Bonusly Reviews

Pros
Ease of Use: Bonusly is the pinnacle of set it and forget it. Their environment is so self sustaining for the users inside it there is basically never any need for administrative input beyond adding new people in! Specifically redemption for employees - its completely handled between Bonusly and the end user claiming their points. With a wide selection of redemption options, everyone is happy!

Cons
Bonusly could probably do to work on some additional features for those that want to do more advanced rewarding programs. Tie-in to other platforms and reporting/monitoring could use work.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
I love how you can reward your coworkers for doing something great. And i love all the options we have with gift cards. I find it easy to use for the most part. You log in, award your chosen amount to your coworker, and then just submit and they see it right away.

Cons
There are a few things. I wish i could manually input the amount of the bonus. It gives set amounts. My biggest gripe though is twice I tried to use my gift card i chose for my bonusly and they DIDNT work. Once was for sephora. I had to actually go to the store, and it took them a long time to try to figure it out and only one person in the store knew what the issue was. I also tried to use it for amazon and had to contact amazon to have them manually add it to my order. I don't feel there is an easy way to contact someone if this happens. It was quite an inconvenience. Esp for sephora having to go to the store. Needless to say I won't choose that gift card choice again.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
My company uses bonusly to encourage inter-departmental collaboration and to remind all employees that reward those who have gone above and beyond to be engaged with addressing a client's need, find an innovative solution, or even just to lend their help and expertise to an overwhelmed colleague. This allows everyone in the company, no matter what level to achieve some recognition for the little things. In return, it helps foster an environment where we want to collaborate and we are grateful for the resources that we have to use for projects and new deals (our coworkers).

Cons
Overall, there aren't any major cons for this project. As a user, I would like to have better emoji and GIF shortcuts to key in - adding them currently is a little tricky - but that is purely a fun, cosmetic con.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Best team building, team morale building platform . Customer Service is great once you get in touch with them. The platform is easy to use, and fun.

Cons
The platform has many Buggy, errors. Customer service is slow to response, the platform is a tad bit glitchy.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
Bonusly is a great software to show members of your organization how much you value the help or feedback they have provided you, while also being able to showcase cross functional goals to others in the organization. I am able to give recognition to coworkers that don't work in my office, which is really nice when you don't have the ability to thank them face to face. Seeing the Bonusly exchanges also gives me an idea of what is going on in other departments for example: if an Account Executive closes a new deal and gets bonusly, i know (being in Marketing) that we may have another new logo for our website. Bonusly is the perfect balance of not bribing people to do stuff but incentivizing them, plus it's fun to give!

Cons
There are limited options for redeeming points in Canada, we are restricted to about 15 companies, which is far fewer than the U.S.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
It's a fun way to say thank you/congratulate my fellow team members on favors/accomplishments. Rather than having to find a small gift from somewhere, I can easily just send someone points to express my gratitude or appreciation. And they retailers they work with for gift cards are great. Amazon is probably our most popular one. It's so easy to add the gift card to my account and I use it for things I already needed and had on my wish list.

Cons
I would just make it easier to submit a help ticket directly from the dashboard. Currently, you have to go to the help center, which has a list of forums that require you to look through for answers. It's only at the footer of that page that you can click "Contact Us" and submit a ticket. It should be easier to access this since I have had technical issues come up with loading my gift card and could not solve the issue myself through a forum search.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
I like the fact that Bonusly encourages engagement by making it fun for people to come out, add bonus' to recognition that others receive. Being able to add some fun animated GIF's to the posts makes it amusing to come out and read the feedback given on a regular basis.

Cons
I wish it were easier to leave some negative feedback privately. This would help close the feedback loop when things didn't go as expected, and constructive feedback is needed.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
I love bonusly for the fact that you can reward your colleagues for going above and beyond in the work place without having to use my own money. I can make sure that they are noticed for their actions, and they get a reward out of it themselves!

Cons
The only thing I don't like is that fact that I have a limit each month that I can send to others. I find myself running out of point to give to people at the end of the month

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Everyone at my work loves Bonusly. It's a fun way to show each other appreciation for small and large things. Helped someone out? They'll give you bonusly. Someone helped you out? Give them bonusly!

Cons
iTunes used to be a gift card option, but no longer is. Other than that, nothing at all. It's a great tool for morale.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
This is a great way to bond with the team and show appreciation in a fun way. A lot of laughter around the office comes from the GIFs shared when sending rewards. The options where to redeem the rewards are pretty good as well.

Cons
Overall the software is simple to use. For what it is used, I see no downside, besides that of course we would love to have more points to give.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Can't say enough good things about Bonus.ly. Their awesome integrations are top notch (Single Sign-On with Office 365/Azure AD, Syncs with our HR system Zenefits, Bots for MS Teams/Slack). Also, when we've had hiccups, the Support team has always been extremely responsive. We spend hundreds of dollars on SaaS apps per user. Adding $25 to allow employees to reward each others hard work and dedication with a coffee or beer (or Amazon gift card)...is no brainer. Supporting and securing modern cloud mesh applications is stressful work for our hard working engineers and support team members. Bonus.ly provides some additional ways to reward inter and intra team comradery. Lastly, the integration with our culture and values by requiring each bonus be hashtagged with one or more company values gives us great analytics to our top performers and alignment. It's tangible data that highlights the team members accomplishments through the year. helping at performance reviews. PS - Did I mention it pretty much runs itself (users auto created/deleted based on HR status + Single Sign-On for Office 365 or Google means no extra passwords to remember)?

Cons
That we didn't implement it sooner at our organization.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
- Easy to set up and use - Slack integration - Statistics and reports - GIFs - Does the job I need - Priced well - Lots of rewards - Custom rewards

Cons
- Weak rewards dashboard - Manual fulfillment of custom rewards

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
This is such a motivating tool for employees to connect and keep morale in the work environment high. I personally feel that Bonus.ly helped me not only want to be more productive during my workday, but also helped me to feel more connected with my coworkers. Bonus.ly was one product in our workspace that helped us to feel more connected as a team. Love that the balance resets every month, and that custom rewards can be added to their system (For example, we had a work fundraiser that could be paid into with bonus.ly points.)

Cons
Minor software issues, such as: Tags did not always work. Sometimes I needed a refresh of my page before I was able to find the tag name of a coworker. On the rare occasion, while redeeming a reward, the page would freeze, yet my points would still be deducted, and the prize was no where to be found. Thankfully customer support was quick to help, so this was not a huge issue, but enough that it should be noted.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
I like the platform's automatic fulfillment and we use custom awards which are really cool. The ability to select cash increments is nice. The custom naming of points (we call them "Sploints" in our office) is awesome. Appreciate the slack integration.

Cons
It would be cool if my staff were able to trade their points. Sometimes we do Poker nights, and would be fun for our staff to trade away the points that they've earned. I find the interface used to be very confusing to find where I can configure things. I wish that we could use more hashtags than the current limit. I find in our slack log, gets a bit crazy when everyone "adds" to someone elses's bonus. Would be nice to either have a toggle to shut that particular slack message off (others bonusing on an existing bonus) or somehow consolidate.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
I think that the idea is just incredible. You get a monthly amount of points that you can give to coworkers as a gift in recognition for good acts or a great work. Then, if you get points from your peers, you can redeem them and get a reward (gift cards, paypal credit, or just donate it to a non profit organization, and more). It is no that much, but it is really splendid when your teammates recognize your contributions to the business. It is better when you integrate it with Slack and with every point you give you can send a funny gif.

Cons
For now I could not be able to find anything to dislike about this platform. Maybe if you have integrated with Slack, notifications can be very annoying if you have notifications on for that channel.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
It's easy to use. Minimal set up and basically no maintenance at all. It also integrates well with the other tools we use, like Office 365 and Slack, so people can see a live feed of bonuses that are given around the company. There are some basic analytics and fun analytics (like a word map created out of the terms used in bonuses during the past 30 days). And they are introducing new features regularly. Recently, they developed an alert system to help prevent fraudulent bonus distribution (which may be a concern for large organizations).

Cons
I can't really put anything in this column. The only thing that could be improved on would probably be adding more granularity to their analytics and perhaps longer timelines for their analytics. But even those things have improved in the last few years that we have been using the software. They are always improving.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
I like the selection of gift cards/options to spend your bonusly on. I like how easy it is to award bonsly to someone.

Cons
I used my bonusly once to purchase a sephora gift certificate which came via email. The code would not work on the site. I then went to the actual store and the cashier still could not get it to work. Finally the manager was able to somehow help her. It shouldn't be that hard. And im not sure who to even contact if something goes wrong with what you've chosen. It was kind of stressful. That being said, I've been using bonusly for awhile and this is the first time it happened.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
We have a bit of an internal competition going on. We publish all bonus.ly points on slack. And each time a team member get the captain of Thank You or captain of Teamwork award there is some friendly competition and roasting.

Cons
The features are limited to the regular plan. I'd love to use the pro plan. * cons an email cannot be used more than once. If you re-activate an old user email, all the history is there. It would be great if we could wipe the history, or be able to create a duplicate with the same email. E.G. we have a strong internship program with some rotation, but similar names are being used for emails. But it causes an issue for bonus.ly.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Bonusly should be a must used platform in every organization due to following reason: 1.)Rewards are provided to the employee if the employee completes its task, it's a great thing to give reward as it keeps the employee motivated. 2.)The organization can also put incentives based on quarterly, half or yearly performance of the individual. 3.)Peers can send rewards to each other on working together with a particular task, this helps in a team bonding and strengthing relationships among peers.

Cons
There is no as such con in the Bonsuly as they are constantly updating their app and website. But it is just a suggestion if they can remove leaderboard from their application as it gives a sense of competitiveness which is sometimes not healthy for an organization.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Easy enough to setup. The basics are definitely there. Bells and whistles are added over time. The reporting is great. It's interesting and helpful for management to see those who are being recognized by their peers and for what reasons.

Cons
As leadership within the company, we still need to drive proper usage of the platform. We see month end emails from bonusly issued and then all of sudden everyone is getting recognition for the simplest of things. That's not really the intent of the product, and we wish we could turn off that month end reminder. It's more harm than good. Obviously, it's in the best interest of bonusly to continue to show high engagement. But we want only authentic recognition. Overall, good program.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Bonusly is a great way to recognise and celebrate hard work and passion. It’s simplicity is it’s strength allowing me to log on and recognise someone quickly.

Cons
It’s very easy to use incorrectly, people can and do use it to give each other points on a quid per quo basis or as a form of payment or incentive. I’ve also heard colleagues offer to do things in return for bonusly points, totally not the point!

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
The Bonusly system is extremely easy to use. It requires basically zero training. Our employees love the opportunity to recognize and reward each other. We started using the system as part of the launch of our core values, intending to only use it 2-3 months. It's been a positive enough experience, though, we can't stop now! The system forces users to tie the micro bonus to one or more predefined hashtags. We have hashtags for each of our core values. This gives us a daily reinforcement of how we apply our core values to real life situations and recognizes/rewards employees for doing so.

Cons
There are only 3 downsides. 1.) You are introducing a new cost into the business, so you need to make sure it's worth it. For us, it has been. 2.) Some of our users report the mobile app doesn't work well, so they will only use the actual website. 3.) The analytics package is amazing, however you can't really share the analytics (like the word map) easily outside of the admin module. Honestly, these seem kind of nit-picky. The positives significantly outweigh the negatives. We were worried that employees might game the system and just give bogus bonuses to one another. We haven't had any problems with that. They give meaningful and motivating bonuses.

Rating breakdown

Pros
Very easy to use, integrations with Slack make it even easier, automation and reporting great to ease administration. Rewards available are great and even being able to create your own.

Cons
don't like the pricing model of the automated birthday/anniversary, for what it offers seems a bit steep

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
The concept of it is amazing. The ease of use and the many different reward options there are.

Cons
The emoji menu works pretty bad, I wish it worked as good as the one in Slack. Also, when someone gives a bonus to a group of people, many times you want to add to that bonus but also including the original giver and that's not possible, so you have to create a new bonus for that specifically and we end up with several different bonuses related to the same event.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
I like that all employees get a say in who can get a bonus. It is a great way to help show your appreciation. Someone ran a report for you? Send them points. Someone covered while you were on PTO? Send some points. Its great.

Cons
I love it. I think the things I don't love only really revolve around my specific business. Like I would like a larger allowance to be able to give out more points throughout the month but that is specific to my company.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10