After hundreds of hours drafting mockups, designing features, and writing state-of-the-art code, your efforts are finally starting to pay off–and your brand new app or website is ready to be shipped.
All that’s left to do is present the work to your client–and collect the final feedback before pushing out a new iteration.
So how do you go about it?
One of the best ways to research this is with a website feedback tools: a piece of software that will allow your clients to tell you directly how they feel about your work.
But which one should you choose?
There’s dozens of different widgets and plugins out there, and the industry jargon doesn’t make it any easier for you to identify what to pick: what is VoC surveying? What’s the difference between community feedback and usability feedback? What is relevant to your business?
No worries: we’ve got your back. In this article, we’ll answer these questions and cover everything there is to know about different website feedback tools–so you can make an informed decision and try one out today.
Read on for our full comparison guide.
3 types of website feedback tools
Very often, businesses like yours look for a website feedback tools because their current solutions make it tedious for the client to point out specifically what they feel is wrong or needs to be changed on their site.
Relying on email tends to create long, back-and-forth chains that are a nightmare to backlog or organize.
The truth is, you can never tell what’s wrong until the client tells you exactly what it is–in one way or another.
Let’s have a look at different types of website feedback tools and what they aim to accomplish.
Voice of the Customer Surveys
You have probably already encountered one of these surveys:
Voice of the Customer (VoC) surveys allow your visitors and customers to give direct feedback about a specific page, product, or service in their own words.
For example…
- Open-ended questions, such as “Do you think the pricing for this product is fair? Why or why not?” (small paragraph)
- Close-ended questions, such as “Are you likely to use this product?” (1-10 scale)
You usually want to keep those short and sweet, at most a minute long–and ideally, as unobtrusive as possible.
With that said, survey widgets come in more aggressive forms, too:
- Pop-up surveys (immediately appear on a specific trigger, like hovering over a product);
- Exit surveys (when you attempt to leave the website).
Why does it work?
Because they are so short by nature, these pop-up forms only take a couple of seconds to fill out. They are also highly customizable and can be tailor-made for every page on your website–giving you a massive amount of data for very little effort.
Feedback Buttons
Although feedback buttons also fall under “Voice of the Customer”, I think they deserve their own category as the more discreet alternative to pop-ups.
Are you looking to gather more lengthy feedback or ideas for your product or service? Maybe a way to report bugs and mistakes on specific pages of your website?
Use a feedback button.
A lot less unobtrusive than pop-ups, these buttons offer several different benefits.
First, they allow your visitors a way to leave feedback without having to exit the page–an advantage often disregarded by marketers. If you force your users to navigate to a contact page, chances are that they will not return to your sign up page afterwards.
More importantly, feedback buttons are highly customizable and can be tweaked in a myriad of ways to achieve your user feedback goals.
For example, if you operate a SaaS, add a “Report a bug” feedback button to the side of your app. But on your Features page, change the wording to “Feature suggestion?”, and your Help Desk to “Is this page helpful?”.
Using different call-to-action messages means you will gather precise criticism and observations on issues you are expecting on those pages, whereas a generic “Feedback” CTA will often be too vague.
Visual Feedback Tools
Visual feedback tools, also called usability feedback tools, directly capture input from users:
Using these widgets, your visitors can point at elements of the page that they like, dislike, or encounter an issue with.
This is particularly useful for newer SaaS products, or large websites that tend to be riddled with bugs that are difficult to find with a smaller developer team.
While reporting technical issues verbally or in writing can be a tedious endeavor, simply pointing at what doesn’t work will encourage your clients to leave feedback on your project–because it’s so simple.
And if that isn’t enough, visual feedback tools and plugins can also be used in a development environment for project managers to more accurately report on UX problems to their own team.
How to choose a website feedback tools
Now that we’ve made it clear what a website feedback tools is, how do you go about choosing one for your business?
Even if you had your hands on the best plugin ever–if you don’t know why you’re using it or what kind of user feedback you’re expecting to receive, this feedback immediately becomes useless.
Here’s a few ideas:
- Usability testing: how do people use your product?
- Bug testing & reporting: if your site is relatively large and a button or function suddenly stops working, chances are that your customers or clients will find that out before you do.
- Collect feedback: what do your potential prospects think about your pricing? Leave a feedback form, collect hundreds of answers over the next few months.
- Improve your conversions: what happens after a visitor lands on page X/Y/Z? What journey do they typically undertake to finally sign up for your service or software?
- Improve landing page copy: at what point do most of your users become uninterested in your efforts to sell?
- Find solutions to high exit rates: how come most visitors immediately leave your website, without scrolling or clicking through any link?
- …and any other use case you can think of!
The best website feedback tools
1- Saasfe
Perfect for:
Product management
Top feature:
Centralized portal
—
Saasfe aggregates all the feedback collected from your customers and internal team into one centralized, easy-to-navigate portal.
Identify top ideas for product improvement, filter feedback by user and account segments, and gauge user excitement for upcoming features with a simple upvote/downvote system.
2- Hotjar
Perfect for:
User analytics and insights
Top feature:
Heatmaps
—
Hotjar helps you understand user behavior on your site.
They offer a wide variety of tools to achieve that goal:
- Heatmaps: a visual representation of where users click and spend time on your website
- Recordings: live playbacks of users on your site
- Surveys: real-time feedback box for visitors to express their frustrations or suggestions
All come with integrations to quickly send that feedback over to your developers.
3- Qualaroo
Perfect for:
User insights
Top feature:
On-page surveys
—
Qualaroo surveys specific users in context while they browse various pages on your website.
Get detailed visitor data such as where they are, who they are, how much they pay, and much more–and send them tailored feedback forms as they complete their customer journey.
4- Zonka Feedback
Perfect for:
Real-time Feedback
Top feature:
In-depth Feedback Analytics
—
Zonka Feedback is a website feedback tools that can be set up in literally every possible way on your website to capture real-time feedback from your website visitors.
- Capture leads and feedback with Website Feedback Button, Website Embedded Surveys, Feedback Popups, Exit Intent Surveys and more.
- Create and customize Voice of Customer Surveys and measure CX Metrics with NPS Surveys, CES Surveys and CSAT Surveys
- Measure feedback and conduct surveys at various touchpoints including Cart Abandonment, Post Transaction, Onboarding, Lead Capture or trigger surveys based on any other event and interaction on the website.
- Integrate with tools you use for creating effective workflows
- Get real-time responses, take action and close the feedback loop.
With real-time responses, instant alerts, and in-depth analytics, website feedback management with Zonka Feedback is a breeze.
5- Marker.io
Perfect for:
QA testing & client feedback.
Top feature:
On-page annotation & integrations
—
Marker.io is a visual feedback tool that you can test right from our homepage!
Our tool was designed to make bug reporting as easy as it can be: see a bug? Click, annotate, send: done.
Offering integrations with major project management and issue tracking tools like Jira, GitHub, Trello, ClickUp, Notion and more, Marker.io is a developer’s dream come true: simple, concise and most importantly visual information on any issues that arise on your software or website.Example of a Jira issue created via Marker.io widget
Some of the features also include automatic environment data information (browser, OS, screen size), WordPress plugin, console recording, and direct client communication: say goodbye to lengthy email chains.
6- HubSpot Survey Tools
Perfect for:
Customer development
Top feature:
Multi-channel surveys
—
Hubspot Survey Tools allow you to get valuable customer feedback for products, services, or experiences that your business offers. It comes stock with the Hubspot Suite right out of the box.
Through Hubspot Survey Tools, you can send surveys over email, host them on websites, and edit them to your heart’s content.
7- UserBrain
Perfect for:
UX teams
Top feature:
User sessions
—
As a user testing tool, UserBrain works a little differently than the tools we’ve seen on this list so far.
Set up a specific task, such as “sign up on my site”, and experience the customer journey first-hand with a recording of real people interacting with your product.
Once you sign up for their platform, UserBrain will regularly send you playback videos of users of your chosen demographic, executing the tasks you set up beforehand.
8- SurveyMonkey
Perfect for:
Market research
Top feature:
Advanced surveys
—
An extremely useful tool for various industries, SurveyMonkey allows businesses of all kinds to conduct market research and optimize their strategies for max ROI.
With market research tools, survey software, and AI-supported touchpoint tracking, it’s a sure way to keep ahead of the curve when it comes to customer experiences.
9- GetFeedback
Perfect for:
CX optimization
Top feature:
In-app & SMS notifications
—
GetFeedback defines itself as a CX platform with a plethora of tools to collect contextual feedback on the customer journey.
Surveys, insights, and analytics are all part of the suite, which integrates with Salesforce and other popular CRM software.
10- Fullstory
Perfect for:
Customer support & UX improvement
Top feature:
User session replay
—
Wondering how people use your website or web app? Wish you could just “watch” them by looking over their shoulders?
Fullstory is the closest thing to seeing how people browse your website. This in turn can give you tons of insights as to how to optimize your product and fix bugs
11- Maze
Perfect for:
User testing
Top feature:
Prototype testing
—
Need a product, service, or website tested–and fast? That’s exactly what Maze aims to help you do.
Maze is a tool that allows you to test anything from ad copy to prototypes and build valuable insights based on those tests.
It comes stock with a platform to collaborate with teams and stockholders, a full reporting suite, and quite a few integrations to make launching those products as streamlined as possible.
12- Loop11
Perfect for:
Usability testing
Top feature:
Built-in participant recruitment
—
Loop11 is a user testing tool that allows businesses to collect feedback across various platforms and devices. Its primary purpose is to enable companies to test anything they need with as much detail as they need.
With support for search engine testing, usability, information architecture, and more–you’ll find very few companies that couldn’t benefit from a tool like Loop11.
13- UserReport
Perfect for:
Audience development
Top feature:
NPS scores
—
UserReport is a suite of tools with powerful features to collect and easily act on user feedback.
Their suite includes:
- A survey widget with net promoter score and demographics data;
- Features prioritization tool where users can vote on the features they want to see next;
- A user satisfaction pop-up;
- Device comparison reports, so you can immediately find out on which devices your site or tool performs the best.
14- TrustPilot
Perfect for:
Consumer ratings
Top feature:
User rating widgets
—
TrustPilot is a consumer rating website that hosts millions of reviews for businesses around the world.
Although TrustPilot is less of a direct feedback tool, they do offer solutions for companies to collect feedback and showcase it on their website–increasing user trust and boosting sales.
15- TypeForm
Perfect for:
Survey & Customer insights
Top feature:
One-question style survey
—
The traditional survey tool makes his way on our website feedback tools list.
TypeForm helps you uncover opportunities and figure out what works and what doesn’t. With plugins supporting a wide array of platforms, their forms are easy to embed on any type of website–and the reports are easily shareable with popular third-party integrations.
Wrapping up…
We hope you enjoyed this website feedback tools comparison guide as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it together.
Use this list to help you choose the most adequate plugin for your next project.
Did we forget one? Let us know in the comments below, and we’ll add it to the mix!
