Which one actually fits your company?
Nectar and Awardco are both strong platforms. They were built for different kinds of organizations, with different philosophies about what recognition is for. This page will help you figure out which one you are, even if the answer is Awardco.
If you only read one section, read this one.
Choose Awardco if:
- You're a large multinational running top-down award programs across many countries
- Global fulfillment logistics, multi-currency tax handling, and compliance tooling are core requirements
- You have a dedicated program administrator whose job is to configure and manage the platform
- Your recognition strategy is built primarily around formal awards, service milestones, and manager-driven programs
That's what Awardco built. It's genuinely good at it.
Choose Nectar if:
- You're a mid-market company, roughly 100 to 10,000 employees
- You want recognition that employees actually use every day, driven peer-to-peer rather than top-down
- You need a platform that works out of the box, without hiring someone to run it
- You want recognition connected to the rest of your employee experience: communications, surveys, performance, and workforce insights, on one platform
Nectar is the category leader in the mid-market. This is exactly the buyer we built for.
Two different products wearing the same category label.
Awardco is an enterprise rewards and award fulfillment platform built around Amazon Business, designed for top-down award programs at global scale.
Its core strength is the transaction: sourcing, fulfilling, and accounting for rewards across borders. Read Awardco's own customer stories and you'll see who they built for: Hertz, Paramount, Dubai Airports, global manufacturers. Complex organizations with complex fulfillment needs.
Nectar is the recognition-first employee experience platform for mid-market companies, where daily peer-to-peer recognition powers a connected suite of communication, engagement, performance, and workforce intelligence tools.
Our core strength is the behavior: making recognition frequent, visible, and genuinely part of how your company operates, then putting that data to work across the entire employee experience.
Same category on a G2 grid. Very different bets on what matters.
It's right there in the names.
Awardco leads with the award. The catalog, the fulfillment, the redemption. The platform is architected around the moment an employee receives something.
Nectar leads with the recognition. The human moment where a teammate says "I saw what you did, and it mattered." The reward is there too, and our catalog is deep: Amazon, gift cards, custom swag, experiences, charitable giving. But the reward is the exclamation point, not the sentence.
Why "Nectar"?
Our name isn't an accident either. In nature, nectar is the essential ingredient. It's what bees gather, one small trip at a time, and turn into honey. No single trip makes honey. Thousands of small, consistent ones do.
We believe the same thing about organizations: frequent, meaningful recognition is the building block of a strong culture. Not the annual award. Not the big ceremony. The small, constant moments that compound into something sweet.
No single trip makes honey.
Here's why this distinction matters more than any feature table:
Rewards without frequent recognition become a perk.
Employees redeem points twice a year, say "neat," and forget the program exists. HR ends up running a small e-commerce operation instead of building culture.
Recognition with rewards becomes a habit.
When peers recognize each other weekly, recognition stops being a program and starts being how the company talks to itself. That's the thing that actually moves retention, engagement, and connection between teams.
This is why we obsess over participation. A recognition platform that employees don't open is a rewards warehouse with a login page. Everything about Nectar's design, the feed, the Slack and Teams integrations, the mobile experience, the speed of giving a shoutout, is built to make recognition frequent. Frequency is the product.
The feed where recognition happens daily, in Slack, Teams, mobile, and the browser.
"With Awardco, it's a separate app people only open when they get a reward, so there's not much engagement. With Nectar, recognition is integrated directly into how we work."
Executive Team · US Legal · Switched from Awardco
The honest question about configuration.
Awardco offers an enormous amount of configuration: custom program logic, regional catalogs, complex budget hierarchies, multi-country tax treatment. For a global enterprise with a dedicated recognition program manager, that flexibility is a real asset. Someone whose job is to run the program can make it sing.
But here's the question most comparison pages won't ask you: do you have that person?
In most mid-market companies, recognition is owned by an HR leader who also owns benefits, engagement, onboarding, and eleven other things. There is no full-time program administrator, and there never will be. For that buyer, a platform's configurability isn't power. It's homework.
Nectar is built for the team without a platform admin. You launch in days, not months. Programs, budgets, and milestones work out of the box with smart defaults. You still get real customization, branding, custom awards, challenge programs, budget rules, and analytics HR leaders actually use in board decks, but you get it without a certification course.
"The question isn't which platform has more configuration options. It's whether you have someone whose job is to configure them."
"Awardco and Bonusly are geared toward very large organizations. Nectar's big selling point was meeting our production-floor and warehouse workers where they are, and catering to mid-sized companies."
HR Coordinator · Hypertec · Evaluated both
The best recognition platform is the one people open.
Buyers on G2 consistently rate Nectar among the easiest platforms to use and administer in the recognition category. That's not an accident, and it's not because Nectar is lightweight. It's a design philosophy: every extra click between "I want to recognize Sarah" and "Sarah got recognized" kills participation. So we removed the clicks. Recognition happens in the feed, in Slack, in Teams, on mobile, in seconds.
The same philosophy applies to admins. Launching Nectar looks like this: connect your HRIS, set your budget, pick your values, invite your team. Most customers are live within days. Reporting is built for the questions HR leaders actually get asked: who's participating, which teams are connected, what's the budget doing, what's the trend.
To be fair to Awardco: more knobs can be the right answer. If you're rolling out region-specific award programs across 30 countries with different tax regimes, you want those knobs, and you probably have the staff to turn them. For everyone else, the knobs are a tax you pay in admin hours every month.
Exclusive PartnerThe world's largest HR association
Johnny C. Taylor, Jr.SHRM President & CEO · Strategic Advisor to Nectar
SHRM chose one recognition partner. It's Nectar.
SHRM is the world's largest HR association, representing hundreds of thousands of HR professionals. When SHRM decided to partner in the employee recognition category, they evaluated the field and made Nectar their exclusive recognition partner.
Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., SHRM's President and CEO, also serves as a strategic advisor to Nectar. That means the person leading the world's largest HR organization has direct input into where our product goes next.
We won't tell you what to conclude from that. We'll just note that the organization whose entire job is knowing what HR teams need looked at every vendor in this category and picked one.
What Awardco does well.
We told you this page would be honest, so here's the other side.
Awardco's reward fulfillment is legitimately impressive. Their Amazon Business relationship gives them one of the largest reward catalogs in the industry, with physical fulfillment in over 100 countries. Their tax and compliance tooling for global award programs is deep. Their A-Pay card product is a genuinely useful option for certain incentive structures.
If you're a 30,000-person multinational running formal top-down award programs across dozens of countries, and you have the program staff to manage an enterprise deployment, Awardco deserves a hard look. Some companies fit that description. If that's you, you should probably talk to them.
Most mid-market companies don't fit that description. They're not trying to solve a global fulfillment logistics problem. They're trying to solve a culture problem: people feel unseen, teams feel disconnected, good people leave quietly. Fulfillment doesn't fix that. Recognition does.
Recognition is where culture starts. It shouldn't be where your platform ends.
Awardco is a rewards platform: when the reward is delivered, its job is done. Nectar is an employee experience platform: recognition is the front door, and behind it is a connected suite where every product makes the others smarter, because they all run on the same behavioral data.
The daily habit layer. Peer-to-peer shoutouts tied to your values, manager awards, milestones, challenges, and a full rewards catalog spanning Amazon, gift cards, custom swag, experiences, and charitable giving.
Internal communications that reach your whole workforce, including frontline and deskless employees who never open email, in the same feed where recognition already has everyone's attention.
HR workflow orchestration. Onboarding moments, anniversaries, birthdays, promotions, and lifecycle touchpoints that run automatically, without a spreadsheet of dates.
Engagement surveys with Mercer benchmarking, living alongside recognition so you can see the relationship between how teams feel and how they behave.
Performance management built for mid-market reality: lightweight reviews, continuous feedback, and goals, informed by recognition data instead of December's memory.
Every product you turn on makes the shared data richer. A single-purpose tool means four contracts, four logins, and four integrations for one problem.
Signals: where it all compounds.
Because recognition, comms, surveys, and performance all run on one platform, Nectar can read the behavioral patterns underneath them. Signals surfaces attrition risk weeks before it shows up in an exit interview, identifies disconnected teams before engagement scores drop, and gives HR leaders something they've never had: an early warning system built on how people actually behave, not how they answer a survey twice a year.
No single-product vendor can build this, because no single-product vendor has the data. A rewards platform sees redemptions. Nectar sees the organization.
"Awardco helps you deliver rewards. Nectar helps you understand and improve the employee experience those rewards are part of."
"I used Awardco at my last company. What I liked about Nectar is that it isn't just rewards and recognition. It also covers engagement, so we don't need separate platforms."
Head of Human Resources · Archway · Former Awardco user
Questions buyers ask us about Awardco.
How long does Nectar take to implement?
Most customers launch within days. Connect your HRIS, set budgets and values, invite your team. No implementation consultants, no certification training, no six-month rollout plan.
Can we migrate from Awardco to Nectar?
Yes. We regularly onboard companies coming from other recognition platforms. Our team helps you plan the transition, including how to handle existing points balances and service award schedules, so employees don't lose anything in the move.
Does Nectar's rewards catalog match Awardco's?
For the vast majority of mid-market companies, yes, and then some: Amazon, hundreds of gift card brands, custom company swag, experiences, and charitable donations. Where Awardco has an edge is physical fulfillment breadth in certain international markets. If you have large employee populations in many countries outside the US, ask us directly about coverage in your specific markets and we'll give you a straight answer.
How does pricing compare?
Nectar prices per employee per month with straightforward tiers, published on our pricing page. We'd encourage you to get quotes from both vendors for your actual headcount and compare total cost, including implementation fees and any charges for admin seats or add-ons. One structural difference worth knowing: Nectar bills for rewards when employees actually redeem them, not when the award is given. Your budget isn't tied up in points sitting unredeemed in accounts. Ask any vendor you evaluate when they charge you, because the answer affects your cash more than the sticker price does.
Does Nectar work for frontline and deskless workers?
Yes. Mobile apps, SMS options, and comms built for employees who don't sit at a desk. Recognition programs fail when half the workforce can't participate, so this is core to the product, not an add-on.
What does the SHRM partnership actually mean for us?
It means the world's largest HR association vetted this category and chose Nectar as its exclusive recognition partner, and SHRM's CEO advises our roadmap. Practically, it means the product is built with direct input from the organization that represents your profession.
We're bigger than 10,000 employees. Is Nectar wrong for us?
Not necessarily, and we have customers above that line. But we'd rather be honest: if your primary need is complex global award fulfillment across dozens of countries with dedicated program staff, Awardco or an enterprise vendor may genuinely fit better. If your need is participation, culture, and connected employee experience, talk to us regardless of size.
See whether Nectar fits
in 20 minutes.
No 45-slide deck, no discovery interrogation. A recognition specialist will walk you through the platform live, answer your Awardco comparison questions directly, and tell you honestly if we're not the right fit.
You'll hear from us within one business day