UserTesting is a leading user research tool that helps to collect video-based human insights from testers. Hubble is a UserTesting alternative that can help facilitate the collection of powerful user insights across the product development cycle. Both platforms offer a variety of features that can be used by designers, researchers and product managers. In this blog post, we will compare Hubble vs. UserTesting based on the following key criteria:
- 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 participants that can be recruited through each of the platforms?
- Factors to consider - What factors should buyers consider when evaluating Hubble vs. UserTesting?
Hubble vs. UserTesting: A General Comparison
Feature Comparison
Ease of Use & User Experience
Study Builder and Navigation
Hubble and UserTesting both offer a navigation bar on the left, with the ability to select various tabs. 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, UserTesting offers workspace, library and folders. Because of this, it can take a little more to locate the right project and study after a while. Hubble's navigation system is much more straightforward, allowing users to access their studies without having to sort through folders.
Hubble and UserTesting both offer easy ways to create research studies, usability tests and prototype tests. Both platforms offer quick and easy ways to invite collaborators to a workspace, and share results with stakeholders, while also support integration with slack or other workspace messaging tools so that you can receive real-time notifications when responses are collected from participants.
Types of supported Studies
Hubble and UserTesting support various types of research insights, including unmoderated tests and moderated tests.
Unmoderated Tests
Both platforms offer unmoderated usability tests that can be used to collect quick and powerful research insights. Hubble is an all-in-one user research tool providing the flexibility to conduct research with both external participants and product users. Hubble includes usability tests, prototype tests and card sorting tests.
Using these tools, product managers, UX designers, and UX researchers can gather research insights throughout every phase of product development. Hubble offers valuable quantitative data, such as heat maps, click data, success paths, completion rates, and time spent on each task.
One important distinction between UserTesting and Hubble is that Hubble offers a direct integration with Figma's API for usability testing so that you can generate click data, heat maps and more detailed usability analysis on prototype tests. Hubble offers an easier way of importing heavy prototypes that contain many interactions and frames. On the other hand, UserTesting offers more integrations with various types of design tools such as InVision, Sketch and AdobeXD, but its Figma integration does not support granular insights like Hubble's.
IA Tests and Card Sorting
Hubble and UserTesting both offer card sorting features that allows teams to conduct information architecture testing and categorization feedback. Hubble offers the option to run open, closed and hybrid card sorting, allowing users to select the specific type of card sorting task that is most appropriate for their projects.
Live Site Testing
Hubble offers live site testing that does not require an SDK installation. UserTesting offers a way to test native mobile applications, which Hubble does not. Through the live site recording, Hubble users can record participants while they interact with a live site in production.
Usability Testing Templates
Hubble and UserTesting provide template libraries that can be used to collect insights for different types of projects across the product development cycle. Hubble offers a wider range of templates with graphical images to help you find the templates that you need more easily. Both platforms also provide the ability to create custom templates and save them for future use.
In-product surveys
Hubble offers a powerful in-product surveying feature for continuous user research, while UserTesting does not offer the capability to collect in-product research insights.
In-product research is a powerful feature because it allows teams to collect actual user feedback continuously 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 is a powerful differentiation that provides Hubble users more versatility compared to other user research tools available in the market that don't offer an SDK.
User Segmentation & Targeting
Hubble's in-product SDK allows customers to track end-user events and attributes. Through the targeting, 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 SDK. UserTesting's in-product prompt does not offer the ability to target specific users based on attributes or events.
Advanced Controls for UX
Hubble offers various granular controls that maximize the quality of the end-user experience. With Hubble's in-product 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. UserTesting does not offer a native experience to launch in-product surveys and participant recruitment.
URL Targeting
Hubble's offers an 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
UserTesting offers a native pool of 2M participants from more than 100 countries to provide a broad panel of B2C testers to customers. In contrast, Hubble has taken a different, integration based approach to provide a participant research pool via API partnership with market leading user research panel providers such as Respondent and User Interviews.
Hubble offers 3 million participants from Respondent and 4 million participants from UserInterviews for all methodologies including unmoderated and moderated. Hubble customers get access to the two top-grade user research participant pools in the world across different countries, ethnicities, jobs and industries.
Many Hubble customers have been delighted with the fast turnaround and quality of the research participants that they can access through the platform, creating an easy way to get user feedback without having to recruit participants manually.
Factors to consider when choosing between UserTesting and Hubble
Now that we have made a detailed comparison between UserTesting and Hubble, it’s time to think about what are some of the most important factors to consider when choosing between the two. Selecting the right user research 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
World class product teams need to have access to different types of research methodologies throughout their research and design process. UserTesting is great if you want to collect user feedback, analyze results and share findings within a single platform. UserTesting is mainly designed for individual in-depth projects and for those focused on qualitative research. With UserTesting, you can:
- Collect responses through video recordings, which can be time-consuming to schedule, script, and review
- Recruit from a B2C focused participant pool of 1 million testers (many unverified)
- Integrate with other workflow tools like Slack, Trello, Jira, Outlook, and Google Calendar
Nevertheless, 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.
In addition, Hubble offers a much broader pool of user research participants, through integration partnerships with UserInterviews and Respondent, the top two leading research participant pool in the market.
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
UserTesting offers integrations with Figma, AdobeXD, InVision and other design tools. Hubble does not support integrations with Invision, AdobeXD and Sketch but it offers are more flexible integration with Figma, allowing for more granular quantitative insights for prototype tests and usability testing.
UserTesting also 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.
Why choose Hubble over UserTesting?
UserTesting is a platform that focuses on deeper, qualitative insights generated from moderated interviews. Based on G2 reviews and customer feedback, it can take up to 10 weeks for insights from UserTesting to arrive, compared with Hubble's time to delivery which typically gets finished in a couple of hours. The merger with UserZoom has allowed them to tap into the unmoderated testing space, but they currently restrict the types of study/blocks you can run concurrently, so it can quickly become a very expensive option to scale and democratize research across your company.
Moreover, while UserTesting 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 including the ability to target, segment and survey users in your product, Hubble is a much more viable option.
Lastly, the participant pool offered by Hubble is much more high quality and broad than UserTesting's participant pool. UserTesting offers 2M participants from it's own native participant pool while Hubble offers API integrations with UserInterviews and Respondent, which are the two leading participant pools in the world that offer more than 4 million participants from 200+countries. Therefore, Hubble's is a much better option than UserTesting if you are looking for a high-end user research platform with the best scale and quality of research personas available.
Conclusion
UserTesting and Hubble are both leading user research tools that can help product teams understand their users better. UserTesting is a leading provider of video-based research insights and has recently started to build out its unmoderated features as well as AI capabilities. If you are looking for a high caliber user research tool but want to have access to more complex in-product and unmoderated tests as well as a higher quality participant pool for all methodologies, Hubble is a better option than UserTesting.
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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 otherUserTesting alternatives, check out 13 best UserTesting alternatives.
- To read a comparison between Hubble and Maze please see Maze. vs Hubble
- 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.
