Enterprise architecture requires a customizable, flexible, and stable loyalty solution. As the demand for cloud-based deployments increases, the market for loyalty software solutions is booming, with small-scale SaaS modular platforms entering the market thus far run by monolithic loyalty giants.
As an enterprise buyer, you have multiple dependencies to manage and requirements to meet. With this post, I will compare some of the most popular loyalty solutions for enterprises to give you a better idea of which better suits your business needs.
Loyalty management software is a technology that allows businesses to:
Loyalty platforms come in all shapes and sizes. However, to be the perfect enterprise-fit, first, they need to meet requirements popular among enterprises. Some of them may include:
The most common issues that enterprise face when managing a loyalty program are as follows:
Most of these issues are caused by the lack of development talent, time, and resources. To build cross-channel loyalty experiences, all data points need to be integrated which can be resource-intensive. This heavy load can be reduced by dedicated loyalty software. Below you will find a list of the most popular loyalty solutions for enterprise clients that can alleviate at least some of the pain points listed above.
“Great partners, strategic, know the loyalty space and are always willing to make roadmap changes on their product.” – Mark F. via G2
CrowdTwist is one of the new additions to Oracle’s long list of services, a global leader in IT solutions. CrowdTwist loyalty module works best when combined with other Oracle products and services, including Oracle Responsys (campaign management) and Oracle CX Unity (business intelligence). As a monolithic service, Oracle CrowdTwist is the opposite of a plug-and-play solution, increasing not only the customization possibilities but also, sadly, the development cost.
“We have found Comarch to be a great partner both from a development perspective and a strategic direction perspective. Their ability to ramp up and resource projects and initiatives have been very impressive. We have never had any regrets in choosing Comarch, and we look forward to a long and innovative relationship.” – Jet Blue testimonial
Comarch is a global provider of IT solutions working with the world’s most recognizable brands (BP, Carrefour, Costa Coffee). Following the cloud revolution, in 2020, Comarch launched the Loyalty Cloud – a new, cloud-based platform that allows users to design, run, and manage loyalty programs with minimal effort. Enterprise clients can choose between a standard, on-premise dedicated loyalty solution or opt for a pay-as-you-go model hosted in the cloud.
As a monolithic service, Comarch offers loyalty solutions tailored to clients’ needs which means that each client operates on a different software version and requires individual support. This kind of setup means that any version upgrade requires a new agreement which may prolong the implementation time and hinder the development.
Arvato is yet another heavy-weight loyalty champion that provides enterprises with the right CRM systems and integrated solutions (including loyalty) custom-tailored to business-specific challenges. As a full-service partner, Arvato delivers comprehensive loyalty solutions from scratch and integrates them into current customer-facing applications and systems. As a monolithic service, the cost of using Arvato’s services is quite high and requires a strict contract, which may limit their clients’ flexibility to respond to new market challenges.
“Questions are followed up accurately and on time. I would like SessionM to make more suggestions to businesses on how to run loyalty from their experience. Overall good team and very good loyalty platform” – Marketing Technology Director via Gartner
SessionM is a Mastercard company that delivers cloud-based customer engagement and data management solutions, including loyalty programs. Thanks to their data management component, SessionM can pull and merge customer data from different touchpoints through real-time APIs to create a single, 360-degree customer view. Their pricing is hidden, however, it can be estimated that the average platform cost starts at $20,000 per 1 million active profiles per month.
“We were able to launch a loyalty program in a few short months. We wouldn’t have been able to do it without Epsilon and the partnership we’ve built." – Kelly Smolinski, Customer Systems at Walgreens
Epsilon PeopleCloud is a global marketing platform used by global enterprises to personalize customer journeys and anticipate measurable business outcomes with a range of marketing tools, including loyalty programs. By delivering custom loyalty solutions, Epsilon is ready to cover both basic and complex loyalty strategies, however, this level of customization can come at a steep price.
“Easy to use customer loyalty program. Makes managing loyalty accounts easy.” – Anonymous via G2
Kobie Loyalty Cloud is a global loyalty marketing platform that focuses on delivering end-to-end loyalty solutions. Their loyalty logic is built around Kobie Alchemy® X, a next-gen loyalty platform. Interestingly, the Alchemy X loyalty engine requires no custom development thanks to easy-to-set rules and logic. Kobie positions itself as an opposite of an outsourcing agency, instead, they offer clients a full-service team to deliver the best results.
“We implemented Fielo combos with specific requirements from the business needs such as combining many types of product combos to receive some rewards. We are very pleased with the tool and with the service provided for the consultant. Fielo provided all the help we needed and we are very satisfied.” – Larissa Okumura via Salesforce Appexchange
Fielo is a Salesforce-native loyalty and incentive automation platform that allows organizations to design and scale loyalty programs for B2B partners, customers, and employees. With an impressive client portfolio (Google, Burger King, ArcelorMittal), Fielo is another heavy-weight player on the market of end-to-end loyalty solutions. Thanks to their Behavior Engine, segmentation capabilities, and Points Engine, Fielo is ready to handle almost any loyalty scenario. Their pricing starts at $2.5 USD per user per month.
“Thanks to Cheetah Loyalty we’re now able to quickly evolve historical campaigns to make them fresh and new and are successfully meeting all of the requirements and expectations of our guests on the loyalty program front.” – Jason Siska, Director of Loyalty & CRM, Craftworks”
Cheetah Digital offers a suite of marketer-oriented engagement solutions with experiences, messaging, personalization, and loyalty modules. The platform allows, among others, for real-time program monitoring thanks to pulling data from multiple sources, flexible tiers and milestones modeling, and custom mobile app development.
“Our loyalty integration is more complex than most, but Annex Cloud was great about working through our challenges. – Anonymous via G2
AnnexCloud is a loyalty solution with referral, UGC, and gamification modules. It offers access to open API and 100+ integrations that can extend the program core functionality and integrate with external tools. AnnexCloud provides a dashboard for running and monitoring the program. However, as noted by some user reviews online, the implementation of the platform may be resource-intensive, especially for less experienced development teams.
“My advice would be to keep in mind that this is a complete solution that helps you across all marketing channels. You have a lot of ways to get insights into your customers' journey, aggregate this data and have API access to it.” – Johnny N. via G2
Emarsys (part of SAP corporation) is an omnichannel customer engagement platform that besides a loyalty module, offers a personalization engine allowing users to incorporate their loyalty strategies into any relevant communication channel, touchpoint, or device. Emarsys loyalty module is best utilized in connection with other SAP services for complete customer journey monitoring.
“We were searching for a loyalty program in order to differentiate ourselves from the competition. Antavo fills the bill to a tee. It can be customized and fits with the aesthetic of our website too.” – Shana L. via Capterra
Antavo is an API-centric loyalty platform with quick POS integration and tenant management functionality to power omnichannel retention strategies for e-commerce and brick-and-mortar businesses. Unlike monolithic providers, Antavo provides a SaaS platform with white-label mobile apps, SDKs & APIs for quicker time-to-market.
“Headless loyalty software is an API-first loyalty platform that enables any software application to integrate loyalty functionality via API. Headless loyalty software has mostly backend functions and is designed to process any type of loyalty transaction in a manner that is decoupled from the frontend, customer-facing environment.” – MACH Alliance
Headless SaaS adoption saw significant growth in 2023, with 2024 anticipated to be the year it went mainstream. This shift is driven by the idea that innovation thrives on modular architectures, where components can be easily added or replaced. Headless SaaS loyalty solutions have cemented their place as a lasting trend.
What’s more, over 80% of businesses are already using at least one SaaS application in their operations, and it's expected that by 2025, a whopping 85% of business applications will be SaaS-based.
“Traditional loyalty platforms tend to be all-in-one, monolithic software. Sure, they have tons of features. However, there’s a catch. You’re losing the business flexibility, are dependent on one vendor, and need to adjust the vision of your loyalty marketing strategy to what’s possible in that heavy platform.” – Open Loyalty
As independent software vendors are breaking into the closed enterprise market, global businesses are beginning to feel the difference. Contrary to traditional enterprise software, headless SaaS loyalty solutions are based on an open web architecture that allows vendors to introduce new features faster and build a new reality where costly and delayed upgrades are a thing of the past. Headless loyalty solutions offer several game-changing benefits for enterprises that are difficult to overlook:
* The price difference is a massive differentiator for headless SaaS providers. Headless solutions usually cost up to EUR 5 000 per month (depending on the scale and custom needs), whereas monolithic vendors tend to offer fixed agreements that could cost up to hundreds of thousands of euros and more.
Here are some of the SaaS companies who are disrupting the enterprise-first loyalty market today:
“The customisability of the API and its rich documentation conquered the development team literally. The API is modern and documented in much detail, being a perfect companion to the dashboard offered. The metadata and its reachability in queries provide a great way to boost customization of various business rules applying to our product offerings.” – Andreea T. via Capterra
Voucherify is the first MACH-certified, API-first loyalty software that, thanks to its modular approach, allows users to build a loyalty program with minimum upfront integration. The flexible data model can be extended with custom objects (metadata) and events allowing users to set up any reward action, program level, reward (both digital and physical), and segment program members with custom filters.
Voucherify loyalty module offers hundreds of features, allowing Enterprise clients to roll out loyalty programs faster, without large upfront costs. Add to that currency-agnostic REST API, guaranteed platform stability, custom deployments, dynamic roadmap, and you get a powerful API-driven loyalty engine suited to the needs of the most demanding global enterprise buyers.
Learn more: How Voucherify meets the requirements of enterprise customers?
Learn more: Explore Voucherify's Open Source Loyalty Accelerator
“Talon.One is a very flexible tool when it comes to building promotions and loyalty services for our clients. It integrates easily with the basket and checkout in a headless manner.” – Rex B. via Capterra
Talon.One is a headless promotion engine with a loyalty module. Talon.One follows the headless model, allowing users to extend and customize program rules, rewards, and tiers with custom fields and actions. Once integrated, Talon.One will enable users to launch and manage campaigns using the UI and get real-time access to any data related to the loyalty program via API.
“Flexible, modular solution that fits my company's needs and an out-of-the-box solution that is branded to our needs” – Phil G. via Capterra
White Label Loyalty is a complete loyalty and marketing platform that can serve as an end-to-end marketing solution or power the rest of the stack with loyalty. The core of White Label Loyalty is their Loyalty Engine, an event-based platform that is responsible for the program logic. Thanks to event-based architecture, the system is ready to reward any high-value brand interaction, and with the rewards API, the system can offer third-party rewards.
“We decided to use Open Loyalty because of an Open Source architecture, a rich set of loyalty features available out of the box, great technical, and development support in our projects." – Nathan Anderson, CEO of Scan Trust
Open Loyalty is the product of Divante, a well-established e-commerce software house. With a flexible set of over 50 API-based building blocks, enterprises can quickly build personalized reward programs by picking and choosing what loyalty features they need. To guarantee cost-effective scalability, Open Loyalty is built on top of the API, not the other way around.
With the market full of alternatives, enterprise buyers are overwhelmed with the number of comparisons they need to make. Enterprises can either go with the traditional on-premise or dedicated cloud model, which allows for a lot of customization, but at a steep price. Or they can choose one of the headless solutions that are not only much more affordable but also easier to mix and match to give enterprises enough flexibility to respond to new challenges.
As reported by MACH, with a headless loyalty platform, enterprises gain a lot of agility. If the program logic has to be changed, users can do so with a couple of clicks on a dashboard or several requests to the API. There is no need to wait for another release round or version upgrade. Now, such agility is a competitive advantage. But in the future, it will be the baseline.
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