The Best Employee Recognition Software for 2024 – Top 10 Compared

Nectar’s extensive reward system allows you to manage your Nectar points as you prefer. Its reward options include direct Amazon integration, a robust catalog of gift cards, branded company swag, charity donations, plus custom rewards you design.

Another fantastic perk of using Nectar is its milestone automation, which helps you avoid errors attached to the manual dating of employees’ anniversaries.

The platform also helps your organization to get more creative in rewarding your employees. It offers a unique feature, allowing you to create challenges for anything, such as health, company training, etc.

Nectar’s pricing is flexible to support different business needs. It’s important to note that its pricing structure is annually billed, fostering a long-term commitment.

Nectar’s standard plan features birthday and year of service automation, a real-time activity feed, company incentives and awards, custom core values, Slack integration, mobile access, and more.

However, large organizations may prefer its Plus plan because of its branding, dedicated account managers, HRIS, and SSO integration features.

Nectar is a good fit for team leaders and HR managers who want an easy-to-use and flexible platform that aligns recognition with company values. It is suitable for small businesses to large enterprises that prioritize a strong company culture and employee engagement.

Review the success of every employee recognition efforts by tracking team activities in real-time. The essence is to quickly understand the impact of different company values and avoid overspending.

It also offers an assistant feature named “Boosts.” Mo’s Boosts empowers HR to create new habits that enable employees to perform and connect better with each other. All you need to do is automate prompts for your teams to share appreciation, wins, learnings, results, and more.

Compared to Nectar, Mo offers multi-currency support, which caters to employee engagement across different locations and helps globally distributed teams with access to reports to simplify tax reporting.

Mo has a three-tier pricing option designed to help different businesses. Its features are designed to empower managers and improve employee engagement.

Mo’s Appreciate plan is suitable for growing businesses that manage local team members. It features 10 habit-forming templates per month, basic reporting, email and help desk support, mobile access, and more. Most global companies prefer the Engage plan because of its advanced features, money-back guarantee, and HRIS integrations.

Mo, like Nectar, provides three pricing options for users based on their company needs. However, Mo’s pricing is a decent alternative because, unlike Nectar, it does not require customers to make long-term annual payments.

Mo is best suited for organizations that have employees across the globe and need a platform to build employee recognition and engagement among their teams. Its higher-tier support for multi-language and multi-currency provides additional tools for managing global organizations.

One of Awardco’s standout features is its flexible solutions, which are adaptable to different industries. It offers features that help employees in healthcare, financial services, technology, professional services, government, higher education, and manufacturing.

Awardco’s inclusive feature for offline recognition, “AwardCodes”, caters to all employees, whether they have computer access or not. Once you give employees the AwardCode, they can scan the code and be led directly to their reward platform, with their points automatically deposited into their account.

While Nectar offers a vast network of reward options, Awardco outshines it. Awardco enables you to reward your staff with health benefits through lifestyle spending accounts. With Awardco’s LSA, employees get points on a regular schedule, which they can use to make purchases that fit their needs.

Awardco offers three pricing plans, Core, Plus, and Pro, providing enterprise solutions.

Its Core plan caters to small businesses and features service anniversaries, onboarding, birthdays, automation, and dedicated customer support. While its Plus plan offers more advanced features like nominations and incentives, large organizations may prefer its Pro plan because of its custom, full-service rewards & recognition.

Like most of the employee recognition software on our list, Awardco does not offer a free plan or trial but a demo.

Awardco is best suited for teams with around 200 employees and large enterprises. The software is particularly rewarding for companies that need a diverse set of incentives to motivate their employees to be more productive and recognize their peers who do the same.

Bonusly analytics is an excellent way of accessing real-time data on employee connections to determine who’s disengaged, providing insights on handling the situation.

Another helpful feature is Bonusly’s milestone workflow automation. This feature helps you stay on top of your employees’ special dates, boosting employee recognition and celebration.

Every feature is employee-focused to engage and incentivize their productivity. Bonusly offers a flexible award system, from automated to manual or claimable awards. Your employee can self-nominate incentives or rewards such as digital gift cards, company swag, cash-out options, custom rewards, and donations.

Bonusly offers three price plans to support different business preferences.

Although there’s no free forever plan, If you want to experience Bonusly full potential, the provider offers a 14-day free trial.

Bonusly is suitable for startups and mid-sized companies looking for an easy-to-use platform to encourage peer-to-peer recognition and keep employees motivated and engaged.

With the Motivosity employee insight tool, you do not have to wait till your team’s annual check-in to understand employees’ sentiments fully. You can use anonymous eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) and pulse surveys to gather information and make better-informed decisions to improve employee engagement.

Motivisity also integrates seamlessly with other business applications you use in your organization. Its integrations are categorized into Single Sign On (SSO), HRIS, and Communication.

Its custom awards and badges help you automate your company’s core values and initiatives.

Motivosity offers three price options: Standard, Pro, and Custom.

Motivosity Standard plan features automated service awards & birthdays, peer appreciation, global rewards, swag connector, custom core values, desktop & mobile apps, reports & dashboards, integrations, and more. This plan suits businesses that need basic recognition program features to engage their employees.

On the other hand, the Motivosity Pro plan supplements the Standard plan by offering features such as Challenges, incentives, achievements, a dedicated success manager, bulk recognition, custom user groups, etc.

With Motivisity’s $3,000 minimum annual spend, it may not be a good option for a small business. It’s more expensive than competitors like Mo and Nectar.

Motivosity is a good option for businesses that want more in-depth insight into how to develop peer-to-peer recognition and leadership appreciation to help their employees feel valued and connected.

Employee recognition doesn’t have to be rigid. Bucketlist provides different recognition options for your employees. These include manager-to-report feedback, peer-to-peer shoutouts, and awards.

Bucketlist offers HR tools to motivate employees’ growth, increase engagement, and boost business outcomes.

Another notable feature that comes with the Bucketlist employee achievement is that it can be self-managed. Employees can track progress, report wins, and claim rewards from the app. This saves time for all managers as they only need to approve employees’ achievements.

Bucketlist pricing plans are unavailable to the public as they offer custom-based price details. However, you need to speak to an expert to fully understand the features that suit you and the rate.

Just like Awardco, there’s no free plan, but it offers a free demo.

Bucketlist is a good option for businesses needing simple employee recognition software to scale with them. It’s an excellent option for organizations seeking to create memorable experiences that align with individual employee interests, enhancing motivation and engagement.

One of ThriveSparrow’s notable features is the granularity of its reports. The dashboard is detailed, offering you everything you need to see, from group reports for departments and teams to performance analysis to trends in your organization.

Also, its AI-powered personal development plan helps employees and HR stay on track with personal goals. It also automatically suggests action plans tailored to your persona.

Compared to Bonusly, ThriveSparrow helps every team member stay motivated with its recurring leaderboard updates feature. This ensures real-time updates and displays of employee positions in the company’s recognition and performance metrics.

ThriveSparrow offers competitive price plans that are available in three tiers. See the table below for information on its full price.

ThriveSparrow’s popular plan, Kudos, is the cheapest and offers features an organization needs to reward their employees’ successes. Its features include fully customizable kudos cards, redeemable rewards, admin reports, recurring leadership updates, and more. This plan is suitable mainly for businesses of any size.

ThriveSparrow’s pricing plans are differentiated into engagement, reward, and performance. Businesses might need to buy all plans for comprehensive employee management, which could be more expensive than Nectar. However, with its 14-day free trial, you can see how each feature may benefit your organization.

ThriveSparrow is suitable for organizations seeking custom, stand-alone features to manage rewarding, engaging, or evaluating employee performance. With ThriveSparrow’s price plan, such an organization can pay for a specific feature they need.

While Motivosity offers employee insights through research, Lattice takes it further. Its automated pulse survey ensures that surveys are sent out regularly without manual intervention, making it easy for HR teams to track trends over time and respond promptly to emerging issues.

We also love its historical overview of previous compensation cycles, which facilitates transparency and consistency.

Lattice offers interactive training & courses to establish continuous employee learning and development. With this feature, employees can develop their skills to boost their personal growth and the overall company success.

Lattice’s pricing plan is similar to that of ThriveSparrow, which is feature-based. Its price plans are in four tiers to cater to different employee recognition methods.

Lattice’s Engagement plan may suffice for businesses seeking ways to engage their employees. It features employee engagement surveys, automated pulse surveys, eNPS, onboarding and exit surveys, engagement reporting, etc.

Lattice price plans are affordable for businesses needing employee engagement or compensation. There’s no free plan, but it allows users to test its functionalities through its free demo.

Lattice is suitable for organizations that need more than an employee recognition platform. Its features provide businesses with a dashboard to track the company’s goals and OKRs while evaluating performance.

With Assembly’s anonymous suggestion box, employees can share honest feedback, ideas, and concerns without revealing their identities. This fosters an open communication environment where everyone feels safe to share their thoughts.

Also, its global enterprise search enables users to quickly search across Assembly and other connected tools. This speeds up locating information, documents, and resources across the entire organization, ensuring that critical data is always accessible.

For organizations offering information hubs to employees, Assembly provides an information collection. It is a structured way to organize and share knowledge on various topics, creating a centralized repository for continuous learning within your organization.

Asembly’s pricing options are in four tiers to help businesses choose based on their needs.

Assembly’s Engagement plan is the most popular, and it’s good enough to support businesses of any size. Its features include recognition, rewards, celebration automation, surveys, suggestion boxes, template libraries, etc.

Assembly is suitable for organizations that need a customizable employee recognition platform. We recommend it for businesses that want to build a strong reward and collaboration culture and make everyone happier.

Cooleaf helps you design an employee incentive plan to celebrate wins and drive key behaviors in sales, customer service, and more. By focusing on rewarding your employees, you can quickly grow specific business goals and KPIs with a custom performance incentive strategy.

Community building is critical to facilitating employee interaction. Cooleafs integrates with your existing business tools like Slack and MS Teams to boost participation and drive a culture of appreciation.

Cooleaf offers a learning platform where employees can upskill to adjust to your company’s standard. You can also host challenges on Cooleaf and reward employees, all in one place. Cooleaf includes health and mental health challenges to encourage employees’ well-being.

Cooleaf’s accurate pricing information is available on request. There is no free plan, but you may get a free demo by providing your information on its website.

Cooleaf is an ideal solution for HR professionals and managers who want a customized strategy to drive performance and foster a positive workplace culture. It’s also suitable for organizations prioritizing employees’ wellness, as Cooleaf aligns recognition with health and wellness initiatives.