Awardcovs.Bonusly
With the right vendor, employee recognition improves every single business outcome. Two well-known options in the space are Awardco and Bonusly, but how do they compare, and which is best for you?
The verdict
Where Bonusly offers a competent yet limited one-size-fits-all solution, Awardco offers a comprehensive solution that is fully configurable to fit your organization and what makes it unique. Many Bonusly customers eventually outgrow its capabilities and move to Awardco, where they find a platform that meets their present needs and easily scales to fit any future opportunities.
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Bonusly at a glance
Bonusly is a peer-to-peer recognition platform designed to foster appreciation through frequent, small gestures, primarily with points attached. Employees receive monthly point budgets to award colleagues, which can be redeemed for digital gift cards, donations, and other perks.
The platform emphasizes simplicity, engagement, and employee performance, with integrations into tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams for easy access and visibility.
Key features include:
- Mobile app: Recognition (and point redemptions) can happen anywhere, anytime, right from employee phones.
- Employee allowances: Admins set monthly budgets; employees award and spend those points on rewards like gift cards, donations, swag, or cash.
- Analytics: A dashboard tracks trends like recognition frequency, team engagement, and social connections in real time.
What sets Awardco apart?
Unlike Bonusly, which emphasizes a simple monetary approach to recognition, Awardco offers a more customizable and scalable recognition solution that provides a global reward network with greater employee choice.
Awardco avoids the technical limitations of Bonusly around program design and configurability. Awardco allows for better alignment with your organization’s branding, processes, and objectives, all while emphasizing a balanced approach between monetary and non-monetary to drive higher engagement, participation, and culture adoption while optimizing your budgets.
Whether you're supporting a team of 50 or 100,000, Awardco makes it easy to design recognition programs that deliver on your values, goals, and budget and is a platform that scales with you, making it the last recognition solution you will ever need.
Key Differences: Awardco vs. Bonusly
Budget Optimized
Awardco goes beyond points. Instead of pushing budgets into the platform to force adoption, Awardco emphasizes the holistic return on recognition—helping organizations unlock the real business impact of meaningful rewards. By focusing on intrinsic motivators and strategies that drive participation beyond simply putting more money into the platform, we drive authentic engagement and lasting cultural change.
Read how WOW Mobile Boutique created a comprehensive compensation plan with Awardco’s incentives and rewards, driving a 120% increase in YoY performance.
Bonusly’s user experience is built around the idea of points being attached to every recognition, despite having a small reward network of <10,000. Awardco understands that points aren’t the only reason employees are motivated to do great work, so we help clients to build cultures of recognition that mix monetary and non-monetary strategies. This helps organizations optimize their strategies and budgets over time to maximize program ROI and align to what drives employees to do their best work.
Scaled Reporting, Insights, & Compliance
Awardco supports organizations anywhere from 50 to 100,000+ employees. Our customers rate us highly on reporting capabilities because we have built highly flexible and configurable reporting, budgeting, and compliance configurability to meet the needs of organizations of any size.
See how Americare built a custom platform, complete with eight different recognition programs, and finished implementation an entire month sooner than planned—and then saw an 89% login rate and lower turnover.
Bonusly, on the other hand, has built simple, out-of-the-box reporting that, while designed for easy consumption, does not stand up to the scrutiny of more advanced needs. Some organizations who use Bonusly do not recognize these needs during initial launch and run into them later, which drives many to switch to more capable reporting and compliance recognition platforms like Awardco.
Integration Capabilities
Awardco offers strong turnkey integrations to nearly every HRIS and HR platform. Further, our Slack and Teams integrations leverage advanced features to fully align recognition with how organizations communicate. Our Awardco Connect capabilities also allow us to develop additional workflows and automations beyond standard capabilities to match the unique needs of each organization.
See First Choice Health upgraded from their outdated platform to consolidate their recognition programs on a single platform while tying administration and communication into their existing tools.
Bonusly is best suited for straightforward use cases, where basic integrations are sufficient and more advanced capabilities are not necessary. Larger organizations or those with unique tech stacks may find their limitations more noticeable, or they may come across important business workflows and needs that simply cannot be achieved on Bonusly at all.
Automation & Scalability
Awardco is purpose-built to scale—from small businesses to global enterprises—with robust administrative controls, program flexibility, and multi-language support. Companies can easily manage regional programs, budget approvals, and compliance. In addition, the platform is designed to alleviate admin time spent managing the programs with advanced automations and workflows.
Read about The Nest School admins save 8 hours per week in program management and administration.
Bonusly’s simplistic approach and limitations make sense mostly for small organizations looking for a lightweight, easy-to-deploy solution. As teams grow or needs become more complex, companies may find they need additional flexibility or scalability because the short-term workarounds on Bonusly are no longer sustainable.
Product Pace & Vision
Awardco has invested heavily into the Product organization over the last three years, hiring top-tier engineers and developers and growing the team by over 300%. This has accelerated our roadmap significantly and allowed us to plan, develop, and implement ambitious innovations that are unavailable on other platforms.
See how All Access utilized AwardCodes, one of our recent developments, in conjunction with custom safety incentives to drive participation and excitement in their blue-collar workforce.
Bonusly staffs a lean and constrained development team to support its entire platform and roadmap (1 Bonusly developer/engineer for every 7 at Awardco). This forces Bonusly’s design principles to focus on standard “one-size-fits-all” solutions catered for simpler use cases and business needs—a major reason why organizations eventually outgrow the capabilities of Bonusly’s platform and need to migrate to a more robust platform in the future.
The strategic choice is clear
If you’re looking for a customizable recognition platform that can scale with your business, adapt to your organization’s workflows, and truly reflect your culture, brand, and organizational objectives, Awardco is the smart, strategic choice.
Contact us today for a demo and see how Awardco can elevate your recognition strategy.
