How much does Kudos cost?

Kudos does not publish pricing. There is no pricing page on kudos.com, and the site routes every plan through a demo or a conversation with sales. The rewards page says there are no transaction fees on rewards. Evergreen publishes $3.99 per active user per month.

Does Kudos plant trees like Evergreen?

Partly. Kudos says each Rewards+ transaction funds tree planting through Veritree, so a tree follows a purchase. In Evergreen the tree is the reward itself: every three seeds a person receives are planted, with nothing bought.

Can Kudos be used without points or rewards?

Yes. Kudos describes rewards as an optional addition to recognition. Evergreen has no points at all, so the comparison in that mode is between two recognition feeds, one in a portal and one in your chat channel.

Alternatives

Kudos Alternative: Evergreen vs Kudos

For teams weighing Kudos against something lighter. Kudos is a full recognition platform with optional points, nominations and announcements; Evergreen is a Slack and Teams app with a tree at the end.

Kudos at a glance

Pricing: Pricing is not published; the Kudos site has no pricing page and every plan is quoted after a demo, with the rewards page stating there are no transaction fees on rewards. (as read on 7 September 2026)
Best for: Kudos is the right choice for a mid-size or large company that wants recognition, service awards, nominations and internal announcements in one platform connected to its HRIS.
Website: www.kudos.com

What Kudos is

Kudos is a recognition platform in the classic shape: a web and mobile app with a social feed, peer and top-down recognition, awards and nominations, years-of-service milestones, birthdays and celebration cards, pinned announcements with readership tracking, and analytics with leaderboards. Points and rewards are an optional layer. When switched on, the catalogue covers merchandise, gift cards, travel, mobile top-ups, events and charities, sourced locally, and Rewards+ transactions fund tree planting through Veritree.

Recognition messages can be sent and received through Slack and Microsoft Teams. The HRIS list is long, including Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, BambooHR, ADP and UKG, and the site lists SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001.

Who it suits

Kudos suits a company that wants one platform for everything that touches appreciation, run by an HR team with time to administer it. The announcements module and the nominations workflow are the tell: these are features for an organisation with formal award cycles and a need to reach people who do not read Slack. If that describes you, and you are buying through procurement anyway, the absence of a public price is a normal part of the process rather than a problem.

How the two products approach recognition

The difference is where recognition lives. In Kudos it lives in the Kudos app, with chat as a way in. In Evergreen it lives in the Slack or Teams channel, and the web is where the reporting goes. A colleague gives a seed with a message and optional value tags; it is posted publicly; every three seeds a person receives are planted as one real tree through a reforestation partner. The dashboard shows who is giving, who is receiving and which values come up, a monthly recap goes to the team, and the company can publish a public impact page.

Kudos ties trees to a rewards transaction and only on its Rewards+ tier. Evergreen ties trees to recognition itself. That is a smaller product, on purpose: no catalogue, no nominations workflow and no announcements module. It is also a cheaper one, because there is no rewards budget alongside the subscription and only people who interact are billed.

On price, Kudos is quoted and Evergreen is $3.99 per active user per month with a 14-day trial and no card. A ten-person team can start this afternoon; a two-thousand-person company can too, though the second group will probably want to read the recognition guide first and decide how many channels to run.

What switching involves

If rewards were on, set a redemption deadline. Export the recognition data you want to keep, map your Kudos award categories to Evergreen value tags, and install Evergreen in the channel where people already talk. Formal nominations do not have an equivalent in Evergreen; if you run an annual awards cycle, it stays a spreadsheet or a separate tool. The weekly reminder and monthly recap look after the everyday habit.

Where Kudos is strong

Points and rewards are optional, so a company can run Kudos as recognition only and switch rewards on later.
The catalogue covers merchandise, gift cards, travel, mobile top-ups, events and charities, sourced locally, and Rewards+ transactions fund tree planting through Veritree.
Awards and nominations, years-of-service milestones, birthdays and celebration cards are all built in.
HRIS integrations named on the site include Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, BambooHR, ADP, UKG, Paycor and Paylocity, alongside SSO through Okta, OneLogin and others.
SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 are listed, which matters for a procurement team.

Where it falls short

No pricing is published and there is no trial, so the evaluation starts with a sales call.
The Slack and Teams integrations are described as sending and receiving messages; the full experience, including redemption and announcements, lives in the Kudos web and mobile apps.
Company-values tagging is not described on the product pages, and the Rewards+ tier that funds tree planting is not defined.
A platform with announcements, spaces, leaderboards and an AI assistant needs an owner; small teams tend to under-use most of it.

How Evergreen differs

Trees for everyone, not a tier: Every three seeds a person receives become one planted tree, on every plan, without a rewards transaction to trigger it. Kudos funds trees on Rewards+ transactions.
Price on the website: Evergreen is $3.99 per active user per month, with a 14-day trial and no credit card. Kudos is quoted.
Built for the channel: Seeds are given in Slack or Microsoft Teams and posted to a public channel with the message and value tags. Reporting, the monthly recap and the public impact page are the only things that live on the web.
Values are the structure: Value tags are how Evergreen organises recognition, and the dashboard reports on which values are named and how often.

Verdict

Choose Kudos if you need nominations, service awards and announcements under one roof with HRIS provisioning, and you are comfortable buying through a sales process. Choose Evergreen if you want peer recognition to happen inside Slack or Teams from the first week, at a published per-active-user price, with a planted tree as the only reward.

Questions people ask

How much does Kudos cost?: Kudos does not publish pricing. There is no pricing page on kudos.com, and the site routes every plan through a demo or a conversation with sales. The rewards page says there are no transaction fees on rewards. Evergreen publishes $3.99 per active user per month.
Does Kudos plant trees like Evergreen?: Partly. Kudos says each Rewards+ transaction funds tree planting through Veritree, so a tree follows a purchase. In Evergreen the tree is the reward itself: every three seeds a person receives are planted, with nothing bought.
Can Kudos be used without points or rewards?: Yes. Kudos describes rewards as an optional addition to recognition. Evergreen has no points at all, so the comparison in that mode is between two recognition feeds, one in a portal and one in your chat channel.