Leadquizzes VS Thrive Quiz Builder! Who makes the best quiz?
Welcome back to another head to head review between two of the biggest names in the quiz building world! If you want to make marketing quizzes for your online business, these two names are bound to crop up! I have personally used both and wanted to give my take on the fight between Leadquizzes and Thrive Quiz Builder. Will it be a points win or a KO, lets find out!!
Which quiz builder will take a pummeling?
The Companies Behind the Products
Thrive Quiz Builder is made by Thrive Themes. Thrive Themes have become one of the major players in WordPress plugins for bloggers, and especially marketing focused bloggers. They have a wide range of themes and plugins that would pimp out any WordPress website! The thing that sets them apart from a lot of other companies in this space, is the fact that they now have a big company feel, and they are bringing the service, sheen and professionalism to match! Thrive are building a brand you can trust for years to come.
Thrive Themes was founded in 2013 by Shane Melaugh and Paul McCarthy. Shane is no stranger to company startups! A quick glance at his CV shows that he has involvement in other ventures such as Whitesquare (a kind of container for lots of his startups!) and Activegrowth (a course for people wanting to setup online business'). Paul seems to have a more technical background, making these two into the perfect storm! One business minded and the other technically minded! Clearly, it has worked, as Thrive Themes must be one of the biggest companies in the WordPress plugin market! And then some!
Leadquizzes were born (or maybe even help create) from the success of viral quizzes on websites such as Buzzfeed. These quizzes were pulling in literally millions of visitors for these type of websites, and attracted the attention of the marketing world! From their website, you might think that Neil Patel is the founder, as he features heavily in their marketing content! The founders of Leadquizzes are actually Dornubari Vizor and Jeremy Ellens. They started as a marketing agency (I assume heavily using quizzes with their clients?), but then transitioned into a quiz based software company. This makes so much sense, as the potential market for software is so much greater! With Neil Patel's support, Leadquizzes have become a big player in this market. My take on them is a bit like how I feel about Clickfunnels in the funnel market. The hip and cool company in the space. The 'hot' company if you will!
The Neil Patel testimonial video below must make Leadquizzes feel they have hit marketing gold. I mean, he is pretty much the 'most famous' internet marketer I know of!
Quiz Building Features
Content Type
Both Leadquizzes and Thrive Quiz Builder are products which focus purely on quiz building, and are not trying to include any other type of interactive content.
Thrive Quiz Builder set out some clear quiz types that they offer. This essentially determines the type of end result you can have for your quiz, from a numerical/percentage score to several categories that the quiz takers are placed in to at the end! Thrive do a great job of presenting this! You literally choose at the start of your product what type of quiz you want!
Thrive Quiz Builder's quiz types!
Leadquizzes just offer the basic quiz type. Categories that your quiz taker will be put into at the end. No scoring systems are present, from what I can tell!
Platform
Thrive Quiz Builder is going for a WordPress plugin approach to their product, whereas Leadquizzes are going for a website based approach. What does this mean? Well, with a WordPress plugin everything is housed on your own website. This means that all the content you make you actually have ownership of. If Thrive Themes went bankrupt tomorrow, you would still have access to your work, If the same happened to Leadquizzes (or you just ended your subscription), then you loose the ability to do anything to what you have spent hours making.
The only downside from the plugin approach, is that having another plugin on your website might slow down it's performance if you already use a lot of WordPress plugins. For me personally, I have used Thrive Quiz Builder on multiple websites and don't really notice any slowdown from using it!
Marketing Features
Most online business owners want the ability to collect leads within their quizzes. Both Leadquizzes and Thrive Quiz Builder do this well. Thrive do it slightly better, as they allow more flexibility. You can add an opt-in gate before your quiz results as standard. If you also own their Thrive Leads plugin (you will do if you go for the Thrive Membership option), you can also add an opt-in form on any of the pages they let you edit. Because, each time you will be using the Thrive Architect page builder to edit, which always has the lead generation element available. I talk about this more in my article on how to make a 'cool results page' with Thrive Quiz Builder!
Leadquizzes simply allow you to add a form field for opt-in to your questions section, and arrange it as you need.
Help and Support
Both have excellent support. Any time you are working In Thrive Quiz Builder, you will see a play button on some items. This means that there is a video available to explain that feature. Click on the play button and said video will pop up and play within the builder. Other than this, Thrive Themes has an excellent help and support section on their website. They have many articles explaining different features of their products in detail. Every time I posted a support ticket in their support forums, someone would get back to me pretty quickly. It does vary though, but the longest I have had to wait is a few hours.
Look for the play button in Thrive Quiz Builder!
Thrive Themes also has one of the best Youtube accounts for such a product. They have many lengthy videos explaining and giving complete walk-throughs of many features in their products, including Thrive Quiz Builder.
As Leadquizzes is a website based service, more of their help is easily accessible within the platform. I particularly like the 'get started' button that you see in the bottom left when building quizzes. Here, they have access to all the key information you will need to get started, They have many knowledge base style articles on their site, to go over the features of their quiz builder. They also have a chat bot, which you can use to get answers or as a search portal for previously mentioned help articles. However, the chat bot response is painfully slow. Several times I had to wait many hours to get a reply from a real person. I swear they have one person behind their chat bot, as it is always the same person that replies. If he is asleep, you are out of luck!!
Elvis is alive! He operates the Leadquizzes chatbot!!
Leadquizzes do have a Youtube account too, but its full of marketing rather than practical support for their product. Mainly success stories from people that have grown their business with the product. You see the similarities with Clickfunnels coming through!
Integrations?
Both Leadquizzes and Leadquizzes have an excellent level of built in integrations. You can't go far with either. I really like the ability of Thrive Quiz Builder to use a HTML code to link pretty much any autoresponders. I have tried out some niche autorepsonders that work great using this method. I don't see this option in Leadquizzes, although they have a Zapier integration that has the possibility to add these more niche autoresponders (with a bit more legwork).
GDPR?
Thrive Quiz Builder has features that allow you to manually make sure that you are GDPR compliant, although these features are not clearly linked to GDPR in the builder itself. They do have an excellent article on their website explaining how to do this!
Leadquizzes make it a little easier, with some clear features available during the design process, such as the cookies permission toggle.
GDPR compliancy is a little easier in Leadquizzes.
They also have an excellent article talking about Leadquizzes and GDPR compliancy.
Quiz Building Hands On
Pre-Made Content/ Templates
Both of these products don't do well when it comes to pre-made content. Both don't offer any real quiz examples for you to bring up and peer into the back end! It's a pretty blank canvas in this regard. I feel it is important to have these, so that new users can see how more complex quizzes are setup!
Design templates, Thrive Quiz Builder does a bit better, having a handful of design templates to change the look of your quiz. Leadquizzes don't have any style templates, and only let you make some basic changes to the look of your quiz. Standard things such as colours and fonts. In Thrive Quiz Builder, you can create more custom splash and results pages, as they let you fully edit with the Thrive Architect page builder.
Leadquizzes allows limited customisation
Adding and Managing Questions
Both products have good user interfaces. Everything is clear and simple to use. As Leadquizzes is website based, they are able to have a much slicker looking UI. It really is one of the best I have seen in any quiz builder.
Both products also have good ways to add your quiz questions. After a short time it was clear to me how to add my desired questions and different answers. Thrive has better features though. More ways to score your quiz, the ability to add extra weighting to questions and the ability to tag your quiz takers if they answer in a certain way. Powerful features not available at Leadquizzes.
Branching Logic?
Branching logic is becoming important for marketers using quizzes these days. This will give you the ability to only ask a question if your quiz taker answered a previous one in a specific way. Powerful stuff.
Both products offer logic branching. One implementation is horrible and the other is amazing!! Look at the screen below, and see how simple logic branching can be if done right!
This is the way Thrive Quiz Builder allows you to build quiz questions, using a mind map style. It is child's play to connect up the different parts and get something really complex.
The same can't be said for Leadquizzes. They have gone for a text based approach to logic branching. This means you have to manually enter in these connections, which is much more confusing to do! You don't have the ability to see the overall picture every time you are trying to make a connection, it's a nightmare! Then, with a logic jump (that's what they call logic branches) enabled, a tiny icon lights up blue on your question overview. Here's a where's Waldo moment. Look below, and see how easy it is to spot that logic jump icon!! Whoever designed this has serious design issues!
A/B Testing?
As with the logic branching feature, A/B testing has become incredibly popular in recent times. You can create two results pages, and see which one gets shared more! (for example). This can lead to much better performing quizzes.
Thrive Quiz Builder has an excellent system for this, right in the builder. Any page that you can edit will have a button available that lets you build additional versions of that page and test. You can even create variables to decide which page will be the winner, or you can manually choose the winner at a later date yourself. It is an excellent and easy to use system, with results building up the longer the A/B test runs. These results will help you choose which variation is the preferred one.
A/B testing is bult into Thrive Quiz Builder
How about Leadquizzes then? I am afraid this is another area that Leadquizzes falls down. They currently have no way to A/B test, apart from manually duplicating a quiz, making small changes and assessing the results yourself. Pretty poor showing lads!
Ability to Add Own Branding?
Both have this ability build in. You can easily take out both the Leadquizzes and Thrive branding from your quizzes without much fuss!
The End Result?
With Thrive Quiz Builder, you get slightly different looking quizzes, as they have differently styled templates available, as well as the ability to completely custom make some of the elements of your quiz. Leadquizzes quizzes all look the same, as there is very little ability to customise. Having said that, the Leadquizzes quizzes look at touch slicker and better put together. Not by much, but that's the feeling I get! Maybe this is a by product of the limited customisation!
Embedding/ Sharing Quizzes.
As Thrive Quiz Builder is a WordPress plugin, does that mean you only have the ability to share your quizzes on your WordPress website? In fact Thrive give you a shortcode for all of their quizzes, giving you the ability to embed your quiz anywhere online that allows shortcodes. When embedding quizzes with a splash page, I found it a little weird that there is a gap present underneath the splash page. Other than that, it worked flawlessly.
The winner when it comes to sharing and embedding options is clearly Leadquizzes. As you will see below they have some excellent options for this and the ability to quickly share to multiple social media platforms.
Reporting Tools
I would rate the reporting tools on Leadquizzes and Thrive Quiz Builder about the same. Thrive has some nice visual features to their reporting, such as the 'flow' reporting section. Leadquizzes have a nice feature to show actual responses from quiz takers. Both are not going super in detail with statistics, but are certainly giving enough for most people's needs. If you are a stat buff, you might want to check out my Outgrow and Riddle reviews, two quiz builders that take reporting to a whole new level!
The Price
Starting with Thrive Quiz Builder, they offer some of the most competitive pricing in the industry. To get all the quality and features mentioned in this article for a mere $67 for a single site install, is a steal. Then consider you could get a Thrive membership, which will include all the Thrive Themes and Plugins, for only $19 a month, and you see what I mean about the pricing. How much do you pay for quality themes and plugins on their own these days? This makes Thrive a no-brainer for many active website builders. And you know that their products will be regularly updated and supported for years to come.
Also, consider that there is no limit on the amount of leads you generate or the traffic you get through your quizzes. A lot of competitors make you pay more depending on these very factors!
How about our friends over at Leadquizzes, I hear you ask (no really!!).
I applaud the fact that Leadquizzes are going for a simple approach to pricing compared to some others. They are not expensive compared to some of the other popular competitors in this space, but are currently lacking a lot of key features (as you have read in this review). This leads me to question why I would pay $29 a month for this over $19 a month for a Thrive Membership. There really is no competition for me! And the traffic limits of the lowest tier make me double down on this feeling!
Which One Would I Pick?
Someone at Leadquizzes has made a huge mistake! They released this Leadquizzes version 3 way too early and they are paying the price. Why did they bring it out with such a limited and frankly crappy feature set? You might be thinking "Don't worry, they are working on those features!" Well, Leadquizzes version 3 has been out since February, and is still sadly lacking in features. Yes, I said February. Why oh why didn't they simply hold off until all the features are in and ready?? The mind boggles at this business decision on their part!
Just look at the feature sets both Thrive Quiz Builder and Leadquizzes offer. Read the review above carefully. Can you make ANY case for buying Leadquizzes over Thrive Quiz Builder?? I am struggling to think of even one! It is Thrive Quiz Builder for me all day long! Leadquizzes has some small wins with certain features, but they are a mere jab in the ribs compared with the knockout punch landed by Thrive Quiz Builder!!
Leadquizzes will still do well due to their marketing tactics and ability to quote Neil Patel as a supporter. But if you actually want to make fully featured quizzes, go for Thrive!
What do you think? If you have experience of both products, we would love to hear your opinions in the comments section below.
If you are interested in Thrive Quiz Builder, we also have many articles on here that will help you get the best out of the product. From our full review article, to a tutorial and help on creating a 'cool reports page'. Oh, I nearly forgot the article showing real live examples of test quizzes built with Thrive!
