Outgrow vs Riddle: Battle of the Quiz Makers!

By corrine | Quiz Product Reviews

Jul 17

Outgrow vs Riddle: Battle of the Quiz Makers!

We have been doing a lot of these head to head showdowns lately, and here is another one! Outgrow vs Riddle. This one is going to be hard, as both of these services reviewed well on my site individually. We are going to have to get deep into the details to find a winner here I think! Another thing to consider is that different people need different quiz makers. My winner may not be your winner. However, doing these reviews forces us to take a closer look at these products, and hopefully this will help you decide which one suits your needs or desires better!

Outgrow and Riddle: Some Background to Start

Outgrow seem to be having a growing (no pun intended!) influence over the interactive content market in recent years. They talk about 'reinventing marketing', focusing on solving someones problem rather than simply trying to sell to them! People are getting wise to a lot of regular marketing tactics, so the interactive content route to marketing is often a more subtle one. Randy Rayess and Pratham Mittal started by making interactive calculators for their own projects, and were amazed by their success. This was the driving force behind starting Outgrow, to allow people to follow in their footsteps and hopefully use similar tools for their own marketing success!

Outgrow seem to have a 'buzz' about them, something that I can't really say about Riddle. I think the name 'Riddle' doesn't really help them, as the word conjures up thoughts of tongue twisters and....er....riddles! If you Google the word, their company doesn't actually come up, as the search results are taken over by riddle makers! There is even a website called riddles.com full of actual riddles! However, if you manage to get over the name and the lack of 'buzz', you might be surprised to find an excellent product lurking behind! Riddle was started by Mike Hawkins and Boris Pfeiffer, and is based in Europe. I had a brief chance to chat with Mike about Riddle, and I have great confidence in his passion and commitment to making Riddle a continually great product.

Comparing Product Features

Content Type

This is a really interesting point of comparison, as both of these companies are going at it in very different ways.

Starting with Riddle, they are focusing solely on the quiz based content. However, they have a platform that allows for a great amount of variety and creativity within these quizzes. You will not find more creative quizzes anywhere else, something that really 'wowed' me when I was first introduced to Riddle. Just look at all the different quiz types you can make!!

There are many great examples I could talk about, but today let's choose the social story. This is what Riddle describes as a "quiz meets blog post". Look at the example below to get the idea, but it is essentially a quiz embedded into other content such as GIF's and text based content. Riddle are bringing many of these types of innovative ideas to quiz making, giving you a much wider scope for anyone making such content for their business.

Outgrow, on the other hand, chose to give their clients variety in the type of interactive content they allow you to make, not just quizzes.

A quick glance at Outgrow, shows you can make things as varied as chat bots to calculators! As the founders experience has shown, intuitive calculators not only make great marketing tools, but they can also help take the strain off customer support. A lot of product pricing queries can be solved by giving a potential client access to an adaptive and intelligent calculator. Imagine being a window company, and being able to let customers see the different pricing structures based on window type, location and more! The possibilities are pretty exciting!

Outgrow didn't stop there though, as they also added many other options to their interactive content roster. 

It is really interesting that they let you make chat bots! The idea is to combine the interactive nature of a quiz, with the customer support provided by a chatbot. You could answer a customer's question or solve a question, right from the chat bot. Below you can see an example script for a chatbot that could be used by medical services that require people to make appointments. These automated but intuitive quizzes could help you get important information about that customer, which could potentially gain you more leads in the long run!

Platform

Both of these services follow the current trend of website based services. This means that all of your content is based on Riddle and Outgrow's sites, and thus you don't really have proper ownership over what you make. If you are looking for a quiz builder that is not only operated through a membership portal, you could take a look at Thrive Quiz Builder.

Marketing Features

Both Riddle and Outgrow allow you to easily collect quiz taker's emails within the content you make. Riddle has a 'collect leads' tab to help you achieve this, whereas Outgrow let's you add a lead generation form when building out content. When making question based content, they let us choose whether this lead form was placed on the welcome screen, results page or in between the questions and result. So, a little more flexibility with Outgrow.

Riddle also has a unique feature between these two services, and that's the ability to add a call too action button within your quiz, enabling you to market services without the user having to click away from your quiz. You can either add one call to action to show up on all results pages, or add a different one to each individually. You can also add timers to your quizzes with Riddle, to give that sense of urgency!


Help and Support

Both of these services have chosen to use chat bots as their main customer support system. When you are on their website's, you will see that these chat bots are a prominent feature. Both as a quick access point to knowledge-base articles (which both have a lot of), or to ask questions of a live support person.

The response of both of these chat bots is excellent too, although you need to be aware that Riddle's response may be slower outside of European office hours. Actually, the Outgrow chat bot can be quite annoying at the beginning, as it will pop up a bit too aggressively. Then all your tab titles are taken over by "Akshay says..." "Lisa says...", as the chat bot operators are frantically trying to get in touch with you or at least show you they have a response. I had several tabs open making quizzes, and found it hard to locate to the right one because of this! The chat bot does die down a bit with time though!

I have to say that the level of service I got from both companies was excellent, with all my queries being answered quickly and well. Quite interestingly, Riddle's founders can often be seen manning their chat bot, which meant the level of service I got there was just one notch higher. You can't beat the enthusiasm of the owners over hired staff, so Riddle has the edge there.

Both Riddle and Outgrow have active blogs on their official sites, something I recommend you check out for further inspiration and advice on how to best use their services! Outgrow even have a couple of free training courses to get you started making meaningful content with their platform.

Integrations?

Outgrow currently has the upper hand when it comes to built in integrations. They have a frankly massive list of these, meaning that your favourite service is likely to be included. Riddle, on the other hand, currently leave you relying on Zapier to integrate a lot of applications. Only a literal handful have native integrations straight from the platform.

If native integrations are important to you, Outgrow has you covered!

GDPR?

Both Riddle and Outgrow have put thought into their GDPR specific tools. You have clear options available when building content with both of them. I like the fact that it is specifically labelled as GDPR, so that users understand the importance of the setting. Some other competitors have similar settings labeled in other ways, and I feel this leads to users not realising the magnitutde or reasoning behind them.

Riddle

Outgrow

Getting Hands On

Templates and Ready Made Content

Both of these services have an excellent approach to ready made content. You will find many full blown examples in both, allowing you to delve deep into the inner workings of even the most complex content. These examples also offer great sources of inspiration and creativity for anyone stuck for ideas! The slight difference is that Outgrow also has style templates too, so that you can change the look of your content in more ways! 

In terms of full on page customization, there is no freedom to drag or drop page structure here. You are just able to do some minor tweaks such as changing fonts and colours.

Outgrow has both style and content templates!

Working with Questions

Both Outgrow and Riddle have excellent user interfaces in terms of usability. Outgrow's just has a more expensive and slick appeal to it! 

The content building process between both is similar too, with the questions visible on the left. These can easily be added to or rearranged throughout the design process. What I like about both platforms is the fact that everything is done on one screen. This makes the whole thing slick and easy to follow. Both also have tabs at the top that you can work through to finish the content you are building. Riddle made these tabs into arrows to make the flow even more obvious. 

Both platforms allow you to preview your content as you go along. Outgrow has a slight advantage, as this preview is also available in a mobile view. As more and more users are viewing on mobile, this is an important addition for some.

You can click the images below to see the UI pictures full size.

Riddle

Outgrow

It is worth noting that Outgrow allows much more complex ways to calculate the end result of your quiz/content. You can add weighting to answers, allowing you to give particular answers more of an influence over an end result. They also allow you to get really technical and come up with full on mathematical calculations for calculating results. Something that is particularly useful when making calculators.

Branching Logic

Both offer logic branching, which is a great start. If you want to make adaptive and complex quizzes, this feature is a must. It enables you to send quiz takers down different routes depending on the answers they give.

However, Riddle's implementation of branching logic is way better than Outgrow's. In fact, this is one area that I was surprised Outgrow got so wrong. 

The only thing to be aware of, is the fact that Riddle only offer branching logic on their 'interactive story' quiz type. However, they are planning on rolling this out as a general feature at a later date.

When working on branching logic with Riddle, you will be using an overview screen such as this....

Questions are represented by blue squares, end results by red squares, and question jumps by green squares. This screen shows an overview of all the elements of your quiz on one page. You can visualize all of the branching logic quickly and easily. With such a system, you can make complex quizzes with ease.

However, for some reason Outgrow decided to go the text based route with their logic branching. An implementation which baffles me greatly. When you select the 'logic jump' option, you are taken to a screen where you need to set up these text based conditions. When set up, the only indication of this on the overview screen is a tiny logic jump icon on your question. Therefore, it is not easy to get the full picture of these logic jumps in one go! I don't know about you, but it would take me way longer to make anything complex with this system!

Can you spot Outgrow's tiny 'logic jump' icon?

A/B Testing

This is a bit of a let down for anyone interested in doing simple A/B testing. Both products here don't offer anything official, and ask you to duplicate quizzes. make small changes and manually check the results yourself! Not ideal if you are doing this a lot! If you want this feature, go and check out my Thrive Quiz Builder Review!

White Label Quizzes?

You can remove Outgrow and Riddle's branding from your content, although Outgrow only allow you to do this on their highest $600 a month tier. Riddle are a bit more reasonable, only asking you to be at least on their $49 a month tier! A bit more palatable if this is important to you.

The End Result?

Of course, when talking about the end result it is more a matter of personal taste. For me personally, it's a close run thing, but I feel the Outgrow content looks a bit more polished and sleek in nature! Look below! What do you think? The only area that I would consider Riddle superior, is with the animations and effects they use for some of their more creative quiz types!

An Outgrow Quiz

A Riddle Quiz

Embedding the Quiz

Both of these content builders have an excellent set of options when it comes to embedding your creations! This will allow you to tweak your content to get the best end result possible. 

Outgrow moves slightly ahead, as they give you a much wider variety of styles to present your quiz once embedded. It can be a simple quiz on a page, a pop up or even in the form of a chat bot. Although to slightly counter this, Riddle have options to make your quiz AMP ready.

Reporting Tools

Both products offer excellent reporting tools for the content you make. This is vital for working out the level of engagement and/or attention that content is getting. Although the Outgrow statistics page is currently slightly more detailed, I have had a sneak peek at an improved page that is coming soon on Riddle's side. By that point, both offerings will be pretty much identical.

Where Outgrow shows a bit more innovation, is by giving you a 'performance' page too! These results aim to give you hints on the quality of the content you just made and how you could improve it. An automated audit, if you will! This is a great feature, that I haven't seen on any other quiz builder.

I am a big fan of the Outgrow 'performance' analysis!

The Price

Please note: In this section of the review, simply click the pricing images below to get more information from the product's official website.

Outgrow are going for a pretty complex and restrictive pricing structure, with the highest tier coming in at a whopping $600 a month.  Some examples of the restrictions are that you can only make five content pieces in total on the $25 a month tier, and generate 12000 leads from this a year. I am not going to list all the restrictions, but would recommend you looking into each tier very carefully. Make sure that the main features you want are in a tier you are willing to pay for!

In comparison, the Riddle pricing structure seems like child's play! There are certainly less restrictions, and it is easier to follow. In general, Riddle offers better value than Outgrow. It is great that they don't put a restriction on traffic to your quiz, or the number of leads it gathers. Riddle have an excellent pricing table, if you scroll down to the bottom of the pricing page on their website. This will show literally all of the features of Riddle, and which tier they are available under. I recommend you take a look at this before you sign up for any Riddle plans!

Which One Would I Recommend?

In general terms, these two services both offer an excellent product in their own way. As the relatively unknown underdog, I was pleasantly surprised at the level Riddle was able to achieve in this comparison review. 

In my opinion, what it boils down to is this! Do you want to go the quiz only route, and do the best examples of these you possibly can? Or would you rather have the flexibility to also create calculators and chat bot style interactions?

What you get with Riddle is some of the most creative and well put together quizzes that it is possible to make in any quiz making software. If top notch quizzes are your main focus, Riddle is your choice!

However, if you want the ability to make a wider range of interactive content, you would find Outgrow better suited!

Some Caveats.....

The only other main factor I see is price, depending on the features you need. With certain features added, Outgrow can become a much pricier proposition. For most use cases, the value would be with Riddle.

Oh, and if you want to do a lot of logic branching in your quizzes, steer clear of the awful system in Outgrow!

Of course. I highly recommend you go through the features of both services and decide which are important for you. These extra factors might be a further influence over your decision.

But, for me, I am not declaring an overall winner. It is just about the type of content you need and/or prefer!