Kudos® Expert Review, Pricing, Alternatives - 2023

Kudos® have paired their employee recognition software with additional employee engagement functionality. Features like spaces and galleries and culture tools are unique to the space. They also do consulting for companies that need extra assistance.

Aside from the fact that they took one of the best possible names for an employee recognition platform, the Kudos® platform has developed over the years to include much more than this aspect of employee engagement. The idea propelling this evolution has been to make a platform for all things related to workplace culture.

That’s why they boast arguably unique offerings to the space, such as the Culture Accelerator™ module. Essentially, this is a product-enabled service. It was recently designed to help manage all of the efforts geared towards improving a workplace’s culture from a single place within the platform, with the added value of having a consultant guide you through the process.

Back to the product, however, a nice part of their workplace culture-oriented features are spaces and galleries. As the names suggest, these are apps to upload, organize, and share photos of the team organized around themes. Let’s say you have a company outing or an off site training. You’d upload these photos to an album and share them with the team, right in the platform where they also recognize each other’s performance.

Which brings us to the employee rewards and recognition part of the tool. It really starts with setting up your core values, which are what your internal recognition programs are going to revolve around, for the most part.

Starting out, you’d set these within the tool as well as the behaviors and qualities you’d like to see recognized. Then, it’s pretty much off to the races, in the sense that you’d add the entire team to the platform. Each employee would have a profile, and then they’re able to do peer-to-peer rewards, share important news, recent accomplishments, and showcase this in a virtual public setting. 

Lastly, Kudos does have the usual set of reporting and analytics tools. However, we appreciate that they put a cultural focus into these. For example, they go beyond the basic recognition and rewards activity (which is present), and also provide reports about the company values that people have embodied in their recent performance.

We’ve found that Kudos® is definitely a product that requires you to get in touch with their team and work together for a successful and thoroughly-planned launch. Companies who are still more casual about their internal recognition program and would rather have a go at a self-service product might not find it to be a good fit.

ATCO, DHL Express, Bulgari, Arch Insurance, KidsPeace, Make-A-Wish

• Culture reinforcement tools: Kudos offers a set of tools and services to manage all of the efforts geared towards improving a workplace’s culture and integrating recognition into it.
• Spaces and galleries: The platform is equipped with places to store photographs from company moments, like off-sites, trainings, or office parties. You can also customize these and share them with the rest of the team.  

Kudos® also has capabilities for: 

• Peer-to-peer appreciation
• Performance and values-aligned recognition
• Extensive rewards catalog and customizable rewards
• Awards, badges, & certificates
• Years of service and birthday tracker 
• Video recognition
• Feedback loops
• Reporting and analytics
• Social hub
• People directory with personal profiles
• Company newsletters, messages, announcements, and event calendar
• Native mobile applications (Android & iOS) and Kudos® TV

• Chat & Collaboration: Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Sharepoint, Skype, and Slack
• SSO: ADP, Azure AD, Okta, LinkedIn, and many more
• User Provisioning: ADP, BambooHR, Workday, Paylocity, & more
• Browser Extensions: Brave, Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Firefox
• For everything else, they have the Kudos® API and you can even request new integrations through their chatbot.

Kudos starts at $3.25 per user per month for a minimum of 500 employees. Actual pricing will vary depending on number of users and contract length.

Kudos® is a cloud-based platform that integrates into many other existing business software solutions including Microsoft Teams,Microsoft Outlook, Slack, and more. Implementation services are provided by Kudos® to ensure a smooth technical setup and effective business adoption.

• One-to-one customer support provided to all customers calls
• Support is provided via online channels (eg. Zoom calls, support tickets, in-app live chat)
• ISO 27001 Certified Infrastructure
• SOC 2 Certified

Kudos®, Inc are the makers of the platform that bears the same name. It is a SaaS solution for employee engagement and workplace culture management. Since their inception in 2010, they’ve been leveraging the perks of social software and to help strengthen people’s relationship to their workplace. By extension, improving the company culture.