Request Metrics vs. WhatUsersDo

Request Metrics is great for small web development teams that want to make fast web applications. It was quick for us to get started and we could use the reports right away without having to read through documentation. If you just need to get some performance metrics, Request Metrics is perfect. It would not be so good for a larger team or a complex backend application as it is pretty limited in what it can measure.

If you want to watch a user journey through your website with commentary, this tool is the perfect one to use, even if it does take quite a few hours for responses. I think if you want to test specific functions, quickly, there are better tools for doing this. Reviewers are very honest and can be quite harsh, so you need to have an open mind to criticism, as what they say is very useful.

Incentivized

• Performance charts are really simple and easy for us to understand what is happening
• It was easy to get started and doesn't need administration or training
• It's affordable for our team
• It's fast

• Very simple and easy to use interface
• Offer recommended questions to ask, which is helpful for a first time user
• You get much more user information than most other similar tools offer

Incentivized

• I wish that it could also do uptime checking of the site
• There is not enough detail to drill into individual users

• Some reviewers can spend too little time on a test
• Their audio box can sometimes hide features, like navigation bars
• It would be useful to be able to specify in more detail the demographic you would like to test

Incentivized

We also consider Speedcurve and Calibre for monitoring. Speedcurve was really nice, but the reports were slow. We had to wait a lot to get information. It was also out of our budget and would require extra justification to use it. Calibre was also nice, but the numbers were based on synthetic rather than real user performance. We felt that this wasn't as helpful for us.

WhatUsersDo provides more detailed and opinion based responses. It can take a few hours more than competitors because of this. I would recommend it if you want to know more about the user journey through your website. I would not recommend it if you want quick feedback about a specific feature, image or copy, as there are tools better suited to this.

Incentivized

• The launch of our project dashboard was much smoother and more successful because we could fix problems earlier
• It fit without our existing operations budget

• It has helped us to improve our website copy to see how much users understood about our service and what was memorable about it.
• We have changed the information given on certain pages, as we realised users' opinions about our company became more positive after visiting secondary pages. So for example, we moved project examples to the homepage.
• We realised that our website did not load properly when using an Internet Explorer browser, so made corrections to this.

Incentivized