Everyone loves an online contest. Well, let’s be honest; most people just like free stuff. You can use this to your advantage in business. Combine the Internet’s reach with good online competition software, and the result might be a couple of thousand new leads for your company.
There are plenty of case studies to prove the point. Take Dropbox, they used a gamified waiting list to generate huge interest in their product. Sumo meanwhile used competitions to rapidly grow their email list.
If you’re interested in running an online contest to grow your audience, read on. Here’s our shortlist of the best competition software.
Best Contest Software
The table below provides an overview of the best contest software. You can find the results in the table below.
| Software | Starting From | Best Thing About It | Biggest Problem |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vyper | $149 a month | Great range of competitions and nice templates. | It’s expensive. |
| Woorise | $29 a month | Create multiple types of campaigns. | Advanced features are available on paid plans. |
| SweepWidget | $29 a month | Free entry plan | No downsides |
| Shortstack | $99 a month | Combines landing page software with contests | It’s expensive |
| Rafflecopter | $13 a month | Simple and easy to use. | No gamified competitions. |
| Viral Loops | $49 a month | Nice range of competitions. | Limited contestants. |
| Referral Hero | $79 a month | Clean UI and can run the competition on your site. | It’s expensive. |
| Gleam | $49 a month | It’s cheap, and you can purchase a lifetime package. | It’s expensive. |
| Kick off Labs | $29 a month | More than just competition software. | Intro plan has limited features. |
Let’s get started with a closer look at the best online contest software!
Vyper
Vyper is designed for bloggers and eCommerce store owners. It’s a pretty cool tool; it allows you to run online competitions and manage customer loyalty programs.
Vyper lets you run four types of online competitions. Here’s a quick overview of the different options:
- Viral contest giveaway: run an online competition to grow your social media following and email list. You can reward contestants for referring friends, and taking actions on social media. Winner is picked at random.
- User-generated content: run social contests around user generated content/ reward people who create user generated content. Can be used for photo contests.
- Milestone contest: reward contestants for joining your competition and completing tasks. For example, you can give people points for following you on social media, sharing info about your company, etc. Winner is picked at random. Though, the more points a person has, the higher the chance of them winning.
- Pre-launch contest: Create a list of people interested in your new product/ service. Great for generating hype for a product launch.
- Leaderboard: classic leaderboard contest. The person who gets the most points, by completing tasks, wins the competition.
Setting up and running the competitions is straightforward. Everything is logically laid out, and the templates are easy to edit and look great.
If you’re used to running competitions, you’ll appreciate the marketing automation features. For example, you can send follow-up emails to contestants, easily add your Facebook pixel for retargeting campaigns, and more. You can also reward contestants with small prizes for completing tasks.
As mentioned earlier, you can use Vyper to bring people back to your eCommerce store. You can use the software to run a referral program, loyalty program, and brand ambassador program.
Vyper is also one of the few platforms that’s run by a growth marketer. Jack Paxton, who is a super nice guy, co-founded the platform. He manages an agency and uses the platform to generate crazy results for clients.
He sells a couple of courses where he shares how he gets these results for clients. I’d highly recommend the Facebook Ads for eCommerce course, which is a steal for $19.
Jack has spent more than $100 million on Facebook ads and knows his stuff.
Overall the developers behind Vyper have created one of the best contest software platforms. The entry price costs $149 a month for the Enterprise package for up to 30,000 leads. The Agency plan is $299 a month. That makes it one of the more expensive competition platforms.
Woorise
Woorise is an all-in-one lead generation and marketing platform that allows you to create a wide range of interactive campaigns such as landing pages, forms, surveys, quizzes, viral giveaways & contests, accept payments and more to collect leads and engage your audience.
Woorise helps you to generate leads, grow your subscribers list and social media following, engage your audience and drive traffic to your website.
Woorise includes a modern landing page and form builder, 40+ fields and thousands of social actions, 100+ interactive templates, conditional logic, real-time email notifications, multi-language support and built-in analytics.
Some of the key features of Woorise include:
- Beautiful and fast design with a powerful drag & drop landing page and form builder
- Embed your campaigns on every website or platform
- Create refer-a-friend campaigns
- Instant redeem rewards
- Send personalized Email Notifications
- Create campaigns in any language
- Workspaces to manage all your brands or clients from a single account
- Export your data in a CSV file
- Geo Targeting to make your campaign available to specific countries
- Multi-Page Forms
- Conditional Logic
- Personalized thank you pages
- Bio Link page to link to all your important content
Woorise also integrates with popular marketing platforms such as Mailchimp, Hubspot, ActiveCampaign, Aweber, Google Analytics, Bitly, Zapier, PayPal, Stripe and many more.
Woorise is a platform that makes it easy to run interactive campaigns & rewards on your website. If you run competitions manually, have trouble picking winners, or struggle to get traction on your giveaways then Woorise is the perfect solution.
Woorise has a free plan of 500 entries/month with many features being available such as the referral campaigns. Also a 14-day free trial of any premium plan is available. Premium plans start at $29/month for up to 2,000 subscribers.
SweepWidget
SweepWidget was designed to help users increase their social media following and grow their email list. It is one of the best affordable social media contest platforms.
You can use SweepWidget to run leaderboard competitions, milestone contests, giveaway coupons, and more. Setting up a competition is straightforward. You select the type of competition you want to run, and add some basic information like the prize you’re offering, and when the competition will start and end.
Once you’ve done that, you choose the entry method. You can allow people to enter by providing their email address, other contact information, or do a social login. There are integrations with 30+ social media platforms, so regardless of where you’re based, SweepWidget has you covered.
You can host your competition on a custom landing page on SweepWidget or embed the competition onto your site.
Managing the contest is straightforward too. They have a nice analytics portal where you can track everything. You can manually or randomly select winners, disqualify entries, and export the data in a CSV file.
You can integrate SweepWidget with your other marketing tools. It has integrations with the most popular email marketing providers, there’s a Zapier integration, and you can easily add tracking code.
One of the nice things about SweepWidget is that it has a free entry plan. Of course, your competition will have SweepWidget branding. The paid plans start at $29 a month.
Shortstack
Shortstack has tried to create an all in one marketing platform. On the one hand, you can use Shortstack to create landing pages, and mini-websites. Pretty handy for your lead generation efforts.
Alongside that, you have the functionality to engage site visitors. You can run online contests, giveaway coupons, set up quizzes, and create lightboxes. There are various types of contests you can run. Here’s a quick overview of the different options:
- Social contests: you can run hashtag contests and comment to win contests. You can run these contests on most social media platforms.
- Video contests: there are various types of video contests available. There are contests where you have a chance of winning if you submit content, and contests where people can vote on the content. You can host these contests on social platforms like Tik Tok.
- Photo contests: there are various types of photo contests. Pick the winner yourself, run polls to select the best photo, and more. Works with Instagram too.
- Instant win contents: this is used for data gathering. Contestants provide you with the requested information and then they are instantly notified if they won a prize.
- Giveaways/ Sweepstakes: more traditional competitions where a winner is picked from the submissions.
It’s a powerful tool.
Shortstack is easy to use too. The platform has a beginner friendly workflow and comprehensive analytics.
Shortstack costs $97 a month. It’s pretty good when you consider all of the features you can access. Competitions are limited to 10,000 entries and 50,000 page views, which is more than enough for most people.
Rafflecopter
Rafflecopter was one of the first companies to develop social media contest software. As a user, you choose the prize you are giving away and select the action a user needs to take to get the chance to win the prize (this could be anything from leaving a comment on a blog post, answering a question, or following a social media account).
The competition templates are easy to personalize. You can add your own color scheme, text, and branding. Once it’s ready you can launch your competition on your own site or through Facebook. It’s super easy to do with zero room for confusion.
The main downside is that Rafflecopter doesn’t offer the same level of choice in competition types as some of the newer contest software. Still, it’s a lot cheaper. The premium plans for Rafflecopter start at $13 a month for unlimited competitions with unlimited entries. The agency pricing is just as competitive at $84 a month.
Viral Loops
Viral Loops is another software contest platform with easy to launch template-based campaigns. The eight campaigns are designed around successful referral marketing formulas. For example, there’s the Altruistic Referral that Airbnb used. This is where you get a discount coupon for purchasing a product or service and receive a discount when you refer a friend.
The idea is straightforward and the software is effective. To get started you just choose one of the campaigns from the main menu. On the loading page for the campaign, there’s normally a walkthrough demo video showing you what to do. It’s very intuitive, though the user interface could be improved.
Viral Loops is a nice growth hacking toolkit. You can host the software on your site pretty easily, though you will need to pay a lot of money to use the service if your competition goes viral. The entry plan costs $49 a month. For this, you get access to three live campaigns at a time with up to 500 participants.
Referral Hero
Referral Hero is a competition software that lets you run three types of contests. There are the sweepstakes where you have one prize for the winner, waiting list competitions suitable for an affiliate marketing product launch and crowdfunding campaigns and finally lead magnets for referral programs (similar to the Airbnb model).
The app has an easy to use interface. The competitions are easy to set up though. You can make small changes to the appearance of the design, like changing the color of buttons, but nothing major. On the plus side, you can easily integrate the competitions onto your website.
Referral Hero has a freemium entry plan, which you can use for up to 250 contestants. The premium plan starts at $79 a month for up to 5,000 subscribers. This makes Maitre App expensive compared to some of the other contest software on this list.
Gleam
Gleam has created a pretty great growth hacking toolkit. You can use Gleam to run competitions, offer rewards to your customers, create lightboxes, and create visual galleries (this last part is only going to be relevant if you do Instagram marketing).
The competition software, like the rest of the app, is well designed. There are plenty of ready to launch template style competitions you can edit and run (there’s no leaderboard though). When your competition is ready to launch, you can run it through a blog post, a landing page, or host the competition on Facebook. These types of competitions, where you get people to a page, can work well with chatbot software.
Unfortunately, the user interface is built for people who like data. It’s all input fields and headings with no visual appeal. Still, it’s a cool bit of software, and we’re only covering one part of the toolkit. The pricing starts at $10 a month for the ability to just run competitions with little functionality. The real starting price is $49. For this price, you get access to the full toolkit.
Kick Off Labs
Kick Off Labs is part optin form creator part landing page creator with contest software functionality. When it comes to the competition software, you can use Kick Off Labs to run leaderboard contests, a pre-launch waiting list, and incentivized referral campaigns.
The software has a great user interface, which is important given how much you can do with it. On the first page, you choose if you’re creating a lightbox, a landing page, or editing a custom form. Assuming you’re running a competition, chances are you’ll use the landing page creator.
There are over 60 pre-made landing page templates to choose from. Choosing the optin page for your competition, the competition page, and the thank you page is very logical. You can edit the appearance of all the pages in the campaign from the WYSIWYG drag and drop interface. You can monitor everything through the in-built analytics and even improve the conversion rate with AB testing.
As I mentioned Kick Off Labs is more than just a contest software. With its page creator and lightboxes, it’s more like an alternative to Click Funnels. This is reflected in the pricing. The hobby plan costs $39 a month with very limited functionality, while access to the full toolkit costs $97 a month.
Final Thoughts
Online competitions are a proven way to grow your audience and extra sales for your online business. There are a lot of great online competition software platforms on the market. In terms of features, and functionality, Vyper is probably the best platform currently on the market.
For more useful tools for online business owners, check out our guide to the best password management software, and the best heatmap tools. You might also want to check out our roundup of the best Mac cleaner.
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