Hubble and Maze are two of the leading next-gen continuous user research solutions for product and UX teams. Hubble is a Maze alternative that can help facilitate the collection of powerful user insights across the product development cycle. Both products offer a variety of features that can be used by designers, researchers and product managers. In this blog post, we will compare Hubble vs. Maze on key consideration points including:
- Cost - what are their pricing plans and how do they differ?
- User experience & collaboration - how easy is the platform to utilize between different collaborators within an organization?
- Type of insights - what types of tests and insights can be collected?
- Participant pool quality - how good are the B2B and B2C participants that can be recruited?
- Factors to consider - What factors should buyers consider when evaluating Hubble vs. Maze?
Hubble vs. Maze: A General Comparison
Ratings from Capterra
Pricing Plans
Before diving into a detailed feature comparison between Maze and Hubble we wanted to present a quick summary of Maze's plans including their cost and the features that are included in each of the plans.
Here is a summary of Hubble's plans
Ease of Use & User Experience
Study Building Experience
Both platforms are easy to use, offering a simple and easy to use user interface relative to other competitors in the market such as UserTesting, UserZoom and Userlytics. Both Hubble and Maze feature a drag-and-drop based study builder, providing the ability to change question orders easily. In addition, both platforms offer a wide variety of templates based on different use cases so that users can easily create a study without having to write all the questions on their own.
As it relates to importing prototypes for usability tests, Hubble offers an easier way of importing heavy prototypes that contain more interactions and frames. Regardless of what research platform you use, it is best to optimize the Figma prototypes using these guidelines, but Hubble can process and import heavier prototypes without issues relative to Maze.
One notable difference between the navigation hierarchy between the two platforms is that Hubble offers three main tabs which include in-product surveys, unmoderated studies and recruit participants. In contrast, Maze offers a projects tab alongside with a tester database. Because of this navigation structure, Maze users always have to select and open a study within a project. Hubble's modular navigation system offers much quicker access to a variety of workflows including recruiting research participants, creating research screener questions, launching in-product surveys and reviewing real-time user activities data.
Team Collaboration
Hubble and Maze both offer easy ways to create research studies, collect responses and share results. Both platforms offer quick and easy ways to invite collaborators to a workspace, and share results with stakeholders. Both platforms also support integration with slack so that you can receive real-time notifications when responses are collected from participants.
Types of Tests
Hubble and Maze both offer multiple different types of research. Both tools offer a variety of features, making them stand out versus other tools that only offer a single feature. However, Hubble and Maze do have pros and cons that must be considered when making a decision for a user research platform.
Unmoderated Studies
Hubble and Maze are the market leading unmoderated tools that can be used to collect user insights across all stages with speed and scale. Hubble is an all-in-one research tool with the flexibility to conduct research with both external participants and active product users. Hubble’s test types include usability tests, prototype tests and card sorting tests. With these tools, product managers, UX designers and UX researchers can collect user feedback across all stages of product development from both external participants and product users. Hubble and Maze provide valuable quantitative data points including heat maps, click data, success paths, completion rates, and time spent on each task. These powerful data points make it a good fit for fast moving product builders that leverage various types of feedback data and research to be able to make user-centric decisions.
Card Sorting & IA Testing
Hubble and Maze both offer card sorting features that allows teams to conduct IA testing and categorization feedback. Maze only offers open and hybrid card sorting for organization plans while Hubble offers them to all plans.
Study Limits
Maze starter and free plans can only run 1 study per month. Hubble does not limit the number of studies customers can run on any of the paid plans. Hubble does limit the number of responses customers can collect on a monthly basis.
Live Site Testing
Maze offers a live site testing feature that can be used with sites that have a javascript SDK installed. Although the SDK allows for features like webcam recording and heatmaps, it requires the installation and maintenance of the SDK in the production code which requires time and effort from the engineering team. The SDK also limits the recording viewport size, which makes it difficult to collect feedback on live sites on wide screen monitors or laptops with greater than 13 inch displays.
Hubble also offers live site testing that does not require an SDK installation, so the preparation that is needed to get started is very light. In addition, Hubble's live site test allows you to test and research all websites (instead of yours only that has an SDK installed, so it offers more versatile use cases.
Study Results
Hubble and Maze offer easy ways to share study results to anyone within the team. Maze offers easy ways to generate insight reports while Hubble offers AI summarization features for text-based questions so that you can summarize insights quickly and effectively.
In-product Surveys
Below is a quick comparison of Hubble vs Maze's in-product SDK and surveying capabilities:
In-product research support is a crucial feature for newer generation research tools because it allows teams to collect user insights across the product development cycle. Instead of solely relying on email-based participant recruitment or using external panels, teams can leverage in-product surveying to quickly launch studies, synthesize results and gather research insights from actual users of the product. In-product surveying allows both Hubble and Maze to provide more versatility and speed relative to other research tools in the market that don't offer an in-product SDK. However, there are major differences between Hubble and Maze when it comes to the capability and power of the in-product SDKs.
User Segmentation & Targeting
Hubble's in-product SDK offers the ability to track user events and identify users natively. Using the track and identify calls included in the SDK, Hubble users can create segments and groups so that they can collect feedback, ask for participation and even opt people in for moderated interviews from a specific group of users as opposed to targeting all page visitors. In order to expedite the installation and use of identify & track, Hubble also offers a Segment destination integration so that Segment users can quickly install Hubble and process events and attributes without having to manually install the Hubble SDK.
On the contrary, Maze's in-product prompt does not offer the ability to target specific users based on attributes or events. Maze does offer an integration with Amplitude cohorts so that you can launch prompts to a select Amplitude cohort but it doesn't offer the full capabilities of identifying and tracking that Hubble's in-product SDK provides natively.
Advanced Controls for UX
Hubble offers various granular controls that maximize the quality of the end-user experience. With Hubble's surveys, you can control the frequency, set a cadence and even add a delay to the surveys so that you can have full control on your product's user experience.
On the other hand, Maze does not offer UX controls such as frequency, cadence and delay options. These limitations make it difficult for Maze's in-product surveying to accommodate teams that need maximum control over the appearance of the surveys and UX versatility.
URL Targeting
In order to launch a survey on a particular page, Maze needs to detect the SDK so that you can select which pages you want to trigger the survey on. However, with dynamic URLs and more complicated subURLs, Maze does not provide auto-detection which makes it difficult for teams to be able to target all.
Hubble's offers are more intuitive URL builder that lets you build more complex but powerful URL targets that can include wildcards and dynamic URLs. It even provides a dynamic URL checker so that you can test whether a particular page is included or not in the URL builder. These details allow for Hubble customers to have much more control around the on page experience, making sure that they can target specific users on specific pages and routes
Participant pool quality
Maze and Hubble both offer integrations with participant pools so that teams can conduct research with external participants.
For unmoderated studies, Maze offers a partnership with Prolific, which provides 200K+ participants from 38+ countries. For moderated studies, Maze offers an integration with Respondent.
Hubble offers 3 million participants from Respondent and 4 million participants from UserInterviews for all methodologies including unmoderated and moderated. Even for unmoderated studies, Hubble offers participants powered by Respondent and UserInterviews which are the top quality research pools in the market. Hubble offers a unique benefit to be able to recruit participants from the top two participant providers of the market at favorable prices.
What are some of the factors that I should consider when choosing between Maze and Hubble?
Now that we have made a detailed comparison between Maze and Hubble, it’s time to think about what are some of the important factors to consider when choosing between the two. Selecting the right tool that can cover your needs will ensure that the research results make the most impact and the product research endeavors continue to drive ROI within the company.
1. Test Types
Modern product teams need to have access to different types of research methodologies in their research and design process. Maze is great if you need to run prototype tests and collect quantitative data, but it doesn’t have a large, US-focused participant pool for unmoderated tests and it’s capabilities to collect insights from actual users in the product is limited.
So, if you need to run usability tests, prototype tests and also collect in-product research insights, you should consider Hubble. Hubble provides various key methods of user feedback including heat maps, card sorting, surveys and in-product feedback. You can also get access to 4 million research participants from more than 150 countries powered by Respondent and User Interviews, which are the top two participant providers in the world.
2. Ease of Setup
You need to consider how fast and easy it is to setup a study and integrate with your existing tools such as Figma, Segment and other analytics tools. Some of the other considerations include:
- SDK support to be able to collect survey responses and send recruitment requests to in-product users
- Easy experience for testers, with intuitive tester UI / UX
- Has a high quality pool of vetted testers that you can use for your testing purposes
- Pre-set templates that you can utilize to reduce the amount of time it takes to launch a study and collect responses
3. Integrations with Other Tools
Maze offers integrations with Figma, AdobeXD, InVision and other design tools. Most of the teams nowadays use Figma, so having a good integration with Figma is table stakes for the user research tool to be effective for any team.
However, Maze only supports an integration with Amplitude cohorts and it doesn’t offer integrations with other user data & analytics platforms to power in-product research and user recruitment. If you are looking for a more versatile tool that can help you collect feedback across the product development cycle (both pre-launch and post-launch feedback), Hubble is a better option.
4. Scalability
Maze recently has made some changes to its price plans and it has limited the starter and team plans to only support a limited number of studies (the existing starter plan now only supports 12 studies per year). This may be okay for smaller teams that don’t have that many researchers or are not running many studies but if you want to be able to launch may studies and surveys without limits, you can opt into Hubble's organization plans.
Why choose Hubble over Maze?
Maze is a tool that is very easy to use and has been used by many freelancers and smaller startups, but it has some limitations if you are looking to adopt a single tool for continuous research across the product development cycle. Most importantly, Maze’s paid plans limit the number of studies per month which can restrain product teams from maximizing the UX research insights they can collect.
Moreover, while Maze provides different types of unmoderated research features, it does not provide a full set of features to be able to collect in-product insights from actual users. If you are looking for more sophisticated all-round capabilities and an extensive panel focused on the US market, there are several other tools that can better serve your needs. Maze provides participants from Prolific for unmoderated, while Hubble offers Respondent and User Interviews participants for all methodologies.
Conclusion
Maze and Hubble are both popular next-gen user research tools that can help product teams understand their users better. Maze offers strong features for unmoderated testing. If you want to have access to more complex features for unmoderated, in-product surveys and a higher quality participant pool for all methodologies, consider Hubble as an option.
Elevate your continuous UX Research
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If you are interested in finding other UX research tools available in the market, we recommend some of the articles below:
- To learn more about top UX research tools, please see the best user research tools in 2024.
- To see our curated list of survey tools, see the best survey tools for research in 2024.
