Top 20 Employee Recognition, Rewards and Engagement Companies - 2024

Discover the top 20 employee recognition & rewards companies! Explore SMB & Enterprise solutions to improve engagement.

March 15, 2024
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Employee recognition is no longer a pat on the back. It's a strategic move to cultivate a thriving workplace. This guide unlocks the top 20 employee recognition, rewards, and engagement companies, empowering you to find the perfect fit for your organization.

We've categorized the companies into two sections:

  • SMB and Mid-Market Companies: This section highlights solutions designed for smaller to medium-sized businesses, typically with 25 to 3,000 employees.
  • Enterprise Engagement Platforms: This section caters to larger organizations seeking comprehensive employee experience platforms.

Each company entry dives into details like typical customer size range, standout customers, pricing, and unique differentiators. This comprehensive overview empowers you to make informed decisions for building a culture of recognition and boosting employee engagement.

Let's delve into the world of top-notch recognition and ignite a spark in your workforce!

SMB and Mid Market Platforms

  1. Assembly                             
  2. Awardco                              
  3. Kudos
  4. Bonusly
  5. Motivosity
  6. Nectar
  7. Guusto
  8. WorkTango
  9. Mo
  10. Cooleaf
  11. Bravo
  12. Bucket List
  13. Empuls
  14. Snappy Gift
  15. Hey Taco

Enterprise Engagement Platforms

1. Achievers
2. WorkHuman
3. Fond
4. Reward Gateway
5. Vantage Circle

SMB and Mid Market Platforms

1. Assembly 

Assembly is a peer-to-peer employee recognition, rewards, and engagement software designed to enhance not only recognition, but moments of connection between coworkers to one another and the company. Assembly is proud of having the highest engagement rates in the space.Go beyond simple recognition and rewards; build an engagement-rich workplace with challenges, contests, nominations, feedback forms, social channels, an anonymous suggestion box, and much more!

Typical Customer Size Range:
- 25 - 3,000 employees

Standout Customers:
- PODS
- 1800 Flowers
- DeVry University
- ClickFunnels
- Lacoste

Pricing:
- Recognition - $2 per employee per month
- Engagement- $4 per employee per month
- Digital HQ - Talk to sales!

Unique Differentiators:
- Service Levels
- All account get dedicated account management, implementation support and 24/7 customer service
- The feature set is unparalleled match a diverse employee base. Assembly understands companies have introverts, extroverts, millennials, genZ, Baby Boomers and different types of employees with all different skill levels. Assembly’s platform is the most flexible in the space to create a custom plan that matches employees where their needs are.

Unique Differentiators:

  • 360º Recognition
  • Rewards automation (gift cards, amazon integration, discounts, non monetary rewards, automated swag)
  • Automated challenges w/points
  • Automated feedback forms
  • Company announcements & social feeds
  • Birthday & anniversary automation
  • Engagement onboarding automation 
  • Drag and drop culture initiative builder (no code HR assistant)

2. AwardCo
Awardco makes recognizing and reward people more effective for everyone. Awardo focuses heavily on having the most robust rewards library in the space!

Typical Customer Size Range:
- 100 employees - 10,000 employees

Standout Customers:
- Zillow
- Pinterest
- JP Morgan Chase

Pricing:
- For SMB’s they have two tiers of pricing
1) $2,500/yr flat fee for just service awards, birthday awards and manager notification
2) $4,000/ yr flat fee for peer to peer recognition
- For enterprise companies, you have to reach out to sales to get a price

Unique Differentiators:
- Awardco focuses on having the largest reward catalog in the space from gift cards, to amazon, to charity rewards, to experiences and swag.

3. Kudos
Kudos is a full suite engagement platform with features ranging from recognition and rewards to pulse surveys and people analytics.

Typical Customer Size Range:
- 500 + employee count

Standout Customers:
- Chewy
- Make a Wish
- DHL
- Telarus

Pricing:
- All plan options require you to call into sales

Unique Differentiators:
- Kudos has a strong hold on the enterprise market for culture. They don’t stop at recognition and rewards, they offer awards and nominations, people analytics, pulse surveys, galleries to highlight memories and more. Great culture starts with Kudos.

4. Bonusly
Bonusly builds high-performing cultures by delivering an employee recognition and feedback solution that amplifies wins, connects teams, and shares insights. The result? Employees love where they work, are engaged, and achieve business results.

Typical Customer Size Range:
- 25-5,000 employees

Standout Customers:
- Toast
- MongoDB
- Headspace
- SeatGeek

Pricing

Core: $3 per user/ month + rewards
Pro: $5 per user per month + the cost of rewards
Custom: Talk to sales

Unique Differentiators:
- Bonusly was one of the early pioneers of the recognition and rewards space. They focus very heavily on the engagement, less so the rewards. They truly lean into reporting, analytics, and notifications to drive very high recognition participation rates.

5. Motivosity
If you're looking for a rewards and recognition program that goes above and beyond to build the culture of your dreams...Hi! We're Motivosity! - a modern employee experience software that does more than just rewards.

Typical Customer Size Range:
-10 employees to 1,000 employees

Standout Customers:
- KPMG
- Cotopaxi
- Bosch
- FujiFilm

Pricing:
Each tier costs $2, if you used all stand alone tiers, the pricing is $8 per employee per month
- $2 Community and connection
- $4 Community Connection + Recognition and Rewards
- $6 Recognition and Rewards + Manager Development
- $8 Everything Above + Employee insights

Unique Differentiators:
- Motivosity goes beyond recognition and rewards and into performance management. They think holistically about culture and have 1:1 features, performance reviews and surveys all in the same platform as their robust recognition and rewards platform.

6. Nectar
Recognize great work, increase engagement, promote core values, and redeem rewards ─ all in one simple employee recognition platform.

Typical Customer Size Range:
50 - 2,000 employees

Standout Customers:
- Redfin
- MLB
- Golden State Warriors
- Heineken

Pricing:
Standard: $2.75
Plus: Recognition and rewards + SSO, Amazon and an account manager

Unique Differentiators:
- Partners with Amazon Business
- Has wellness incentives and a clean User interface
- Quick Setup Time and no contracts

7. Guusto
Guusto is a leading provider for front line workers, making it simple to deliver rewards and recognition to your staff, contracts and beyond.

Typical Customer Size Range:
Teams of 200+ employees

Standout Customers:
- The Body Shop
- Seaspan
- Pilgrim’s
- Seaspan

Pricing:
Free - Single user account to send rewards
Lite - $40 per month single user account plus milestone automation
Essential - $120 per month 30 seat minimum and $4 per head additional users
Premium - $400 per month 80 seat minimum with $5 per seat add ons

Unique Differentiators:
- Guusto makes it really easy to gift to front line workers. They don’t have to be tech savvy to receive a rewards and appreciation. Gusto has over 4,000 reviews in the app store!

8. WorkTango
Discover Employee Recognition & Rewards, Employee Surveys & Insights, and Goals & Feedback - available individually or bundled within WorkTango's holistic Employee Experience platform.

Typical Customer Size Range:
200+ Employee size

Standout Customers:
- Critical Start
- Pizza Pizza
- Habitat for Humanity
- VMLY&R

Pricing:
- $8,000 minimum forRecognition and rewards
- $8,000 minimum for Employee survey and insights
- $10,000 minimum for the full employee experience

Unique Differentiators:
- Worktango has acquired multiple companies over the years and functions as a full service employee engagement and performance management platform. Worktango generally gears towards larger companies who are putting their employee experience at the forefront of company culture!

9. Mo
Mo helps companies transform their cultures through recognition, rewards and engagement. We build connection and amplify wins, empowering teams to love their work, access their potential and achieve results

Typical Customer Size Range:
25-3,000 employees

Standout Customers:
- AXOL
- Quark
- Harrier
- SGN

Pricing:
- $2.25 per employee per month for their Appreciation tier
- $4.50 per employee per moth for teams who want guaranteed employee engagement results

Unique Differentiators:
- Mo has a template library of culture ideas that can help boost connections and engagement instances across a remote work environment. Mo gives more reasons for employees to engage with one another!

10. Cooleaf
Recognize and empower the everyday hero in your employees. Cooleaf is your all-in-one employee engagement platform for rewards, virtual events, and more. With Cooleaf, keeping teams engaged and connected is easy.

Typical Customer Size Range:
10-1,000 employees

Standout Customers:
- Shipt
- Acosta
- Bluelinx
- Aprio

Pricing:
Talk to sales, that is the best way in!

Unique Differentiators:
- Unlike most of the engagement programs out there, Cooleaf does an amazing job of integrating into the tools employees are actually using, ie salesforce, Salesloft, Linkedin Learning, Lessonly, Litmos, Zendesk, front on top of all of the HRIS integrations that are all now standard today. Combine your recognition with daily workflows on Coolleaf!

11. Bravo
Boost employee engagement and motivation with BRAVO Awards, the AI-powered platform that revolutionizes employee recognition and rewards programs.


Typical Customer Size Range:
- Teams of 5-200

Standout Customers:
- Yelp
- LinkedIn
- Jira
- EKomi

Pricing:
- Pricing can be found here
- 0-10 employees - $39 USD per  month
- 11-50 employees - $79 USD per month
- 51-200 employees - $199 USD per month
- Over 200 employees, talk to sales which can be found here

Unique Differentiators:
- Bravo pushes the boundaries on AI recognition, making recognition more meaningful, making the appreciation even better with the help of technology! Their north american reward system is very robust and simple to get set up

12. Bucketlist
Bucketlist is an employee recognition and rewards platform and app that can be customized to your unique business needs, to help keep employees engaged.

Typical Customer Size Range:
- 100 to 1,000

Standout Customers:
- First Bank
- 1800 Got Junk
- Orlando Magic
- Chick-fil-A

Pricing:
- Talk to sales which can be found here

Unique Differentiators:
- Bucketlist focuses on recognition and rewards and goes deep into their core proposition of making people feel appreciated and recognized!

13. Empuls
Employee engagement platform to improve workplace satisfaction and productivity. Foster collaboration, recognition, and communication to empower your team.

Typical Customer Size Range:
- Teams of 25 and up

Standout Customers:
- Pepsi
- Grammarly
- Adobe
- Freshworks

Pricing:
Tiers can be bough a la cart or together bundled
- Reward and recognize - $3 per employee
- Surveys - $3 per employee
- Social Intranet - $1 per employee per month
-Perks and Benefits - $2 per employee per month

Unique Differentiators:
- Empuls goes beyond just recognition and rewards. Empuls offers surveys, polls, contests, announcements and a unparalleled reward system. Empuls truly lives by it’s ethos and works to connect employees all across the world.

14. Snappy Gift
Reward employees and customers with ease - send gift choices and let them pick their favorite.

Typical Customer Size Range:
- From small teams to enterprise, Snappy makes gifting easy

Standout Customers:
- Meta
- Uber
- Zynga
- Microsoft

Pricing:
- Pricing can be found here
- Essential - Free tier that only pays for rewards based on redemption
- Elevated - $999  year - Connect with the HRIS system and send high quality gifts to your team
- Enterprise - Talk to Sales which can be found here

Unique Differentiators:
- Snappy is a one of a kind gifting platform that enables a curated experience for people to gift to one another. Gifting made easy, trackable and with a tremedous library of fun rwards employees will enjoy!

15. Hey Taco
HeyTaco brings people together and helps teams recognize each other, have a little fun, and celebrate on Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Typical Customer Size Range:
- Companies from 3 - 100 employees

Standout Customers:
- Buffer
- Axios
- Lynton

Pricing:
- $3 per employee per month

Unique Differentiators:
- Hey Taco is a direct MS Teams and Slack plugin which has a very quick setup time to start giving recognition right into the workflows that your company is already using.

Enterprise Engagement Companies

1. Achievers
We partner with you in building a culture of recognition that empowers employees to live out shared core values every day. Our science-backed employee recognition software has the highest active usage in the industry – proven to increase productivity, engagement, and retention.

Typical Customer Size Range:
- Enterprise, 1,000+

Standout Customers:
- CVS Health
- Samsung
- GM
- Discover

Pricing:
- Talk to Sales which can be found here

Unique Differentiators:
- Achievers customers are 2.5x more likely to see increased retention
- Their users are 2x more likely to see a long career with their current company
- Their users are 2x more likely to report being highly productive

2. Workhuman
Workhuman’s employee recognition and experience software is informed by over one billion data points derived from the interactions of millions of real, actual humans. Our platform’s DNA translates to ROI, retention and productivity.

Typical Customer Size Range:
- Large Enterprise organizations

Standout Customers:
- BP
- ADP
- Intuit
- LinkedIn

Pricing:
- Talk to sales which can be found here

Unique Differentiators:
- Workhuman has been around for 20 years and goes beyond just recognition. Workhuman promotes great rewards, social connections, milestones and even offers engagement consulting. Workhuman serves 180+ countries, 7 million users globally and serves 34 languages.

3. Fond
Create a culture people want to be part of with Fond's recognition and rewards platform. Additionally, Fond has recently joined forces with the enterprise engagement platform Reward Gateway!

Typical Customer Size Range:
- Teams of 500 +

Standout Customers:
- Salesforce
- Instacart
- PEGA

Pricing:
- Talk to sales can be found here

Unique Differentiators:
- Fond is now part of a much larger network of enterprise organizations utilizing reward gateway for the engagement and rewards.

4. Reward Gateway
Attract top talent and keep your best employees with reward and recognition, communications, surveys and more

Typical Customer Size Range:
- Enterprise customers only

Standout Customers:
- Orbis
- C Space
- ABC Medical

Pricing:
- Talk to sales which can be found here

Unique Differentiators:
- Reward Gateway has not only been serving enterprise customers for almost 20 years, they are proud of the full suite engagement kit. Their services range from recognition and rewards, to discounts, to wellness programs (we all know that is needed today), to surveys and engagement and employee analytics. It’s the full suite for the enterprise customer!

5. Vantage Circle
Vantage Circle is an Employee Engagement and Recognition platform that helps HR professionals build winning work cultures through innovative AI-powered and SaaS-based solutions, namely, Vantage Rewards, Vantage Pulse, Vantage Perks, and Vantage Fit.

Typical Customer Size Range:
Best for teams with 500+

Standout Customers:
- DHL
- Wells Fargo
- Bosch

Pricing:
- Grow Plan - $2.69 USD per employee per month
- Transform
- Transparent Pricing can be found here

Unique Differentiators:
- Vantage is a comprehensive solution that enables not only recognition, but rewards, discounts, wellness programs and surveys. Engage the hard to reach employees with Vantage

Browse our Free Employee Recognition Guide

Get the foundational knowledge on creating an employee recognition program that boosts employee engagement and helps them feel valued.

Explore Guide

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Assembly SOC 2 compliant?

Yes, at Assembly, security is a top priority. Each quarter, we have ongoing security work that is everyone’s responsibility. While we maintain a strong security posture, it was important for us to prove to our customers that we do everything we claim to do. This led us to pursue a SOC 2 Type II report that would provide evidence of our compliance with industry gold-standard security practice.

What's the ROI for employee recognition?

There is study after study showing that employee recognition leads to increased engagement. This in return creates an environment where employees are happier and more motivated which increase productivity and reduces voluntary turnover significantly. In order to filled critical roles, companies tend to spend nearly twice the value of an annual salary. Assembly is an investment in your employees that supports your bottom line.

Does Assembly offer longer-term contracts?

Yes, we will offer contracts for companies with longer-term agreements to help larger customers have more certainty around future costs.

The minimum agreement term is a 12-month subscription.

Does Assembly offer onboarding support?

We do and for FREE! Any new customer needing further support to get started with Assembly to ensure you're set up for success can request custom onboarding support. Improving your employee experience is about much more than just using our amazing software; it’s about transforming your business to create a workplace that people love. That’s much easier to do with the personal support and advice from our passionate people experts.

Is there a free version of Assembly?

Yes. We offer a completely free plan for up to 50 team members. This plan is intended for teams or organizations that are looking to get started with an employee engagement tool. Keep in mind, this plan is limited in features.

All customers can open an Assembly account for free and get started without a credit card. Then you can change plans as necessary.

How much do rewards cost?

At the time of redemption (when your employees exchange their points for a paid reward) you'll pay face value. If a reward is a $10 Amazon gift card, your cost will be $10. All paid rewards are billed for on a monthly basis.

The good news is that you don't have to pay for rewards upfront because we only charge you when points are redeemed, not when they're earned.

Does Assembly offer discounts?

We offer discounts or educational or charitable organizations. In order to secure a discount, you'll first need to book a demo with a customer support specialist.

For all other organizations, we are willing to consider longer-term agreements in exchange for discounts. To set up annual plans or longer, you will need to book a demo with a customer support specialist.

How do I cancel my plan if needed?

If you're on a month to month plan, you can go here and cancel anytime. If you're having concerns or need help setting up your account for success, you can always book a demo with a customer support specialist.

If you're on a longer-term custom plan, you'll need to reach out to your customer support specialist to cancel your account or email us at support@joinassembly.com.

What customizations are available?

Great question! You can customize your core values to match your organization's to boost and track alignment. You can change your currency from the 🏆 emoji (our default) to any emoji of your choice. You can swap our logo for your own. You can also set up company culture rewards such as, "Lunch with the CEO," "Buy a book on us," and so much more!

Who can give or receive recognition?

While we recommend a peer to peer set up where anyone in your organization can give or receive recognition, you can set up Assembly however you want. If you need to limit the people who can give or receive recognition, that's perfectly fine and can be done from your Admin, here.

What integrations are available?

Assembly connects to the tools your employees use every day to offer an easy, seamless experience with minimal change management.  

Assembly has integrations with HCM/HRIS systems like ADP, Google, Office 365, and Slack. We also integrate with communication tools like Slack and Teams so you and your employees can access Assembly wherever they work now.

What's your average adoption rate?

That depends on the company's permissions set up. That said, over 90% of the employees on Assembly's platform are recognized on a monthly basis. That means nearly every employee across all of our customers are receiving regular recognition from their peers, managers, or leadership. We're extremely proud of this.

Must rewards be set up to use Assembly?

They are not required. You can use Assembly without having rewards set up. However, we don't recommend it if you intend to have a high adoption and usage rate. You can always keep the costs down by offering internal culture rewards that are fulfilled by you internally.

Are points required to use Assembly?

No, you can remove allowances from anyone or everyone. It's up to you but we do recommend using points whether they're worth a real dollar value or not. Companies that use points have a much higher engagement rate even if those points don't exchange for real dollars.

Could find the answer you are looking for?

Please schedule time with an expert and we will help you to get all your questions answered