Find out how Bonusly builds connections, boosts engagement, and strengthens workplace culture across the organization
Updated: May 28, 2025
According to the 2025 State of Recognition Report, one in every five employees report feeling lonely at work. Employee engagement is also at a 10-year low, with only 31 percent of workers actively engaged. The impact? Lower morale, higher turnover, and significant costs to your organization.
Bonusly, an employee recognition platform, believes the antidote is simple: effective employee recognition.
In this review, we’ll discuss Bonusly’s key features, system integrations, and pricing options. We’ll go over what makes it different from other platforms on the market—including a chance to try before you buy.
Bonusly is a recognition and rewards platform that helps improve employee engagement and connection. Bonusly does this by creating bonuses to reward achievements, encouraging team members to recognize their peers, or showing gratitude to employees who reach milestones.
Each month, all employees on the Bonusly platform are awarded points that they can use to reward and recognize others in the organization. This pot of money cannot be carried over, so it must be used up in the same month it was given.
Points that are awarded as part of a reward do not expire. Employees are free to save these or redeem rewards from the Bonusly rewards catalog. Exchanging points for cash is possible, too.
Key features and capabilities
Bonusly has an all-in-one platform that carries these features:
Let’s take a closer look at each:
Bonusly’s recognition platform allows everyone – managers and team members – to give recognition to anyone in the organization. It works like a social media feed (think Facebook) where you can tag an employee and write a short message of recognition.
Everyone else can join in by adding their own comments, emojis and GIFs to make it fun!
You can also add hashtags representing your company values. This can help you and managers link these values with individual behaviors.
Managers and employees are given a fixed number of points that they can award. Yes, even employees get an allocation of points, allowing for peer-to-peer recognition and rewards.
Those who receive points can save these or exchange them for rewards or gift cards.
Bonusly’s rewards catalog showcases over 1,200 items under categories like:
If employees prefer getting cash for their points, that’s an option too! For a complete listing of items and brands in your location, browse through Bonusly’s reward catalog on their website.
Bonusly allows you to create custom rewards and experiences such as lunch with the CEO or tickets to a local sports tournament.
The platform also allows employees to use their points to donate to causes they support. Bonusly has over 50 donation options to organizations like:
Here are more ideas on how you can show recognition and appreciation toward your employees.
With Bonusly’s performance module, everyone in the organization gets to share real-time feedback – no need to wait for yearly performance reviews. Managers get a better idea of how their team members are performing by looking at the platform. This results in evidence-based performance reviews.
The platform also offers templates and prompts for one-on-one meetings. These can help managers define goals and track progress. These prompts also offer a good starting point for meaningful performance review discussions.
HR teams can send automated messages with points to employees celebrating their birthdays, work anniversaries, and other milestones. No need to do it manually – just enter the relevant dates when you create a new user.
Bonusly also integrates with various human resource information systems (HRIS) to sync employee data.
With Bonusly’s nomination and awards module, you can:
You can also set how many points each winner gets for different award categories.
Write and edit company messages in one location to reach your employees wherever they are. You can even choose to include incentives for better response rates in questionnaires and surveys.
You can prepare messages ahead of time and choose a future date to post the announcement.
Bonusly works with most tools and systems, so there’s no need to modify your existing HR tech stack. What follows is a list of software that Bonusly integrates with.
Bonusly connects with leading HRIS platforms to sync employee data and keep your records up to date. Here’s a sampling of HRIS products that Bonusly integrates with:
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AlexisHR
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Breathe
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ChartHop
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Charlie
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Dayforce
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PeopleHR
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Personio
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UKG Pro
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UKG Ready
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Workday
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Namely
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ADP
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SAP
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BambooHR
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Okta
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Office365
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OneLogin
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OpenID
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Generic SAML
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Plug Bonusly into your team’s everyday tools to make recognition easy to give, share, and celebrate where work happens.
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Slack
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Microsoft Teams
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SharePoint
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Zapier
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Bonusly’s integrations make it easy to connect with the tools your team already uses. This helps streamline setup, boost user adoption, and keep recognition visible across your organization.
Bonusly is one of HRD’s best employee rewards programs – read our top 10 list for more.
Bonusly pricing comes in three tiers (current as of May 2025):
Appreciate, the most basic, is priced at $2 per user per month
Connect, which comes at the mid-level (and is the most popular, according to Bonusly) is priced at $5 per user per month
Achieve, their top-level offering, comes at $7 per user per month
Here are the key features of each package:
You can test the platform before committing to any of these price packages. Bonusly offers a demo – just fill in your details on the pricing section of their website. Even better, you can sign up for a free 14-day trial.
Bonusly has three stages of customer support:
Onboarding: helps define goals and measures of success; integrates Bonusly with existing HR tools
Adoption Acceleration: continues to help and guide you in the early stages of using the platform
Value Realization: supports you with data analysis and other features you have yet to uncover
Bonusly also offers other programs and activities to encourage clients to share best practice and connect with other like-minded industry leaders. More on that in the next section.
The website has a robust Help Center covering a range of topics such as billing and rewards, admin training, and the catch-all “for all users”. Any other questions not covered by the Help Center can be directed via email.
From what we’ve seen, there are two points that make Bonusly stand out as a rewards and recognition tool:
Here’s what we mean:
Since we started this round of HR software reviews for HRD, we haven’t seen any free trial offers until we came across Bonusly. The sign-up process is simple - just give your email address, then you’ll get a link where you can access a mock platform. No need to give credit card information.
This is a good opportunity to test drive the platform. You’ll be given some basic tasks to get you started:
There’s an option to look at the admin page for a peek at the dashboard and other settings.
The platform offers options to set up a payment method (if you’d like to seal the deal right away) or contact Bonusly for a free demo.
Did you know? Bonusly was one of HRD’s 5-star awardees in the employee recognition category in 2023.
Here’s another point that caught our eye: Bonusly supports its clients offline by organizing these activities:
Bonusly Customer Roundtable brings together clients from similar industries to share best practices
Early Access Program gives clients the chance to test new features and share feedback with Bonusly’s Product and Customer Success teams
Product Research is an invitation for clients to contribute to improving Bonusly through discussions and surveys
Thought Leadership provides a platform to share HR leaders’ knowledge and expertise via panel discussions, webinars, and co-writing blog posts
Appreciation Research links clients and researchers to share insights on employee appreciation
These programs help foster the relationship Bonusly has with its clients. They even expand the circle by building connections between clients and industry leaders.
Year established: 2013
Size (number of employees): 51 – 200
Global locations: Colorado, USA
Businesses served: 3,250+
Key people: Charles Hough (CEO), Radhika Samant (COO), Raphael Crawford-Marks (founder and CTO), Debra Squyres (chief customer officer), Judith Bartels (VP, product & design), Jeremy Thomas (VP, engineering)
Bonusly has been in business since 2013, when founder and CTO Raphael Crawford-Marks seized the opportunity to reinvent the way employers, employees, and colleagues recognize and reward their team members.
“I knew that, in order to be successful, companies would be shifting their approach to employee experience, and I thought software could enable that shift,” Crawford-Marks told TechCrunch in 2020.
“Bonusly was this elegant idea of empowering employees to give each other timely, frequent, and meaningful recognition that would not only benefit employees because they would feel recognized but also surface previously hidden information to the entire company about who was working with whom and what strengths they were bringing to the workplace.”
Bonusly brings together recognition, performance tracking, and reward features in a single platform aimed at improving employee engagement. Its integration options and self-serve trial may appeal to teams looking for a user-friendly starting point.
As with any HR tech investment, it’s worth weighing Bonusly’s capabilities against your company’s specific goals and culture before deciding. If you’d like to explore more options, here are other rewards and recognition software we’ve written reviews on:
Whether you choose Bonusly or another platform, taking that first step toward recognition is key to building stronger connections in your workforce.
Visit our HR Software Reviews Section for more tools and resources to help streamline your HR processes. Don’t forget to bookmark this page for easy access
