Top Conversion Rate Optimization Tools
Home // Conversion Rate Optimization // Top Conversion Rate Optimization Tools
July 7, 2020 By John E Lincoln
We've gathered the most popular CRO platforms on the market, plus five free conversion rate optimization tools that can stand alone or add to your paid capabilities.
Equip your CRO arsenal with the top conversion rate optimization tools
CRO (conversion rate optimization) is one of the most important acronyms in sales and marketing—and one of the hardest to master. It's the process of optimizing your website and lead capture campaigns to get users to do what you want them to do: buy your product or service. It involves testing, testing, and more testing—and you'll need the right conversion rate optimization tools to capture and make sense of all that data.
We've categorized our list based on each product's price and standout features, so you can easily find which tool—or combination of tools—is right for your business.
Price: Starting at $50,000 per year
Best for: Enterprise-level A/B testing
Optimizely is one of the top conversion optimization tools for enterprises, with comprehensive features for desktop, mobile, email, apps, chatbots, and more. Leverage A/B testing, multivariate testing, server-side testing, and funnel analysis.
Schedule tests, segment and target campaigns, and analyze results with website performance metrics sent directly to Google Analytics or a platform you choose. Optimizely also has account-based marketing capabilities, making it unique from other conversion rate optimization tools in its class and ideal for larger organizations with bigger marketing budgets.
Price: Starting at $1,000 per month
Best for: Mid-range A/B testing
AB Tasty is a mid-range conversion rate optimization tool—it is cheaper than Optimizely and Google Optimize's paid version but could be out of range for small businesses. For the price, it's one of the top conversion rate optimization tools for A/B testing, with multivariate testing, split testing, audience targeting, and campaign segmentation.
It also offers comprehensive analytics like statistical relevance analysis and performance metrics. Built-in surveys are a nice bonus, and the abandoned cart saver is a valuable feature for e-commerce.
VWO Testing
Price: Starting at $199/month
Best for: Small business A/B testing
Visual Website Optimizer, known as VWO, offers several plans to fit various needs. VWO Testing is its A/B testing platform, which comes with a point-and-click visual editor, pre-made widgets you can program based on user behaviors, the ability to run multivariate tests and split URL tests, full-funnel reporting, and basic customer segmentation and targeting. VWO also offers several complementary plans, including VWO Insights, with session replays, heatmaps, and surveys.
CRO enables you to optimize your website's functionality while helping you understand the whys and hows of visitor behavior.
Price: Free version, paid version about $150,000 per year
Best for: Free A/B testing
There's no shortage of options for testing and personalization, but Google Optimize is one of the only free conversion rate optimization tools in this area. It offers A/B testing, split URL testing, and multivariate testing, plus extensive personalization.
The free version limits multivariate testing to 16 combinations, limits test objectives to three per test, and can only run five experiments at a time. There is also a paid version, Optimize 360, which adds audience customization and allows full multivariate testing (36 combinations), ten objectives per test, and the ability to run 100+ tests a time. Seamless integration with Google Ads, Google Analytics and other Google products make it a popular conversion rate optimization tool in both the free and paid categories.
Price: Starting at $24/month
Best for: Behavior mapping
When it comes to heatmapping conversion rate optimization tools, Crazy Egg is hard to beat. Its heatmaps and session replays show you exactly how users interact with your page. Crazy Egg sets itself apart with its proprietary "confetti map," which shows individual clicks that you can segment by the operating system, geography, or custom UTM parameters, adding valuable context.
It also has list reports, which let you take a deep dive into single pages and forms and provide data in a numbers-oriented format for the more analytical members of your team. Once you know what users are doing, you can A/B test landing page variations to find a winner. Crazy Egg's integrations are minimal, but include Optimizely, Bitium, and Boast. It also gets points for ease of use.
Price: Free version, paid version starting at $29/month
Best for: User analytics
Hotjar offers similar capabilities to Crazy Egg, with heatmaps, scrollmaps, session replays, and A/B testing, but there are a few key differences. Hotjar's pop-up user polls and surveys provide valuable direct user feedback, and funnel analysis shows you exactly where users are dropping off—both of these tools make Hotjar's data and analytics more comprehensive.
It also has a move heatmap report that shows how people move the mouse around the page. HotJar integrates with Shopify, making it popular with smaller e-commerce sites; but it also offers API access, so it's great for large enterprises as well. Perhaps the biggest differentiator for Hotjar is that they offer a "free forever" plan, while Crazy Egg does not have a free option.
Plerdy
Best for: Heatmapping, session recording, and SEO checker
This conversion rate optimization tool also offers website heatmapping tools to record clicks, hovers, scrolls, and other website interactions. Plerdy also has event tracking tools to help you focus on selected objects such as user interactions with forms, images, or videos. Tap into this tool's conversion funnel analysis to show you where your website visitors are dropping off and what stages they ignore to help you boost your ecommere sales.
Ready to jump in? Plerdy only takes 30 seconds to install! You'll start the registration in your personal dashboard and paste a script on your website. That's it. Once the first click on your website is made, analytics and statistics will flood your dashboard. Plerdy offers a free version, that is limited in tracking but will be free forever. If you're interested in bumping up your plan, Plerdy offers 14-day trials and prices range from $23 a month to $79 a month.
Plerdy Offers Conversion Rate Optimization Tools
Best for: Advanced landing page optimization
Unbounce offers flexible tools to create, test, and optimize landing pages, including A/B and multivariate testing, heatmapping, and targeting. Their highly customizable designs do have a learning curve, but once mastered, offer many features for lead capture and optimization. Unbounce stands out in terms of lead generation and capture: It has popups and sticky bars that allow you to target your offer toward certain users based on UTM parameters, cookies, or geography. It will also compare your page with others in your industry and provide a report on how you can improve your conversion rates. Unbounce also gets points for affordability—it's one of the cheaper landing page conversion rate optimization tools on the market.
Best for: Easy landing page optimization
Like Unbounce, Instapage is a drag-and-drop landing page editor with A/B testing, multivariate testing, heatmapping, and targeting capabilities. Instapage has more templates than Unbounce, and they're easier to use "out of the box" thanks to features like Instablocks, which are customizable elements you can re-use from page to page. It also has a cool collaboration feature that allows others to annotate your in-progress pages. But this conversion rate optimization tool sets itself apart with its dynamic text replacement, which allows you to personalize an entire page based on UTM parameters or other user attributes—and hopefully resulting in more lead captures. If you're thinking about the best conversion optimization tools for landing pages, you may want to try out both Unbounce and Instapage to see which one is right for you.
Best for: Overall CRO on a budget
While it isn't free, Lucky Orange is one of the cheapest and most robust conversion rate optimization tools you'll find. It offers heatmaps and scrollmaps, session recordings, form analytics, live chat, surveys and polls, conversion funnel analysis, and more.
It will even send you a daily email report about your website. However, you will encounter some cons along with the cheaper price: historical data is limited, your options are not very customizable, and the user interface can be confusing. However, for the number of tools you get for the price, Lucky Orange could be a great choice for smaller websites and businesses.
5 best free conversion rate optimization tools
While all free conversion rate optimization tools will have limitations, you can configure a program that works for you by combining several tools, or using free tools to supplement any of the paid tools above. Here are some of the best specialized conversion rate optimization tools on the market right now.
Woopra Core
For a free conversion rate optimization tool, Woopra Core offers a ton of user analytics capabilities. For up to 500,000 actions per month, you get user journey tracking and reports, trend and retention reports, and basic segmentation capabilities. It creates a profile for each visitor to your site and tracks their life cycle. Best of all, Woopra Core retains your data for 90 days—longer than even some of the cheaper paid CRO platforms.
Best for: Lead capture
HubSpot's free forever plan is ideal for both sales and marketing. You get unlimited users, data, and up to a million contacts with no expiration date. In addition to sales and performance reports, marketing tools like email templates and analytics, form tools, live chat and chatbots, and prospect tracking makes HubSpot CRM one of the best conversion optimization tools out there for capturing and nurturing high-quality leads.
Sumo Free
Best for: Social media
Sumo is a great tool to supplement your email and social media campaigns. Build your email marketing list with custom popup forms and smart bars, and easily display social media share buttons. With an intuitive point-and-click interface, Sumo is popular with bloggers and small ecommerce websites. The caveat: the free version will display Sumo branding in the top right corner of your website and in its popups.
Drift Free
Best for: Live chat
With Drift's free chat plan, you can use targeting to show the live chat option only to certain website visitors—like those with the highest chance of converting. Set up routing to automatically connect the right sales rep to each prospect. And you can set an automatic welcome message based on whether you're online or offline, to proactively set expectations. While you'll need to upgrade to get the chatbot and other tools, the free version is ideal for those who just need basic live chat capabilities.
Typeform Free
Best for: User surveys
Typeform's free version allows users to create beautifully designed surveys and forms with just a few clicks. Embed forms on your website or within email and connect to Google Sheets to collect leads. The free version limits forms or surveys to ten fields and limits responses to 100 per month, which is comparable to the more well-known SurveyMonkey. But Typeform's smooth user experience and sleek designs make it one of the top conversion rate optimization tools in the survey category.
As with anything marketing-related, the conversion rate optimization tools that are right for your business will depend on your size, budget, industry, and specific needs. Ultimately, it's about taking a look at your current tools and processes and determining where you can find the most efficiencies and get the most bang for your buck. Most tools also offer free trials, so you can test and compare features and usability to see what works for your team. After all, if there's one thing to learn from conversion rate optimization tools, it's that testing is everything!
What is a Good Click Through Rate? (And How it…
How to Create the Highest Converting Landing Page in Your…
How to Use Heatmapping to Increase Landing Page Conversions