10 Best Employee Recognition Platforms to Celebrate Top Talent in 2023

Mo, which is short for Moments, helps you recognize the great work your coworkers do every day by posting Moments of appreciation and celebration, via their mobile app or website. Don't let your unsung heroes go unrecognized! Instead, post a Moment, tag your company values, and add an on-the-spot reward to incentivize positive behaviors. Their platform is a popular choice for small teams and enterprise organizations alike.

Why I picked Mo: I included Mo because their platform measurably increases employee retention and engagement by boosting morale and building a connected culture that people don’t want to leave. With Mo, it’s easy to design and automate your rewards and recognition program, with a huge range of rewards to choose from, including top brands like Amazon, Doordash, Uber, Starbucks, Deliveroo, and ASOS. Their rewards and recognition platform is also available across 26 countries and in 12 languages, making them a great choice for multi-national organizations.

Mo Standout Features & Integrations:

Features include Boosts, a performance-enhancing automation that prompts people to post wins, recognition, key results, and more so that over time, these consistent habits transform culture and performance. You can implement peer-to-peer rewards with full budget control, and manage awards and nominations, from Employee of the Month to Sustainability Superhero.

Mo includes tools to help employees create vibrant personal profiles where they can share working preferences, hobbies, and interests, enabling people to connect over common ground. You can pin your favorite Moments to your personal highlights reel and use them in future performance reviews.

Other features include sophisticated budget management functionalities and analytics, so you can control your spending, run reports, keep your accounting team happy, and analyze the success of your employee recognition efforts.

Integrations are available with popular communication tools like email systems, Microsoft Teams, and Slack. Their platform is also fully GDPR compliant and secure (ISO 27001 accredited).

Nectar is an employee recognition platform that helps team members feel valued, connected, and engaged no matter where they work. It works well for small to medium-sized businesses with 50 to 500 employees.

Why I picked Nectar: I included Nectar because their recognition and rewards platform offers a 360-degree set of culture-building tools that enables staff at all levels (peer-to-peer, manager-to-employees, and vice versa) to send meaningful recognition shoutouts rooted in your company's core values. Their platform was designed around 6 key pillars (Connection, Recognition, Empathy, Alignment, Trust, and Elevation = CREATE) that help organizations build a solid company culture.

Nectar Standout Features & Integrations:

Features include public shoutout tools, core value hashtags, automatic milestone celebrations (e.g., birthdays and work anniversaries), and incentive points that are redeemable for rewards like gift cards, entertainment discounts, custom rewards, company-branded swag, or items your employees can choose for themselves through Amazon.com. Platform admins can also use Nectar to create custom challenges, such as health and wellness initiatives, and recognize employees internally for their participation by gifting them Nectar points.

On top of all that, Nectar includes useful analytics that help HR teams spot any trends in how individual managers are recognizing their employees, identify which core values are recognized the most, and uncover examples of employees who aren't being recognized to help them find out why.

Integrations are available with 20+ popular HR software systems, including ADP, BambooHR, Gusto, Microsoft Teams, Namely, NetSuite, Paycor, Rippling, Slack, Workday, and Zenefits. To make system access smoother for your workforce, Nectar integrates with many single sign-on (SSO) providers too, including Azure, G Suite, Okta, OneLogin, Ping Identity, VMware, and others.

Motivosity is an employee recognition and engagement platform that addresses work culture through a research-backed approach to building gratitude and rapport among different teams. Using Motivosity, employees can be recognized by each other and by their superiors, with top achievements celebrated publicly in a social-media-like interface.

Why I picked Motivosity: Motivosity’s Recognize product empowers employees to celebrate each other's everyday wins publicly. Each month, employees are given a set amount of 'influence currency' (aka recognition dollars) that they can reward their colleagues with as they see fit.

Motivosity also has a ThanksMatters Card, which is a Visa card that's accepted worldwide. Each time employees are recognized by their staff or management, real dollars accumulate on their ThanksMatters Card - not points, like with most other systems. These dollars can be redeemed at any location that accepts Visa, whenever your employee chooses, giving them a lot more flexibility than with many typical rewards and recognition platforms.

Motivosity Standout Features & Integrations:

Features include a social media-like public activity feed, public achievements and celebrations, public comments, influence currency (recognition dollars), a dollar-based accrual system, customizable rewards, bonus 'sweeteners', spot bonuses, highlights & announcements, personal profiles, organizational charts, interest groups, and financial reporting tools. Their Milestone Tracker ensures that milestones like birthdays and anniversary dates are easily accessible by date so people can plan celebrations in advance too.

Integrations are available with 20+ popular software systems, including ADP Workforce Now, BambooHR, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Okta, Paylocity, Paychex, Rippling, SAP SuccessFactors, Slack, UKG Pro, Workday, Zenefits, and others.

Awardco is an all-in-one employee rewards and recognition platform that helps companies deal with high turnover in ultra-competitive labor markets. Customers like Ford, JPMorgan Chase, Pinterest, Hertz, Paramount, and Chick-fil-A use Awardco to build culture and retain the people they can't afford to lose. Best for organizations with over 100 employees, Awardco helps build world-class programs that make a big impact on the bottom line.

Why I picked Awardco: Awardco brings everything you love about Amazon into a platform for rewards, recognition, and incentives. Having an official partnership with Amazon Business, Awardco provides millions of reward choices, lower vendor fees, and dollar-for-dollar spending to your organization. With Awardco, companies cut down on expensive vendor costs, admins save time on manual tasks, and teams feel more connected. Essentially, they offer more choice, more capability, and less spending in an all-in-one total rewards platform.

Awardco Standout Features & Integrations:

Features include peer-to-peer shoutouts and social recognition tools, automated anniversary celebrations, celebration kits, wellness program templates, customizable service awards, automation tools, curated bonus boxes, and incentive programs that motivate your workforce to earn reward points for top performance.

Integrations are available with many popular HR management systems and collaboration tools, including ADP, BambooHR, Ceridian Dayforce, Infor, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Paycor, SAP SuccessFactors, Slack, Workplace by Meta, and UKG Pro. They also have an open API to support additional custom integrations, as well as native integrations with many SAML 2 and single sign-on applications.

Bucketlist Rewards is an employee recognition platform that utilizes gamification to promote engagement within organizations. This innovative platform allows companies of any size to quickly and easily recognize their employees for a job well done. Through its intuitive interface, Bucketlist Rewards provides an easy way for employers to reward their employees with points when they go the extra mile or achieve success in the workplace. Team members can choose from over 2,576 rewards or make requests for new rewards.

Why I picked Bucketlist Rewards: Their rewards system helps motivate employees by providing them with tangible benefits, such as merchandise, discounts, vouchers, and more. Companies can also customize their own rewards programs that best fit the company culture and values. With Bucketlist Rewards, employers can show appreciation for hard work while increasing motivation among team members in a meaningful way. In addition, employees have access to an engaging leaderboard where they can compare results with one another and strive towards becoming top performers in their organization.

Rewards don't have to just be performance-based, they can celebrate events and milestones like employee events, including anniversaries, birthdays, and welcome messages. You can automate correlating rewards, such as 100 bonus points for 1-year anniversary or a $50 gift card on birthdays.

Bucketlist Rewards Standout Features & Integrations:

Features include peer-to-peer and manager recognition, automatic milestone anniversary workflows, customizable rewards & badges, company-wide announcements, weekly newsletter templates, retention tools, and unlimited support by email or phone.

Integrations include Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Gmail, and Slack.

Leapsome is an employee development and recognition platform that helps organizations connect the dots between employee feedback, engagement, and performance. Used by companies like Spotify, Northvolt, Unity, and Workato, Leapsome enables a continuous cycle of employee recognition and personalized learning that powers the growth of your people and business.

Why I picked Leapsome: Like other platforms in this list, Leapsome goes beyond employee recognition and engagement and offers more depth to your HR team, including modern performance management features like 360-degree reviews, and goals & OKR tracking. You can customize and run leadership reviews designed around the key competencies of each role, collect meaningful feedback from across the company, and make it actionable through development frameworks and learning paths.

Leapsome Standout Features & Integrations:

Features include public or private recognition and praise, open-ended or competency-based feedback, mentorship features, feedback analytics, continuous performance feedback tools, engagement surveys, a best practice library, engagement benchmarks, and automated learning and onboarding experiences.

Their instant feedback feature captures timely feedback regarding projects, results, or initiatives, which can be easily incorporated into 1:1 meetings to make the feedback actionable. Another worthwhile feature is their praise wall which acts as a shared dashboard of all employee recognition and praise messages given and received across the company, to help boost employee morale and motivation.

Integrations are available with Active Directory, ADP, BambooHR, GSuite, HiBob, Jira, Microsoft Teams, PayFit, Personio, Rippling, Slack, and others.

Connecteam is an employee management solution that helps businesses recognize, reward, and celebrate the achievements of their top talent. Users can set up custom criteria for how employees are recognized—whether based on skills proficiency or overall performance—and track progress over time.

Why I picked Connecteam: Connecteam's gamification feature adds fun to the mix by incorporating game elements into the platform. Managers can create competitions and challenges that require teamwork, collaboration, and problem-solving skills to win prizes or rewards. To make it even better, the app displays each employee’s rank according to various criteria, such as total points earned, and the number of completed tasks, creating healthy competition among colleagues and helping them stay motivated.

Among the rewards you can give the team are badges and tokens that people can change for gift cards. Connecteam allows managers to recognize outstanding employees in real time by showcasing their success privately or publicly on a leaderboard within the platform.

Connecteam Standout Features & Integrations

Features include rewards, surveys, time tracking, task management, in-app chat, events, knowledge base, onboarding, quizzes, and a document repository for all HR-related files.

Integrations include a Quickbooks two-way sync that connects your timesheets to expedite payroll processing.

Guusto is an employee recognition platform that modernizes employee milestone and performance recognition rewards and helps organizations build powerful peer-to-peer programs. Guusto is used by many notable organizations to consistently reward great work and shape their workplace culture, including Harvard University, The Body Shop, Carlton Cards, Arc'Teryx, Canada Life, Marriott, Levi's, Fairmont Hotels, and Harry Rosen.

Why I picked Guusto: I appreciate how Guusto takes a different approach to their recognition and rewards platform than most other providers in this list. For example, instead of starting out with a costly, company-wide program, Guusto will work with you to develop a pilot program as a test run, before you roll out their platform to everyone in your organization. This lets you get a feel for how it will work for your company, before making a bigger commitment.

Another unique feature that sets Guusto apart is the fact that they'll donate a day's worth of clean water via the One Drop Foundation for every gift users send within the platform. Knowing this will help incentivize your employees to support your internal employee recognition program, while also making a positive impact outside your organization too.

Guusto Standout Features & Integrations:

Features include a long list of ready-to-use recognition programs such as milestone, anniversary, and years-of-service awards, onboarding programs, real-time recognition (spot bonuses), performance programs, learning and development incentives, quarterly and annual rewards, birthday and holiday rewards, wellness programs, and peer-to-peer shoutouts and nominations.

Platform admins can reward recipients with digital Mastercards that work in 160+ countries, and make bulk purchases of up to 1,000 reward cards at once. Guusto also supports custom rewards, charity donation gifts, and other gift cards that can be used at over 60,000 global merchants in-person or online.

Other features include milestone automations, advanced budgeting tools, unlimited non-monetary recognition, and a whole host of actionable reports analyzing every aspect of your employee recognition program from the number of rewards sent to taxable benefits and core value assessments.

Integrations are available with many HRIS, communication, and SSO systems, including ADP, BambooHR, Dayforce, Google Suite, Microsoft Teams, Okta, UKG Pro, and Workday.

With Cooleaf, you can shout-out your workplace heroes—both managers and peers—for everyday wins, and reward them with employee incentives they'll be excited about. You can design your own global rewards catalog to include charitable giving options, team swag, gift cards, experiences, and more. Your team members can then choose to redeem their points for rewards, or even use them to send gifts internally or externally.

Why I picked Cooleaf: Cooleaf helps companies empower and celebrate their employees through a meaningful recognition strategy. To help you get set up, their engagement experts partner with you to create meaningful experiences that will drive your team recognition. Cooleaf also helps organizations reinforce their core values and incentivize the right behaviors at the right time through ongoing communications, recognition challenges, and virtual team-building activities. Their customizable engagement calendar also makes it easy to maintain a positive, fun culture for both remote and in-person teams.

Cooleaf Standout Features & Integrations:

Features include automatic work anniversary rewards, personalized milestones, digital cards, a gifting budget, core value tags, performance measurement tools, and a large catalog of rewards to choose from. Their platform also includes tools to capture employee sentiment through pulse surveys and monitor their employee experience through powerful dashboards and analytics. Employees will also appreciate how easy it is to recognize their co-workers' achievements thanks to their popular integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Integrations are available with many other platforms including popular HRIS providers, single sign-on platforms, and learning & development systems.

Kudos® is a people management platform that leverages gamification features to encourage your employees to praise each other. Their platform also helps managers run employee recognition programs, improve company culture, and increase employee retention.

Kudos® facilitates positive interactions between staff members that boost employee morale and ensure everyone feels appreciated. Individuals who receive points can convert them into gift cards and redeem them at different vendors of their choice through their reward gateway.

Why I picked Kudos®: One of the perks of using this software is that it ties all the recognition messages back to company values. The platform’s reporting tool gives managers a visual representation of the values that are important to staff, enabling them to focus on initiatives that can improve the employee experience and drive performance.

Kudos® Standout Features & Integrations:

Features include public recognition messages, gamified badges, emojis and emotion-based tags, milestone celebrations, automation so no milestones are missed, anonymous employee sentiment surveys, recognition reports with easy-to-understand visual analytics, and a large rewards catalog with no transaction fees added to items purchased.

Integrations are available with popular applications like Google Workspace, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Okta, Ping Identity, SaaSPass, and Slack, and with many commonly used HRIS platforms like ADP, BambooHR, Oracle, Paylocity, SAP SuccessFactors, and Workday.