17 October 2025
What is Totara Perform, and is it right for you?
Jonny McAlister
Head of Customer Experience
Totara Perform is a performance management system that combines both modern and traditional performance management processes to achieve continuous performance management.
It’s part of the Totara Suite of learning and performance management tools. In common with Totara Learn, the suite’s learning management system, it is a flexible and highly customisable platform. As such, it is designed to help you do performance management your way.
Totara Perform’s main purposes are to increase productivity, improve performance and boost employee retention through its array of performance management tools. We’ll discuss exactly how it achieves those things in the course of this article.
What is continuous performance management?
Continuous performance management is a form of performance management that encourages frequent and ongoing feedback, coaching and development among employees.
Previously, performance management was largely reliant on formal annual performance reviews between employees and their managers.
Continuous performance management is based on more regular check-ins and appraisals. This is designed to enable a more responsive approach to performance improvement. It ensures employee goals and organisational objectives are regularly aligned and realigned.
Totara Perform provides an infrastructure for both modern continuous performance management processes and more traditional performance management methods, so organisations enjoy the benefits of both approaches.
What are the key Totara Perform benefits?
There are several advantages of using Totara Perform within your organisation. They include:
✅ Building supportive work environments
With check-ins, reviews and simple feedback options, Totara Perform makes it easier to build a coaching or mentoring culture within your organisation.
✅ Improving performance through targeted, skills-based learning
Totara Perform uses competency profiles. This means you can align performance reviews with personalised learning plans to boost performance in key areas.
✅ Increasing productivity with adaptive appraisals
With 360-degree feedback and regular check-ins, you can keep managers and their teams on the same page to achieve greater productivity across your organisation. Align company, team and individual goals for better results.
✅ Boosting staff retention
Helping employees feel supported, continuously developing their performance through meaningful feedback and identifying opportunities for career development increases the likelihood of them staying with your organisation.
✅ Doing performance management your way
Totara Perform’s open-source frameworks give you the flexibility to put in place the performance management process that works for your organisation. This is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to replicate using proprietary performance management software.
Totara Perform features
You might be wondering how Totara Perform works as a performance appraisal system. Some of its key features include:
✳️ Performance review workflow builder
An incredibly versatile performance review builder enables you to model a performance appraisal system that perfectly matches your organisation’s structures, processes and priorities.
✳️ Flexible check-ins
Keep managers and employees in regular contact with each other through frequent, flexible check-ins that work for everyone. Ensuring staff and leaders are aligned helps to boost productivity across the board.
✳️ 360-degree feedback
Totara Perform works as a 360 appraisal system by creating an environment where individual employees, their managers and peers can share consolidated feedback on performance.
✳️ Continuous performance management tools
Continually enhance existing appraisal processes or create new ones as needed. Totara Perform offers a variety of check-ins, feedback and other tools that consistently improve performance.
✳️ Traditional and modern performance management
Deploy your preferred goal-setting frameworks and combine them with the latest adaptive appraisals to get the best of proven and cutting-edge performance management techniques.
✳️ Intuitive performance insights
A powerful reporting system gives you all the information you need to track performance across your organisation. This includes easily identifying top performers and employees who need extra support.
✳️ Skills gap tracking
Closely linked with the performance insights mentioned above, Totara Perform’s powerful reporting system also enables you to track and close skills gaps. See where individuals, teams and the organisation as a whole are lacking key competencies, then put in place the measures to build those skills.
✳️ Seamless human capital management integration
As well as integrating with Totara Learn, Totara Perform also integrates with HR systems and other human capital management software, including payroll, recruitment and talent management. This saves enormous admin time and resources, while also ensuring wider business objectives are closely aligned with performance management.
Do I need Totara Perform?
If you’re looking for a versatile, customisable performance review software or employee evaluation software for your organisation, Totara Perform is a great option.
The platform’s open-source framework provides the foundation for an employee evaluation tool that can be moulded and tailored to how your organisation works.
If you’re already using Totara Learn as your LMS — or you’re about to start using it — adopting Totara Perform as your performance management system is a no-brainer.
The two platforms dovetail perfectly to give you a comprehensive approach to both performance and development within your team.
How do Totara Perform and Totara Learn work together?
Totara Perform and Totara Learn are both based on competency frameworks. With Totara Perform, you can map skills to individual people and roles. You can also map competencies to different achievement levels, effectively creating degrees of competency or indicating proficiency levels of a particular skill.
Within Totara Perform, managers can create competency assignments to encourage individual users or a group of users to develop particular skills.
This can be aligned with learning pathways within Totara Learn, so each learner can complete courses or activities on your LMS that will enable them to develop the required competency.
Back in Totara Perform, managers can hold regular check-ins to monitor their team members’ competency and performance levels, then adapt or update competency assignments as needed.
By integrating Totara Learn and Totara Perform, you connect your organisation’s competency management processes with its learning and development priorities.
By connecting L&D with performance-related goals, you’re making learning more meaningful and engaging for the individual as well as making it more focused and strategic for the organisation. This makes Totara Perform a powerful piece of performance evaluation software.
See Totara Perform in action
Keen to take a closer look at some of the features we’ve discussed? Take a Totara Perform demo with our learning technology actions to see how everything works.
Just fill out the form and we’ll be in touch to arrange a demo.
