Awardcovs.Motivosity
With the right vendor, employee recognition improves every single business outcome. Two well-known options in the space are Awardco and Motivosity, but how do they compare, and which is best for you?
The verdict
While Motivosity offers a simple, centralized tool for recognition, communications, and engagement, Awardco delivers the same suite of products with greater depth of capability, scalability, customization, and alignment to your organization’s business operations. Third party assessments like G2 and Gartner rate Awardco well ahead of Motivosity, with Awardco servicing more customers than Motivosity in every segment from SMB to Enterprise.
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Motivosity at a glance
Motivosity is a recognition and engagement platform focused on social interaction and community. Its feed-style design encourages frequent peer-to-peer appreciation and connection, helping smaller teams or socially driven organizations build a culture of gratitude.
Founded in 2013, Motivosity has primarily focused on supporting smaller businesses, with a strong emphasis on monetary recognition programs. Only in recent years has Motivosity allowed its customers to have non-monetary recognition programs. Over the years, Motivosity has focused on expanding its platform with simple capabilities around employee surveys, groups, and communication, though many of these features have not seen significant investment or improvement over time, catering mostly to smaller businesses with simple needs and low configuration requirements.
Key features:
- Classic recognition and anniversary programs: This includes monetary and non-monetary programs, such as peer-to-peer and manager to peer.
- Reward network: Motivosity offers an extensive reward network that includes options like Amazon, gift cards, charitable donations, swag, travel, and more.
- Thanksmatter visa cards: Motivosity offers customers the ability to give their employees cards that operate similar to credit cards to redeem on items outside of their rewards network.
- Employee surveys: A simple survey tool that allows leaders to get a pulse of employee sentiment and feedback.
- Employee performance: A simple employee performance management tool.
- Employee spaces and communications: Send top-down communications to employees beyond recognitions and rewards
- Incentives and wellness: Challenges and incentives provide ways to engage employees around certain behaviors and business outcomes.
What sets Awardco apart?
Awardco is a highly flexible, scalable recognition platform built to evolve with your organization. It offers the world’s largest global reward network with extensive program customization and competitive pricing. Leaders can set up unique recognition and incentives programs that meet the diverse needs of the organization with zero compromises.
Awardco offers all of the same capabilities as Motivosity, and while organizations often outgrow the rigid features and simplistic capabilities of Motivosity, Awardco customers never have to worry about needing to move onto another platform someday.
Regardless of how big your company is, 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. Motivosity
Impactful Recognition
Awardco emphasizes the holistic return on recognition, helping organizations unlock the real business impact of meaningful recognition and rewards—without forcing a focus on points. 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 Wow Mobile Boutique created a comprehensive compensation plan with Awardco’s incentives and rewards, driving a 120% increase in YoY performance.
Motivosity’s original user experience was built around the idea of points being attached to every recognition, and most of their product investments remain focused on monetary programs. 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.
Rewards Variety
Awardco offers a more comprehensive and global reward ecosystem tailored for global teams and diverse workforces. Through integrations with Amazon, Priceline, Viator, and other partners, employees can choose from millions of products, experiences, charitable donations, or custom reward stores. This unmatched variety, along with zero markups through Amazon Business and our A-Pay™ payment cards powered by Stripe, ensures every employee finds something meaningful, no matter their location or interests.
Motivosity offers a meaningful but curated marketplace with gift cards, branded items, donations, and flexibility through the ThanksMatters VISA card. While these options work well for smaller teams, the catalog is limited and does not include direct vendor integrations such as Awardco’s integration with Amazon.
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.
Motivosity, 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 Motivosity 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 unique Awardco Connect capabilities also allow us to develop additional workflows and automations beyond standard capabilities to match the unique needs of each organization.
See how 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.
Motivosity 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 Motivosity 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 create and manage regional programs, handle budget approvals, and meet any compliance needs. In addition, the platform is designed to alleviate admin time spent managing the programs with advanced automations and workflows.
Read about The Nest Schools admins save 8 hours per week in program management and administration.
Motivosity’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 past 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 Staging utilized AwardCodes, one of our recent developments, in conjunction with custom safety incentives to drive participation and excitement in their blue-collar workforce.
Motivosity staffs a lean and constrained development team to support its entire platform and roadmap (1 Motivosity developer/engineer for every 10 at Awardco). This forces Motivosity’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 Motivosity’s platform and need to migrate to a more robust platform in the future.
Customer Support
Awardco’s dedicated support teams and Center of Excellence provide personalized, fast, and strategic guidance. Customers value the responsiveness and tailored expertise, especially when managing global or complex recognition programs. With more than 100 people dedicated to customer success and support, Awardco has the ability to provide support and strategy to organizations of any size.
Awardco partnered with Americare not only to bring on a better recognition strategy and technology, but to drive greater adoption and a short time-to-value through additional resourcing support from the Awardco Center of Excellence.
Motivosity does not offer meaningful consultative support or guidance beyond implementation, other than through its resource library, blog, and occasional webinars. It does not staff former practitioners, thought leaders, or researchers, unlike Awardco’s Center of Excellence, and relies exclusively on third-party data and partnerships because it lacks in-house expertise.
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.
