Smartlook vs. UserTesting

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

It's the best for A/B tests or tests where you need a broad audience. If you don't need a real niche audience (that you should recruit then rather yourself), then you can rely on UserTesting. It's good because it's so quick, almost instant, it takes about 10 minutes on average before I can start reviewing and documenting sessions.

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

• Taking notes with video clips. I can take notes while I am watching a session and I can create clips of UX issues or bugs occurring. This really helps when I share them with other teams.
• Exporting all your notes. I analyze all usability tests by exporting my notes from UserTesting. I wish I could bulk export multiple tests though.
• Setting up demographics. This helps me reach out to users who are similar to our audience.
• Setting up screeners. Some studies require specific audiences (using a specific tool etc.), by setting screeners I can make sure I reached the correct audience.

Incentivized

• 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

• The organization of the work spaces/dashboards could use some work.
• I don't feel as supported as I used to from a customer success perspective. I used to have dedicated, go-to professionals to reach out to about my account who knew my project context, account history, etc. Recently we've been pushed into general support pools, and it doesn't feel like my account gets any personalized attention anymore.
• I would like to see a more refined experience for collaborators - the test plans I share with them are plain text/hard to read.
• Would be nice to be able to conduct focus groups using this tool.

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

I'm very happy with my experience of the product and the level of service and learning resources they provide. If the service becomes more expensive than it currently is then we might not be able to justify additional cost - but this is theoretical. I would recommend UserTesting and would ideally renew our contract.

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

User Testing is very easy to use. You first select the profile of your participants. This is as simple as checking on checkboxes and creating some questions to target the right market and user. You may also just send the tests to your own customers with a simple link. After selecting your audience, you just need to drag and drop the tasks and set them up. You're always guided throughout the process and if you're missing something, the user testing platform will let you know. Really simple stuff.

Incentivized

Never encountered any problems

Incentivized

Perfectly fine. Never had any problems.

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

Taking a long time

When we had issues or questions, it often took a long time to receive a response from the support team. This delayed our testing and caused frustration for our team.

Not helpful in our specific questions

When we did receive a response, it often did not fully address our specific questions or issues. This made it difficult to resolve problems or move forward with our testing.

Incentivized

From a technical perspective, the implementation was extremely smooth. Most of the change management / implementation hurdles were clearing use of the tool through our various security, legal, and information privacy teams. Once these concerns were addressed (UserTesting.com was very helpful in providing all the needed documentation), the implementation process was very simple and we were able to get going right away.

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

UserTesting allows for a quicker recruiting process for our studies. Additionally, UserTesting has more unmoderated research features and capabilities. I think that their payment model is also easier than UserInterviews. We typically user UserTesting for reaching our hard to reach segments and recruiting prospective users not already within our product user population.

Incentivized

The package we have limits the number of people who can set up tests. This prevents us from scaling the use of the platform.

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

• Cost savings of over $100K as we dont involve our research vendors as much as we used to do in the past
• Better tested experience get out in the market quickly even when we don't have enough time available with our researchers; our designers who are well-trained on usertesting.com can test out quickly

Incentivized