Looking for worthy Lookback alternatives? Or just trying to find a good user research tool that fits your needs? Whatever it is, you’ve come to the right place.
If you’re familiar with Lookback you probably know that one of the major drawbacks of that tool is that it does not offer a user panel to help recruit participants for your user tests. This means that research teams may be burdened with the cost and logistics of recruiting user testers themselves.
Let’s take a look at some of the Lookback’s primary features, advantages and drawbacks and see if it can be replaced with other research tools. (Spoiler: It can be😉)
Lookback features
Here’s a list of Lookback’s most popular features:
- Moderated & Unmoderated usability studies
- Prototype testing
- Mobile app testing
- Screen activity testing
Lookback.com
Lookback is a great tool for quick moderated or unmoderated tests where UX researchers need to quickly test a new product feature, for example, to see how users will engage and interact with it. Although it offers a list of handy features, there are some roadblocks that Lookback users encounter when working with the tool.
Lookback reviews
According to Capterra:
Overall score – 3.3/5
Ease of Use – 3.5/5
Customer Service – 2.1/5
3 drawbacks of Lookback as a research tool
There are a couple of reasons why you may be looking at Lookback alternatives. They include:
1. Connection drops
One of the major disadvantages that have been heavily noticed are connection drops when conducting live user tests. The user tests are intuitive and all happen on one screen, however, for some devices (e.g. iOS), Lookback does not always function properly. Some users claim that it often returns back a poor connection error which can result in an inaccurate response from the user or even totally cause the entire research study to stop.
2. No user panel
Lookback does not provide their own user panel to recruit study participants from. Users need to figure out how to get testers themselves. This process can be hectic and time-consuming, especially for UXRs that may want to run quick tests. Also, some external participants may worry about their privacy and data and may not be comfortable putting their names and email address on the platform.
3. Technical constraints
It has been recorded that a few Lookback users have struggled with setting up the tool on their devices. Most participants who do not have Chrome on their device need to install Chrome and the Lookback plugin before they can participate in any test. This can be limiting for users who already enjoy their current browser and may not be ready to pivot to a new browser that can enable Lookback plugins to work.
Depending on your research goals and budget, Lookback may not be an ideal tool and this is where having alternatives comes to play.
There are many competitors in the market that cater to more robust research and testing needs. Let’s take a look at some of the worthy Lookback alternatives.
12 best Lookback alternatives:
- UXtweak
- UserQ
- UsabilityHub
- Lucky Orange
- Microsoft Clarity
- Trymata
- Ribbon
- UserZoom
- SiteRecording
- Betafi
- Respondent
- User Interviews
For each tool listed below you’ll find:
- A short description
- A list of features
- Pricing
- Pros
- Cons
Before we jump straight to their descriptions, here is a table that gives a quick overview of each tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Rating | Ease of Use | Quality of Support | Pricing | |
UXtweak | 4.8 | 5.0 | ✓ Free plan Plus plan - $80/month Billed annually | |
UserQ | 4.8 | 4.5 | ✗ No free plan Paid plans start at $10/month. | |
UsabilityHub | 4.8 | 4.8 | ✓ Free plan Pro plan - $75/month Billed annually | |
Lucky Orange | 4.7 | 4.7 | ✓ Free plan Plans start at $18/month. | |
Microsoft Clarity | 4.6 | 4.7 | The tool is free. | |
Trymata | 3.2 | 3.0 | ✗ No free plan Plans start at $99/per month | |
Ribbon | 4.9 | 5.0 | ✓ Free plan Plans start at $495 per month. | |
UserZoom | 4.5 | 4.7 | ✗ No free plan Upon request, starting at $70,000/year. | |
SiteRecording | 5.0 | 5.0 | ✗ No free plan Plans start at $14 per month | |
Betafi | 5.0 | 5.0 | ✗ No free plan Plans start at $20 per month. | |
Respondent | 4.7 | 4.4 | Is determined based on the number of participants and incentive. | |
User Interviews | 4.1 | 4.8 | ✓ Free plan Plans start at $150 per month. |
With so many options and alternatives to choose from, it may be difficult to decide on a tool that will cater to your research and testing needs best. Let’s take a deeper look at each of these Lookback alternatives and help you make the right pick.
1. UXtweak
UXtweak provides powerful tools for usability testing of websites and web apps, from prototypes to production, including information architecture research and user behavior analytics. This platform is a great affordable Lookback alternative with more flexible pricing plans and offers everything you need for a good user test combined in one place.
Key features
- Unmoderated usability studies
- Prototype testing
- Mobile app testing
- Card Sorting & Tree Testing
- Preference testing
- 5 second test
- Surveys
- First click testing
- Session recording
Try UXtweak user testing tools as a respondent in these demos:
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are solely based on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.9/5
Ease of Use – 4.8/5
Quality of Support – 5/5
Pros
- Advanced analytics that are easy to read – UXtweak offers a variety of data visualizations that will give you plenty of insights about your users’ behavior.
- 155M+ User Panel to recruit participants from
- Recruiting Widget – allows you to turn real website visitors into testers
- Intuitive UI and easy set-up
- Free plan
Cons
- Only supports 10 languages
Pricing & Plans
UXtweak offers an alternative pricing model: a variety of plans for any type of project.
Free plan is available and is unlimited in time for small projects. You can also choose a pro plan only for $80/month, billed annually. It is safe to say that UXtweak is one of the most affordable user testing platforms out there, which makes it a great Lookback alternative.
You can create a free account now and choose one of the plans which suits you the best!
2. UserQ
UserQ is the first fully remote user research solution that centers MENA testers and researchers with Arabic and English testing options, utilizing a panel of local testers. UserQ allows you to validate design decisions with local insights very easily.
It ensures you are building the right product for the right market by validating everything from big ideas to product concepts with your users creating delightful experiences for your users by testing wireframes, prototypes, interfaces, and more, anywhere anytime.
Key features
- Prototype test
- Tree test
- Surveys and feedback
- Card sorting
- Preference test
- 5-second test
- Quantitative Metrics
- Audience Targeting
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are solely based on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.5/5
Ease of Use – 4.8/5
Quality of Support – 4.5/5
Pros
- Rapid user response
- Simple to use and gets the job done
- Supports local language in Arabic
- Very intuitive UI, easy set-up and seamless user experience
- Has a free plan
Cons
- Cannot post survey results on social media
Pricing & Plans
UserQ is very cheap as their paid plans start at $10/month. Although they do not offer a free plan, they offer a 14-day free trial to help you hit the ground running and meet research needs. It is a worthy alternative to Lookback.
3. UsabilityHub
UsabilityHub is a user research platform that enables you to test designs with real users to gain audience insights. UsabilityHub allows you to save time and money by improving user engagement, and increasing conversion rates with its range of testing tools.
UsabilityHub is intuitive and easy to use, providing fast and actionable feedback that allows teams to quickly iterate and improve their designs.
Key features
- Card sorting
- Prototype testing
- Design surveys
- Five-second tests
- Preference tests
- First click tests
- User panel
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are solely based on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.7/5
Ease of Use – 4.7/5
Quality of Support – 4.9/5
Pros
- Great functionality for getting feedback from real users easily and fast.
- Can be used as part of a larger CRO (conversion rate optimization) methodology
- It is very simple and easy to use.
Cons
- Inability to filter user testers based on industry.
- Often sends unclear instructions to user participants when interacting with an image.
- Quality of participants may not be reliable.
Pricing & Plans
UsabilityHub allows product leaders, UX researchers and UX designers to gain valuable insights and improve customer experiences through user testing for absolutely free. This gives it a valuable edge over Lookback.
4. Lucky Orange
Lucky Orange’s dynamic heatmaps and session recordings give you insight into what people do on your site. It allows you to uncover bottlenecks and other UX challenges and devise improvements using AB tests.
Lucky Orange uses Google Optimize integration to track behavior on different test variants as you gather qualitative data from visitors who engage with your test variants through the Survey tool, which allows you to launch on-page surveys at no additional cost.
Key features
- Session Recordings
- Dynamic Heatmaps
- Surveys
- Live Chat
- Dashboard Insights
- Conversion Funnels
- Form Analytics
- Visitor Profiles
- Announcements
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are solely based on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.7/5
Ease of Use – 4.7/5
Quality of Support – 4.7/5
Pros
- Daily email updates help to keep the team informed on website traffic.
- Has a very intuitive UI and is very easy to set up.
- Can have multiple clients under one account without paying for them separately.
Cons
- Bots usually give misleading numbers which can alter the result.
- Has a learning curve.
- With a lot of traffic, the live function does not seem to always work properly.
Pricing & Plans
Lucky Orange is very cheap as their paid plans start at $18/month. They also offer a free plan which caters to small teams.
5. Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity is a free, easy-to-use tool that captures how real people actually use your site. It is easy to set up as you can start getting data in minutes.
Microsoft Clarity instant heatmaps help you to see at a glance which areas on your page drive the most engagement and how far your visitors scroll, its session recordings give you a live feed of how people use your site in order to find out what’s working, learn what needs to be fixed, and test out new ideas and insights helps you to quickly discover user frustration and turn these problems into opportunities.
Key features
- Heatmaps
- Session recordings
- Insights
- Google Analytics
- Clarity for mobile apps
- Integrations
- Clarity extensions
- Co-pilots
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are solely based on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.5/5
Ease of Use – 4.6/5
Quality of Support – 4.7/5
Pros
- It is absolutely free.
- Great tool for small businesses that run e-commerce stores and websites.
- It is easy to set up.
Cons
- Delays in data processing delay due to limited historical data available. This hinders access to real-time insights, trends, and data.
Pricing & Plans
Microsoft Clarity is absolutely free. This is a great alternative to Lookback as it supports small to midsized businesses in meeting their research goals and needs giving them a level playing field to win in their market.
6. Trymata
Trymata provides fast, comprehensive, and budget-friendly usability testing services that any product team can fit into their timeline and workflow. You can feel confident in your design decisions by testing solutions for all platforms and at every stage of product discovery, design, and development.
It allows you to test with your own users, or have Trymata recruit and screen participants for you. Optimize the user experience of your digital products with the qualitative and quantitative data you need.
Key Features
- Live product analytics
- Usability testing
- Tracking
- Research repo
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are solely based on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 3.6/5
Ease of Use – 3.2/5
Quality of Support – 3.0/5
Pros
- Has a very intuitive UI and is easy to navigate across mobile and desktop
- Has a useful user qualification ratings functionality.
- Gives real-time feedback upon completing a test.
Cons
- Has very limited space to accommodate user testers.
- Feedback sometimes can be critical without specifics.
Pricing & Plans
Trymata has no free plans, however, they have a 14-day free trial that helps you get up and running with your research needs. The paid plan starts at $99/per month. You can get a payout of $10 if you qualify for a review. This is added advantage to Lookback because it makes people want to use this tool more.
7. Ribbon
Ribbon is a user experience insights platform that helps you understand your users and build better product experiences with in-product user research and discovery. It can be embedded within your website and app.
This allows product and user research teams to rapidly deploy research studies like user interviews, surveys, and usability tests to actual customers at any stage they choose within the customer journey.
Key Features
- Rapid research
- Insights
- User interviews
- In-product surveys
- Reporting and analytics
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are solely based on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.8/5
Ease of Use – 4.9/5
Quality of Support – 5.0/5
Pros
- Very easy to use.
- Unique ability to recruit customers/users in the context of your product wherever you want to conduct research with them.
Cons
- Lacks the ability to clip videos during reporting.
- It is expensive.
Pricing & Plans
Ribbon has a free plan that helps research teams recruit users/participants needed for product testing. For team plans, the pricing starts at $495 per month.
8. UserZoom
UserZoom is a user testing software that empowers your team with high-quality UX insights to create digital experiences that delight users and grow your business at scale.
Key features
- Research platform
- Participant Recruitment
- Insights Hub
- Live Interviews
- Live Intercept
- Benchmark with UX score
- Usability testing
- Tree testing
- Surveys
- Card sorting
- Click tetsing
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are solely based on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.4/5
Ease of Use – 4.5/5
Quality of Support – 4.7/5
Pros
- Ability to export data into an easy to analyse format.
- Provides designers and no-code engineers with the ability to mock up enhanced prototypes to evaluate design concepts.
- Saves reviews of other businesses which helps with market research
Cons
- It is expensive.
- May not be ideal for international research due to language barrier.
Pricing & Plans
Upon request, starting at $70,000/year.
9. SiteRecording
SiteRecording is a user testing tool that analyzes website visitors’ interactions to ascertain user behavior. It allows you to record all user interactions such as their mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, and conversions to determine website productivity and optimize the user experience.
Key features
- Behavior Analytics
- Conversion Rate Optimization
- Customer Journey Mapping
- Track visitor path
- Analyze user mouse clicks
- Real-time Monitoring
- Unlimited Session Recordings
- Store unlimited recordings
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are solely based on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 5.0/5
Ease of Use – 5.0/5
Quality of Support – 5.0/5
Pros
- Easy to use and saves time.
- Ability to replay sessions through recordings and note insights.
Cons
- Due to its wide range of features, it can become slow when running tests.
Pricing & Plans
SiteRecording allows you to monitor and keep track of user interaction at $14 per month. It does not have a free plan, however, it offers a 14-day free trial for new uses.
10. Betafi
Betafi is a tool that enables businesses proactively uncover quality insights from talking to their customers with a fraction of the effort.
Betafi allows you to run user interviews and usability testing to enable you and your team easily test your ideas, prototypes, or beta websites, capture user feedback with one click and then find patterns across conversations to identify quality insights. Betafi integrates with Zoom, Miro and Figma which makes it easy for collaboration
Key features
- User Interviews
- Usability Testing
- Integration
- Report sharing and Analytics
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are solely based on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.5/5
Ease of Use – 5.0/5
Quality of Support – 5.0/5
Pros
- Easy to use with very minimal learning curve.
- Great user interviews functionality.
- It is affordable.
Cons
- UI is not intuitive
- Does not have a wide range of functionalities
Pricing & Plans
With Betafi, you can find patterns across conversations to identify quality insights at $20 per month. It does not have a free plan, however, it offers a 14-day free trial for new uses.
11. Respondent
Respondent is a user research platform that allows businesses to reach the right audience for user research using vetted business professionals and consumers for research interviews.
Key Features
- Usability testing
- User interviews
- Focus groups
- Surveys
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are solely based on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.5/5
Ease of Use – 4.7/5
Quality of Support – 4.4/5
Pros
- It is efficient and user friendly.
- Increased privacy which gives users a sense of trust
- They pay users for participating in interview sessions.
Cons
- The pricing model may not be ideal for users on a tight budget
- Lacks the ability to save data according to trends and preference.
Pricing & Plans
Respondent’s pricing plan is a bit different than most. The pricing is determined based on the number of participants and incentive per participant.
12. User Interviews
User Interviews is a user research and testing platform that helps UX and product designers make better business decisions by connecting researchers with participants to learn consumer behavior, product usage and get detailed feedback with quality insights from the research study.
Key features
- Unmoderated and moderated Research
- Security
- Live data feed
- Reporting
- Integrations
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are solely based on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.4/5
Ease of Use – 4.1/5
Quality of Support – 4.8/5
Pros
- Very easy to use and does not require any learning curve.
- They have an excellent, vetted, varied, and reliable panel of participants.
- Reliable and inexpensive platform for both-person and remote moderated testing.
Cons
- Lacks filtering for interview screener questions.
- Does not have a built-in conference/chat platform.
Pricing & Plans
User Interviews allows you to prioritize your users and iterating on feedback to create better products with their free plan. They also have a monthly plan that starts at $150 per month.
Deciding on the right Lookback alternative for your project
Stepping away from a tool you have always known and used for something different may seem difficult, however, selecting the right user testing tool should not be a hassle. We hope this list of Lookback alternatives was helpful and you’re now able to make a change for a tool that suits your research needs best.
If UXtweak made it to your final selection, don’t hesitate to register for a free account and give our tools a try!
