Bonusly was the most-named product in this category, named in 5 of the 6 buyer questions we put to ChatGPT and Gemini on 3 August 2026. No other product came close to that reach. We asked one question at a time, let each assistant run a single live web search, and logged every product it named and every source page it cited. This page is only that count, with nothing modeled, weighted or guessed.
Behind Bonusly sat a tight pack. Connecteam, Motivosity, Small Improvements, Workleap and Worktango were each named in 4 of 6 answers, a 67% hit rate, and PeopleGoal was named in 3 of 6, or 50%. Workleap and Worktango are two different products rather than a typo, and each was named 4 times. So the consensus shortlist an assistant would hand a buyer today runs about seven deep: Bonusly at 83%, five products at 67%, then PeopleGoal at 50%.
How the shortlist changed from question to question
The most useful thing in this data is how little the six questions agreed with each other. The plain query "best employee engagement software" returned a shortlist that shares almost nothing with the rest: Achievers, Workday, BambooHR, Workleap, SurveyMonkey, Vantage, Leapsome and Qualtrics. Of those eight, only Workleap and BambooHR appear anywhere else in the study, and six of them (Achievers, Workday, SurveyMonkey, Vantage, Leapsome and Qualtrics) were named in that one answer and nowhere else. Bonusly, the overall leader at 5 of 6, is completely absent from the bare "best" answer.
"Best for small teams" opened a second, separate world. That question named BambooHR, Culture Amp, Lattice, MangoApps, Bonusly, TinyPulse, Matter and PeopleGoal, and four of them, Culture Amp, Lattice, TinyPulse and Matter, appear in this question and no other, 1 of 6 apiece. A buyer who only ran the generic "best" search would never see that Culture Amp and Lattice are exactly what the assistants reach for the moment the words "small team" are added.
The remaining four questions behaved almost as one. "What should I use," "best free," "most affordable" and "recommendations" all returned the same core five: Worktango, Bonusly, Small Improvements, Connecteam and Motivosity, present together in all 4 of those answers. That shared core is what carries the high counts. Even so, each of those four phrasings tacked on a different tail name: "recommendations" alone surfaced Sogolytics, at 1 of 6, and "best free" and "most affordable" each added their own, below.
Free versus affordable: nearly the same list, but not quite
"Best free" and "most affordable" look like one question and mostly agree, but not fully. Both named the same five: Worktango, Bonusly, Small Improvements, Connecteam and Motivosity. "Best free" then added Workleap, PeopleGoal and SweetHawk, and SweetHawk was named in that one answer only, 1 of 6 across the study. "Most affordable" instead added MangoApps and Microsoft, and Microsoft likewise appeared in that single answer and nowhere else. A free-tier name and a price-led name each rode in on exactly one phrasing of the question. Change the wording and they vanish.
Where the answers came from
Three domains fed all 6 answers: reddit.com, peoplegoal.com and achievers.com. Reddit is the community thread in the set, and it was pulled for every one of the six questions, 6 of 6. selectsoftwarereviews.com, an independent HR-software roundup, came next at 5 of 6, then oak.com, peoplemanagingpeople.com and quantumworkplace.com at 4 of 6 each. Sixteen source domains fed the study in total.
Here is the part worth sitting with. peoplegoal.com fed all 6 answers and PeopleGoal the product was named in 3 of them. achievers.com fed all 6 answers and Achievers was named in 1. oak.com fed 4 answers and Oak Engage was named in 2. mangoapps.com fed 2 answers and MangoApps was named in 2. Four of the products on the shortlist publish the very "best employee engagement software" roundups the assistants are reading, and they turn up inside their own roundups. Owning the source and owning a slot in the answer are the same move here.
The classic review directories barely registered. G2 appeared exactly once, and only through its blog at learn.g2.com, inside the plain "best" answer. Capterra did not appear at all. Quora showed up once, in the "small teams" answer. The pages steering these recommendations are Reddit plus vendor and publisher roundups, not the star-rating directories most buyers picture when they hear "software reviews."
What it takes to get named here
Being named tracks with being in the sources, not with market size. Workday, Qualtrics, Culture Amp and Lattice, four of the largest and best-funded names in the category, were each cited in just 1 of 6 answers, while Bonusly reached 5 of 6. The assistants are not ranking the market, they are summarizing a small stack of pages, and if a product is not on those pages its revenue does not rescue it.
So a vendor who wanted to climb would work the exact source list this run exposes, in order of reach: get talked about in the Reddit threads that fed 6 of 6 answers, get placed in the roundups on peoplegoal.com and achievers.com (6 of 6 each), selectsoftwarereviews.com (5 of 6), then quantumworkplace.com and peoplemanagingpeople.com (4 of 6). Better yet, publish a credible roundup of your own, the way PeopleGoal, Achievers and Oak already do, since their domains sit in the citation set for nearly every question. You do not need all sixteen sources. You need the five or six that keep repeating.
The full list, counted
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Bonusly | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Connecteam | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Motivosity | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Small Improvements | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Workleap | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Worktango | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| PeopleGoal | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| BambooHR | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| MangoApps | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Oak Engage | 2 of 6 | 33% |
Workleap and Worktango are two separate products, listed here with their own counts rather than merged. Another 13 products were named once each, 1 of 6: Achievers, Culture Amp, Lattice, Leapsome, Matter, Microsoft, Qualtrics, Sogolytics, SurveyMonkey, SweetHawk, TinyPulse, Vantage and Workday.
Where Glotier fits
Glotier does not sell employee engagement software, so we are not named in any of these six answers, and that is the correct result. We would not want a mention we did not earn. But running this measurement is exactly what Glotier does for a customer: we put your category's buyer questions to ChatGPT and Gemini, record who gets named and which source pages did the naming, and hand you the gap. This whole page is the output of one such run. The check is free, needs no account, and takes about a minute.