The 100 Most Transparent Tech Companies of 2021

The importance of transparency in an organization cannot be overstated. Transparency builds trust and attracts better talent. It can also increase employee retention and bring in loyal new users.

In Slack’s 2018 Future of Work study, 87% of workers said they were seeking transparency in their next job. Transparency is also the number one factor in contributing to employee happiness, according to a 2013 study of more than 40,000 workers at 300 companies.

Organizations that do open themselves up stand more to gain than lose in scrutiny and competition. 94% of consumers prefer brands that practice transparency, meaning there are customers out there looking to interact primarily with transparent brands.

Internally, being open can combat resources wasted through employee disengagement and mistrust, which ultimately hurts a company’s bottom line.

There is no right way to practice organizational transparency. Some startups build in public, publishing detailed reports on revenue, churn, growth and numbers on social media or public forums. Others operate transparency internally, which can look like a weekly all-hands where key company metrics are discussed or open office hours where the floor is open for employees to ask leadership questions.

We chose the companies on this list because of how they operate, and less about the products they deliver (though we took that into account, too). Using information from our own database, interviews, nominations, company websites and other public documents, The Org has selected 100 tech companies that we believe are operating the most transparently in 2021—and succeeding because of it.

We ranked all 100 companies by these 10 factors after our research. We also selected winners for each category of transparency that we ranked for. Check out who made this year’s list below.

1. Buffer: Buffer has been a transparency trailblazer since its founding in 2010. The social media marketing platform is known across the industry for publishing details about its operations, growth and numbers and salary information in an accessible way on its website. It’s also transparent about its people. Its public org chart has 88 members.

Transparency is one of its core values and a team member shared last year in our 2020 list that this value has helped their remote workforce establish a culture of trust.

2. Gitlab: Topping our transparent list last year, GitLab is another pioneer of pulling back the curtain into its internal operations. All company OKRs are published on the website, and the open-source DevOps platform has been building its remote operation in public for the past seven years — from support tickets to Slack messages and even live-stream bug fixes.

3. Front: Founder and CEO Mathilde Collin is passionate about making Front as transparent as possible. She defines transparency as making relevant information and context easily accessible so that everyone can be more efficient and effective. Internally, Front employees share goals, metrics and progress no matter what position. Externally, its product roadmap and fundraising decks are public.

4. Stripe: Stripe has fostered a contrarian culture simply by having a flat organizational structure, where there are no job titles and employees are measured by their input rather than experience. But the fintech has gone to great lengths to be transparent about its own hiring process, actively contributing to open-source projects and making its own diversity stats public.

5. Adobe: Adobe has embedded transparency in its culture in a practical and tangible way. It is a leader in the equal pay movement, with the whole company achieving pay parity in 2018. It also publishes detailed reports about its own diversity, equity and inclusion and is an advocate for corporate responsibility.

6. Netflix: Netflix has been a champion of open-source information for developers and engineers everywhere. The company also runs its own podcast discussing its hiring process and providing insight to current and future employees on how to best get noticed.

7. Figma: Figma’s collaborative design tool makes it easier for companies to transparently share projects they are working on in real time. It also shares the progress and strategy behind several of its features on its company blog, and its team members have publicly chronicled what it really has been like to work remotely since it was announced in 2020.

8. Uber Similar to Netflix, Uber also has a transparent resource for engineers that includes open-source code and answers to complex coding issues. On its business side, it also publishes a yearly transparency report outlining the volume and nature of safety incidents, such as sexual assaults, that occur during app-facilitated interactions in the offline world. (It’s the only tech platform that currently does something like this, including dating apps.)

9. DISQO: Los Angeles startup DISQO is developing a unique culture of transparency in real time, along with the rest of the business. Operationally, transparency is a core value, practiced in the form of collaboration on cross-functional projects across the business. It’s also a founding principle of their consumer insights product and platform that invites participants to openly share their data in exchange for rewards, an irregularity in the marketing industry.

10. GreyNoise Intelligence: Cybersecurity startup GreyNoise has made its organizational chart public on its careers page so prospective candidates can see who they would be working with. They also include information on its DE&I policy, concrete steps of its interview process and information on how to prepare for interviews.

11. Airbnb: Airbnb has placed an extra emphasis on open-source projects, going further than just creating a profile on GitHub and creating an entire website just for engineers and developers to learn.

12. Change.org The petition and social change website releases financials, roadmaps, and business strategy within its annual Impact Report. In 2019, Change.org also published the goals and strategies of a new Diversity and Inclusion Leadership Council alongside its models and revenue numbers.

13. Doorvest: Doorvest not only makes salaries public to its employees internally — it also links out to a spreadsheet listing what each title at the company makes. In addition, Doorvest breaks down the thought process and formulas behind each salary, noting that negotiations are not accepted as it believes “better negotiators aren’t better employees.”

14. Gumroad: As a decentralized, distributed workforce, Gumroad has built its business in public to help both its users and its workforce of freelancers have a better understanding of what business strategies are. Founder Sahil Lavingia has shown off the more vulnerable sides of building a startup, documenting Gumroad’s biggest operational failures online as well as its successes.

15. Squarespace: Squarespace published a “20 Key Moments in 2021” list this year, where it outlined the work its internal teams did to prioritize its employee experience. This included adding new touchpoints for employees to communicate with leadership and hosting more than 50 employee events for workers to connect and learn throughout the year.

16. Procore: Austin-based Procore has made an effort to scale its culture of transparency at the same pace as the rest of the business. CEO Tooey Courtemanche holds quarterly “All Company Updates” meetings where employees are encouraged to attend and ask questions about that quarter’s board meeting and company outcomes.

17. Shutterstock: Internally, the senior leadership at this stock photo website provides full roadmap and planning to the entire company on a biweekly basis, and externally, the company empowers photographers to get discovered, recognized and paid for their work within the historically opaque photo rights market.

18. Cuttles: The Danish startup-builder makes sure the development tools they offer clients give visibility of the whole operation to everyone at the organization, from transparent cap tables to product roadmaps to equity shares to investor relations.

19. Otis: Otis is democratizing fields that have previously thrived on opacity by allowing anyone to invest in pieces of art, fashion and culture through NFTs and shared investments. The company also publishes its investor updates to the public and has an end-to-end application and hiring process.

20. Stack Overflow: As an open community for developers, Stack Overflow has been built in public from the beginning. It also publishes resources on its blog regularly documenting new product launches and advice on computer programming.

21. Asana: Leadership at Asana publishes detailed notes about what was discussed at board meetings and upper-level management huddles rather than keeping this information under wraps. This often includes context around company direction and goals.

22. Shippo: Shippo makes its interview process transparent by posting the exact step-by-step process candidates go through on its jobs page. Multiple team members have been interviewed for public blogs about what it's like to work on their teams, and have placed an emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion.

23. BareMetrics: Not only does BareMetrics make it possible for companies to build in public, the analytics and insights platform has joined its own Open Startups program. The program allows startups to share and track key metrics like revenue, churn and growth rates easily and publicly on its website.

24. Abzu: Since its founding in 2018, the Copenhagen and Barcelona-based startup has been building out fully transparent and explainable AI technology. Internally, salaries are transparent, board material is sent out to all employees and everything is accessible on the company drive.

25. Contentful: Contentful releases detailed case studies on how their users use its product, and the specific value-add of doing so. It also maintains a detailed blog where it explains its product roadmap and how Contentful is used.

26. FullStack Labs: As the tech company with the largest public org chart on The Org, FullStack Labs has shown off its entire 200-person team, including the entirety of its engineering and technical team.

27. Twitter: Fostering a safe and thriving culture is a core value at Twitter, which was highlighted by new CEO Parag Agrawal’s first email memo sent out to employees. On top of its culture, Twitter runs an entire Transparency Center to triage requests about information. It also provided insight to its moderation philosophy in the lead-up to the November presidential election and their efforts to stop disinformation — more than other social media platforms.

28. Notus: Founder and CEO Yuliya Bel has been intentional about building in public and creating a transparent culture. Founder salaries are shared with new candidates during the interview process so they have an understanding of how the company operates. Notus is also open about its investor thesis, a document used to determine which investors can become partners in long-term rounds.

29. Notion: Notion publishes an open product development roadmap, letting customers know exactly what it’s prioritizing and what it’s going to work on next. It’s also put out pieces detailing how it uses its own product internally, a tool used by several other companies on this list to share important company goals, strategies and numbers.

30. Lyft: Diversity and Inclusion is one of Lyft’s core principles, and the ride-sharing app demonstrates living that value by its annual D&I reports. The report documents diversity statistics at the company, as well as revealing its goals and hiring plans set in motion to make sure each team closes the gap on its workforce demographics.

31. On Deck: On Deck not only provides a valuable resource to entrepreneurs through its accelerator program and community, but the product and business have been built entirely in public. Founders Erik Torenburg and David Booth have built and recruited the starting team in public and share its operating principles on its careers page.

32. Witch Doctor Gaming: Besides the power move of adding screen names to employees’ position pages in its public org chart, Witch Doctor Gaming was built as an open and transparent organization. They engage enthusiastically in sharing business info on social media and have a level of responsiveness and engagement with their fan community that is uncommon.

33. Scalero: All financials at this email marketing firm are in the open for any employee to access. A re-structure of its org chart was done in 2021, and it used The Org to publicly describe changes to the company. Its interview process also attempts to remove bias by asking candidates to do sample work and take assessments.

34. Trustpage: Trustpage’s product is all about transparency. Its “Trust Center” platform is used by companies to transparently communicate with their customers (and the public) the full extent of its security posture and, in doing so, how it protects the data it processes. It also has a public org chart documenting all of its employees.

35. All Web Leads Transparency runs so deep at All Web Leads that all company KPIs are posted on the office walls. The marketing tech business seeks out candidates who value trust and transparency in its interview process in order to maintain its hyper transparent culture.

36. Elpha: Online community forum Elpha is a place where women in the tech industry can communicate openly about everything from negotiating and team dynamics to Q&As and diversity. Its Transparent Salary Database is available to anyone with a free Elpha account and reveals anonymous salaries of real Elpha users by title, race, location and years of experience.

37. MatcHR: MatcHR has been documenting its startup journey publicly on its LinkedIn and Medium, and even addressed its decision to layoff 60% of its workers during COVID-19. It also published its entire employee handbook which includes its processes, management style and tools they use.

38. Reddit: Reddit’s yearly transparency report provides insight into its post moderation, government requests and other administrative actions that might have impacted content on its platform.

39. Google: While Google has some definitive flaws when it comes to honest communication, it still has cultivated an open and public internal company culture. When new employees start, they get access to almost all the Google code, the OKRs, goals and objectives of every other employee. There are also weekly all-hands meetings where anyone can ask the founders questions about anything.

40. FORM: Before GoSpotCheck was acquired by FORM, it established transparency as a company value after all employees were asked to take a survey on what means the most to them. “Sharing information freely” was the top shared value. FORM employees have access to all company financials, management meeting notes and customer churn debriefs.

41. Morning Brew: Founders Austin Rief and Alex Lieberman frequently share wisdom on Twitter on how they built their newsletter business from scratch as college students. They regularly discuss company strategy and personal ambitions online and on Morning Brew’s media products.

42. Deel: Deel displays over 160 employees on its public org chart. The remote work and payroll management startup also provides services that enable hundreds of companies to be transparent with their workforce.

43. Iterable: Iterable's hiring focus zeroes in on diversity and inclusion. The company is transparent about using inclusive language in the interviewing process and offers current employees DE&I training as well.

44. BambooHR: One of the company’s five values is “be open.” Recognized by Glassdoor as a Transparent Workplace, BambooHR reinforces “being open” through internal communications, meeting themes, performance reviews and annual awards.

45. Templafy: Templafy practices transparency in a completely open and transparent all hands weekly meeting where anyone in the company is encouraged to share their work and receive feedback. The company also builds in the public and shares the growth of its organization and team in an active and transparent blog.

46. Duetto: Duetto uses benchmark data to help inform company leaders on pay disparities between different races, genders and other people at the company. The cloud technology company is also transparent about how its employees get raises.

47. Intercom: Intercom has built their company culture around internal communication as it has grown. The company holds a biweekly, ask-me-anything with its CEO, a Friday afternoon show-and-tell with individuals across the company, a weekly internal newsletter and cultivates a no-holds-bar style in Q&A sessions.

48. Nextmv: Nextmv publishes salary bands in all external job postings, as well as a clear outline of its job interview process. Internally, employees in all positions and at all levels have access to company financials, including exact salaries and equity of every team member.

49. dbt labs: As a product that gives analysts transparency into data, dbt labs embodies transparency by including its entire distributed team on its public org chart on The Org.

50. 3DLOOK: 3DLOOK’s entire team is accounted for on its public org chart. The company provides transparency externally on its social media accounts and careers page to give its distributed workforce as much information about their co-workers and the company culture as possible.

51. Hyperscience: Hyperscience's business automation platform is designed to make the entire operations of a business easily comprehensible, transparent, and available to all internal stakeholders. Its product hopes to enable companies to get a hold of and make available the basic details of its own operations.

52. Hubspot: Hubspot has a "No Door" policy in their office and manifests full transparency in their culture. All employees have full access to HubSpot's P&L statements, cash balances, slide decks for board meetings and long-term strategy information.

53. MetroMile: Car insurance startup MetroMile built trusting relationships with users, by being upfront about what data it was collecting from its physical trackers. Internally, its CEO holds weekly Q&A sessions with the 235+ person team and empowers even its most junior employees to ask questions.

54. SeatGeek: SeatGeek has been lauded by Harvard Business School in creating price transparency in the ticket market by making prices across resellers searchable and aggregating data to make the market better for consumers. That approach has won them acclaim with customers, who find it better and easier to navigate than the broader scammy world of ticket-buying.

55. Coinbase: Coinbase’s company blog shines a light into its internal processes such as step-by-step stages of the interview process and responses to legal action taken by the SEC against the company. It also has several conversations during the interview process dedicated to explaining what the culture and daily tasks are really like inside the company.

56. Course Hero: Course Hero’s online learning platform helps millions of students access study resources created by and for students and educators. The company promotes honesty and integrity as part of its mission and looks for transparent employee feedback. It openly posts its executives, board and academic advisors, and investors on its website.

57. Slack: Slack’s communication platform is a powerful tool that enables distributed teams to have an easy way to connect over all internal processes in a company. It has an extensive blog that regularly publishes workplace surveys (such as the data used in this article) and documents progress in internal transparency as well.

58. Minds: Minds is a fully open-sourced and decentralized social network dedicated to privacy and free expression. Its content moderation policy is accessible on its website and tracks how many posts were taken down and what actions were reported in real time.

59. FitBit: The fitness technology company FitBit collects valuable customer data related to health and behavior. To ease concerns of users wary about how this data is used, FitBit is open about which data points it collects, how it shares that data and how adult data collections differ from children’s.

60. Ro: Ro’s mission is rooted in transparency. Its focus is to make information about healthcare, diagnosis, pricing and policy more accessible and publicly available.

61. Glitch: To ensure fair pay at their company, Glitch looked to making salary bands completely transparent on internal job postings. The move has helped the software maker beyond just pay parity. Applications to jobs have increased, candidate feedback is more positive and has earned the company praise on social media.

62. Remix: Remix is building a platform to improve transparency and empower cities to plan the best possible transportation system. Along with operating transparently internally, its product gives cities and citizens visibility into how they can operate better and more efficiently.

63. Pearmill: Every week, co-founder and President Nima Gardideh writes an essay about building in public that includes lessons learned from his business that week. Topics include plans for organizational structure, forms of management and leadership.

64. Disney: The Disney Institute, which does Disney's thinking on its management and culture, is a strong advocate of workplace transparency, practicing it throughout the company. Glassdoor reviews from former employees highlight that it "exudes transparency, kindness and fairness" and that "integrity and transparency" are core values for staff members.

65. Nebullam: CEO and co-founder Clay Mooney wanted to build his indoor farmtech company in public after judging a local pitch competition in 2020. Shocked by how secretive and protective of company information founders were, Mooney went the other way. Now a D2C startup, the company’s revenue, churn and growth numbers are all public.

66. Fast: The head honchos at online checkout startup Fast tweet out strategy updates, down to how the company uses quizzes to grab the attention of loyal customers.

67. Wikimedia Foundation: The core mission of the Wikimedia foundation is to support free access to the sum of all human knowledge. This orients the organization towards a culture of information sharing and openness, especially in how it uses and shares data. Its yearly transparency reports give a rundown of how the company answers outside requests for data and what they have released.

68. Zappos: Zappos ratherly famously created a “vendor extranet,” giving its vendors complete visibility into its business and core numbers.

69. Cognizant: Cognizant was recognized on the 2021 Transparency Awards list for Best Overall Corporate Disclosure, meaning it created meaningful and user-friendly corporate disclosure agreements that spanned its regulatory documents and websites.

70. CA Technologies: CA Technologies practices transparency by talking through all major business decisions with the rest of the company. The result has seen better alternate proposals and happier employees.

71. Convert Kit: Part of the Open Startups movement, ConvertKit makes all of its growth metrics publicly available on BareMetrics.

72. Atlassian: This dual-CEO company focuses its product offerings on breaking team silos and improving the internal flow of information through transparency. In its collaboration offerings, the company highlights that 87% of employees want to work for transparent and open companies, and that 60% wish their company used technology to make their work more visible internally.

73. Ecologi: Another company in the Open Startups movement, Ecologi posts their revenue and membership statistics on its website. It also posts other growth metrics on BareMetrics.

74. RocketChat: RocketChat brings visibility into its team by placing its entire workforce on its public org chart. The open-source communication platform also has an extensive culture and employee handbook available online.

75. Ghost: Ghost was started back in April 2013 as an open-source technology platform for journalism. The founders have built the entire business in public and all of its growth metrics are updated in real time on its website.

76. IBM: IBM is a long-time champion of trust and transparency in technology, pioneering the release of yearly data transparency reports. Its AI initiative in particular focuses on making AI explainable, open-source, public and trustworthy through a variety of public disclosures and open software projects.

77. Microsoft: Microsoft topped the 2021 Transparency Awards for Information Technology, its first time ever appearing in the top 20. Its first-of-its-kind Transparency Center deals with information sharing and partnerships to share its information in an ethical way. It also pivoted to focus more on disclosure and prevention in matters of data security, employing bug bounties and open change-logs.

78. Superhuman: Superhuman has a famously flat structure and approach to customers. For its first years of operation, every new Superhuman user was given one-on-one onboarding with the CEO or a major figure at the startup. It’s cultivated an incredibly open approach to customers and are more engaged and responsive than its peers.

79. Duda: The executive team at Duda holds company-wide, quarterly business reviews where they share information about finances, performance metrics and activities around the company. The product team also shares the full Duda roadmap twice a year.

80. AllVoices: AllVoices is an anonymous reporting tool employees use to report harassment or bias to their leadership. The company uses their own reporting tool internally and extensively in an effort to boost transparency about employees’ experiences and build a "bottom-up '' culture. They also encourage anonymous questions in advance of all-hands meetings, to be answered in front of the whole group.

81. Updater: Employee reviews of Updater emphasize the internal culture of transparency, which is also emphasized in its team blog and culture pages, which go deep into its commitments to internal communications.

82. Unbounce: Unbounce joined in on the transparency trend in 2014 through its detailed company blog posts. Several employees have been asked to contribute their own experiences to the blog. CEO and Founder Rick Perrault has also discussed the benefits of sharing his company’s financials and KPIs internally.

83. Lightyear Health: Lightyear Health has changed its candidate experience over time to make its hiring process more transparent. Its job descriptions now include more information on Lightyear’s mission and values, FAQ documents and compensation ranges to help level the playing field for all applicants.

84. VTS: VTS emphasizes the role that transparency plays in the interview process through responsiveness. Hiring managers are encouraged to respond to all candidates in a timely manner. The company also has a separate “values interview” for all candidates to make sure future employees embody the company culture.

85. Refersion: Refersion tries to be as transparent as possible in every step of its interview process, starting with adding compensation, benefits and training to its job descriptions. It invests heavily in training its hiring managers so it gets the most value out of all interviews and is upfront about how much its culture plays into its decision.

86. Ginger: CEO Russell Glass has publicly shared his philosophy that “vulnerability is transparency.” At the mental health startup, openness and collaboration are highly encouraged so that stronger trusting relationships are built between employees.

87. Pento: Pento posts a public employee handbook and detailed look at its company as a Notion doc, which provides a deep level of insight into its operations and vision as a company. It also makes several internal company documents publicly available this way.

88. Brex: Chief People Officer Neal Narayani once shared that transparency is practiced at Brex through accountability. Leaders are encouraged to own up to mistakes and to create an open dialogue with employees if something goes wrong. Additionally, the company actively seeks diversity in thought to make sure all perspectives are considered in a decision.

89. OCC: OCC’s CEO provides company updates about its product roadmap and company strategy to all employees through all hands meetings and Q&As.

90. Buildout: One of the company values at Buildout is "information transparency." Any employee is allowed to ask leadership any question, and vulnerability is a trait shared throughout leadership.

91. Twitch: Twitch launched a program to create transparency in sponsored content and promotions, making the often-unclear world of streamer product endorsements more open so consumers can be better informed. They also created moderation procedures which expose more information to users and creators than is typical.

92. Scribd: As described in a company blog post about "Tools for transparency," Scribd enables transparency for all kinds of organizations by making it easier for them to make documents accessible and public without hosting them themselves or paying exorbitantly.

93. Amherst: Amherst Labs defines transparency as knowledge. This knowledge is delivered on various topics, such as company decision-making, process, workflow, policies and ideas.

94. Noodle: Noodle partners argue that the company is making a smarter way to search for schools through a process which is more transparent, releasing more information on employment at schools than any other platform and making the whole process more informative and open.

95. Groove: Groove was a pioneer of building in public, documenting its work to reach its revenue goal of $100,000 in 2013. It’s been running a hyper-transparent blog since around 2015 that shares its business challenges, failures and new strategies.

96. Squarefoot: Squarefoot CEO Jonathan Wasserstrum combats distrust by having biweekly, all-hands meetings where anyone is free to ask him questions, and group discussions about the state of the business are encouraged.

97. StrongDM: StrongDM lists transparency as one of its company values. A proxy that manages and audits access to databases, servers, clusters and web apps, StrongDM demonstrates its transparency with the audit trail its product provides, its transparent pricing scheme and its company blog and roadmap.

98. Osmind: Osmind is a non-profit mental health company that hosts an open transparent forum for mental health care patients and providers to openly discuss conditions and treatments. It also hosts an open research platform for collaboration among academics and physicians in mental health.

99. Kickstarter: Not only is Kickstarter now unionized, but the company also led efforts to create a new series of guidelines to make its project descriptions more transparent and honest. As a B Corp, Kickstarter also puts out a yearly public benefit statement on the benefit it gives the world.

100. Verizon: Verizon is the winner of the 2021 Transparency Awards for Telecommunications Service. It was selected for its accessible corporate disclosure agreements and making information to investors accessible and consumable.