Usability testing can help you to understand the problems and desires of your users. With this knowledge, you can continuously improve your product. The goal is to offer a great user experience that automatically will lead to happy customers. 

Due to the importance of usability testing, there are many tools on the market that are offering free services for conducting user tests. In this blog post, we’ll present them to you, and speak about the pros and cons to help you make your decision. 

1 Userbrain | userbrain.com 

Userbrain is a remote usability testing service with a focus on continuous testing. You can order and watch videos of real people interacting with your website. You will hear what users think and see what they do, to build better products for happier customers.

You can test an array of live websites, those under development, prototypes, or even competitor’s sites on either smartphones, desktops, or tablets. 

What Userbrain offers for free: 

• The first two participants are free (👉 use free trial)
• 5 sessions with your own users are included for free

Pros:

• No long term contracts (and even a Pay as You Go plan)
• Fast results (only a few hours)
• Unlimited testing with own participants

Cons:

• No native app testing
• No phone support

Pricing: Pay as you go $35 per tester, Subscription starts at $249/mo 

2 Lookback | lookback.io

Lookback offers a rich set of features that offers everything you need for running user tests with your own participants in one place. Lookback allows you to directly talk with participants – live and face-to-face in moderated user tests. You can use the “Live” feature to broadcast your research to your team and invite them to watch and gain insights.

What Lookback offers for free: 

• 60-day free trial

Pros:

• Remote moderated testing 
• Broadcast your research using the “Live” feature 

Cons:

• No account sharing
• No tester pool, you’ll have to recruit testers on your own 

Pricing: Freelance Plan: $25/mo and 10 sessions, Insights Hub Plan: $344/mo and 300 sessions, For enterprise contact support 

 

3 Usability Hub | usabilityhub.com

UsabilityHub allows you to run summative studies like first-click and five-second tests, design surveys or preference tests of multiple design solutions. You will receive written answers and can either recruit your own participants or use UsabilityHub’s integrated participant panel.

What Usabilityhub offers for free:

• All Tests under 2 minutes are for free 

Pros:

• Starting at $1 per answer when running summative studies
• Full CSV export 

Cons:

• No screen and audio recording
• No prototype testing

Pricing: Longer tests than 2 minutes and advanced features require a test upgrade. Flexible upgrade $50, Annual $100, Enterprise contact, Paying per response starts at $2

 

4 Userlytics 

What Userlytics offers for free:

• Free Trial
• First participant test session at quick & easy plan
• At annual enterprise plan one free session with your participant for each purchased session with a Userlytics participant and bring your own participants for free

Userlytics is the first UX research service to offer picture-in-picture (webcam view + screen and audio recording), skipping logic for qualitative unmoderated usability testing. Additionally, Userlytics offers advanced quantitative tools such as card sorting & tree testing fully integrated with your qualitative usability tests.

Pros:

• Automated and multilingual transcriptions 
• Quantitative metrics like time on task, SUS, NPS or SUPR-Q.

Cons:

• Outdated user interface 
• Complex pricing plans, offering 5 different pricing tiers with different options

Pricing: quick & easy $49 per participant (limited feature set), annual enterprise $69, custom project $99 per participant, annual subscription (special recruitment services)

 

5 TryMyUI

TryMyUI is noted by Forrester Research as an affordable, effective SAAS usability testing tool for user research and design insights. TryMyUI delivers videos of real users navigating any website.

What TryMyUI offers for free:

• Free Trial
• Unlimited testing with own participants with Enterprise and Unlimited plan

Pros:

• Audience targeting
• Conducting surveys

Cons:

• Setting up a test a bit complex
• No option to save your test scenario as a draft
• No option for automated user testing

Pricing: Personal $99/mo, Team $399/mo, Enterprise $2.000/mo, Unlimited $8.000/mo

 

6 Crazy Egg | crazyegg.com

Crazy Egg offers Heatmaps, User Recordings & A/B Testing. 300,000 Customers. Heatmaps show you how customers scroll, click, engage and experience your website or application. Filters help you understand specific customer segments &use cases. User Recordings help you follow individual user journeys through your website or application. You can organize Recordings into playlists to quickly identify patterns. A/B Testing and Editing helps you translate what you’ve learned into experiments to improve UX.

What Crazy Egg offers for free:

• All plans free for 30 days

Pros: 

• Easy and fast set up
• Great UX and UI within the tool
• Easy to understand visual reporting

Cons:

• Heat mapping with limited visualizations
• Pricey for users who have a lot of page views
• Annual billing 

Pricing: Basic $24/mo, Standart $49/mo, Plus $99/mo, PRO $249/mo, Custom plan 

 

7 Usabilla | usabilla.com

Usabilla empowers brands like KLM, Tommy Hilfiger, and Toyota to become truly customer-centric by improving digital experiences on websites, apps and emails. Through targeted surveys and embedded feedback options, enterprises acquire the ultimate solution to capture the voice of their customers, collect quantitative along with qualitative data, and turn insights into actions that drive success.

What Usabilla offers for free:

• free, personalized demo

Pros:

• Well designed and clear reporting
• Clean UI, easy to use
• short and intuitive feedback collection button and supporting questions

Cons:

• No heat mapping
• A bit pricey

Pricing: Contact Customization

8 Validately | validately.com

Validately is a comprehensive solution for user research that includes a dedicated testing platform, recruiting services, and automated reporting. Validately makes it easy to talk to users – helping user researchers, UX designers, and product managers build products that customers love.

What Validately offers for free:

• Free trial at every plan
• Bring your own testers for free at every plan

Pros:

• Recruiting services offered 
• Run Moderated and unmoderated tests

Cons:

• All plans are billed yearly
• Limited researcher seats at plans

Pricing: Basic $299/mo, Experience $499/mo, Collaborate $999/mo, Enterprise Contact Support

 

9 Loop11 | loop11.com

Loop11 is a useful UX tool for benchmarking a site’s KPIs, finding out where exactly users are running into an issue and gathering quantitative data on UX improvements.

What Loop11 offers for free:

• 14-day Free trial at every plan

Pros:

• Unlimited number of users
• Quick report generation

Cons:

• No participant pool, recruiting tester on your own 
• Tests can’t be edited after publishing

Pricing: Rapid insights $69/mo, Pro $249/mo, Contact for Teams plan 

 

10 Optimizely | optimizely.com

Optimizely is the world’s leading experience optimization platform. The Optimizely platform technology provides A/B testing and multivariate testing tools, website personalization, and feature toggle capabilities.

What Optimizely offers for free:

• Free Rollouts plan

Pros:

• API output
• Quickly adjust test volumes or turn tests on/off

Cons:

• Poor user interface
• Sometimes long load times in the app

Pricing: Rollouts plan for free, Price for essentials, business and enterprise plan offered when contacting the sales team