Outgrow vs Riddle – an overview
Sure, there are dozens of quiz creator tools out there – to save you time, we created this in-depth review of Riddle and Outgrow.
(Updated: we’ve gone back and re-analyzed both platforms with their latest features, so this Outgrow review is nice and current.)
We’ll start with a high level overview, then dive in with a detailed feature by feature look at each quiz maker’s audience engagement and lead generation capabilities.
Right – let’s start with the fundamental question… why use quizzes for marketing and lead generation? Quizzes have increasingly been in the news the last couple of years. We bet you’ve already heard how quizzes can turn your passive audience into active participants. Why? People just can’t resist a good online quiz.
It’s hard-wired into us as humans; we love discovering new things about ourselves – then (most importantly) sharing our results with their friends. You can see this on your own Facebook feed – the marketing gurus at AdWeek found that quizzes are some of most posted/shared content online. And quizzes don’t stop at engaging your audience. This is a difficult time for online marketers. Banner advertising is dying – with ad blockers up to 25% and banner blindness resulting in ever-decreasing clickthrough rates (from 44% back in 1996 to a measly 0.05% in 2018 – that’s 1 in 10,000 views!).
Native advertising is increasingly the way forward – engaging your readers and then asking for their email for follow up conversations. Marketing experts including Neil Patel and Larry Myler know that quizzes are an easy, scalable tool for online lead generation – you can create bespoke, compelling content around your marketing goals.
Lead generation and quizzes – the Grease connection
Let’s dive in a bit deeper about why quizzes and lead generation are such a natural combination. Being big fans of the movie Grease, we had to throw in a quote – “they go together – like *rama lama lama ka dinga da dinga dong*.” (And apologies if that very catchy song is now playing in your head.)
Right – effective lead generation is all about context and timing. For most online content, the audience is passively reading and absorbing information. Now add in a lead form – and it can feel abrupt, and ‘sales-y’.
It doesn’t fit the experience, which makes your audience defensive. Quizzes are different.
Each quiz taker will have already answered 6-10 questions before they are presented with your lead form. Psychologically-speaking, they’re in an ‘answer-ready’ state – predisposed to answer the next question, or in your case, your form.
Timing matters – showing your lead generation form between the last quiz question and each user’s results also boosts opt-in rates. Your audience is emotionally engaged with your quiz, and fired up to get their results. Placing a lead form here will see results of up to 40% – that’s almost 20X typical lead generation tools. (Note: this only works if your form is related to the quiz. Asking someone about, say, your financial planning consultancy in a Harry Potter quiz wouldn’t work nearly as well.)
Online quizzes – the data connection
Okay – so we’ve shown how quizzes can engage your audience and get excellent sign up rates.
But quizzes go beyond just a place to add a lead generation form. Nope – any good quiz maker should let you also collect and send the lead’s quiz responses to your marketing software such as HubSpot or MailChimp. Once there, your quiz leads and data can power your marketing funnel to send out the right message to the right lead, personalized and based around their quiz responses.
And there are a number of online quiz creators out there – you don’t just have to pick between just Outgrow and Riddle.
Online quiz maker use case
Let’s walk through a typical use case. Imagine you’re running a travel site – and you want to send the best offer to each lead around their interests.
You could whip up a personality test called ‘What’s your dream summer vacation?’ – with 6-10 questions such as “Do you prefer beaches or mountains?” or “All-inclusive or make your own way?”.
You could then send targeted discounts or offers to each lead – based on their vacation preferences. A beach lover would get your 7 days in Maui while the more independent leads could receive your self-guided ‘American road trip’ adventures.
Outgrow – review summary
The founders of Outgrow are a good start up story – two business grad school buddies who teamed up in 2016 to start their own lead generation/quiz maker company. They started out with customizable calculators as a lead generation tool – so leads could discover, say, how much of a mortgage they could afford with simple sliders or entering their incomes. Add in easily selected templates and you’ve got their “PowerPoint for interactive content” approach.
This information would then help marketers qualify each lead – so they can segment and follow up with the right messaging. It’s a good idea – and Outgrow does it well.
Outgrow formats and lead generation
However their initial focus on easily created calculators has come at a trade off. Looking at Outgrow vs Riddle, they have a much more limited range of quiz types (8 vs 13) – providing basic quizzes, polls, and personality tests, but not a wider or unique range of tools.
Their lead generation tool also lacks advanced fields that today’s marketers demand – including hidden text/URL to better track/tag where each lead comes from. For a sense of the flexibility offered – compare their six field types with Riddle’s 17.
Outgrow pricing and customer support
From a cost perspective, they’re also pricey – their plans top out at almost 3X Riddle ($720 vs $249), and even there, they cap how many leads you can collect each month.
The other key area comparing Outgrow vs Riddle quizmaker has to do with customer support. If you sign up for their $22 or $45 a month plans, you’re limited to their help FAQ section only. And even at their premier plan at $720 a month, you still have to wait up to 24 hours for a reply.
Outgrow quiz design and user interface
In terms of aesthetics – check out Outgrow’s quiz design. Outgrow has recently changed the layout of their online quiz builder – it’s an improvement but is a bit cluttered and takes some time to get to grips with.
We are big fans of their calculators though – these are powerful ways to get users to enter their own data, then suggest the appropriate products around that. Some sample use cases are mortgage calculators for real estate sites, tax planners for financial consultants… well, you get the idea.
Riddle quizmaker – review summary
At Riddle, we’ve adopted a different philosophy. Our team have been in the quiz creator business for a long time – with over 30 years combined experience (dating way back to Tickle.com – one of the web’s very first quiz sites).
We know that both lead generation and audience engagement are crucial parts of the quiz marketing equation.
You need the right quiz type to attract your audience’s interest AND the right lead generation set up to collect/process/send your lead data to your marketing software so you can convert them to happy customers.
Riddle offers 13 quiz types
Riddle offers 13 types of quiz types (and counting!) – including a wide variety of quiz, polls, surveys and personality quizzes.
And we don’t stop there. We’ve worked closely with our partners like the BBC to create quiz types unique to Riddle – such as our image-based ‘Order It’ ranker quiz (‘Arrange the Star Wars movies in chronological order’) to ‘Tap and Find’, where you place quiz answers directly in images.
This wider portfolio will give your marketing and editorial teams will have a much more diverse range of creative options – so they can build the right content for each of your campaigns.
Plus, you’ll avoid ‘quiz burnout’ – caused by showing the same type of quiz over and over again. Today’s audience is fickle – and respond best to a variety of content.
Riddle is great for Lead Generation
That brings us back to our engagement goals – to constantly provide the widest range of creative options for our clients. On the lead generation side, we have a similar approach – going beyond the basic name/email fields offered by many quiz makers. Nope, we offer 17 types of data fields – including dropdowns, radio buttons, date/time picker, and more.
And creating forms is a breeze – you simple drag/drop fields into the form and then style it to match your site’s branding.
You can also save forms as templates – for rapid reuse in future quizzes.
Now getting leads with quizzes is great – but it’s only as useful as your data connection with your email marketing tool.
Just like our quizzes, we designed made it easy and intuitive to send data to any of 3,000 email marketing tools (Salesforce, AWeber, Pardot, and more). With no coding required, you can be up and collecting leads in just minutes.
Riddle offers you full customization options
These first two areas – quiz creation and leads – are a great start. But we also know that each customer and website is different.
Instead of a ‘one design fits all approach’, we’re fired up about giving you complete control over almost every aspect of your quizzes.
The benefits to you? You’ll have a huge range of customization options in all our plans – from colors to styles, layouts, languages, and more.
And for publishers, brands and agencies, you can use things like our CSS editor and uploading your own fonts to create quizzes that blend organically into your website – matching its look and feel for maximum brand consistency.
Outgrow vs Riddle quizmaker – detailed feature list
Looking at Outgrow vs Riddle, they’re both highly capable quiz makers – and can deliver good results. But your use case is as specific as your business – so we also added this detailed comparison of Riddle and Outgrow across 40+ features:
| Feature | Outgrow | Riddle | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5-star customer service | No | Yes | Outgrow: $22 and $45 plan only have FAQ for support. $115 – chat support only, 48 hours response time. $720 – phone/chat, 24 hour response time |
| Scored quizzes (with right/wrong answers) | Yes | Yes | |
| Personality tests (each result based on all answers) | Yes | Yes | |
| Standalone lead generation form | No | Yes | |
| Four types of polls | No | Yes | Outgrow: only one type of poll |
| Surveys (with data export) | No | Yes | |
| Social stories (where quiz meets blog post) | No | Yes | |
| Social sharing (Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, LinkedIn) | Yes | Yes | |
| Conditional logic | Yes | Yes | |
| Multilingual | Yes* | Yes | Outgrow: 30 languages, Riddle: 67 |
| Quiz layouts: multiple layouts | Yes | Yes | |
| Single and multiple correct answers | Yes | Yes | |
| Free text responses | No | Yes | |
| Both ‘as you go’ or at end of quiz scoring modes | Yes | Yes | |
| Correct/incorrect answer explanations | Yes | Yes | |
| Custom ‘correct/wrong’ messages and other quiz text fields | Yes | Yes | |
| Random question and answer order | Yes | Yes | |
| Rich text formatting: include links, lists and emojis | Yes | Yes | |
| Hide vote totals | No | Yes | |
| Automatically close polls (by date/time) | No | Yes | |
| Unroll quizzes – display all ?’s at once | No | Yes | |
| Show multiple personality results (X% for #1, Y% for #2, etc.) | No | Yes | |
| Quiz statistics – track starts, completes, leads, shares | Yes | Yes | |
| Detailed quiz stats – by question and results | Yes | Yes | |
| Optimize quizzes using ‘engagement graph’ | No | Yes | |
| Add multimedia | Yes* | Yes | Outgrow – upload images and video only, and in limited places. No audio, Giphy, Twitter, or stock photo search engine support. |
| Timed quizzes | Yes* | Yes | Outgrow – only per question timer. Riddle: set by question or overall quiz (ie. ’30 seconds to finish’ for more flexibility. |
| Upload your own images | Yes | Yes | |
| Google image search | No | Yes | |
| Classy stock photo library | No | Yes | |
| Giphy – search/use animated GIFs | No | Yes | |
| Twitter – embed any tweet | No | Yes | |
| Sound files | No | Yes | |
| Video files – set start/end points | Yes* | Yes | Upload video only – no YouTube support. Also can’t set start/end points for video clips – useful for ‘What happens next?’ or trivia quizzes. |
| In-tool image editing (crop, filters, text) | No | Yes | |
| 17 types of lead fields | No | Yes | Outgrow has basic fields – but not the more flexible ones like time/date picker, hidden text/urls, etc. |
| Optional or mandatory forms | Yes | Yes | |
| Connect to any marketing tool (on all plans) | Yes | Yes | |
| Connect to any data system with webhook (all plans) | No | Yes | Outgrow only gives access to webhook in their $720 a month plan. |
| Send leads to Google Documents | No | Yes | |
| Import your own forms | No | Yes | |
| Display your videos or ads | No | Yes | |
| Full creative control – all paid plans | Yes* | Yes | Outgrow – no complete white labelling except for $720 plan |
| Select background patterns | No | Yes | |
| Accessibility features (hearing/vision-impaired) | No | Yes | |
| Customize social text | Yes | Yes | |
| Add your own branding | Yes | Yes | |
| CSS editor – full control over your quiz styling | Yes | Yes | |
| Team templates – save/apply your own style combinations | No | Yes | |
| WordPress plug-in | No | Yes | |
| Google AMP support | Yes | Yes | |
| Drupal plug-in | No | Yes | |
| Customize embed width | Yes | Yes | |
| Lazy loading images | No | Yes | |
| Include quiz text to enhance your SEO | No | Yes | |
| Refresh ads on quiz page | No | Yes | |
| Doubleclick and other pixel support | Yes* | Yes | Outgrow: only at $720 a month plan |
| Facebook pixel support | Yes | Yes | |
| Google Tag Manager | No | Yes | |
| Display your banner ads below your quiz | No | Yes | |
| Place your own video ads | No | Yes | |
| Multi-user team features | Yes | Yes |
We like being upfront and transparent – so let’s point out the elephant in the room (or blog). You’re reading this on Riddle’s blog, so it’s no surprise that we’re big advocates of Riddle. Now, we know that no one quiz maker works for every marketer. Outgrow and Riddle are both capable, powerful quiz maker platforms. However, you have your own unique requirements. To help save you time, we decided to compare Outgrow vs Riddle across the key features that might drive your decision-making process.
Riddle is the best alternative to Outgrow – Summary
You can probably tell how passionate (and long-winded) we are about quizzes! Comparing Outgrow vs Riddle, there’s no one ‘correct’ answer about which is the best quiz creator. Each platform has their own strengths – and it comes down to your product requirements while balancing cost and customer support.
- Choose Outgrow if you’re focused on calculator-based lead generation. They’ve made a very good business out based around interactive calculators to drive lead generation. This initial focus has limited their wider quiz portfolio though, and there might not be as much lead generation and overall quiz customization as you might expect at their price point.
- Pick Riddle if you need a broader range of quiz formats and customization options.
We’re big believers that today’s marketers want a wide array of quiz tools with robust lead generation options – all easily customizable to match their site and brand.
(Oh, and we’re big/huge/massive customer service geeks – both our founders and our entire team race each other to answer customer questions first. Try us at hello@riddle.com or via support chat.)
A blog post like this is a great first step – but if you can’t decide, we recommend you try both quiz creators. Outgrow and Riddle both offer free trials – with no credit card required – so you can quickly get a sense of which might best your needs. Happy quizzing!
For today’s online quiz maker comparison, we’re going to take a look at Outgrow vs Riddle.
Sure, there are dozens of quiz makers out there – to save you time, we created this in-depth review of Riddle and Outgrow.
