Opinion Stage, Apester & Ex.co Pricing vs. Value

By Opinion Stage Updated: March 14, 2022 Updated: Mar 14, 2022

In this article, we’ll compare the main attributes of 3 of the most popular interactive content platform alternatives – Opinion Stage, Apester & Ex.co/Playbuzz. The comparison will focus on the following dimensions: tool variety, ease of use, integrations, and performance. We will also compare Opinion Stage, Apester & Ex.co’s pricing to evaluate value vs. cost.

Cost is always a major buying factor, although some businesses are more sensitive to it than others. Following are the pricing structure and plans that Opinion Stage, Apester, and Ex.co offer.

Opinion Stage

Opinion Stage offers a free plan and paid plans that start at $19 / month for new businesses, $65 / month for small businesses, and $199 / month for established brands. Opinion Stage also offers enterprise plans that include an account manager, advanced security features, custom integrations, and more. All plans have a monthly and annual option.

View Opinion Stage pricing details

Ex.co Pricing

Ex.co offers only 2 plan options – a professional plan with limited features and up to 100,000 views and an enterprise plan with advanced features. They don’t offer a free plan so you will need to use their trial period to test the service. Pricing details are not indicated so you will need to contact them to get more details.

View Ex.co pricing details

Apester Pricing

Apester offers 3 plans ranging from $29.99 to $559.99 per month. Each pricing plan supports a different amount of monthly page views and different features.

View Apster pricing details

Interactive Tools Variety

Using an interactive content platform with a wide range of tools will help your creative process. All of the tools included in Opinion Stage, Ex.co, and Apester come with templates you can use when you want to get up and running quickly without fiddling with too many settings.

Opinion Stage offers 7 interactive formats and tools – an online voting tool, a multi-poll creator, a trivia quiz builder, a personality quiz maker, a survey maker,  a form builder, and a story builder.

Apester offers 6 interactive tools – poll, countdown poll, quiz, personality test, interactive video & story.

Ex.co offers 5 interactive experiences – flip, poll, quiz, trivia & checklist.

Selecting between the options will come down to which specific tools are important for your work.

Performance

Using an interactive content platform is great and everything, but if it doesn’t deliver actual results, then it’s not very useful. We looked at the performance of Opinion Stage, Apester, and Ex.co / Playbuzz across three dimensions: Mobile Compatibility, Completion Rates, and Session Times.

Here’s what we found:

Mobile Compatibility – All the templates and tools included in Apester / Playbuzz, Apester, and Opinion Stage are fully mobile compatible.

Completion Rates & Shares – Out of all the interactive content formats available, quizzes had the highest completion rates. 90% of users who started a quiz completed them, and the share rate was also fairly high, at a few percents depending on the scenario

Session Times – The average session duration for quizzes created on Opinion Stage, Apester, and Ex.co (Playbuzz) was relatively long and lasted about 2-3 minutes. The duration increased as we optimized the content’s length and targeting.

Overall, all platforms showed a solid performance. Ultimately, the performance of your interactive content will depend on your audience and the topic of your content. You will get the best results by testing different versions of your content across different audiences and channels.

Ease of Usage

Creating interactive content should be as easy as possible. Otherwise, you’ll spend more time figuring out how things work than actually creating content.

Ex.co / Playbuzz and Apester alternatives have a learning curve. If you’ve never created interactive content before, you might find some of their features confusing and their interfaces difficult to navigate at first. However, both platforms have video tutorials and templates to help you get started.

Opinion Stage is comparatively easier to use. You can create your interactive content in a matter of minutes by using templates. If you’ve ever used a text editor before, you won’t have any trouble using Opinion Stage. It’s that easy.

Another strong point of Opinion Stage is that it has a very good WordPress Plugin that makes it easy to work with Opinion Stage on WordPress blogs.

Integrations

The right integrations can help you do more with your interactive content. Some integrations will allow you to connect user responses with your marketing automation software while others will make it easier to embed your content on your site. Here are the integrations offered by Opinion Stage, Apester, and Ex.co (Playbuzz) as were found online.

All options let you embed the items on any type of content management system that supports HTML and iframe. 

Ex.co / Playbuzz and Apester alternatives also make it easy to share your content with your audience on social media. 

Apester doesn’t publicize on their pricing page integrations, although you can expect that they support a few. 

Ex.co mentions ad server integrations, DPM integrations, and pixel integrations.

Opinion Stage offers integrations with hundreds of marketing automation tools such as Mailchimp, Hubspot via native integrations, webhooks, and 3rd party integrators (e.g. zapier.com). Opinion Stage integrates with different pixel solutions, with google tag manager, ad integrations, and more.

Conclusion

All three platform alternatives offer a wide variety of tools and reliable performance. However, it’s worth picking a platform that has all the tools you want. For example, if flip cards are a must for you, then go for Ex.co, which offers that tool. If you are sensitive to pricing, compare Opinion Stage, Apester & Ex.co pricing details above. If ease of use & 3rd party integrations is your priority, then Opinion Stage is probably the best option.