Fellow vs 15Five: Best 1:1 Meeting Tool for New Managers
March 19, 2026
You just got promoted, you have your first round of 1:1s coming up, and you’re staring at a blank Google Doc wondering how to keep track of everything. You need a tool. The two names that keep coming up are Fellow and 15Five. I’ve used both extensively, and here’s the real story.
What These Tools Actually Do
Both Fellow and 15Five help you run better one-on-one meetings. They give you shared agendas, action item tracking, and a history of past conversations. But they approach the problem very differently.
Fellow is laser-focused on meetings. It’s a collaborative agenda tool that lives where your meetings happen. You build agendas together with your reports, take notes during the meeting, and track action items afterward.
15Five is a broader performance management platform. It includes 1:1 agendas, but also weekly check-ins, pulse surveys, OKR tracking, and review cycles. It’s trying to be your entire people management system.
The New Manager Perspective
Here’s what matters when you’re new to management: you need less, not more.
You’re already overwhelmed learning how to lead. The last thing you need is a platform with 14 features you don’t understand yet. You need something that helps you show up prepared for your 1:1s and remember what you talked about last time. That’s it.
This is where Fellow pulls ahead for most new managers.
Fellow: The Case For
Setup takes five minutes. You connect your calendar, invite your reports, and you’re running. There’s no configuration rabbit hole. No OKR frameworks to define before you can have a conversation.
The shared agenda is genuinely collaborative. Both you and your direct report can add items before the meeting. This is huge. It shifts 1:1s from “manager interrogation” to “our meeting.” Your reports start owning the agenda, which is exactly what you want.
Meeting notes are searchable and persistent. Three months from now, when you need to remember what you discussed about someone’s career goals, you can find it. This beats the scattered Google Docs approach every time.
It integrates with the tools you already use. Slack, Google Calendar, Outlook. It shows up where you work instead of making you go somewhere new.
Pricing is reasonable. The free tier covers the basics. The pro plan runs about $9/user/month and includes everything a new manager needs.
15Five: The Case For
If your company already uses 15Five, use 15Five. Seriously. Don’t introduce a second tool. The value of having everything in one system outweighs any UX advantages.
Weekly check-ins are genuinely useful. The async pulse check where reports answer a few questions before your 1:1 can surface things people won’t say face-to-face. Questions like “How are you feeling this week?” with a simple rating scale give you signal you’d otherwise miss.
The performance review integration matters long-term. If you’re going to be writing reviews in six months, having a trail of weekly check-ins and 1:1 notes in the same system is powerful. You’ll thank yourself during review season.
It scales better for larger organizations. If you’re managing managers, the cascading visibility in 15Five is valuable. But if you’re a first-time manager with 3-7 direct reports, you don’t need this yet.
Pricing starts around $4/user/month for the Engage tier, but the full Perform tier with 1:1s and reviews runs about $14/user/month.
Where Each Tool Falls Short
Fellow’s weakness is that it’s just meetings. If you want pulse surveys, engagement tracking, or performance reviews, you’ll need additional tools. For a new manager, I’d argue this is actually a strength disguised as a limitation.
15Five’s weakness is complexity. The onboarding takes longer. The interface has more going on. When you’re trying to prepare for a 1:1 in ten minutes, you don’t want to navigate past OKR dashboards and engagement analytics to find your agenda. It can feel like enterprise software when you just need a notebook.
The Verdict
If you’re a new manager picking your own tool: go with Fellow. It does the one thing you need right now and does it well. You can always add more tools later as your management practice matures.
If your company already has 15Five: use it. Learn it. The organizational buy-in matters more than individual tool preference.
If you’re not ready for either: a shared Google Doc works fine. Seriously. The tool matters less than the habit. If you want tips on what to actually discuss, check out how to run your first 1:1 meeting — the framework works regardless of what software you use.
And if you’re still in your first week figuring all this out, start with the first-week survival guide before worrying about tooling.
Bottom Line
Fellow wins for new managers because it’s simple, fast, and focused. 15Five wins for organizations that want an all-in-one performance platform. But the best 1:1 tool is the one you’ll actually use every week. Pick one, commit to it, and focus your energy on the conversations themselves — that’s what your team actually cares about.