a choice of assessments, such as self-review, manager review and endorsements from colleagues, to confirm how good someone is at a skill. In Nestor’s November 2023 description, the employee rates their skills from 1 to 5, and a rating appears on their profile only after their direct manager confirms the level. The manager’s part is a quick confirmation that a level has or has not been reached, with no discussion or development plan attached. Skills from earlier jobs work differently: employees rate those themselves, and they appear on the profile without a manager’s approval.

Levels are set for each skill according to what each role requires, on a scale from 1 (“Aware of”) to 5 (“Advanced”) that can be customised. Performance reviews and 360 feedback add further ratings of the same skills. In a skills-based performance review, the employee and their manager each rate every skill on the same 1 to 5 scale, and the two ratings are compared. A 360 feedback round collects views from up to four directions: the employee, their manager, their peers and their direct reports.

Where the AI deals with individual people, it makes suggestions. Managers get suggested skills for their direct reports, and employees get suggestions of adjacent skills they might have. Since the redesign in March 2026, role matching, career-path recommendations and learning suggestions are done by the platform itself rather than set up by users. Nestor’s chief executive wrote in December 2025 that skills mapping should not depend on periodic reviews or manual upkeep, that it should “evolve as people work, learn, and move”, and that “this is what we’re working toward”, so ask on the demo which parts of that work today.

Nestor connects to HR systems, calendars and productivity apps. Its HR data connections include Workday, SAP, ADP, UKG, Personio, HiBob, BambooHR, Rippling and Deel, and its single sign-on providers include Okta, OneLogin and Microsoft Azure. If you would rather not connect a system at the start, people, roles, skills and organisation structure can also be loaded from spreadsheet files.

Nestor redesigned the product in March 2026, and the detail on how a self-rating reaches the profile, how skills from earlier jobs are added, how reviews compare ratings and how the scale is set dates from 2023. Customisable proficiency levels are still on the current price list, and Nestor publishes no product documentation, so the demo is where you check that the rest still works this way.

Nestor’s AI helps you describe roles and suggests what people might know, and every level on a person’s profile comes from someone rating it, so a Nestor skills picture is a record of what your people and their managers have agreed.

Its figures

What its figures measure

Nestor publishes figures on one customer’s results, on set-up time, adoption, user ratings and admin time. Each needs a named customer and a stated measure before it can support a decision you will have to defend.

25% of employees made internal career changesOrange

At Orange, 25% of employees made internal career changes and more than 20% of open roles were filled internally. Orange used all four modules, starting with performance management and team culture and adding skills in the second phase, so the figures measure the whole programme rather than the skills module alone. The headcount given is Orange Group’s 136,000 employees in 26 countries, so ask how many of them use Nestor.

Skills mapped to roles in under three weeksSet-up time

Nestor maps skills to job roles “in less than 3 weeks”, which covers the set-up. Frigotehnica, part of VINCI Energies Romania with 200 to 1,000 employees, describes the rollout: “We successfully implemented the platform in two countries within just two years.” Build your own timetable around getting the product used by your people as well as around the set-up.

98% adoption rateAdoption

Nestor gives a 98% adoption rate. Before it goes into a business case, ask what counts as adoption, among whom, and at which customers.

#1 easiest to use, and a Net Promoter Score of 100G2, a software review site

Nestor was ranked easiest to use in G2’s Spring 2025 skills management rankings, on a score of 8.8, and G2 reviewers gave it a Net Promoter Score of 100 in autumn 2024, a measure of how readily users would recommend the product. A score from a handful of reviewers tells you far less than one from hundreds, so ask Nestor how many reviews each rests on.

“3x less admin time”Admin time

Nestor promises “3x less admin time”, and its chief executive says automation has saved up to 80% of time on routine tasks “in some cases”. Ask which customer each figure comes from and how the saving was worked out.

Fit

Where Nestor makes sense

You want every skill level traceable to people

A level on Nestor comes from the employee’s own rating, confirmed by their manager and endorsed by colleagues, and Nestor includes employee, manager and peer evaluations with an evaluation history. When an employee questions a level, there is a record of the ratings behind it. Skills from earlier jobs are the exception to manager confirmation: the employee rates them alone and they appear on the profile without the manager’s approval, so the record behind those levels is the employee’s own rating.

You have no skills framework yet

With Nestor’s ready-made library, AI suggestions for the skills each role needs and AI-written level descriptions from beginner to advanced, your HR team starts from a draft rather than a blank sheet.

You want skills, reviews and 360 feedback in one product

Nestor runs skills alongside performance reviews, objectives and 360 feedback, and its skills-based reviews set the employee’s rating of each skill beside their manager’s. Nestor serves organisations from 200 to more than 10,000 employees, and four of its six customer stories are at 200 to 1,000 employees, so if you have more than 1,000 people, ask for a reference nearer your own headcount.

You are preparing for EU pay transparency

Nestor sells help turning the job titles already in your HR system into a consistent, skills-based structure of roles, with what it calls “a defensible evidence trail for every pay decision”. That is work on roles rather than on individual people, and it starts from records you already hold.

Limits

Where it falls short

Your purchasing rules favour a large, well-funded supplier

The company behind Nestor is Marionette Studio, Inc., which does business as Nestor, so use that name when your procurement team runs its supplier checks. It has between 11 and 50 employees. It joined Y Combinator, a start-up programme, in 2018, and its last announced funding is a $2 million early-stage round in December 2022, led by Eleven Ventures, with no funding, acquisition or layoffs announced since. It was named to Deloitte’s EMEA Technology Fast 500 list in 2024, and in March 2026 it launched a new logo and a redesigned product. The company is still trading and still developing its product, but it is small, so check it against your purchasing rules before the demo rather than after.

You want skills worked out from the work itself

Nestor does not read work tools such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, GitHub, Confluence or Salesforce for skills, and it does not work skills out from CVs or LinkedIn profiles. If you choose Nestor, plan on rating rounds rather than on profiles that update themselves.

Your managers will not keep confirming ratings

In Nestor’s 2023 description, a self-rating stays off the profile until the direct manager confirms it, and the manager’s part is a quick yes or no on the level. If managers fall behind on those confirmations, employees’ own ratings stay off their profiles, so the skills picture you report from is only as complete as your managers keep it.

You need a level proven by a test

Levels are confirmed through ratings by the employee, the manager and colleagues, and in performance reviews and 360 feedback. Certifications are among Nestor’s skills features, so if a role needs proven competence, ask on the demo whether a certification or a test result can set someone’s level, and where it would appear.

You need a learning or recruitment system connected from day one

Nestor offers ready-made connections to HR, learning, recruitment and single sign-on systems, and builds custom ones on enterprise plans. The learning system it names is Kallidus. Ask which learning and recruitment connections are live at a customer today, and speak to that customer.

You want a reference that uses the skills module at scale

Of Nestor’s six customer stories, Orange lists all four modules and Arcadia, a private healthcare network in north-east Romania, lists the skills and performance modules. Frigotehnica and Extern use the performance and development modules, HB Reavis was running a pilot group whose first skills assessments were nearing completion, and Raiffeisen Bank used the skills module to run a 360-degree survey on agile behaviours it had run before, which its HR specialist says now runs on “a more modern and user-friendly platform”. Orange is the only story at more than 5,000 employees, and five of the six are in Europe, with Extern in the US. Nestor counts Fortune 500 companies among its customers, so ask which ones use the skills module and whether you can speak to one in your region.

Your security and data protection teams will want documents before the demo. Nestor is SOC 2 Type 2 certified, compliant with GDPR and CCPA (the European and Californian privacy laws), and ISO 27001 compliant. It hosts on Amazon Web Services, keeps each customer’s data in a separate database, gives enterprise customers servers that no other customer shares, and keeps EU data in the EU and US data in the US. It publishes no data processing agreement or list of the companies that process data on its behalf, and its privacy policy covers the website rather than the employee data you would put into the product. Ask for the SOC 2 report, the ISO 27001 position and the contract documents early, because this product would hold your people’s ratings and reviews.
Price and exit

What it costs, and what leaving involves

Nestor prices its three plans by quote after a demo, and the price scales with your number of employees and the features you choose. Nestor says it costs less than Gloat, which you can test once you hold both quotes.

Essentials is usually for up to 150 users, Premium for 150 to 500 users and Enterprise for 500 or more, and no minimum number of users, contract value or contract length is published. Essentials includes the AI features, the skills library, multiple languages and single sign-on. Premium adds what Nestor calls its HR-AI Companion, custom branding and API access, the route other software uses to exchange data with Nestor. Enterprise adds a service level agreement, dedicated servers and custom integrations. Every plan comes with an implementation consultant to help with set-up, integrations and launch. If your headcount sits near 150 or 500, ask which plan the quote assumes: near 150 that decides whether you get API access, and near 500 whether you get a service level agreement and dedicated servers.

If you look for Nestor’s price elsewhere online, check which product a listing is for. Capterra, a software review site, shows “NESTOR”, in capitals, from €799 per month per user. That listing is SVITEX’s cash-register software for catering, and Capterra lists the HR platform separately as “Nestor”.

The other cost to settle before you sign is what leaving would involve. You can load skills, job roles, users and organisation structure from spreadsheet files and download reports as spreadsheet files, and API access comes with the Premium and Enterprise plans. Nestor publishes no customer terms, so ask what a full export contains and what happens to your data when the contract ends. A product like this builds its value from people’s ratings, confirmations and reviews over time, and that history is what you would lose, so get a complete export, in a documented format, written into the contract.

There is a second route to this. The same job, built on the systems you already run, is usually a narrower piece of work, and we have mapped what that version looks like. See it as an agent

Before you sign

What to ask Nestor

  1. Show us, live, how one skill and its level get onto one employee’s profile. Who enters it, who confirms it, and what does the profile show if the manager never confirms? Is the rule in your November 2023 article, that a self-rating appears only after the manager confirms it, still how it works?
  2. Your chief executive wrote in December 2025 that skills which keep up as people work are what you are “working toward”. Apart from ratings, confirmations, endorsements and reviews, what can add or change a level on someone’s profile today, and what is planned, with dates?
  3. Which learning and recruitment systems do you connect to today, and does any learning data come in from Kallidus? Can we speak to a customer using one of those connections?
  4. Please send your SOC 2 Type 2 report, your customer terms and your data processing agreement, and tell us whether you are certified to ISO 27001 or follow it without certification.
  5. Where will our employees’ data be stored, which other companies process it for you, and does any outside AI provider receive it?
  6. Which Orange country business uses Nestor, and how many employees are on it? Can we talk to a customer using the skills module across more than 1,000 people?
  7. At a customer a year after launch, what share of employees have manager-confirmed skills profiles, and how many of those profiles were updated in the last six months?
  8. For our headcount and the modules we need, what is the price per employee per year, what is the minimum term, and do we need the Premium plan’s API access to get our own data out?
  9. When we leave, can we export every employee’s skills, levels, confirmations, endorsements and review history in a documented format, and will you write that into the contract?
Other options

Alternatives to Nestor, including buying nothing

The closest alternatives to Nestor are Microsoft People Skills and TechWolf, which work skills out from people’s work, the skills modules in Workday Skills Cloud and SAP Talent Intelligence Hub if you already run either, and a trial round of ratings with no software at all.

The cheapest route is to try a rating round before you buy anything. Run one round with one team in a spreadsheet and see whether the managers take part. If they don’t, that is the thing to work on before you buy any software, because a product that waits for managers to confirm ratings works only as far as your managers do.

If a job structure for the EU pay transparency rules is what you need, start with your roles rather than with each person’s skills. Nestor sells its product as modules and has its own pay transparency offering, so ask what that work costs on its own before you add a skills inventory.

If you want skills worked out from the work people already do, our guide covers two products built for that. Microsoft People Skills works out skills from what people do in Microsoft 365 only, and costs $0 extra, so far, with a Copilot or Viva licence. Microsoft says it is not designed for promotion or pay decisions, and its proficiency levels are not described in Microsoft’s People Skills documentation. The other is TechWolf, whose price is not published, and the smallest company it names in a case study has about 5,000 people, so if your headcount is lower, ask whether it works with companies your size.

If you already run Workday or SAP, both of which Nestor connects to, check what your existing contract covers for skills before you buy a second system to hold them. In SAP SuccessFactors, having the software work out skills automatically needs a separately purchased AI units licence.

Our guide to skills intelligence software sets out the other products that ask people to rate themselves, the products built to read people’s work, and which kind suits each job you might be buying for.

Sources and method

Unless another source is named below, every statement about Nestor comes from Nestor’s own website, articles, customer stories and LinkedIn posts, or from its Y Combinator listing, all read on 14 September 2026. What Nestor publishes about its own product is taken as its description of that product. Where we say something is not published, we checked Nestor’s site for it on the same day. The finding that Nestor has announced no funding, acquisition or layoffs since December 2022 covers Nestor’s own site and Google News. The Capterra name clash and the description of Kallidus come from those two sites, read the same day. Facts about Microsoft People Skills, TechWolf and SAP come from each company’s own documentation, and the list below gives the date each was checked.

Nestor website
Nestor articles and announcements
Nestor customer stories
Other sources
Microsoft People Skills, TechWolf and SAP