Key takeaways
💡 Both tools offer card sorting, tree testing, survey, first click testing and a version of heatmaps (UXtweak heatmaps are more robust)
🐝 UXtweak is an all-in-one UX research platform and offers more tools for usability testing
🙋♀️ Both offer access to User Panel and the option to bring your own participants for free
🗣️ UXtweak has more built-in recruitment options – Onsite Recruiting Widget and Own Database, a custom tester management tool, for your own tester database
💬 Review scores average at 4.9/5 for UXtweak and 4.4/5 for Optimal Workshop.
🍯 UXtweak offers a more extensive, yet more affordable plan.
Both UXtweak and Optimal Workshop aim to substitute usability testing in UX labs with remote user testing.
They offer their users multiple testing methods, features, and filters to obtain the most relevant data for each study. However, each of these tools offers a slightly different set of features for a different price.
So, which one’s the better alternative? Let’s find out!
The main focus of Optimal Workshop vs UXtweak
UXtweak and Optimal Workshop are both usability testing tools, meaning that they aim to make your website as user-friendly as possible. Their focus, however, is quite different.
UXtweak is a more complex usability testing tool. As we are going to see in this article, its range of features is very diverse and thus suitable for the earlier development stages as well as the later ones.
Thanks to this fact, UXtweak is your go-to tool for every stage of your digital product’s lifecycle.
Optimal Workshop’s focus is much more narrow. Its features are focused primarily on the website architecture and thus for the early stages of website development.
Features | UXtweak | Optimal Workshop |
Card Sorting | ✓ | ✓ |
Tree Testing | ✓ | ✓ |
Session Recording | ✓ | ✓ (prototype only) |
Heatmaps | ✓ | ✓ (limited) |
Website Usability testing | ✓ | ✕ |
First Click Test | ✓ | ✓ |
Surveys | ✓ | ✓ |
Mobile Usability Testing | ✓ | ✕ |
Prototype Testing | ✓ | ✕ |
5 Second Test | ✓ | ✕ |
Preference Test | ✓ | ✕ |
*if you want more details about each feature, they are explained further in the article
Need to conduct moderated research?
With UXtweak, you can recruit, schedule, conduct, and analyze user interviews or any other moderated studies directly in one platform.
Try our Freefrom Interview tool for user interviews or use Study Interviews to run any UXtweak studies moderated (eg. moderated card sorting, moderated website testing…).
Moderated testing supports multiple recruitment methods:
👉 Bring your own participants
👉 Access prequalified participants from a global User Panel in 130+ countries
👉 Turn site visitors into participants with Onsite Recruiting
👉 Use your custom panel with Own Database
What do users say about Optimal Workshop?
It used to be brilliant… but then they changed their pricing strategy, to fund other products. Once the subscription has expired there’s no access to your studies for analysis, despite having paid for the study. With that, I wouldn’t recommend it, nor will I be using again going forward.
Source: Trustpilot
Once questions have been written for a survey, you can’t drag and drop them in a different order, you have to delete and start again.- While recruitment is quick to come back I find many responses are completed too quickly and I have to spend considerable time looking through responses to check which are genuine.
Source: capterra.com
It has limited logic customization, constraints in survey routing, and lacks deeper analytics tools
Source: G2
Tired of Optimal Workshop’s Limitations?
Stop settling for less. Switch to UXtweak.
❌ If you’re frustrated with expensive pricing, limited research methods and flexibility, there’s a better way.
Optimal Workshop users are switching to UXtweak for good reason:
✅ All-in-one platform – 15+ research methods in one tool
✅ More value at a better price – our upgradable Business plans starts at $92 per month
✅ Top-rated customer support
✅ High quality recruiting – Study audits and recruiting are handled by an expert
✅ Better performance – Handles large studies without issues
See Why Teams Are Switching – Start Your Free Trial Today!
What do users say about UXtweak?
I love how easy and quick it is to set up the tests. To import the prototype from Figma you just need a link.
It imports all your transitions directly from Figma or you can choose to connect the screens manually during setup. The analytics are great, you can easily filter out specific respondent groups, based on different criteria, and analyze results for each of them.
I like that you can get a great amount of qual and quant insights without having to spend hours on the manual analysis.
Source: G2
We used UXtweak to test usability of our mobile app’s interface and it helped greatly. We were able to recruit a rather niche audience of participants directly in the app, which honestly saved a lot of time.
The study had great analytics for each task of our test. There are also recordings for each session that you can come back to for further analysis.
Source: G2
Sometimes it takes time to import Figma prototypes. I guess because of API. Also, the interface of UXtweak should be a little bit more designed. Their site is very modern, but the application can also be redesigned. But it is functional and easy to use.
Source: G2
4 ways UXtweak is a great Optimal Workshop alternative:
✅ Flexible pricing
UXtweak has a flexible pricing policy and a free forever plan available. This allows you to get quality insights even when you’re on a budget.
💡 Pro Tip
Wondering if Optimal Workshop is worth the cost? In the Optimal Workshop pricing article, we break down its pricing plans, features, and limitations to help you decide if it’s the right tool for you.
✅ More features
UXtweak is an all-in-one UX research tool that offers a lot more tools than Optimal Workshop. We provide tools for you to test any type of digital product, be it a prototype, website, or an app. Just look at our features tab.
✅ Beginner-friendly UI
If you are new to UX research, UXtweak is a perfect platform to start with as it provides tons of helpful explanation videos, product demos, and guides, not to mention the intuitive UI of the platform. Our support team is always ready to provide you with quick assistance with any problem.
✅ Advanced analytics
Although qualitative research is essential in UX work, there are times when quantitative data is required, most notably when attempting to make design choices or illustrating the effect of design changes.
With UXtweak you can get both qualitative and quantitative feedback from users, analyzed for you in a form of comprehensive graphs and tables.
With UXtweak it’s not scary to analyze tons of data. Check out how we do it here: Sample Results of a Card Sorting Study.
Card sorting
Card sorting is a frequently used method to help web designers better understand what the best information architecture for their potential customers is.
During a card sorting session, respondents are given “cards” with various topics and they are asked to organize them into categories that seem logical to them.
UXtweak’s card sorting
There are three types of card sorting, all of them provided by UXtweak – open card sorting, closed card sorting, and hybrid card sorting.
- Open card sorting: your respondents do not only organize topics into categories that seem logical to them, but they also create the categories. This gives you a good idea about which words describe each category most accurately.
- Closed card sorting: your respondents organize the given topics into predefined categories – they do not name them. If you are working with predefined categories, this gives you a good idea about how your potential customers perceive these categories.
- Hybrid card sorting: this option combines the best of Open and Closed card sorting and it can be used to validate an information grouping strategy while still leaving respondents room for free expression.
After finishing your study, UXtweak allows you to filter your respondents based on factors such as the time taken to finish the study and the number of categories.
It also analyzes the results for you, giving you insights about what categories your respondents created, which cards they sorted into each category, or which card groupings had the strongest agreement.
OW’s Optimalsort
Similar to UXtweak, Optimal Workshop offers an open, closed, and hybrid card sort. The study (moderated or unmoderated) is easy to set up, and the results are analyzed straight after you finish it. Their Card Sorting tool is also known as Optimalsort.
This part may be confusing to the ones who are new to the world of UX research, but Optimalsort, essentially, is just another word for card sorting. This terminology was created by Optimal Workshop and describes the same process as any other card sorting study.
Tree testing
Let’s say you conducted your card sorting study. Now what?
A great option to evaluate the category structure you created, whether with the help of the card sorting feature or not, is tree testing. In a tree testing session, respondents are presented with a branching (tree-like) structure.
The respondents are asked to find specific information within the menu. Thanks to the obtained results, you can then evaluate where users get lost, whether category names make sense to them, and if category hierarchy matches user expectations.
UXtweak’s tree testing
UXtweak offers you three options on how to create your tested tree. You can:
- build a new tree in a straight-forward editor
- import the tree from a spreadsheet
- load the tree from your website
The study is fully customizable and it allows you to use questionnaires to screen out respondents, to collect additional comments and feedback, and to segment respondents later based on their attributes.
The results you obtain after finishing are designed to give you quick, actionable insights and enable you to delve deeper into the data. You can see how users move through the navigation menu – including where they got stuck.
Treejack
Optimal Workshop offers the option of conducting an unmoderated tree test study as well. Similarly to Optimalsort, Optimal Workshop also has another word for their tree testing tool – Treejack.
But don’t get confused! Treejack is the same thing as tree testing, just named differently. It describes the same process and caters to the same research needs.
In treejack, you can adjust the tree structure as you want, but you have to do it manually.
After conducting the Treejack study, Optimalworkshop analyzes the results for you and you can also filter the respondents according to several criteria such as time taken to finish the task or the success rate of your respondents.
Session recording
One of the best ways to see how users behave on your website is UXtweak’s session recording tool.
The session recording tool allows you to record and watch how visitors on your website interact with it and whether they are experiencing any problems.
Session Recording captures every respondent’s journey on your website and provides heatmaps, activity tracking, and statistics which helps to understand how your regular visitors see your website, if they are confused by something, or if they find something to be unclear.
Analyzing hours of recordings can be exhausting. Luckily, Session Recording’ feature SmartSearch allows you to skip sections of inactivity, watch sessions at double or quadruple speed, and directly seek out the important events on the timeline.
It also gives you important insights into your respondent’s behavior such as success rate, time of completion, and lostness.
Optimal Workshop offers session recording through its Prototype Rewind feature, which captures screen and audio during static prototype tests, but it does not support session recording for live websites or fully interactive prototypes.
Heatmaps
Another efficient way to evaluate how respondents behave on your website is to use heatmaps.
By using different colors, ranging from warmer colors such as red and orange to cooler colors such as green and blue, heatmaps show you what parts of your website people focus on the most – where they clicked, tapped, moved their mouse, etc.
The visualization makes it easier to understand large amounts of data.
Both UXtweak and Optimal Workshop offer heatmaps, however, they are slightly different.
UXtweak offers complex heatmaps with the visualization of mouse movements, mouse clicks, and taps. It also offers you scroll maps, which is a variant of heatmaps showing how far down the visitors have scrolled down the page.
Optimal Workshop has a different type of heatmaps. A part of their first-click testing is click maps – heatmaps, that visualize where users click the most often after landing on the website.
This gives you numerous insights needed to make a website intuitive and efficient, however, the tool is limited to testing where on an a user interface people would click first to complete a task.
Website Usability Testing
Sometimes, you might be experiencing a specific problem on your website such as the number of visitors subscribing to your newsletter being too low.
In such a case, using UXtweak’s Website Testing tool may be a great option to understand why that is happening.
At its core, it is very simple. The respondents are asked to complete a task – sign up for a newsletter, fill out a form, make a purchase, or simply find something on the website. If they manage to do so, they complete the task.
- Website testing is for task-oriented session recording or user testing. When using this feature, you set up a task directly on your website. Then you just watch them complete the given task. You can record mouse movements, scrolls, clicks, and keypresses on your web. These insights allow you to uncover the confusion, uncertainty, and hesitation of your users which is valuable information for improving your website’s usability.
⚠️ Optimal Workshop does not offer website testing.
First-click testing
First-click testing is a type of usability testing, allowing you to evaluate the effectiveness of the linking and content structure of your site. First-click testing examines what a respondent would click on first to complete a certain task.
This might seem to be of little importance, but statistics show that 87% of people who find themselves on the right path after the first click will successfully complete their task.
UXtweak offers an easy-to-set-up First Click Test tool that gives you all the insights you need to guide users toward success. The first click is the most important one, right? With UXtweak all you need is a picture.
First clicks provide a usability benchmark that can be used from early through every stage of the design process. This tool is perfect for A/B testing.
Optimal Workshop also offers a range of first-click activities to get actionable insights needed to improve the usability of the website.
Surveys
Thanks to all the features described above, you will have a fair picture of how visitors feel about your website and how they interact with it.
But even if you used every single tool we spoke about, you still only see data – actions, clicks, scrolls, etc. To know exactly what people think and how they feel about a certain thing, you have to use questionnaires.
Both UXtweak and Optimal Workshop offer a very similar set of questionnaires. To begin with, both of these tools offer you the option of using screening questions that enable you to “choose” the right people for your study.
For example, you can ask respondents about their gender if your study is primarily targeted at women. This way, you only get relevant results and save everyone’s time.
UXtweak and Optimal Workshop also allow you to ask questions before and/or after the study and even after each individual task.
Apart from that, UXtweak offers a separate Survey tool that helps you gather both qualitative and quantitative insights about the users. Check out this “What is a UX Survey and how to conduct one” article to learn more about how to create an effective user survey.
Optimal Workshop has the online survey tool in their feature set as well.
Mobile Usability Testing
Providing a good user experience even on a small screen size is crucial, especially in a time when 72,9% of online sales come from mobile devices.
UXtweak has recently introduced their new Mobile Usability Testing tool, which can help you test your mobile UX with users and improve your product based on the insights!
It gives you an opportunity to tap into real users’ minds, analyze their behavior and see how they perform certain actions.
Most importantly, by analyzing the recordings of a mobile usability testing study you can see where customers have problems with using your mobile website or app, what confuses and frustrates them.
With that new tool, you can test a variety of products, which makes it an all-in-one solution for any case. You can test:
- A released mobile app from AppStore or Google Play store. You’ll just need to provide UXtweak with the link to the store where your app can be downloaded.
- An app’s beta version uploaded to TestFlight. Uncover usability issues and eliminate them all before the app’s release.
- A mobile website. Find out how users interact with your website on a small screen size and improve your mobile UX.
- Mobile prototype. Uncover and get rid of the issues early in the design stage by testing your mobile prototype of an app or website. Upload a link to your interactive prototype from tools such as Figma, InVision, Axure, or create an interactive prototype from design screens exported from any other tool.
To find out more about mobile testing and how to create a study visit our comprehensive Mobile Usability Testing guide where we explain it all!
⚠️ Optimal Workshop doesn’t offer mobile usability testing.
Prototype Testing
Testing your design prototypes is a must in case you don’t want to spend tons of money improving the usability issues on the already running website. It saves your time, money and the nerves of your developers.
UXtweak offers a great prototype testing tool that helps you easily uncover all the downsides of your Figma and Invision and Axure prototypes.
You can set up a whole Prototype Testing study in a matter of minutes, without the need to upload any huge files.
You just need a link. Alternatively, you can simply create an interactive prototype in the UXtweak’s editor from exported design screens.
The option to test Adobe XD prototypes is currently in the development stage, so stay tuned – we’ll let you know when it’s live!
⚠️ Optimal Workshop doesn’t offer prototype testing.
Five Second Test
A Five Second Test is a crucial tool for anyone who owns a website. It allows you to find out if users are able to grasp the message of your website or is totally incomprehensible. Do users even know what your site is about when they first get there? That’s the question for a Five Second test.
UXtweak offers a great Five Second Test tool that will break all your doubts. It’s quick and easy to set up and gets you valuable insights into users’ perceptions of your website.
⚠️ Optimal Workshop does not have a Five Second Test tool.
Preference Testing
UXtweak offers a Preference test tool that will quickly help you choose the design options that work best for the users. Just ask participants which design from a group they prefer most.
You can also include the questions after the study and learn about their perspectives and the deciding factors.
⚠️ Optimal Workshop doesn’t offer a preference testing tool.
🔽 Take a look at how a preference test and five second study can look like in these demos!
Respondents recruitment
UXtweak recruitment options:
- Use UXtweak’s Onsite Recruiting widget. Inserting the widget into your website turns visitors into study respondents after they click on the widget. You can also provide testers with an incentive in the form of coupons after they complete a study.
- Copy a link generated for each study – you do not have to install any additional software or browser extension. You can send this link to your existing contacts, users, or customers, or you can simply post it on your social media. After clicking on this link your respondents will be automatically redirected to the study.
- UXtweak’s 155+M User Panel provides you with quality targeted testers in no time. The price per tester starts at $5.
- Own Database – A CRM-like tester management database with filtering options, perfect for when you already have your own set of participants
What is very important, these methods are mostly free (aside from the user panel) and will not burden your budget.
Optimal Workshop recruiting options:
- Get your own participants by sharing a link to the study
- Recruit testers from their panel of 50+M participants. The price starts at $10, it can be heavy on your budget mainly if a bigger amount of participants is needed.
Pricing and plans
UXtweak pricing and plans
- Free Plan (€0/month) – A great way to experiment with UX research tools at no cost. Includes access to all tools, 15 responses/month, 1 active study, and 14-day access to results.
- Business Plan (€92/month, billed annually) – Ideal for teams that require essential UX research tools and features for their projects. Includes 50 responses/month (upgradable), 1 active study (upgradable), unlimited tasks per study, 12-month data retention, reports and video exports.
- Custom Plan (Pricing upon request) – Tailored for organizations with advanced research needs, providing unlimited active studies, customizable responses, live interviews, access to a global user panel and much more.
Optimal Workshop pricing and plans
- Starter plan: $2388/year, billed only annually
- Enterprise Plan: Customized pricing solutions are available upon request.
Reviews
Based on user reviews from Capterra.
UXtweak
- Overall score: 4.9/5
- Ease of use: 4.7/5
- Value for money: 4.8/5
Optimal Workshop
- Overall score: 4.4/5
- Ease of use: 4/5
- Value for money: 4.3/5
Summary
When it comes to UXtweak vs. Optimal Workshop, the choice is obvious.
While Optimal Workshop locks you into an annual-only subscription with high costs and a limited set of features…
With UXtweak, you get:
✓ Better pricing, even a free plan to start
✓ Complete research toolkit (for moderated & unmoderated research)
✓ Top-rated support team
✓ Reliable, high-quality participants
✓ Performance that scales with your studies
See why people are switching from Optimal Workshop to UXtweak – Try it for free today!
