Optimal Workshop vs. Smartlook

Optimal Workshop is great for UX testing for those with a budget to do so. This may be a little on the expensive side for smaller businesses, but definitely not anything crazy expensive. The insights that you get out of these tests are invaluable and can be the difference between launching a site and succeeding/failing.

Incentivized

Smartlook is best for screen recordings. Especially when you are running MVPs. However, its pricing is very high. If your daily visitors are too much then either you will have to lose many of your recordings or you will have to pay too much money.

Incentivized

• The user interface is quite user friendly
• Variety of tests
• Access and variety of help on how to run tests, as well as educational information on which tests to run for your use case

Incentivized

• Funnels are both easy to configure yet comprehensive enough to detect complicated customer journeys.
• Real-time recording provides exceptional insights to our design & engineering teams.
• Session recording is surprisingly lightweight and seems to cause no substantial performance degradation for our customers.

Incentivized

• The recruitment panelists are not professional, nor do they take the tasks seriously. You are going to get a lot of bad data.
• They are HQ'd outside the US and must have a small team because the customer service is the absolute WORST I've experienced in their industry.
• They pride themselves on documentation, but when they fail to document something they blame the customer for the mistake.
• There are way too many limitations with the tool after you launch, limited integrations, and poor survey questionnaire options. The tool itself is far too basic for most sites, especially B2B.

• I feel nickel and dimed with the events and funnels.
• We came from sessions being 30 mins of inactivity and now it's 5-10 mins. Session count has gone up significantly which we weren't prepared for.
• Recording playback isn't as clean and maneuverable like FullStory.

Incentivized

As my ratings show, I have been absolutely delighted with Smartlook in terms of usability, cost, support, and its benefit to our organization. I have given it such high ratings because I think it has really benefitted our organization and I think it could do the same for other companies too.

Incentivized

Excellent and easy platform to use. Easy to onboard new members of the team. Easy to set up tests and follow number of participants performing the test. Easy to plug into other platforms to record participants. Excellent reporting. Easy to share reports with stakeholders. Easy to recruit through platform, however the quality of participants can be better.

Incentivized

Every page, the tool setup pages and dashboards are built very well, the site structure is perfectly designed and intuitive to use. All functions are well documented and the help sections are really everywhere, you don't have to search for answers, as they are just popped up or max. a click away for your service.

Incentivized

The support has been good. No complaints. I have not needed to contact support more than 1-2 times when I was first getting set up, because the tools work well and are pretty straight forward. They do have good documentation

Incentivized

Sofia P. is being our point of contact with the issues we faced. I was unsure about how to explain to her what was going on with the recording numbers (the recording has stopped before we were expecting to), but she readily understood and came with a solution for us in the same day. The problem was blocking our developer to test the integration, so it was great to have support so fast that he could continue his work.

Incentivized

For the price as it is very convenient for first-time beginners, its intuitiveness both for the one who is designing the activities and for those who have to interact with them. The fact that it collects and gathers the data into insights of the overall responses collected by all users.

Incentivized

It has been a year between the time when I last used Hotjar and first started using Smartlook. I would say both tools are more or less equal when it comes to features, the only 2 differences I can think of are - price and customer support. Smartlook is cheaper and has superior customer services. You have the feeling when interacting with them that they genuinely care.

Incentivized

• Optimal Workshop has had a positive impact on investigating information architecture on several websites.
• Optimal Workshop has helped investigated the labeling on several websites.
• Optimal Workshop has also support in the investigation of UX in navigations.

Incentivized

• Smartlook is used by different individuals from different organizations to have insights into different parts of products. It is used as the sole developer of our website as well as marketing campaigns.
• Smartlook has an amazing feature which is tracking the activities of return users.
• It gives reliable and efficient services.

Incentivized