What’s the Best Employee Recognition Software? 8 Top Options

6 Key Considerations When Choosing the Best Employee Recognition Software

We’ve spoken to countless companies with unique employee recognition programs, and there’s no one-size-fits all approach. That said, all successful programs share one common factor: proving return on investment (ROI) through high staff retention rates and team performance. However, it’s not always clear how each software helps.

When shopping for a new tool, you’ll be bombarded by flashy features, but it’s important to stay strategic. Ask yourself the following:

• • Do you need to replace fragmented solutions? If so, you may benefit from a centralized platform to manage employee engagement. Prioritize vendors who offer everything from recognition to wellness to employee listening.

• • What kind of awards do you plan to offer? Consider the variety and categories (e.g., merchandise, vacations, events), whether the pricing options suit your needs, and the availability of custom award options and configurability for your program.

• • Is (some of) your workforce mobile? Look for providers that support non-desk workers with a mobile app and password-less login.

• • How important is scalability? Switching providers as you grow can be an expensive pain. A modular solution with plenty of integrations and customizations is ideal if you plan to scale your program.

• • What do you want to pay? Account for hidden costs: markups, shipping fees, and how you’re charged for points and gift cards (i.e., before or after an employee redeems them). There’s more to consider than just the per-user price.

• • What data do you need? Many platforms fall short on analytics, limiting insights to participation and redemption. This won’t help you measure ROI. If you need to make the business case for employee recognition software, choose a vendor that can connect the dots to eNPS and engagement indicators (like whether your employees feel a sense of equity and belonging).

Next, we’ll introduce our employee recognition software, followed by some alternative tools.

 

Terryberry: The Best Employee Recognition Software for Measuring Impact & ROI

Terryberry’s employee recognition solution helps growing businesses scale their employee engagement programs, measure impact, and prove ROI.

Our platform empowers organizations to scale programs that focus on employee recognition, happiness, and retention while keeping teams motivated and encouraging consistent performance.

It’s not just another manager-led tool for micro bonuses and awards—such tools risk derailing your program’s trajectory by turning recognition into an additional form of compensation.

Once we configure Terryberry for your specific recognition program, we’ll work with you to measure its impact and build a business case for leadership, supported by deep analytics and reporting features.

Terryberry’s features reveal participation stats for your program, employee sentiments across different cohorts (e.g., most and least recognized), and trends among them. For example, do your most recognized employees feel a strong sense of belonging but a low sense of equity?

Before we dive into measurement and analytics, let’s explore how Terryberry can be configured for your unique recognition program.

 

Scaling Your Recognition Program with Terryberry

We often hear from businesses wanting to move away from on-the-spot, manager-led recognition and transition to a comprehensive, year-round program that runs on autopilot. The first step is defining a clear vision for your program—one that aligns with your company’s core values, encourages active participation and establishes a way to measure success.

Once the vision is set, the next stage is bringing it to life with the right technology. Terryberry offers all the essential features to build a robust recognition program, including:

• • Peer recognition: Allow employees to nominate and recognize each other.

• • Manager recognition: Enable managers to award and review peer recognitions.

• • Service awards: Automatically reward employees for milestones, years of service, or anniversaries.

While these core features act as the building blocks, custom configurations are what really bring unique employee recognition programs to life. Being able to tailor workflows, award and nomination types, redemption experiences, and measure the program’s impact are essential.

To illustrate how Terryberry can be customized for your company’s needs, here’s a closer look at a gamified program we helped a customer launch across 15 branches:

 

Chelsea Groton Bank’s “Acorn Rewards” Program

Chelsea Groton Bank, the largest mutual bank in Eastern Connecticut, operates across 15 locations with over 200 employees.

The Goal:

When the bank approached Terryberry, they already had a milestone award program and a strong workplace community. They wanted to expand their recognition program beyond milestone awards to appreciate day-to-day contributions and promote their seven core values: being innovative, collaborative, trustworthy, professional, knowledgeable, versatile, and positive.

The Vision:

Chelsea Groton Bank had a unique concept for a gamified peer recognition program called the “Acorn Rewards” program. The idea was simple:

• • Team members could give each other a “Purple Acorn Award” when they observed a peer demonstrating one of the bank’s core values or going above and beyond in their work.

• • When an employee collects 10 Purple Acorns, they receive a plush toy—a “Happy Squirrel”—which they can proudly display and dress up during the holidays.

• • For every additional 10 Purple Acorns received, a team member is awarded points that can be redeemed for luxury and lifestyle rewards.

We worked closely with Chelsea Groton’s team to configure the Terryberry platform and roll out the “Acorn Rewards” program across all 15 of their branches. The Purple Acorns became a tool for peer recognition, integrated with Terryberry’s “Give a WOW” peer-to-peer recognition platform.

When recognizing a peer, team members could choose from Chelsea Groton’s seven core values:

 

When you set up your own recognition program, you can also create different recognition levels:

Creating these levels allows you to reward employees more meaningfully during special moments. For Chelsea Groton Bank, this could mean awarding two or three acorns instead of one for achieving a particularly important milestone.

The bank also wanted to be sure that people felt motivated to participate in the program, so they used Terryberry’s Recognition analytics to measure monthly participation. They were pleased to discover that participation in their Acorn Rewards program is more than double the industry average for financial organizations.

Rachel Evrett, Chelsea Groton’s HR specialist, thanked us for customizing Terryberry to meet their program’s needs:

“Having the team from Terryberry behind the scenes has really helped our program succeed. Alex, Donna and Arvid have always been very helpful in providing anything that we ever need, whether it’s reports or research or modifications to the site. That’s another reason for the level of success that we’ve seen.”

 

Measuring Impact & ROI

Building a business case for your employee recognition program and justifying ROI requires more than just simple participation data. While shopping around, you’ll encounter other recognition software with basic surveying tools for employee listening.

These tools offer basic insights that let you find correlations—e.g., after implementing your recognition program, you’ve had an increase in engagement and an increased eNPS. But this data alone isn’t enough to create a convincing business case for your leadership team.

The key is to combine recognition analytics with employee listening data so you can answer specific questions like:

• • What’s our eNPS for the most recognized employees?

• • How is recognition impacting eNPS?

• • How is recognition influencing detractors?

• • Which indicators are our most recognized employees scoring low on (e.g., leadership, equity)?

Terryberry helps you answer these questions and more by combining data from your recognition program with insights from:

 

1. Research-Backed Surveys

Unlike employee listening tools that require you to build your own surveys from scratch, Terryberry provides pre-made surveys designed by PhD researchers and backed by I/O psychologists. These surveys measure engagement across six culture categories: belonging, leadership, equity, purpose, empowerment, and well-being. We call these engagement indicators.

 

2. Participation Stats

These reveal details about who’s participating in the recognition program, including the quartile you’re in for giving recognition, the quartile you’re in for receiving recognition, and whether your manager gives recognition.

Combining eNPS, engagement indicators, and participation stats helps you measure and prove the impact of your recognition program. For example, let’s say:

• • You want to check if your recognition program increases a sense of belonging. You’d start by looking at eNPS for your most engaged and least engaged employee cohorts. You can check the respective engagement indicators for each cohort to confirm that recognition increases a sense of belonging.

• • You’re interested in seeing the impact of leader participation in the program. You can take two cohorts—for example, leaders who are highly participatory and those who aren’t—and compare retention scores.

• • You want to check in on the well-being of your employees. If you’re also using Terryberry’s employee wellness tool, then you’ll have another layer of data for interpreting employee engagement and well-being.

Now, let’s say you’ve checked the eNPS of your most and least recognized employee cohorts, and the data confirms that more recognition correlates with a higher eNPS score. But when you factor in wellness program data, you find that the most recognized employees have lower well-being scores than their less recognized peers. This could indicate a deeper issue—your top performers might be experiencing burnout.

Terryberry is the only employee recognition platform that offers this level of granularity. This means you can approach leadership with data-backed reports and say:

“Our retention program is increasing a sense of belonging in our employees and improving net retention scores. It’s helping us retain our top performers. Here are the numbers…”

While top scores across all engagement indicators and cohorts are rare, here’s what your scores could look like:

Low and average scores are also important for justifying your recognition program because you can approach leadership with findings like:

“Our most recognized employees don’t feel a strong sense of equity. They might not feel there’s room to move up here, despite their hard work. What could be causing this? What can we do to fix it?”

So, you not only uncover what’s working but also identify gaps that could be hurting productivity or retention.

Turning these insights into action and tracking the impact of improvements over time can help you demonstrate your program’s long-term value to leadership.

 

Pricing: Pay for What You Use

Our admin fees are among the lowest in the industry, typically 30–40% below the market average. We protect you from hidden costs and collaborate with local fulfillment providers to deliver employee rewards to over a hundred countries without the hefty international shipping fees.

Our platform follows a pay-for-what-you-use model, meaning we only charge customers for gifts upon redemption, ensuring cost efficiency. Plus, our flexible pricing structure allows you to scale your recognition program as your organization grows.

 

Schedule a free demo to learn more.

 

Integrations

Terryberry’s employee recognition platform seamlessly integrates with most HRIS systems, allowing for easy import of employee files and quick onboarding to your recognition program. It also connects with popular communication apps like Microsoft Teams and Outlook.

By enabling notifications, you ensure employees are promptly informed when they’re recognized or awarded points.

 

Terryberry Alternatives: 7 Employee Recognition Software Platforms

 

1. Motivosity

Pricing: Contact Motivosity for a custom quote. The vendor requires a $3,000 minimum annual spend.

Motivosity offers employee recognition and listening tools, with service awards, peer recognition, pulse and eNPS surveys, and various award types. The platform also integrates with Venmo and PayPal—meaning employees can convert points directly to their wallets. They also offer a ThanksMatter Card, with dollars instead of points, meaning employees can use it to purchase rewards themselves.

Motivosity’s engagement and listening modules are two separate features in their platform, without integrated analytics. This means you can’t combine the data to paint a bigger picture of employee engagement; e.g., to see how eNPS varies between the most recognized and least recognized employees in an organization. Another issue is that Motivosity’s employee listening tools are fairly basic.

 

2. OC Tanner

Pricing: Contact OC Tanner for a quote.

OC Tanner is the only employee recognition platform other than Terryberry that also manufactures awards, meaning you can get highly customized awards for special occasions, like longer service anniversaries.

OC Tanner’s platform includes extensive employee recognition features, including anniversaries, milestones, peer and manager recognition, and the option to create custom programs around shared company goals. However, the software lacks employee listening capabilities, meaning you can’t use it to directly measure the impact of rewards and recognition on employee engagement.

OC Tanner specifically caters to the enterprise segment, typically companies with at least 5000 employees. Buyers may need to pay for the vendor’s additional services to get the most value from the platform.

 

3. Kudos

Pricing: Contact Kudos for a quote

Kudos is a comprehensive rewards and recognition platform that lets you track your program’s participation, including month-over-month recognition sent, cross-department and cross-location communication, and which values are celebrated the most. Kudo’s interface also organizes day-to-day recognition from service and milestone awards, simplifying the experience for employees.

A nice feature is its “Recognition Assistant” which is built into the platform and helps employees quickly craft messages to recognize peers or people they’re managing (something we also offer). You can give it some pointers in note form, and the assistant turns it into a personalized message that you can tweak.

 

4. Bonusly

Pricing: Bonusly offers three plans, with the lowest tier costing $2/user/month. It also offers a free trial.

As the name suggests, Bonusly helps teams automate employee awards and bonuses. It has thousands of rewards options, including gift cards and cash-out options, although the vendor notably lacks merchandise rewards. Bonusly is best for smaller, close-knit teams looking to encourage spot recognition. Managers can award microbonuses and schedule 1:1 meetings with employees.

Bonusly can be underwhelming for businesses looking to build year-round programs that encourage performance and participation, and help you measure recognition’s impact. For example, if you want to launch a president’s club for sales teams, or combine recognition with listening, Bonusly falls short.

 

5. Awardco

Pricing: Contact Awardco for a quote

Awardco is a recognition tool that supports peer recognition, incentive programs (including for wellness activities), and manager/leadership recognition.

They’re an official partner of Amazon Business, and employees can redeem points in exchange for Amazon products at zero markup. If you need highly customized rewards, though, like for service awards or a president’s club, having Amazon as your only choice is limiting.

Awardco has developed a special feature for recognizing non-desk workers, called Awardcos, which lets managers give out customizable codes that employees can scan and receive points into their account.

 

6. Snappy

Pricing: Snappy has a free Essentials plan in which you only pay for claimed gifts. The paid Elevated plan costs $999/yr.

Snappy is a gifting platform that’s a good choice for sending periodic service awards and gifts—think of employee appreciation day or employee of the month programs. The platform includes nifty features that make gifting experiences special, like the option to create “digital unwrapping” experiences, and recipients can even pick their own gifts. Snappy also lets you send gifts externally to people outside your organization.

While Snappy does gifting really well, the platform is underwhelming for teams looking to build mature recognition programs. It lacks the core infrastructure and customizations you’d need to create an always-on program, track employee and leadership participation, analyze cohorts, and measure your program’s impact.

 

7. NectarHR

Pricing: Nectar’s plans start with the Plus tier, which costs $5 per user/mo when billed annually. The company offers volume discounts on their plans for companies with over 500 employees.

Nectar has the core features you’d need to drive employee recognition and track participations. It offers service awards, peer recognition, nominations, and more niche features such as “challenges” that lets you incentivize specific activities, like wellness initiatives. The platform also offers an extensive rewards catalog, where employees can exchange their rewards for swag, gift cards, custom awards, and Amazon products.

Nectar’s data and analytics are focused on participation—so you can see how employees and leaders are participating in your program. But Nectar doesn’t combine recognition with employee listening or wellbeing, meaning you can’t measure the impact of your program on a deeper level.

 

Scale Your Recognition Program & Measure ROI with Terryberry

Organizations choose Terryberry's highly configurable employee recognition platform to launch and scale unique recognition programs that reinforce company values and build a sense of workplace community.

We work closely with our customers to measure the impact of their recognition programs and build a business case to present to leadership. With Terryberry, you'll have real data that shows your program's impact on eNPS and reveals the sentiments of specific cohorts.

If you’re ready to launch or scale a recognition program that delivers tangible business value, schedule a demo to discover how Terryberry can help.