13 Best Employee Recognition Apps for Slack

One of the key qualities of effective remote work is active communication. When your team members are spread across different countries and time zones, the chances of them feeling left out of the loop and unrecognized are high.

Slack apps and bots make it easier for your team to stay more engaged and connected despite being physically apart. These apps make Slack more interesting by improving overall team culture and morale. You can use these integrations to give kudos to a team for a job well done.

Here’s a list of the 13 best Slack apps for employee recognition.

1. Friday

Kudos, Goals, Icebreakers, Async Meetings

How do you recognize colleagues when you're working remotely? You need a system that prompts gratitude and thankfulness.

Friday is a team communication tool that not only is a roadmap for your day, but also is a way to stay connected with your remote team, including saying thanks.

Unlike other Slack apps, Friday is a more robust application that, yes, can be used for saying thanks and giving employee recognition--but helps you stay connected to your team for better asynchronous communication.

With each update, you can also have an option to send a kudos to a team member, and even connect those kudos to your team goals and values. You can even use Friday as a modern intranet with Slack, keeping your most important things at work all in one place. This is something that other Slack apps for employee recognition don't do.

Your team is always aligned with Friday.

• Reduce the number of meetings for smoother team updates
• Send kudos to team members connected to your team goals and values
• Use fun icebreakers to get to know coworkers
• Start a company handbook for your values

Here’s how to integrate Slack with Friday:

2. Leaderboard

Team Building App

The Leaderboard app is to let your inner child out and challenge your co-workers to a game of Mario Kart, Ping Pong, Table Football, and more. Report your score once you’re done and track your progress on the leaderboard. This is not only a fantastic way to bond with your team members but also recognize the office champion at the end.

Features

You can integrate the Leaderboard app in your Slack and get live alerts of match results for every match played in your team. The app has 11 commands that make interacting with it easier. Type a / forward slash in any conversation to view a list of available slash commands. For example, you can access the leaderboard with the ‘leaderboard command’ to see who’s leading. See who you could challenge next and record new matches--all without leaving Slack.

Pricing

• $7.5/month for 8 users after free trial

3. Bonusly

Team Culture

With your team spread across geographies, giving recognition to team members can be challenging. Remote work can often make members feel out of the loop and disconnected. Bonusly allows teams to celebrate work and wins across the team seamlessly in Slack.

Features

With Bonusly, everyone can see the kudos and well done improving overall team morale, job satisfaction, and employee retention. Recognition from teams and management is a great way to keep your team members motivated and aligned to the company objectives.

Pricing

• Contact for details

4. Disco Slack

Team Culture

Disco boosts team culture by celebrating value-driven work and fostering team appreciation. It gives all the members of the team to recognize, nominate, and engage their peers for their work. You can send compliment cards, send kudos, and use the appreciation dashboard to keep the employees engaged around company culture.

Features

Use the forward slash to see the list of commands on the different ways to celebrate your teammates. The shortcuts make it easy for you to create tasks and take action, all without leaving the Slack interface.

Pricing

• $3.00 per month. It includes a free trial.

5. HiThrive

Employee Recognition Solution

Recognition not only awakens the human spirit but it’s also key to enhanced productivity at work. This is especially important when teams are spread across different geographies and time zones. HiThrive empowers leaders, managers, and team members to celebrate the best in each other.

Features

With HiThrive, you can give peer-to-peer shoutouts to all team members for contributions big and small. You can also automate birthday and service anniversaries to make sure that you never miss an important date. You can reward employees by giving them Amazon, eGift cards, non-profit contributions, and more.

Pricing

• 30-day free trial, $1 per user/mo thereafter.

6. Kudos Slack App

Team Culture / Employee Recognition

A good employee experience and consistent recognition improves team engagement and strengthens your culture for a healthy return on investment. With Kudos, you can improve employee experience, company culture, and encourage your team to reach bigger goals, engage more deeply, and go the extra mile.

Features

With Kudos, you can create a real-time peer-to-peer feedback loop where you can give them recognition, give badges, coach, and mentor them. It easily integrates with your apps and the analytics dashboard gives you in-depth insight into team morale.

Pricing

• $3.00 per feature, per month

7. HeyTaco

Team Culture

HeyTaco improves the connectivity between team members by encouraging active communication and giving kudos to peers for their hard work. Being on the highest-rated HR and Team Culture Apps, it gives your team a fun, light-hearted way to engage with each other and solidify their bond when working remotely.

Features

One of the best features of this app is the tacos that you add to a message add up over time and can help employees climb the leaderboard for being recognized for their work. Members can redeem their tacos for various rewards or prizes that you build into the platform.

Pricing

• $3.00 per person per month. 

8. BucketList

Employee Recognition

BucketList is a recognition platform that rewards employees for accomplishing a personal life goal. The aim of the platform is to motivate employees to grow, thrive, and be more productive not just in their professional life but also in their personal lives.

Features

Happy employees are productive. Team members can share when they accomplish a personal goal from their BucketList. They can even share photographs to build a more engaged and positive community. The app gives you detailed reporting so you can understand the impact on the personal lives of your employees and the bottom line of your company.

Pricing

• Paid app with a 14-day free trial. No credit card information required.

9. Karma

Team Bonding

Karma is a bot that allows you to build stronger, happier teams by setting goals, tracking team performance, and rewarding good work--all within Slack. You can collect anonymous feedback and analyze appreciation and praise activity through reports.

Features

As a manager, you can set monthly goals and the Karma bot will reward the best performing actors, the rockstars of your team. 1 reaction is worth 0.1 karma; members can collect their karma points and then redeem them for an Amazon gift card, a book, a desert, or whatever reward system you’ve set up.

Pricing

• Free
• Pro: $30 for up to 19 users
• Enterprise: Tailored to your needs

10. YouGood

Team Morale

YouGood allows colleagues to acknowledge each other’s contribution with small bonuses. Each bonus appears in the team’s overall feed for everyone to see the important work being done in the company. Accumulated bonuses can be redeemed for a customized reward, like a gift card, or anything you set up in your company store.

Features

YouGood offers a great Slack integration that keeps everyone engaged. You can send bonuses, manage reward requests, and get notified about all important dates like anniversaries and birthdays related to you without the need to leave Slack.

Pricing

• $2.50 per user per month.

11. Greetbot

Employee Engagement

The GreetBot app does exactly what it says--it greets people. It’s a great way to help new members feel welcome and informed when they join your team, especially when it’s remote. A good onboarding process can help ease new members into your office environment and improve productivity.

Features

You can schedule follow-ups wherein you engage new members with a series of scheduled messages delivered minutes, hours, days, and weeks after they’ve joined. You can add more personality to your onboarding with built-in message packs like lyrics from hit songs or quotes from cinema classics.

Pricing

• Starter: Free
• Plus: $49 per workspace / month

12. Birthday Bot

Employee Engagement

The Birthday Bot Slack app will turn you into that amazing, caring person who never forgets an office birthday or anniversary. BirthdayBot gives you a gentle reminder before a birthday so you can send your wishes and maybe prepare a present for your colleague.

Features

BirthdayBot automatically collects the team's birthdays and anniversaries (you don’t have to input anything). It comes with a fun collection of wishes that are posted in the team chat to celebrate an important day.

Pricing

• Free plan allows recording up to 50 birthdays in your workspace.
• Standard: $0.75 per active user / month
• Pro: $1.99 per active user / month
• Custom: Tailored to your needs

13. Scorebot

Team Building

Give your team members a healthy competition to boost morale. You can assign point values to emojis, rack up points with reaction-worthy Slack posts, and view your team's leaderboard to find out who’s been the most active in the team.

Features

You can assign points to come of the default and custom emojis. You could take it up a notch by adding negative points to some emojis. Scorebot tracks these emojis and assigns points to the members on the leaderboard.

Pricing

• Free
• Pro: $99 per month for up to 500 users
• Enterprise: Tailored to your needs

Why Use Slack Apps for Employee Recognition?

Slack apps can be a fantastic way to engage and connect with your remote team and enhance their productivity. Many of these apps and bots can improve team motivation and help with project management.