Nectar

Nectar is a cloud-based employee recognition solution that seeks to cultivate a positive work environment with employee recognition rooted in its core values. Nectar specifically targets organizations with heavy remote work as a solution for keeping employees engaged even when they are not in an office. Additionally, Nectar has Android and iOS apps for convenient access on the go.

TrustRadius Research Team Analysis

What is Nectar, and how Does It Work?

Once the points are distributed to employees, they can then recognize each other by awarding points. The employee awards allow for messages consisting of text, emojis, pictures, and GIFs and require the attachment of a company value. Not attaching a company value will result in an error, as shown below.

Most of the core mechanics of Nectar are not unique. Both Awardco and Bonusly share similar point systems for awards. Awardco has the same requirement for attached company values.

The rewards catalog for Nectar is expansive. A significant portion of the catalog is from Amazon, which many of Nectar’s competitors also use. Notably, however, Bonusly, Nectar’s most direct competitor, does not use direct Amazon fulfillment. Their catalog is instead limited to gift cards, charity donations, and custom rewards.

Beyond Amazon, company swag is available from some but not all of Nectar’s competitors. Nectar’s discount selection for restaurants, resorts, theme parks, and other businesses is extensive and a feature that stands out from its competition.

In addition to the standard recognition programs, Nectar provides challenges and milestones. Challenges allow the company to set particular individual or group goals and distribute points to employees if they are met. Milestones allow for automatic distributions of points on significant days, like birthdays or work anniversaries. Most of Nectar’s competitors also provide milestone-type programs or rewards. Challenge-type programs are hit or miss across the space. For example, Bonusly does not have a standard challenge feature, but something similar can be created with their manual reward tool.

How is the user interface?

This is the home screen. It has four sections. The navigation bar works like any navigation bar (This is an Admin account, not all profiles will see the Admin part of the navigation). The profile shows how many points you have to give and how many points you have to redeem.

The social feed is both where you give points and recognize people and where you can see the recognition others have received. Finally, the “My Team” section shows how much of your team you have recognized and when the last time you recognized each member of your team was. The “My Team” section either requires a spreadsheet upload or HR integration to populate appropriately.

This is the awards screen. It is pretty straightforward to use. You have the categories on the top banner, and you simply select the rewards that you want. Swag can be sourced either from a company provider or Nectar’s partner Axomo.

Of course, the question immediately arises: “Does this set Nectar apart?” The answer is yes and no. For comparison, here is the home screen for Bonusly.

Here is the equivalent home page for Awardco.

Awardco is pretty different in that the social feed is not on the home page and that recognition and the social feed are not on the same page. This is because Awardco is generally a deeper, more complicated product than Nectar with features like different programs for different employees, keyword exclusion to limit Amazon purchases, and the ability to stream the data outside the application.

What analytics are available?

But it is the collaboration that is my favorite. The reason for this is that this information can provide useful insights into cross-functional dynamics. From the diagram, we can see that sales and marketing recognize each other a lot. This is something that I think most people would expect and consider a good thing.

In contrast, the amount of recognition between Engineering and Product is very low. This might be worrying because those two departments would work together a lot. So are they not working as well as they should together? Have they not adopted the recognition platform yet? Who knows, but this chart gives you that visibility. It shouldn’t be the only way you measure those interactions, but it is another line of sight into your organizational dynamics. You can have the same chart but at the individual level, as shown below.

So the question is, yet again, how does this compare to the competition?

How is the support?

If you go for the Plus tier, you get a dedicated account manager who can assist you with any issues. If you have selected the standard tier, you can contact Nectar through their website. For comparison, Bonusly all of Bonusly’s support is through website contact, while Awardco has a 24/7 support line.

What are the integrations?

Nectar integrates with many HRIS and SSO systems commonly used among small and medium-sized businesses. It also integrates with Slack and Microsoft Teams for recognition in everyday communication. Its integration suite is somewhat narrower than Bonusly’s, missing products such as Google Chat, Zapier, Zoho, UKG Pro, and SAP, but still covers many of the major players. However, both Nectar and Bonusly far surpass Awardco for the number of integrations.

What is the cost?

Awardco doesn’t provide stated pricing, instead calculating a price based on individual company metrics. However, Awardco stated that their fees were typically around 15% of a customer’s rewards budget. This would be roughly equivalent to $4.00 per month per employee if you spend $320 on rewards per year per employee. This doesn’t account for any discounts.

Nectar falls on the cheaper end of the spectrum. While there are cheaper options out there, like Recognize or Giftogram, those options tend to lack all of Nectar’s features, especially the social feed and expansive reward catalog.

How does Nectar Scale?

What is the use case?

• Extra bells and whistles like the “My Team” section on the home page and a few additional reporting options

• A lower price with a yearly agreement or the flexibility of not having a yearly agreement

• Providing both direct Amazon fulfillment and company swag in the rewards catalog

This advantage disappears when Nectar’s Standard tier competes against Bonusly’s Core tier. While Nectar still maintains a bells and whistles advantage, it loses its price and rewards catalog advantages, which turns it into a toss-up.