Bonusly is a familiar name in recognition—but today’s workforce needs more than points and gift cards. They need connection, community, and a reason to stay. Motivosity is the only people-first recognition and rewards platform built to unite your culture, automate recognition, and give employees unlimited flexibility in how they’re rewarded.
With Motivosity, companies see:
If your goal is engagement, retention, and real business impact—not just rewards—Motivosity is the clear leader among Bonusly alternatives.
Bonusly has made a name for itself as an all-around employee recognition and rewards platform. It has over 500,000 users and the recognition programs you can build with it are effective. However, it's far from the only employee recognition platform out there, with many of its alternatives offering features that aren't available in Bonusly.
We will examine 10 of the best alternatives to Bonusly and how they can help you build an employee recognition program that promotes a stronger workplace culture.
Bonusly is a point-based platform through which you can offer employee incentives based on the points those employees earned. These incentives include gift cards and the ability to cash out points for money or prizes. The platform also places a heavy emphasis on peer-to-peer recognition by providing a social media-like setting that offers useful metrics you can use to track employee development.
So, why look for Bonusly alternatives at all?
There are many reasons, such as wanting a platform that allows you to customize and offer more personalized rewards to your employees. Some may choose a Bonusly alternative because they've outgrown the platform and it no longer aligns with their company's core values and goals. The desire for more affordable pricing or additional integrations could also drive a desire to switch.
While encouraging employee participation and offering reward programs are fundamental to employee rewards platforms, the following features are the true must-haves if a platform is to make your shortlist.
A 2024 survey reveals that only 31% of your employees are actively engaged at work. With engagement at a 10-year low, it's critical that your recognition platform offers ways to boost employee morale and connection.
Built-in peer-to-peer recognition is a must, and so is collecting employee feedback to make your recognition programs better. Remember that these platforms are less about performance management - though that's important - and more about rewarding great employee performance.
Flexible pricing is crucial when choosing an employee recognition and rewards platform. Look for pricing that allows you to customize your plan based on your company's needs. Also, be on the lookout for transaction fees, as some programs tie those to your employee's ability to redeem points. Those fees can significantly increase your expenses and diminish the value of your recognition program.
Your desire to motivate employees shouldn't lead to disruption in your workplace ecosystem. Ideally, your employee recognition platform will integrate with your HRIS tools and the most popular communication tools for workplaces, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.
The following 10 platforms are all great choices to help you celebrate achievements in the workplace and boost employee engagement.
Motivosity is the people-first Recognition & Rewards platform built for today’s workforce—one that is remote, hybrid, multi-generational, and increasingly disconnected. Unlike traditional recognition tools, Motivosity unifies your culture through community, connection, and consistent gratitude. It’s where your culture lives.
As a modern alternative to Bonusly, Motivosity gives organizations complete flexibility to design recognition programs that reflect their values, motivate great work, and support every employee across locations, time zones, and job types. Recognition in Motivosity goes far beyond simple points—it’s meaningful, social, tied to company values, and designed to build belonging across your entire organization.
Where most platforms stop at peer-to-peer recognition, Motivosity provides an end-to-end ecosystem: automated milestones, top-down recognition, peer recognition, incentives, nominations, internal communication tools, community Spaces, and global Rewards flexibility. Every program is supported by full program automation and advanced analytics, giving leaders the visibility required to measure engagement, strengthen culture, and make data-backed decisions.
The heart of Motivosity is connection. From social feeds to employee profiles, interest groups, personality insights, and interactive org charts, every part of the platform is carefully designed to bring employees together and foster genuine human interaction—something Bonusly and other competitors simply don’t offer. This focus on belonging is why Motivosity users report feeling twice as connected to their culture and are 2.3x more likely to stay with their company.
Motivosity also offers the most flexible, global rewards experience available today. With millions of reward options, 850+ gift cards, Shopify and Amazon storefronts, charitable donations, custom catalogs, swag, local items, and the ThanksMatters™ Visa card, employees can redeem rewards instantly—anywhere in the world—with no markups draining your budget.
With flexible, scalable pricing tailored to your needs, Motivosity is built to support both SMB and enterprise organizations—driving high adoption, consolidated engagement programs, and measurable business impact.
While Bonusly is well-known for simple peer recognition and points, Motivosity is the clear choice for organizations looking to build a truly connected, high-performing, unified culture. Here's why:
Bonusly focuses narrowly on point-based recognition. Motivosity delivers the full engagement ecosystem—recognition, connection, communication, surveys, Spaces, leadership visibility, and automation—all in one place.
Result: Higher engagement, stronger culture, and more meaningful recognition.
Bonusly provides a limited catalog and no universal spending card.
Motivosity offers:
Result: Employees get what they want—instantly—and your dollars go further.
Bonusly has limited reporting.
Motivosity provides full program analytics, eNPS, sentiment trends, AI summaries and insights, manager effectiveness, cross-team visibility, and granular reporting by group, department, and location.
Result: Leaders understand exactly what’s working—and where to improve.
Bonusly is recognition-only.
Motivosity includes:
Result: Employees feel like they belong—regardless of location or role.
Bonusly charges redemption fees and operates on a traditional markup model.
Motivosity is 142% more efficient than other vendors because your dollars actually go to employees—not the platform.
Result: More value for employees and dramatically better ROI for your company.
Bonusly is designed for simplicity; Motivosity is designed for impact.
From automated milestones to LSAs to internal comms automation, Motivosity grows with your culture and consolidates multiple systems into one.
Kudos offers an interesting blend of employee feedback and peer-to-peer recognition tools that makes it one of the stronger Bonusly competitors.
Kudos allows you to tie rewards both to special occasions - such as employee milestone celebrations - and an in-built incentive program. The latter rewards points that employees can redeem for prizes you select from the Kudos stock. However, our favorite feature is the Pulse Surveys, which allow you to gather feedback from your people on how to make your employee recognition programs better.
Kudos offers custom pricing based on individual needs, which is discussed during a 30-minute product demo.
Variety in reward types is Achievers' biggest selling point, with one-time, milestone, and spot rewards all available. The platform also offers a social aspect that encourages co-workers to praise one another.
Achievers offers a nice combination of social recognition tools - with feedback from fellow employees delivered in real-time - and a points-based recognition system. Earning points allows employees to redeem great rewards, which you can preselect from a growing catalog of 2,500+ brands. Plus, the platform integrates with the most popular tools for workplace communication, including Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. Add the ability to create surveys and you get a single platform for both rewards and gathering feedback from employees.
As with many other tools on our list, Achievers doesn't have a defined pricing structure. You can book a call with the platform's sales department to discuss your options and arrange a demo.
Personalized rewards linked to everything from employee achievements to important milestones are Fond's stock in trade, with the platform aiming to provide the most varied set of rewards possible.
Fond has over one million rewards for you and your employees to choose from. That sheer variety is one of the platform's most unique features as it enables a level of reward personalization based on employee preference that isn't available elsewhere. Those rewards are redeemable in a couple of clicks and tied to a global points system that allows colleagues from all over the world to send redeemable points to one another.
Fond is another employee recognition platform that prefers to customize its pricing to your needs. Thankfully, you don't have to worry about transaction fees, and the points your employees earn never expire.
HeyTaco's interesting spin on a points system has your company and employees awarding each other digital tacos for a job well done. Those tacos can be redeemed for a reward, allowing managers and peers to recognize top performers in a fun way.
Using tacos instead of points is a cool twist, though it all still amounts to a platform where tacos are traded for employee rewards. The leaderboards are more interesting to us, with HeyTaco tracking how many tacos are given and received, showing how engaged your employees are with the platform. Superb Slack integration is also a positive. HeyTaco creates its own Slack channel and creates automated celebrations and notifications for when tacos are given and received.
You get a choice between the Everyone, Team, and Enterprise plans, with the latter being suitable for companies with more than 100 employees. HeyTaco also has a set price - $3 per employee per month.
WorkTango is part of the company's wider 'Employer Experience' suite, which offers analytics tools and surveys. Our focus is on the rewards aspect of that suite, with this being another platform that allows employees to trade points for prizes.
WorkTango integates with over 50 platforms including Slack and software used by HR professionals, such as HRIS. That makes it an integration powerhouse, but it's also beefy when it comes to reward variety. You can choose from over 10 million employee rewards, though some are limited to specific countries. WorkTango also leverages automation, particularly for anniversaries and recognition of achievements aligned with organizational goals.
WorkTango encourages you to get in touch to learn more about its pricing, making it another platform that tailors to your needs. The 12-month commitment it requests may be a little too much for those who just want to test what it can do.
Nectar is one of the major names in employee recognition platforms. It's also a good Bonusly alternative for businesses operating at the enterprise level.
Nectar's Amazon business relationship is its standout feature. Through that relationship, and the integration that comes with it, employees can trade the points they earn for Amazon gift cards or selected products. Nectar also understands the power of employee recognition linked to branding, meaning you can create company-specific promotional items to use as rewards.
Nectar is another employee rewards platform that offers customized pricing based on your organization. However, it typically charges between $2.75 and $4.50 per user per month. It also splits its platform into three tiers - Plus, Premium, and Custom - and requires you to spend a minimum of $4,000 annually.
Awardco is an employee rewards platform catering to enterprises and growing businesses. It integrates with popular communication tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams and allows you to set up automated milestone rewards.
Our favorite Awardco feature is its digital albums. These can be created for major events, such as work anniversaries and departures, allowing employees to share photos and write notes to their colleagues. Beyond that, you can set up automated rewards for milestones and birthdays, in addition to building a customized rewards catalog. It's customizable and you can tinker with each program you create from a single dashboard, however the number of programs you can have varies based on the package you've purchased.
You have to get in touch with Awardco to discover how much you'll pay for its Core, Plus, or Pro tiers.
This platform offers a gamified version of a typical employee recognition suite. Rewards are linked to survey completion and points are sent from peer to peer.
It's the recurring surveys that stand out for us with SurveySparrow. You can create and customize any type of survey you want, from employee pulse check-ins to 'Ask Me Anything' surveys, all of which can be linked to rewards. Customizable widgets enable you to visualize the data your company collects via these surveys. The integration with Rybbon is also a positive. It allows you to send rewards directly to an employee's email as soon as they complete one of your surveys.
SurveySparrow charges $19 per month for its Basic individual plan, and up to $39 for the Starter plan. These net you 2,500 and 15,000 survey responses per year respectively. Plans for teams range between $79 and $249 per month, with survey responses going up to 100,000 annually.
Bucketlist Rewards is slightly different from most employee recognition platforms because it goes big. Really big! Some of its rewards are tied to major life experiences in other countries, making it a platform for organizations willing to spend heavily on their people.
Offering experiences in different cities is a major plus for Bucketlist, though that type of reward comes at a high cost. For more budget-friendly options, you can create workplace-specific rewards to foster camaraderie, such as awarding the top performer a prime parking spot for the month. The platform features analytics tools so you can track your recognition programs and see which is the most effective.
Prices all depend on the specific experiences you choose, so you have to contact the vendor to determine your pricing.
We'll leave you with a handful of final pointers to help you choose the best Bonusly alternatives for your company.
Many employee recognition platforms offer similar features in terms of delivering points and redeeming those points for rewards. Look beyond that. Key features may include employee surveys - ideal for gathering employee feedback - and powerful analytics to support the reward programs you create.
Don't let an employee earn a reward your company can't afford. Create a budget for both the platform subscription and the rewards you plan to offer before committing to a Bonusly alternative.
Evaluate the employee experience by analyzing feedback from other organizations. Seek out reviews to get an unbiased depiction of what the platform does well and which, if any, of its key features don't meet expectations.
Integration with the most popular tools for workplace communication, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, is a must-have. Check to make sure the platform works with the tools you use or you’ll end up with a rewards program that's separated from the rest of your business. Take full advantage if you're offered a dedicated account manager to help with these integrations.
Does the platform offer personalized rewards? Can you set up automated recognition for important milestones, such as work anniversaries? Just what types of rewards can you access via the platform? Ask all of these questions to avoid disappointment.
A demo or free trial is always the best way to learn what a Bonusly competitor offers. If you don't have access to a demo, we'd recommend looking elsewhere.
Each of the Bonusly competitors we've discussed here offers something interesting, but it's Motivosity that stands out. The detail you receive via its analytics ensures you create employee reward programs that impact engagement. Then, there's the customization - you can create practically any program you can think of. Plus, with Motivosity's unique view on social connection and integrating community into their employee recognition and rewards programs...it's a no-brainer.
Get in touch with Motivosity's team to discover how this Bonusly competitor can take your employee retention and engagement to the next level.
