UXtweak vs Optimal Workshop: The Better Alternative?

Editor’s note: this post was originally published on October 2, 2020, and was updated on April 11, 2023, to stay relevant and comprehensive.

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.

Key Insights

👉 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 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

👉 Reviews score average at 4.9/5 for UXtweak and 4.4/5 for Optimal Workshop.

👉 UXtweak plans are cheaper than Optimal Workshop

🐝 Register for a free account on UXtweak now and try it 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.

*if you want more details about each feature, they are explained further in the article

4 ways UXtweak is a great Optimal Workshop alternative:

1. Flexible pricing
2. More features
3. Beginner-friendly UI
4. Advanced analytics
5. Integrated Moderated Testing

Flexible pricing

UXtweak has a flexible pricing policy and a free forever plan available. This gives you the opportunity to get quality insights even when you’re on a budget.

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 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.

Optimalsort

Optimal Workshop offers, similarly to UXtweak, the 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. However, 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.

Image source: Optimal Workshop

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 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 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.

Image source: Optimal Workshop

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. Session Recording also gives you important insights into your respondent’s behavior such as success rate, time of completion, and lostness.

Optimal Workshop does not offer session recording.

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. UXtweak 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.

Interested in Optimal Workshop? Try UXtweak instead!

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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.

Image source: Optimal Workshop

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 – you can for example 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

What icon designs do my users like better?

Preference Test

Is my website communicating the right message?

Five Second Test

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

Subscribing to one of the UXtweak’s plans, including the free one, you get access to all of the tools.

1. Free forever plan, for small projects with an unlimited number of studies.
2. Plus plan is $80/month (billed annually). You get an unlimited number of studies with up to 40 responses each. We recommend this plan for solo researchers.
3. Business plan, for $144/month when billed annually isbest suited for companies. It also comes with benefits such as an unlimited number of active studies, invoicing, technical support as well as PDF and CSV reports.
4. Enterprise Plan, a customized solution to fit your complex needs. You can contact us for a custom quote.

Optimal Workshop pricing and plans

1. Free plan, only allows 1 live study and 10 participant responses.
2. Pro plan is $166/month (billed annually) and allows for unlimited live studies and participant responses.
3. Team plan is for larger teams and starts at $332/month for 2 admin users.
4. A customized pricing solution 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

Conclusion 

UXtweak and Optimal Workshop are two very similar user research tools. They offer multiple features to help you evaluate what the best solution for your website is and gain user insight.

Both tools offer card sorting, tree testing, surveys, heatmaps and a first click test combined with advanced analytics.

On top of that UXtweak offers a five second test, mobile, website, and prototype testing, session recording, and preference testing. It also has more recruitment opportunities, providing you with a handy Onsite Recruiting Widget and Own Database for managing your own testers.

If billed annually, UXtweak is also definitely the cheaper option. 

The final choice is up to you. If you want a first-hand experience of UXtweak, go ahead and try it out with a free account!

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