Comparison · with sources
From the outside the two look alike: both sort people into types, and both are used for team development. But they answer different questions, and they do not rest on the same evidence. Here are the differences as they actually are.
This page is written by teachers who make a living teaching the Enneagram. You should know that as you read it. We have therefore made a point of including the MBTI’s strengths, and of writing out the Enneagram’s weaknesses rather than tucking them away. Every figure on the page can be checked in the sources at the bottom.
The MBTI rests on four either-or dimensions. You are one or the other on each, and the four letters combine into your type:
The Enneagram is not built on dimensions but on nine patterns of motivation. Each type has a basic fear and a basic desire, and those are what explain the behaviour. The nine types fall into three centres: the head centre (types 5, 6 and 7), the heart centre (types 2, 3 and 4) and the body centre (types 8, 9 and 1).
That is the difference that matters in practice. Two people can do exactly the same thing for two entirely different reasons. A type 3 and a type 1 may both work until ten at night. The 3 does it to reach the goal and be seen. The 1 does it because it is not good enough yet. The MBTI will register the same behaviour. The Enneagram asks what is driving it.
| The Enneagram | The MBTI | |
|---|---|---|
| Core question | Why do you do what you do? | How do you prefer to function? |
| Number of types | 9, plus wings, subtypes and levels of development | 16, built from 4 dimensions |
| Core concept | Basic fear and basic desire | Preference |
| Describes development? | Yes – direction under pressure and in security is part of the model | Only indirectly, through type development across life |
| Origin | Oscar Ichazo (the types, 1950s–1970) and Claudio Naranjo (the Western psychological version, from 1970) | Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, during the Second World War, on the basis of Jung’s Psychological Types from 1921 |
| Ownership | Nobody owns the model. Individual tests are trademarked | One trademark, one worldwide publisher since 1975 |
| Use for recruitment? | No | No – the publisher itself calls it unethical |
The MBTI is the better studied of the two. A synthesis of 193 studies from 1999 to 2024, published in the Journal of Counseling & Development in 2025, found internal consistency between 0.845 and 0.921 across the subscales. Those are solid figures. Type distributions were pooled from 178 articles covering 57,170 participants.
But the same synthesis notes something striking: «Structural validity and test-retest studies were absent from the 25-year literature sampling.» In a quarter of a century, then, no independent studies have been published on whether the instrument measures what it says it does, or whether you get the same result next time.
The publisher’s own figures are kinder: test-retest of 0.94 to 0.97 after one month, and 0.57 to 0.81 after four years. The publisher also states that only about half of people get exactly the same four-letter type on a retest.
The weightiest professional objection came from Robert McCrae and Paul Costa in 1989. They tested 468 people and concluded that there «was no support for the view that the MBTI measures truly dichotomous preferences or qualitatively distinct types». Instead the instrument measured four fairly independent, continuous dimensions – not types, but scales. Their correlations with the five-factor model, reported separately for men and women, were:
| MBTI index | Five-factor trait | Men (n = 267) | Women (n = 201) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Introversion | Extraversion | −0.74 | −0.69 |
| Intuition | Openness | 0.72 | 0.69 |
| Feeling | Agreeableness | 0.44 | 0.46 |
| Perceiving | Conscientiousness | −0.49 | −0.46 |
The negative signs are simply a matter of which way the scale is scored: the MBTI index runs towards introversion and towards perceiving, so a strong negative association with extraversion and conscientiousness means exactly the same as a strong positive one the other way. All eight coefficients were significant, and the pattern was replicated in a study of 900 people in 2003. Note what is not in the table: neuroticism, that is emotional stability, has no counterpart in the MBTI at all. That is an entire trait the model does not measure.
Here we have to be honest: the Enneagram’s evidence base is thinner than the MBTI’s, not thicker.
The only systematic review is Hook and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2021. They went through 104 independent samples and write in the abstract: «we found mixed evidence of reliability and validity». Only 49 of the 104 were published; the rest were doctoral dissertations, master’s theses and unpublished manuscripts.
Two findings from the same review are worth knowing if you want to use the Enneagram honestly. First: «42% of participants were classified into the same type by the RHETI and the Wagner Enneagram Personality Style Scales» – two widely used Enneagram tests agree on the type in fewer than half of cases. Second: factor analyses typically find fewer than nine factors, and nobody has used cluster analysis to derive the nine types empirically.
On the other hand, Enneagram scales correlate with the five-factor model in the direction theory predicts, across nine studies. Type 1 was positively related to conscientiousness in 9 of 9 studies, type 5 negatively to extraversion in 9 of 9, type 8 negatively to agreeableness in 9 of 9. That suggests the scales measure something real – but it is also the strongest argument that they measure something the five-factor model already covers.
We have written a separate page about it: The Enneagram and the research – what is supported and what is not.
It is worth reading what the MBTI publisher says, because it is unusually clear. On its own facts page it states that the instrument «is not intended for use in selection of job candidates», and that doing so anyway is «unethical». And further: «There have (appropriately) been no meaningful studies evaluating the MBTI’s ability to predict job performance.»
The same holds for the Enneagram, for a different reason. When two widely used instruments place only 42 per cent of people in the same type, the precision is nowhere near what a hiring decision requires. We do not use 360indicator for selection either.
If you want to predict job performance, other methods work. A large recalculation of the selection literature from 2021 puts structured interviews at the top at around 0.42, job knowledge tests at 0.40 and work samples at 0.33. Personality in the form of conscientiousness sits at around 0.19 – and that is the five-factor model, not the MBTI or the Enneagram.
Both models belong where they do good: in development, in the conversation, in the team. Not in the decision about who gets the job.
Choose the MBTI if you need a shared, neutral language for working style and communication quickly, and if you do not want to go into what drives people emotionally. The model is easy to grasp, it is well established in business, and it feels safe because it does not point at anything vulnerable.
Choose the Enneagram if you want to understand why the same conflicts keep arising from the same place, why a capable colleague falls apart under pressure, or what it actually takes to motivate an individual. The Enneagram goes closer, and it also asks more of whoever is teaching it.
Our experience after more than twenty years in business: what makes people use the model the day after the course is that they recognise something in themselves they had never put into words. That is why we stay with the Enneagram. But we are not neutral, and you should not take our word for it – the sources are below.
If you want to try it yourself, you can take a free Enneagram test or read about our Enneagram courses. We also compare the Enneagram with DISC and with the five-factor model.
Sources: Erford et al. (2025), «A 25-Year Review and Psychometric Synthesis of the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator – Form M», Journal of Counseling & Development. · McCrae & Costa (1989), Journal of Personality 57(1), table 3. · Furnham, Moutafi & Crump (2003), Social Behavior and Personality 31(6), n = 900. · Hook, Hall, Davis, Van Tongeren & Conner (2021), «The Enneagram: A systematic review of the literature», Journal of Clinical Psychology 77(4). · Sackett, Zhang, Berry & Lievens (2022), Journal of Applied Psychology. · The Myers-Briggs Company, own pages on reliability and on use in selection.
MBTI and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are trademarks of the Myers & Briggs Foundation. We are neither affiliated with nor certified by them, and this page is an independent comparison.
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