Optimal Workshop vs Great Question
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
From $199 per month (billed annually, includes 5 launched studies)
Free tierFrom $129 per seat/month (self-serve; $1,290/year annually)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Annual plans reduce the effective monthly rate substantially; recruitment is separate.
Self-serve is $129 per seat/month, or $1,290 a year paid annually; enterprise is quoted. Recruitment from external panels is billed on top of the subscription.
Free tier
Free plan with limited participants per study.
Free trial rather than a lasting free plan.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
Optimal Workshop · since 2008
Emerging
Great Question · since 2020
Strengths
- The reference tool for card sorting and tree testing; the analysis visualisations are excellent.
- Tree testing validates navigation before any build effort is spent.
- Well-established methodology support and training material.
- One workflow instead of separate recruiting, scheduling, testing and repository tools.
- Recruits from your own CRM, which reaches real customers rather than panel participants.
- Handles incentive logistics.
Limitations
- Narrow scope — it does not do usability testing of interfaces.
- Expensive per seat for occasional use.
- Interface is dated in places.
- Breadth means individual modules are less deep than specialists.
- Smaller vendor than the enterprise incumbents.
- Own-customer recruiting needs clean CRM data to work.
Best for
Teams restructuring navigation, taxonomy or content on a large site.
Research-ops teams consolidating a fragmented toolchain.
All of these integrate with: Slack.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.