Canonical reviews

3.2

49% would recommend to a friend

(440 total reviews)

Mark Shuttleworth

40% approve of CEO

46% positive business outlook

Canonical has an employee rating of 3.2 out of 5 stars, based on 440 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Canonical employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

440 reviews
3.0
Dec 16, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Full remote company. A lot of smart people, working with passion for their project. An engaging mission of the company. Precise and interesting rules for internal moves. Automatic salary review every six months. The real intention of the CEO is to excel in all aspects.

Cons

Too many internal processes to follow make up for more than half of your work time, while your own tasks get delayed. The result is that you need to work during holidays or weekends to keep up. 360 is good, but using it to harass employees makes it meaningless, as the whole company inflates the scores in an attempt to save their own teams. Internal moves are available only to the top 30% of 360 results, meaning that popularity is more important than real and measurable performance. Promotion tenures at level are too long: a graduate shall not wait ten years to become a mid-range technical engineer. The result is that good engineers leave because they get stuck and find better positions elsewhere. The woke system discriminates against males to push forward women, who receive special privileges and a much easier life. Diversity and equality are a pretest for women's specific privileges, training, and special treatments. Automatic increases are a good thing, but once you hit the salary cap of your role, you get stuck because you cannot get a promotion for five+ years. Highly stressful environment, not because of the work, but because of the highly time-consuming internal processes. Very poor product management and testing culture leads to low quality. Stress, poor company policies, low quality, impossible promotion times lead the best engineers to look for better offers.

3.0
Dec 15, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good perks, lot of travel, work quality is good

Cons

Stack ranking, 360 performance reviews means you have to make sure to keep everyone happy all the time

4.0
Nov 27, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Salary ranges are high, at least in Europe. Although they are moving to a compensation system which aims to normalise this. I.e. they want all engineers to be able to buy 500 cheesburgers per month, how much does this cost in their country? This kind of thing. The remote culture and that the whole company meets every 6 months is really awesome and you get to meet and interact with so many fantastic people. There are a lot of processes in place and rigor.

Cons

Sometimes it feels the we are developing software in a bubble. The evaluation system is weird, in which you get evaluated by your peers and 10% every year is out. This is turning more and more into a popularity contest, where teams are inclined to put good reviews on everyone, so that they don't lose members. And this keeps creating a positivity inflation in reviews

Viewing 19 - 21 of 440 Reviews

Glassdoor has 510 Canonical reviews submitted anonymously by Canonical employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Canonical is right for you.