Learn how to create a crossword puzzle with Riddle.com. Creating a crossword puzzle for your website is a fun activity and will also help you with reader engagement, plus increase the time your visitors spend on your website. Crossword puzzles will increase your revenue from ads and improve your search ranks as your users spend a lot of time solving them and often share their results – and your website – with their network.

Importance of interactive and engaging content

Getting readers to engage with your content is a key ranking factor for all search engines, which also affects your ranking in popular AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity. These tools also base their recommendations on search engine results from Google and Bing.

A crossword is consistently one of the most popular puzzle types. The New York Times website is famous for its New York Times Mini Crossword, which creates a crossword puzzle every day (a ‘quick bite’ 5×5 to 7×7 format) that is beautifully designed and not too hard to solve. By engaging readers in solving a crossword puzzle, you also get more attention for the ads on your page, which will increase your overall ad revenue.

Introducing Riddle: A high-end online crossword puzzle creator

The Riddle.com crossword builder allows you to make a crossword puzzle that works really well on mobile devices and desktop computers alike. The flexible grid gives you the option to create easy-to-solve small puzzles or very large, extensive crosswords that keep readers engaged for half an hour or more.

With the 14 day free unlimited free trial option, you can create and publish a crossword puzzle with Riddle for your website or app – with no credit card required. In fact, building a crossword with Riddle is probably more fun than solving it.

We consciously decided against an AI crossword puzzle generator as they are not very ‘pretty’, displaying mostly empty spaces. AI has not been able to solve the puzzle of creating a crossword like the NY Times Mini just yet.

True, you can create them with the help of AI as we outline below, but that’s not recommended. Fully AI-generated crosswords that fill a symmetrical grid aren’t possible yet (according to the best AI researchers).

Play a live crossword puzzle from Riddle

This crossword puzzle was created with Riddle.com. We left all the reveal and check options turned on to make it a little easier to solve this puzzle.

Step-by-Step Guide to Create a Crossword Puzzle with Riddle

The crossword puzzle is just one of the many mini game types available in all Riddle subscription plans.

1. Create a new Riddle and select “Mini Game -> Crossword”
2. Set the grid size from 5×5 all the way to 15×15 – Smaller grids seem easier to fill out at first, but you will find it easier to create a crossword with a bigger grid. Start with 7×7 or larger for your first crossword. Bigger grids give you more choices for words, especially if you combine them cleverly with blank spaces.
3. Pick the theme – the best crossword puzzles have a overarching theme. Select a theme and start adding words related to the theme. Especially the longer words should fit the theme. A theme also makes it easier for you to come up with words than to create something completely random.
4. Create a list of 15 to 20 words and add clues – Please avoid words shorter than three letters for your first word choice. You can use AI to find clues by prompting “I am creating a crossword puzzle, find a crossword-style clue for the word ‘TEAM”.
5. Drag your longest words into the grid first – Riddle will show you visual cues if the word placement works with all intersecting words or if there is a problem.
6. Aim for a high amount of ‘checked letters’ – A checked letter is a letter appearing both in a across and a down word. Focus on common letters for the intersections. Common letters in English are E, A, R, S, T, N, I, O.

How to find words for your crossword puzzle

The good old dictionary is still one of the best tools to find words. When looking for a letter word that starts with TE , you can go to T in your dictionary and go through all words with these starting letters to find a match.

Want to leverage AI?

• Try this prompt: “I am creating a crossword puzzle. Find words that match the pattern TE?L. Replace any variable letter with a “?” AI will give you a list of matching words.
• We have found all popular AI tools (ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Claude) to provide excellent results with this prompt.

If you end up with 2 or 3 letter combinations that result from other words crossing, you can either:

• Look these up in a dictionary
• Ask AI if it can give you a good definition of the respective letter combination.

For example, when building a crossword, I ended up with the letters “NR” – and I was stumped.

I ended up asking AI with the prompt:

“I am building a crossword puzzle and I am left with the letters “NR” for a word. What would be a possible explanation I could add for that? I know this is not a common word, so I am also looking for common abbreviations that have a meaning using these letters.”

Shorter prompts just asking for explanations for “NR” will often have the AI give you a lecture about good crossword design instead of providing the needed clues.

Hint: The best results (as of October 2025) come from Google Gemini. The other AI engines tend to come up with quite a few hallucinations and wrong explanations.

Tips for Designing a Beautiful Crossword Puzzle for All Devices

Most users will visit your website from a mobile device (60% of all traffic as of 2025). Any grid size larger than 9×9 will be too small to read and complete on a regular phone. The very popular New York Times Mini typically sticks to grid sizes of 5×5. This is a perfect size for a phone, but also very hard to create, as your choice of possible words is extremely limited.

A good approach when you set out to make a crossword puzzle?

Create a series of smaller grids for your daily crossword and then provide a large crossword for the weekend, where readers may have the time to solve the puzzle on a desktop browser. Riddle will automatically adjust the crossword display and font size for each device, so you don’t have to worry about creating multiple designs.

(Just keep in mind that grid sizes above 9×9 will result in very small and hard-to-read fonts on a phone.)

Benefits of Sharing and Embedding Crossword Puzzles on Website

Adding a crossword puzzle to your website is a fun way to turn visitors into active participants. Instead of just reading your content, they can play, think, and interact right on your page. Crosswords keep people on your site longer, increase engagement, and make your content feel more dynamic.

When you share them on social media or in newsletters, they become great conversation starters that attract new visitors. With Riddle.com, you can create and embed your puzzles in minutes, match the design to your brand, and give your audience something fun and memorable to enjoy. All social shares will lead straight back to your website.

Exploring Additional Features and Customization Options

As with any Riddle mini game, quiz or puzzle, you have a wide range of customization options to choose from. For the crossword, the key options are:

• Show rules
• Allow guess-checking
• Allow auto-checking of all letters
• Allowing answers to reveal, especially the options to enable checking and answer revealing, can make your crossword really easy or super hard to solve. We recommend auto-checking options to avoid frustrations unless you are using your crossword for a serious competition. With the ability to add pre- and post-roll ads from your ad server as well as ad banners below and above the crossword, Riddle offers a wide range of monetization options (our Business Plan is required to serve ads). You can also use the crossword puzzle as a lead generation engine by adding a lead form either before users start to play or after they finish (or give up) and promise to provide the solution to the game via email.

Conclusion and Encouragement for Creating Your Own Crossword Puzzle

Give the Riddle crossword maker a try. You will most likely find that creating a crossword is more fun than solving one. Whenever I finish creating a beautifully filled grid, I proudly share it with my network and my readers.

After you built your first crossword, you will have a lot of appreciation for crossword creators. These games are not easy to create but offer a great sense of achievement. You will also find your website visitors loving your game and spending 5 or 10 minutes on your website, which will lead to your page ranking higher on Google.

Market overview – all crossword puzzle makers compared

Global Crossword Puzzle Platform Market Overview for 2025

The market for digital crossword puzzle platforms is thriving worldwide. In 2025, the global crossword and puzzle market (including crosswords and other puzzles) is valued at roughly $3.02 billion, with continued growth driven by cultural engagement and digital innovation. 

Publishers, educators, and brands increasingly use online crosswords to engage audiences and build habit formation on their websites. Launching a web app that lets publishers create and embed crosswords means entering a competitive landscape with both B2B-focused providers (serving media outlets, businesses, and schools) and consumer-oriented tools.

Below, we survey major competitors, their offerings, and pricing models – with an emphasis on B2B services.

Enterprise and B2B-Focused Crossword Platforms

B2B crossword platforms are geared toward publishers, media companies, marketers, and educational institutions. These services often support high traffic, branding customization, and advanced features (analytics, multiplayer, etc.). Pricing is typically subscription-based, with tiers defined by usage (number of puzzles or plays) and enterprise support.

Riddle.com – Crosswords, mini-games, quizzes, polls and surveys

Riddle.com is a versatile multi-format platform that offers unlimited usage of all content formats for one monthly fee.

The Riddle crossword engine allows you to build crossword grids from 5×5 to 15×15 grid sizes with smart tools to help you with word placements.

The crosswords work cross-platform and are mobile-optimized. You can add pre- and post-roll content and also serve ads from any ad server above or below the crossword. Riddle also provides you with a flexible form builder to collect user data for lead generation, crossword raffles, and newsletter signups.

The benefit of using Riddle.com for creating crossword puzzles are the unlimited views and completions that are part of every Riddle plan. There is also no limit to how much content you can generate. Riddle content can be embedded via iframe and is optimized for mobile delivery. There is also an option to use Riddle content inside your native apps.

Pricing: Riddle has 4 pricing tiers that are all unlimited in terms of content, leads generated and usage. The main differentiator between the plans are styling options and advanced features like tracking, developer tools like API and JS events and connectivity to tools like Looker Studio for advanced analytics.

Riddle’s Essential Plan starts at $59 and allows you to create unlimited crossword puzzles. The Pro Plan starts at $119 and allows you to remove the Riddle branding. The Business Plan at $249 and the Enterprise Plan at $749 are targeting larger publishers and brands and come with a whole set of features that allow perfect styling with full CSS access, custom fonts, advanced connectivity and interoperability with your website and more.

Riddle is ISO 27001 certified, fully accessible and 100% GDPR compliant, which makes it a great choice for brands and publishers that need to follow current government regulations.

Competitive position: Riddle is a market leader in the interactive content market. With its previous focus on Quizzes, it is used on many leading publishers, sports and brand websites. Riddle’s recent addition of mini-games like Sudoku, Slot Machines, Wheel of Fortune and now Crosswords (in October 2025) will make it an easy choice for publishers who need more than just a crossword puzzle maker.

Riddle’s unlimited pricing and low entry level plans allow risk free usage, without any extra cost for successful crossword puzzles. Riddle also offers a risk-free 14 day trial that has all features unlocked.

Amuse Labs – PuzzleMe

Amuse Labs offers the popular PuzzleMe platform. PuzzleMe provides a robust toolkit: an online constructor for creating crosswords (and other puzzles like Sudoku, quizzes, etc.), easy embedding via iframe, and rich features such as multimedia clues, responsive design, multi-player mode, leaderboards, and analytics. Notably, PuzzleMe has an AI crossword generator to help create puzzles (e.g. generate clues from a topic or even auto-fill grids) and supports contest modes and custom theming. The layout of the AI generated cross words however are not great as too few words actually intersect.

Pricing: PuzzleMe operates using a freemium model.

A Personal plan is free for individual use (unlimited puzzles, embed allowed) but limited to 2,000 plays per month and no commercial license. For commercial use, the Professional plan costs $249/month (or $229/month billed annually) and includes a commercial license, priority support, contest/leaderboard features, and higher limits (up to 5,000 monthly game plays, 2 staff accounts, etc.).

PuzzleMe also offers an Enterprise tier starts at $500/month (usage-based pricing) with custom features, up to 5 staff users, on-demand play volume, white-label options, and an enterprise SLA. Wrapping things up, PuzzleMe’s pricing is primarily tiered by usage (number of puzzle plays/views per month) and feature set. All paid tiers allow unlimited puzzle creation; the limits apply to how many times users play the embeddable crossword. Amuse Labs also offers special pricing for small startups/teams on request .

Competitive position: PuzzleMe is a market leader in B2B crossword platforms, offering a polished solver interface. However, its usage based pricing makes it a very costly option for high traffic websites.

Arkadium (White-Label Games)

Arkadium is a long-established provider of digital games and puzzles to publishers. They have over 20 years in the industry, famously powering Microsoft’s Solitaire and supplying the daily crosswords for some of the world’s biggest publications.

Arkadium’s model is slightly different: instead of a self-serve puzzle creator, they offer a library of ready-made games (including crosswords, Sudoku, word searches, etc.) that publishers can license and embed as white-label content. Publishers using Arkadium typically get professionally made crossword content (e.g. daily puzzles from renowned constructors) delivered via Arkadium’s platform and customized to the publisher’s branding. Arkadium emphasizes its scale – providing over 1 billion hours of game engagement per year through its partners .

Pricing: Arkadium does not publicly list prices; deals are typically enterprise licenses or revenue-share agreements. Publishers can either license the crossword as a service (often ad-supported with Arkadium managing monetization) or pay for an ad-free white-label implementation. For example, Arkadium’s site mentions 300+ premium HTML5 games available for licensing, with customization to fit the client’s brand.

Pricing likely depends on the package (number of games, traffic volume, exclusivity of content, etc.) and is negotiated case-by-case. (One unrelated hint: Arkadium launched a consumer subscription Arkadium Advantage for $29.99/year, but for publishers the costs are much higher and bespoke.)

In short, Arkadium represents the syndication model – publishers pay for high-quality puzzle content plus a robust hosting platform, rather than creating puzzles themselves.

Competitive position: Arkadium is a major B2B competitor for engaging puzzles. Its strengths are the quality of content and its turnkey solution – a publisher can add a daily crossword or suite of games with minimal effort.

However, it’s less flexible for publishers who want to create custom puzzles in-house.

Newer self-serve tools (like Riddle) target those who have their own content or specific branding needs, whereas Arkadium serves those who want a proven plug-and-play game section on their site.

For a new web app entrant, Arkadium represents competition in terms of publisher budget: a client might choose to license puzzles from Arkadium versus using a new platform, especially if they lack a crossword constructor on staff.

Puzzel.org

Puzzel.org is an interactive content platform that allows users to create and embed various games, including crosswords. It’s a flexible, self-service tool popular among educators, trainers, and small businesses for embedding quizzes and puzzles.

For crosswords specifically, Puzzel.org provides an online crossword maker with customization options (colors, fonts, etc.) and HTML5 embed code. Besides crosswords, it supports many other puzzle types (word search, bingo, memory, etc.), making it a broad solution for gamified content .

Pricing: Puzzel.org operates on a freemium + subscription model, where usage limits are defined by “player sessions.” A free account allows up to 2 puzzles (activities) and 60 player sessions per month (i.e. 60 plays). To go beyond that, paid plans are available at accessible price points, especially for non-profits/education:

• Education/Non-profit: Teacher plan at $30/year for 600 sessions/month, Teacher Plus $50/year for 2,000 sessions, and School $125/year for 5,000 sessions (with up to 5 teacher sub-accounts). These low-cost plans make Puzzel popular in classrooms.
• Business: Subscriptions are also inexpensive: a Supporter plan is $100/year for 1,000 sessions/month, and an Ambassador plan is $200/year for 5,000 sessions/month  . (It appears one can increase the session quota beyond 5,000 – possibly by custom quote – as the website interface suggests adjustable options .) All paid plans include unlimited puzzle creation and full feature access (e.g. result tracking, embedding anywhere, etc.)  .

Importantly, a “player session” on Puzzel is counted per unique user per puzzle – if the same person plays a puzzle multiple times, it still counts once . This usage-based model means pricing scales with audience size.

Smaller publishers or blogs can pay just $100–$200 per year for a decent amount of plays, making Puzzel.org one of the more affordable B2B options for interactive crosswords. However, compared to Qzzr.com’s low price of $9 per month for up to 1,000 completions and Qzzr’s wider range of formats, Puzzle.org only comes in second as a choice for teachers and smaller publishers.

Competitive position: Puzzel.org’s strengths lie in cost-effectiveness and versatility. It’s a one-man project by a developer (Daan) but has gained global reach with localization in many languages . The platform might not have the enterprise polish or advanced analytics of PuzzleMe, but it covers the basics well: you can create good-looking crosswords, embed via iframe, and even leverage an AI “PuzzleGPT” generator for puzzles.

Given its low price, Puzzel is often the choice for small businesses or educators who need a few puzzles embedded without a large investment. For a new entrant, Puzzel.org represents competition on the lower-end of pricing – it sets an expectation that basic interactive crosswords can be very cheap (or free) up to a certain scale. Being a one man operation also carries a significant risk for publishers who might want to consider a more established competitor with a bigger staff and a global footprint.

Interacty

Interacty is a broader interactive content and gamification platform (founded in Europe) that includes a crossword puzzle builder as one of its product offerings. Aimed at marketing campaigns, media, and education, Interacty lets users create visually rich crosswords with custom designs, timers, leaderboards, and even the ability to export puzzles to printable PDFs.

It focuses on making puzzles engaging and on-brand: you can start from templates or scratch, style the crossword with your own background images, colors, and even incorporate lead-generation forms or competitions around the puzzle. Interacty essentially bundles crosswords into a suite of interactive widgets (quizzes, memory games, “spin the wheel,” etc.), and all can be embedded on websites or shared via link.

Pricing: Interacty uses a tiered subscription model with separate plans for individuals vs. business. Key plans (annual billing) are :

• Starter – $14/month (billed annually). Up to 1,000 views/month and 100 leads captured; includes all game types, basic stats, and a few premium templates .
• Basic – $29/month (annual) for 5,000 views/month, 1,000 leads, more templates .

For heavier use/business, the Pro plan is $85/month (annual) which allows 50,000 views/month, 10,000 leads, 5 team members, and other advanced features like white-label (remove Interacty branding), custom domain, Google Analytics integration, and priority support. (There is mention of a Pro+ or enterprise tier beyond Pro, though details weren’t fully visible – likely for even higher traffic and full white-label capabilities.) Interacty also offers a 7-day free trial (with Pro+ features enabled) so users can test all functionalities .

Interacty’s pricing is essentially based on monthly pageviews, and feature access. Unlike PuzzleMe or Puzzel.org, Interacty explicitly counts page loads rather than unique players – but the principle is similar: larger audience = higher tier. It does not limit the number of puzzles you can create, only how many times they are viewed/played per month across all your content.

Competitive position: Interacty competes by offering rich marketing features around puzzles. The ability to capture leads (emails from players), run contests, and integrate analytics appeals to businesses using puzzles for promotions or customer engagement.

It’s a B2B SaaS with a polished interface and has both educational and corporate clients. In the crossword space, Interacty might not have the crossword-specific pedigree of PuzzleMe (no famous crossword editors behind it), but it provides a solid, modern UI and gamification elements (timers, leaderboards, etc.) to make solving more fun.

For a publisher-focused app, Interacty is a competitor that positions crosswords as part of a larger interactive content strategy. Its pricing (Pro at $85/month for robust use) is expensive compared to Riddle’s $59 essential plan, especially if you factor in the view limit. A view based pricing is also very risky for publishers as they will end up paying for traffic to any web page that has an Interacty module embedded, regardless if the reader interacts with the game or not.

Other Notable B2B/Enterprise Options

• H5P (Open Source/Enterprise): H5P is an open-source framework for interactive HTML5 content. It includes a crossword content type, allowing creation of responsive crosswords with customizable look and even randomized letter arrangements. Organizations can use H5P for free by installing it on their site (e.g. as a plugin in WordPress or Moodle). H5P.com offers a paid hosted solution for enterprises or schools to create and embed H5P content without technical overhead . (H5P’s enterprise pricing is based on number of authors and learners rather than puzzle count; exact figures aren’t public on their site without contacting sales.) H5P’s crossword is fairly basic but appeals to educational publishers who want an in-house, privacy-compliant tool and have a skilled engineering team on staff who can set up H5P and maintain it.
• Syndicated Puzzle Providers: Aside from Arkadium, other syndicates like Andrews McMeel’s Universal Crossword or NY Times Games offer embeddable crossword content to publishers via licensing, but these are typically content deals (where the publisher gets a daily crossword feed) rather than tools to create custom puzzles. Prices vary widely; some smaller news sites simply embed free syndicated puzzles that come with advertising, while others pay for premium content. These providers are indirect competition, relevant if a publisher is deciding between “make our own crosswords” versus “license an existing popular crossword.”

Consumer and Educational Crossword Tools (B2C & SMB)

There is also a vibrant ecosystem of crossword creation tools for individuals, educators, and hobbyist constructors. These often overlap with B2B in functionality (you can embed puzzles from many of them), but their pricing and positioning target single users or small groups. Typically, these tools are lower cost (or free) and may not handle massive traffic or advanced branding needs, but they’re important competitors – a small publisher or independent blogger might choose one of these to embed puzzles instead of a pricier enterprise solution.

Qzzr.com – free crossword puzzle and quiz maker

Qzzr launched their free interactive content tools in September 2025. It offers a modern interface that provides a full-screen landing page experience and mobile-optimized embed code options. With many customization options and over 50 different formats its a viable competitor to the enterprise SaaS tools.

The crossword puzzle maker is part of the mini-games content format, which also offers Sudokus, a Wheel of Fortune, and a Slot machine. The Qzzr makers say that they plan to add more mini-games frequently. Qzzr was one of the first online quiz makers that recently relaunched under new ownership.

Pricing: Qzzr offers free use of all formats for up to 300 completions. While that sounds like a low number for bigger publishers, it will give smaller websites a few months of free usage, especially as only completed crosswords and quizzes are counted. Qzzr’s pricing beyond the free plan is extremely simple. You pay $9 for each pack of 1,000 monthly completions and you can cancel monthly.

Competitive position: If you don’t require unlimited completions as offered by players like Riddle.com, and if you are looking beyond just crosswords, Qzzr is the go to choice for serious hobbyist, educators, small publishers, coaches and consultants. No other tool provides such a rich feature set at $9 per month. If all you need is a crossword maker, also consider My Crossword Maker.

My Crossword Maker (Crossword Hobbyist)

My Crossword Maker (formerly Crossword Hobbyist) is a popular online crossword puzzle maker geared toward teachers, students, and puzzle enthusiasts. It provides a simple web-based interface to create custom crosswords with a variety of grid sizes and layouts. Users can print puzzles or allow them to be solved online. Importantly, puzzles can be embedded on your own site using a provided JavaScript snippet.

Pricing: My Crossword Maker is a subscription service with a very accessible price point: unlimited crossword creation costs $5 per month (or $4 per month if billed annually) . There’s a 30-day free trial, and no credit card is needed to try making printables/online puzzles. With a paid plan, users get unlimited puzzles and features like saving online, printing, and embedding. They also offer options to purchase individual crossword licenses for one-off events or to get a joint subscription bundled with their sister sites (a word search maker and worksheet maker) at a discount. For classroom usage, they even support collecting online student submissions for assigned crosswords .

There is no explicit limit on how many solvers can play an embedded puzzle; the model is that a single subscription covers your usage as a constructor, and puzzles you publish can be taken by unlimited users. In practice, since this service is designed for individual use, extremely high traffic might not be the norm (and if a site got tens of thousands of players, they might run into bandwidth issues). But formally, pricing is flat-rate per month for unlimited puzzles and plays, making it very budget-friendly.

Competitive position: My Crossword Maker is positioned as one of the best low-cost tools for making custom crosswords. Because of its affordability, a small publisher or a teacher might choose this over costlier solutions. The trade-off is that it’s a simpler, more barebones platform: it may not have the fancy interactive features or analytics that the enterprise solutions do. The embed functionality works but is essentially the same interface as on their site, with MyCrosswordMaker branding unless you arrange otherwise.

Overall, for individuals and small sites, this is a strong competitor (at just ~$5/month) offering essentially unlimited crosswords. If cost is a major concern but you need more than just crosswords, you should also check out Qzzr and their free plan for up to 300 completions.

Crossword Labs

Crossword Labs is a well-known, long-running website for generating crossword puzzles quickly and for free. Its appeal is the utter simplicity: you enter your words and clues, and it instantly makes a crossword that you can share with a URL, embed, or print. No registration is required and it’s completely free for basic use. There are no ads or watermarks on the output, which is quite generous for a free tool.

Key features of Crossword Labs include the ability to solve the puzzle interactively online, mobile-friendly display, one-click print/PDF export, and even export to formats like Word, PNG, or SVG for editing. Embedding is supported: after creating a puzzle, the site provides an HTML iframe code snippet to embed the crossword on any website. The embed is straightforward (a simple interactive grid), but not highly customizable – it’s a WYSIWYG solution .

Pricing: The core functionality is free. However, Crossword Labs offers an optional membership (paid account) for those who want extra features like privacy control. A one-time fee of $9.95 gives you a membership. Members can mark puzzles as hidden or private (so they won’t appear in public search results on the site) and can view answer keys of public puzzles.

Essentially, paying is only required if you need to keep puzzles secret or access answer keys easily – most casual users don’t need to pay. The creator explicitly states that “most people don’t buy one, because you can do basically everything without a membership (you’re welcome)”. There are no usage limits on free accounts: you can create unlimited puzzles, and any number of people can play them. Even commercial use is allowed; Crossword Labs confirms you can use puzzles for commercial purposes with no attribution required (though appreciated).

Competitive position: A small publisher could use Crossword Labs to create a quick interactive crossword and embed it at no cost. The downsides are that it’s a very basic platform – no fancy styling or advanced gameplay features, and no dedicated support beyond a FAQ. It would also be highly advisable to opt for the paid version to avoid having the crossword appear on other websites and create duplicate content (which is really bad for SEO). Also, the interactive solving interface is simple and functional but not as slick as newer platforms.

Crosshare

Crosshare is a newer entrant (launched around 2020) that has quickly become popular among the crossword constructor community. It’s a free, ad-free, and open-source platform for creating, sharing, and solving crosswords. Crosshare is community-driven: users (including many indie crossword makers) upload puzzles, and solvers can play them on the site or via an embedded viewer. It supports modern crossword features like puZ file import/export (for compatibility with other crossword software) and has a clean solving interface with timer, dark mode, etc.

For someone launching a puzzle on their own site, Crosshare offers embedding as well. In fact, Crosshare’s FAQ specifically addresses embedding: they encourage it and point out the advantages of their platform being open-source and free for this purpose . One can create a crossword on Crosshare and then use an embed code to place it on any webpage, similar to YouTube video embeds.

Pricing: Crosshare is completely free to use. The creator of Crosshare committed to keeping the site free and open-source, relying solely on donations from the community to cover maintenance. There are no premium tiers or charges for advanced features – everything (unlimited puzzles, unlimited plays) is available to all users. The project’s code is on GitHub, and enthusiasts can even contribute improvements or host their own instance if they wished.

Competitive position: Crosshare’s philosophy makes it a unique competitor: it essentially removes financial barriers and focuses on community and innovation. For example, Crosshare was known for hosting contests and featuring daily mini-puzzles, building a social aspect around crosswords. For a publisher, using Crosshare could be attractive because it’s free and one knows the platform is transparent (open-source code).

However, since it’s donation-supported, large organizations might be cautious about relying on it for high-traffic needs (no formal SLA or dedicated support team). Also, Crosshare is designed by and for crossword enthusiasts, so it might lack some business-oriented features (like branding customization or data analytics that publishers might want).

Nonetheless, it’s a strong competitor on the merit of cost (free) and has goodwill in the puzzling community. A tech-savvy publisher could integrate Crosshare puzzles and even customize the open-source code if needed.

Other Platforms and Alternatives

• Wordwall.net: A popular tool in education for creating interactive activities (including crosswords). Teachers can create a crossword with drag-and-drop ease and either share a link or embed it. Wordwall operates on a freemium model (limited free usage, then ~$6–$9/month for unlimited activities). It’s mostly B2C (teachers), but a small website could use it to embed learning games. The drawback for publishers is that Wordwall content carries Wordwall’s branding and is not designed for heavy traffic.
• Discovery Education Puzzlemaker: A classic free puzzle generator (by Discovery) that many teachers use to make printable crosswords. It recently added an online interactive option, but it’s very basic (no embedding, just a printout or image). It’s more of a legacy competitor for print crosswords rather than interactive web embeds.
• Custom Development: Some large publishers have in-house solutions – e.g., The New York Times has its proprietary crossword system (with paid subscriptions for users), and others use custom HTML5 games. While not “competition” in the sense of a service on the market, it’s worth noting that a potential publisher client might consider building their own crossword applet especially if they want a unique experience. This is more relevant for very large outlets with resources.

Conclusion and our thoughts on AI crossword puzzle makers

The crossword web app market is a mix of global players and niche solutions, serving everyone from major news publishers down to individual educators. Globally, interest in digital crosswords remains high as they drive engagement and even subscription revenue for publishers (e.g. NYT’s Games). For publishers, brands, sports teams and leagues, Riddle stands out with its no limit approach.

While many tools offer AI to create a crossword, you will find that there is no AI available yet, that can build a good crossword. On average an AI makes a crossword puzzle with close to 50% empty cells and very few words that actually cross. There are numerous university papers on the topic. Large language models (AI tools) are good crossword puzzle solvers. So if you get stuck on a crossword, check out these tools to cheat if that is your thing.

This is what a typical AI crossword puzzle looks like, created using the Amuse Labs AI crossword puzzle maker with a topic where the AI should be able to find plenty of words: “American History”

Summary

• Enterprise clients expect robust features (responsive design, multimedia, analytics, support) and are willing to pay for it – this is where PuzzleMe/Amuse Labs and Riddle currently dominate with a full-featured platform at professional pricing. Riddle’s long-standing service and no limit on views or completions appeals to those who want quality content delivered seamlessly .
• Smaller organizations or independent publishers have many affordable options like Qzzr.com (excellent value, usage-based pricing) or Interacty (integrated marketing features). These competitors cover the middle ground with moderate pricing and flexibility.
• Individuals and educators can essentially get by for free or at very low cost – from Crossword Labs’ free embedding to Crosshare’s open-source community approach, and low-cost subscriptions like Qzzr.com.
• Mix it up – create frequent crossword puzzles but also add mini-games like a Sudoku to your website for a greater variability of content.

FAQ

Is it GDPR-compliant?

Protecting your customers’ information and data is a key factor to consider. The EU has data privacy and protection regulations covering every aspect of collecting personal information from users. 

If you collect leads with the wrong tool, your business could face big fines. 

Make sure your quiz maker is 100% GDPR-compliant (or compliant with California’s CCPA). 

We have prepared this handy checklist to creating GDPR-compliant interactive content like quizzes, polls, and personality tests.

How is the pricing structured?

There are two pricing models to choose from: 

• Flat-rate subscription: Most quiz maker tools charge a usage fee billed monthly or yearly.
• Charge by usage: Small fee (or “free usage”) with limits. If you collect leads, have a lot of traffic, or create too much content, your bill will increase depending on the given limits.

Make sure to choose a quiz maker with transparent pricing, or even better, choose an unlimited quiz maker like Riddle.com. 

Can I add my branding?

Look into customization options. Good content – with well-thought-out questions, information, and flows – is imperative, but how it is presented will take your creations to the next level. We all strive for that fresh, professional, strong first impression, and content that matches the look of your website will attract more participants and convert more leads. Your quiz platform of choice should allow you to tailor style, colors, and settings so that your content looks and feels native to your brand and fits seamlessly into any website you choose to embed on. 

Find a quiz maker that allows you to add a logo to your content, as well as change the colors and fonts. 

How can I generate leads, and what can I do with them?

Creating quizzes and polls to engage your audience is just the start. You should also use your content to gather users’ emails and details. 

Check if the quiz maker offers options on what to do with the collected leads: 

• Can the lead data and the user’s answers be downloaded?
• Is it possible to integrate the quiz maker with your CRM? 

What extra features are there? 

As you create more and more content, you’ll get to know the features that are most important for your company or project, but here are some ideas to get you thinking while choosing a quiz maker:

• Multiple formats: Vary the content so your users won’t get bored over time.
• Timers: Limit users’ time to answer your questions as a gamification feature.
• Tracking: Is it possible to add monitoring to measure how successful your content is? 
• Team features: Is it possible to work on projects with your colleagues? 
• Social sharing: If you want to create viral content, your users should be able to share it effortlessly. 
• Call to action: To prevent losing traffic after the quiz, place a clickable CTA button based on the quiz takers’ results. 
• Video ads or other monetization content: Can you include ads in your content?
• Competition features: Is it possible to create competitions with leaderboards and then draw a winner? 
• Email automation: Is it possible to notify your quiz takers (and yourself) after they play the quiz? good

Check customer reviews

Read what others think about the quiz maker you are considering. Here are three review sites with quiz maker categories to check out:

• SourceForge overview “Online quiz makers“
• OMR Reviews “Best quiz maker software & tools“
• Slashdot.org “Best online quiz makers“

Please also consider giving Riddle a try. Sign up for our 14-day free trial here.

There are several online quiz makers out there – today, let’s compare Typeform vs Riddle.

Are you looking to create a quiz to power your marketing funnel? Today’s marketers are turning to quizzes to collect leads – savvy gurus like Neil Patel know they’re a natural way to engage and qualify potential customers.

You’ll discover how both Typeform and Riddle compare in everything from customization to white labeling, the range of quiz formats, and quiz/lead data collection.

We’re proud of our quiz maker, but we know that each business is different. You each have unique goals and requirements for your quiz marketing funnel.

Our goal is to be transparent and help clarify the features and capabilities that might best suit your particular needs.

Quizzes: powerful lead generation & engagement

Rather than forcing people to view your ads, quizzes flip that process on its head.

1. Create a quiz that intrigues potential leads
2. They voluntarily start engaging with your quiz
3. Add a lead form to collect their email address (generally before they see their results)
4. Automatically send each lead’s quiz responses to your email marketing tools for automated follow-ups

Each quiz taker will spend around three to five minutes answering your quiz – and will be super engaged to determine their quiz results. Adding a lead form in this gap – when they’re most emotionally connected – translates to a whopping 20X boost in opt-in rates compared to traditional online marketing methods.

For lead generation, quizzes leverage engagement and social sharing – and turn them into actionable leads.

Effective quizzes will see up to a 40% opt-in rate of people giving their email address and other information… that’s over 20X the average for online lead generation tools.

Every lead who has just spent all that time finishing your quiz – actively clicking, thinking, and responding – is now in an ‘answer-ready’ state. You will find it much easier to get them to fill in your form than casual visitors to your site.

Any decent quiz maker should let you add your own customizable optional or mandatory lead form. The choice helps if you prefer to gate off quiz results until each lead completes your form.

Typeform – overview

Started in 2013, Typeform is a Barcelona-based company that develops easy-to-create forms and surveys. Their mission is to “Make online forms a little more human,” and they’ve done a great job.

They do many things right with 200 people and top-tier clients like AirBnB. Their big focus is easy-to-create, rapidly implemented forms. With their name, that’s no surprise, right?

Recently, they’ve also branched out to basic quizzes and polls.

Typeform has devoted a great deal of resources to making it easy to connect their forms and quizzes to popular software tools. They have 29 native integrations – from email marketing like Active Campaign to productivity leaders DropBox, Trello, and more.

This impressive focus on connectivity and forms has left Typeform with just a limited suite of quizzes and other interactive content tools.

Regarding Typeform vs. Riddle, Typeform has just 3 options — a quiz, survey, and poll —compared with Riddle’s 15+.

Typeform: quiz useability (UX)

We’re big fans of Typeform’s overall approach – their form builder is simply gorgeous.

However, we did find it difficult to dive in and do some basic tasks — especially when creating a Typeform quiz. The takeaway? Creating a Typeform quiz has a big learning curve.

It shouldn’t put you off the tool – but you’ll need to budget some extra time to get your team up and running with their online quiz maker.

Typeform: pricing

Typeform offers four separate options – including a very basic ‘free’ option and then going to $70/month. Typeform quiz pricing follows most quiz makers – they limit the number of responses you can collect per plan from 100 to 10,000 a month.

There is also an enterprise-level plan – with an ‘ask us’ button instead of a clear price. (We’ve generally seen ‘ask us’ pricing for quiz maker software to start at $500/month.) Compare this with Riddle’s unlimited usage – across all plans.

Typeform: GDPR

TL;DR? We believe Typeform is NOT GDPR-compliant – and Riddle is GDPR-compliant (learn more).

• Typeform uses 72 Cookies and Trackers!
• Personal data is stored in the USA.
• Typeform does not offer a DPA (data processing agreement).

Riddle quiz maker – overview

Over at Riddle, we’ve taken a different approach. We know marketers rely on quizzes for engagement and lead generation.
Our team has experience working on the marketing side for agencies and publishers. Since we launched Riddle in 2014, we’ve pushed our platform to provide a comprehensive array of content tools and formats—check out our 23 favorite customer quiz examples created by the BBC, Red Bull, CNN, and Manchester United.

Looking at Typeform vs Riddle, we’ve gone beyond the standard quiz – introducing a wide range of unique formats and features. Our 15 quiz and engagement types include four distinct polls and surveys, five quizzes and personality quizzes, our branching logic ‘journey / interactive story,’ the always reshuffling ‘quiz generator / auto-quiz,’ and the drag/drop ‘order It’

Riddle: add images, GIFs, videos, or audio

On the media side, today’s audiences demand more than just text and images.

We’ve made it easy for you to create a quiz and quickly search/add the perfect video, animated GIF, audio and other media – all from within Riddle.

The payoff for you?

Leveraging our various formats, your marketing teams can keep things fresh for your visitors. This avoids the quiz burnout that happens after showing the same quiz type repeatedly.

Riddle: customization options

Once you’ve picked your quiz format, you’ll want to customize it to match your site’s look and feel seamlessly. Quizzes convert best when they feel organic to your site – not just a 3rd party widget. With Riddle, you’ll have near-total creative freedom.

Customize almost everything – from adding your own fonts to editing your quiz CSS to blend with your site and more. You can see how easy it is to do with our CSS editor.

Now, about lead generation – Riddle quiz maker has been fully designed to connect to any email or marketing tools.

You have options, including our native integrations for MailChimp, Google Docs, AWeber, ActiveCampaign, Brevo and more. You can also use our Zapier app to sync to over 5,000 software apps, including Salesforce, Shopify, and Klaviyo.

You can also send all lead responses and their quiz data to any tool with our webhook and our API.

Riddle: pricing

Riddle’s quiz maker plans start at $59 a month, and all our plans are completely unlimited.

Seriously – unlike Typeform, every plan has no limits on how much you can use it. We like keeping things simple:

• Create as many quizzes as you want
• Unlimited quiz takers
• Unlimited leads

Riddle: GDPR

This is the biggest update to our Typeform vs Riddle review.

Data privacy is becoming a huge global issue – strict regulations have come into force, starting with the European Union’s GDPR and followed by California’s CCPA and Canada’s PIPEDA.

You need to be:

• Completely transparent about how and why you collect personal data
• All personal data must be stored within the EU – you can’t use any cloud-based storage from U.S. companies (like AWS or Google).
• You must get consent before tracking/collecting personal data… even IP addresses.

We don’t want to get bogged down into too many details – but the TL;DR? Typeform is NOT GDPR-compliant – and Riddle is 100% GDPR compliant.

Riddle stores all data in the EU. We do not collect personal data via cookies and trackers!

We also have a data processing agreement (DPA) ready to sign.

Typeform vs Riddle – over 60 quiz maker features

Riddle is the best alternative to Typeform – Summary

You’re no doubt asking, “Okay – but looking at Typeform vs Riddle, which is right for me?”

Well… it depends.

There’s no single ‘right’ answer – it depends on your and your business’ unique quiz marketing needs.

If you have any questions about Riddle, Typeform, or getting started with quiz marketing?

Just ask away – you can use our support chat on this blog or in our quiz maker, or go old school and email us (hello@riddle.com).

Pick Typeform if…

• You are happy with their preset templates – Typeform has some great-looking templates, great for beginners.
• You need native integrations – they’ve done a great job, offering 29 native integrations for sending quiz leads to your software.
• Your quiz will be text-focused – instead of using images, videos, and the like
• Your audience is not in the EU or California – Typeform is not GDPR-compliant; they add lots (and lots) of ad trackers to your quiz, collecting information about your audience for their own purposes.

Choose Riddle quizmaker if…

• If you want more flexible quizzes, Typeform has made a name as a form builder, and Riddle has been an online quiz maker since Day 1. You’ll have more flexibility in scoring, results, and the like.
• You like more quiz formats – 15 quiz types (compared to Typeform’s 3) will give you more creative options for various use cases.
• You need more media support – easily search & add images, videos, audio clips, and animated GIFs in your content.
• You want more flexibility with customization – white label and tweak everything from fonts to CSS, to completely match your site.
• You require complete GDPR/CCPA compliance. We’re 100% EU-based and don’t add any cookies or trackers to collect your audience’s data.

We hope that this review helped clarify things a bit and narrow down which capabilities (and data privacy approach) are most critical for you.

What is your next step? We recommend trying both Typeform and Riddle.

Both offer free trials – with no need to add a credit card.

Both Try Interact (TryInteract) and Riddle are some of the most popular online quiz creators around – which quiz maker should you choose? TryInteract vs Riddle?

It’s no secret – online quizzes flat-out rock at engaging online viewers and turning passive visitors into active leads.

Read our full review of TryInteract vs Riddle – we’ll compare these two quiz maker options across 45+ features, to help you decide which is best for your particular needs.

Comparison points

• Quiz / poll / survey formats
• Customization options & data integrations
• Pricing / customer support
• Data privacy / GDPR-compliance

(Being transparent, this post is on Riddle’s blog – so we’re obviously fans of Riddle. But don’t worry – both are really good quiz makers. It’s just a question of which features and capabilities will best match your own particular use case.)
But: Both quiz creators are excellent – you just need to pick the one that suits your particular requirements.

What’s your main focus – engagement or lead generation?

First, some background about quiz marketing we dive into discussing Riddle and TryInteract in detail.

Marketers turn to online quiz creators to accomplish two marketing objectives – engagement vs lead generation. And each quiz maker has their own approach about what works best.

On the engagement side, quiz maker developers have to balance creating innovative quizzes, lists, and polls (to engage their customers’ audiences) with getting more traffic through social sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and other networks.

Lead generation is a natural fit with quizzes – and lets you add an optional sign-up form between the questions and the user’s results.

This is a great opportunity to present a special offer or reason to sign up for more information – and then send that data to your email marketing tools for automatic follow-up messages to convert a lead into a happy customer.

TryInteract – overview

TryInteract (AKA Interact Quiz Maker) is one of the major players in the online quiz maker and lead generation space.

They place a huge focus on lead generation and growing your email list. The TryInteract mantra is “Interact is a tool for creating online quizzes that generate leads, segment your audience, and drive traffic to your website.” With this in mind, it’s clear TryInteract has spent a lot of time on the lead generation side.

They’ve developed a good range of native integrations to leading email and marketing software – but with some serious caveats.

TryInteract proudly says they support 37 integrations to popular tools like ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, and Constant Contact. But many of these are not native integrations.

Moreover, this focus on data collection means TryInteract hasn’t put as much focus on the engagement side of the equation.

Comparing TryInteract vs Riddle, TryInteract offers a much more limited range of formats.
Try Interact used to be a middle-of-the-road quiz creator – featuring six options. However, Try Interact recently discontinued their polls, giveaways, and surveys, so now they only provide three flavors of quizzes:

Their scored quiz is pretty solid – it has a good range of customization and scoring options around asking right or wrong questions, suitable for most marketing use cases. We have to admit that we were a little confused by their assessment quiz though. It seems like a hybrid of scored quiz meets personality test – but we weren’t sure how to use it.

And we like Try Interact’s personality test module – it was easy to use and understand. However, it’s designed for basic personality tests/assessments only. They don’t use a subtle, weighted scoring system – with TryInteract, each answer counts the same.

Riddle uses a much more flexible weighted response system!

Riddle – overview

Riddle takes a different approach. We believe that marketers and publishers need a wide range of quizzes in their tool kit – to keep things fresh for their audience.

You can create 13 types of question blocks and 17 lead-form fields – ranging from a personality quizzes to lists, our branching logic quizzes / polls, our image-based ‘tap and find’, ‘order it’, and more.

That’s a heck of a lot of options – your audience will never suffer burnout from seeing the same type of quiz over and over. This will keep your quiz engagement statistics high as you grow your email list – such as quiz starts, completes, and lead opt-in.

We’ve taken a different approach to quiz lead generation. Comparing Riddle with TryInteract, we have native integrations for many common email marketing tools like ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, and AWeber. However, our quiz software supports 3,000+ other marketing tools like Constant Contact and ClickFunnels through our Zapier app or webhook options.

Zapier makes it easy to connect your online quiz to so many tools – no coding required. And from a resource perspective – that’s much more efficient than constantly updating and supporting dozens of native integrations.

This lets us focus our development resources on our far wider range of quiz types, customization options, and media types (videos, audio, GIFs). This means you’ll have a richer pool of creative tools to craft your quiz campaigns.

The benefit? Riddle can devote more dev resources to new quiz types and customization options.

Want to see our quiz software in action? Check out these live quiz Riddle examples – from our partners including the BBC, Red Bull, and CNN.

Creating a quiz – TryInteract vs Riddle

Both tools make quiz creation fairly easy – you can be up and running in no time. While their personality quiz is straightforward, TryInteract confused us with their ‘scored’ vs ‘assessment’ types of quizzes. They’re pretty similar – and could have been combined into one TryInteract quiz type.

Assessment quiz: you get one point for each quiz answer. But you have no flexibility in creating results – TryInteract just splits the points evenly.

By comparison, Riddle gives you much more creative freedom – you can use our sliders to assign any point breakdown to any result.

TryInteract vs Riddle – what types of images, video, and audio?

Quizzes have come a long way since the days of text-only questions. Today’s audience is used to a multi-media online experience – they want (and expect) to see images, animated GIFs, and video or audio clips in their online content.

TryInteract media options

TryInteract has taken small steps to make adding images easy – currently, they support:

• Giphy – animated GIFs
• Unsplash – stock photography
• Upload your own images

Riddle media options

Our team at Riddle has made it easy to add multimedia to any of our quiz, poll, or survey types.

We support a much wider range of tools, giving you much more creative freedom to improve your quiz performance and boost conversion rates.

Our image options include:

• Google image search
• Pexels – great stock photography
• Giphy – animated GIFs
• Upload your own images or GIFs

Audio/video/social options:

• MP3 audio: add your own audio clips to any question or answer.
• Vimeo: embed your video – play just a short clip with start/end times.
• YouTube: embed any video – just copy/paste the URL. Set custom start/end points.
• MP4 video: skip the middleman – upload your own video clips
• Twitter: you can embed any tweet directly into your quiz, for super-topical content by celebrities worldwide.

TryInteract pricing & data privacy

TryInteract pricing

At first glance, we liked how the TryInteract quiz maker offers a free plan – but then realized it doesn’t include lead generation or email collection, and there’s no support. That makes it useful for ‘fun’ quizzes – but not for marketers.

TryInteract pricing is across three paid tiers, and it’s pretty competitive – however, their Lite and Growth plans do not offer unlimited leads. Instead, they have a monthly cap on how many leads per month are included in these two plans.
That can hurt small to medium businesses – especially if their quizzes go viral. You could end up being forced to upgrade to cover a traffic spike.

TryInteract & GDPR

For data privacy, we were doing some research and saw this in-depth review by Quiz-Maker-Review.com about TryInteract.
Want the high-level summary? – TryInteract is NOT GDPR-compliant!

We recommend you check that review out – it breaks down how:

• TryInteract adds cookies and tracking scripts to all of your quizzes (collecting the data from each quiz taker without consent)
• Stores your leads’ personal data in the U.S. – violating the GDPR (and putting you at risk for fines from the E.U.)
• No data processing agreement – a key requirement of the GDPR
• No opt-in feature if using their Facebook Pixel.

Riddle pricing

Okay – next up in our TryInteract vs Riddle comparison, let’s take a look at Riddle’s pricing and GDPR/CCPA compliance.

We have a simpler (and cheaper) pricing model at Riddle – it’s based entirely around features.

All our plans are unlimited – unlimited quizzes, quiz takers, and leads per month. You simply pick the plan you need – and create away.

We found this fairer and much more transparent – especially for the budget-conscious small firms and startups among our quiz maker community.

And all our plans feature our famous customer support. We don’t outsource our help desk or have a customer support team.
Instead – everyone at Riddle helps with support; you’ll see our founders race our developers to answer questions first.

And all our plans feature our famous customer support. We don’t outsource our help desk or have a customer support team. Instead – everyone at Riddle helps with support. You’ll see our founders race our developers to answer questions first.

Riddle & GDPR

In terms of data privacy, Riddle is a fully GDPR-compliant quiz maker (as well as California’s CCPA):

• Riddle’s online quiz maker is 100% EU-based including our servers in Germany and Luxembourg.
• We don’t use any US cloud storage (like AWS)
• We never add cookies or a tracking script to collect personal data from your audience.
• Heck, we even use self-hosted finance software and analytics (so your audience won’t get tracked by Google).

Online quiz lead generation with TryInteract vs. Riddle

TryInteract is a capable online quiz maker – especially for basic quiz marketers. Their team has made it pretty easy to create a quiz with a lead form – and integrate leads into your marketing tool like HubSpot.
However, the TryInteract lead generation module lacks flexibility and the advanced customization most modern marketers demand.

For example, let’s take a look at their lead form creator. Here’s a sampling of standard features missing from TryInteract’s quiz maker:

• You can only change the text and color for the button.
• No ability to change or format the other fields – not even the ‘call to action’.
• You can’t add images or change form background.

What you see is what you get – a fairly effective lead generation form, but one that can’t reflect your site or brand.

TryInteract does have a good way of helping users create a form in their quiz, then configure settings to send each lead to their marketing software. TryInteract takes you through six steps, from form building to data integration and mapping, then on to testing the connection.

Riddle on the other hand offers you 100% flexibility with 17 different lead fields that you can use.

We give you the possibility to create exactly the lead form that matches your usecase! Plus you can customize the look & feel to fit to your brand.

In-depth review of TryInteract vs Riddle

Any questions? Just ask us!

And hey – if we can answer any questions about TryInteract vs Riddle , just drop us a note at hello@riddle.com – or using our support chat.

We’re big customer support geeks – from our CEO Boris down, our whole team races each other to answer questions… it’s part of our ‘customers are king’ philosophy at Riddle.

Buzzfeed was one of the very first quiz maker software tools out there. Launched way back in 2006, they’re a true legend in the space – but they’ve pivoted to become a news and media company, instead of a pure quiz creator. They still offer free quiz builder tools though – so we wanted to see how Riddle is the best alternative to Buzzfeed

We should mention at the top that this is a little bit of an ‘apples and oranges’ comparision – Buzzfeed made its name as a B2C (business to consumer) quiz maker, putting easy to use and create tools in the hands of consumers.

You’ve probably seen Buzzfeed quizzes from people ranging from a 13 year old (“How much do you REALLY know about Little Mix?”) to 67 year old history geeks (“Test yourself on this Roman mythology quiz!”).
Buzzfeed’s quiz business has very much become a sideshow for their new media company’s direction. It’s clear that the Buzzfeed quiz tools haven’t continued to evolve over the past few years – so their functionality is pretty limited compared to other quiz makers.

Riddle is a quiz maker designed by and for businesses – this means our focus is completely different. For example, we’ve built extensive white label features (custom fonts, CSS editor, add your branding) as well as GDPR-compliant lead generation and data capture.
And of course, we’re a quiz maker first, last, and always – not a media company – so our marketing platform is continually evolving at lightning speed.

Quiz builder for engagement or lead generation?

Okay, so quiz maker tools have two general business uses:

Audience engagement: quizzes, polls, and surveys are awesome at capturing visitors’ attention so they interact more, stay longer, and share their quiz results on social media to get more traffic.

Lead generation and data collection: most quiz creator software lets you add an optional form to collect each user’s email address and quiz responses. Paired with an email marketing tool like MailChimp or SalesForce, you can segment leads and send out targeted follow up messages based around each lead’s tastes and answers.

Every quiz builder like Buzzfeed and Riddle have to decide how they want to develop their product – software coders are a scarce commodity.
Some go all-in on engagement, others on leads – but each quiz maker has unique strengths and weaknesses.

On the engagement side, quiz developers have to decide how to create innovative quizzes, lists, polls, and more to engage their audience and get more traffic through social sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and other networks.
Lead generation is a natural fit with quizzes, and you can add an optional sign–up form between the questions and the user’s results. This is a great opportunity to present a special offer or reason to sign up for more information, and then send that data to your email marketing tools for automatic follow-up messages to convert a lead into a happy customer.

Every Buzzfeed quiz has zero lead generation capabilities – while Riddle has been designed around quiz lead generation from the ground up.
You can create your own forms and then automatically send all leads and quiz data to any marketing software.

Buzzfeed vs. Riddle – how many kinds of quizzes?

People often use ‘quiz’ as a general term for all sorts of interactive content formats – including surveys, polls, personality tests, and more. One thing is for certain, more is almost always better – you’ll have a much deeper and more varied tool kit for your marketing needs.

Buzzfeed does well – they have seven formats, including their popular personality test and checkbox list. At the risk of (ahem) sounding a bit immodest, Riddle does much better – we have 15 types, including unique quiz types like our multi-poll, our branching logic ‘journey’, and more.

We won’t discuss each of these different types of quizzes in great detail; instead, we’ll focus on a high-level look at the most popular types.
It’s clear that Buzzfeed quiz creator tools are designed for a B2C audience – Buzzfeed quizzes are really easy to use, but their tools lack many of the key features and flexibility that today’s marketers and content teams require.

Buzzfeed vs. Riddle – quiz maker overview

Buzzfeed quiz creator

We liked the Buzzfeed quiz format – at least for basic quiz use cases. It’s super easy and intuitive to just dive in and create a quiz.
However, marketers and businesses might find it difficult to make a quiz that reflects their brand, with the flexibility to ask more complicated questions. For example, you can see here – each Buzzfeed quiz maker only supports:

• Single correct answer
• No multiple correct answers
• No free text answers
• Each question is one point only – can’t change so harder questions are worth more than easy ones.

We like how you can add a correct answer explanation in your Buzzfeed quiz—it’s great to provide feedback for users as they interact with your quiz. But overall, most marketers require limited quiz-wide settings, like deciding when (or if) you share correct answers. Many marketers like to delay that until after a lead form to increase their quiz opt-in rates.

We also love some of the other formats for each Buzzfeed quiz you create—especially their ‘checklist quiz’. This one’s pretty slick: Each user is presented with a range of choices, and they get a result based on how many they choose.
The checklist quiz is great for light/fluffy quizzes like “How many cities have you visited?” – based on how many places you’ve been, but also for more serious business needs. For example, marketers could ask things like “How cyber-secure are you?” – and segment all quiz takers and return a general risk assessment based on how many protections their business has in place.

Riddle quiz creator

Riddle’s quiz maker features almost every one of these formats – plus a heck of a lot more. Take a look at just some of the options we support – for quiz creators!

Plus we include loads more marketing-focused features – including:

• Call to action buttons – show each user a text and a button linked to URLs based on their quiz results.
• Result redirect pages – automatically send quiz takers to different URLs, based on their own responses (ideal for product recommendations and special offers).

That’s just scratching the surface – you can learn more in our blog post around creating the perfect online quiz.

Buzzfeed personality quiz creation

We were pretty surprised at the approach the Buzzfeed quiz team took with their personality test. You match each response with a result type – but there’s no flexibility, and each answer can only used for one result type (e.g. either Yoda OR Darth Vader, but not both).

That’s a remarkable lack of flexibility, but it’s probably based on Buzzfeed’s targeting of a less tech-savvy consumer audience.

Riddle personality quiz creation

By comparison, Riddle uses a more flexible, weighted assessment system, with a range of 21 options for each choice:

0: No association / 1-7: Weak association / 8-14: Medium association / 15-20: Strong association

As you move the slider for each response, each ‘tick’ increases the points assigned for that response. A tick on #12 (medium) is worth less than a tick on #13 (medium), for example.
At the end of the personality quiz, our system counts up the points for each result type – then assigns the user the particular result with the most points.

Buzzfeed poll creation

We’re not going to beat around the bush here – Buzzfeed’s poll options are much more limited than their quiz.
Polls are essentially surveys that give each user the results after they vote. Buzzfeed offers quick and easy, single-question poll units.

Riddle poll creation

Riddle, by comparison, offers six different online opinion poll options, ranging from our single-question classic opinion poll to our multi-question ‘multi-poll’, audience sentiment widget ‘reaction poll’, and loads more.

Check out the multi-poll on Riddle – you can ask unlimited questions, give single or multiple votes (‘Pick your top X choices’), or rank your favorites!

And here’s our ‘reaction poll’ – quick to create, it lets your audience quickly give their feedback to any question. Our publishing partners like the BBC use these to boost engagement (25% of page visitors click and vote) and interactivity in their long-form articles (like this BBC Sport post around video replays in football).

Buzzfeed quiz add images

This one is easy – you can only add images to your Buzzfeed quiz. And somewhat annoyingly, you can’t add images in every text block – only in the main images and some of the question answers.

Riddle quiz add images (and so much more)

By comparison, Riddle’s quiz builder supports a wide range of video, audio, and image search options. You can search, find, and embed content using:

• Google
• Giphy
• YouTube
• Instagram
• Pexel images
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Add your own photos, audio (MP3s), video (MP4s) or animated GIFs

Online quizzes live and die by how well they capture and hold your audience’s attention. We highly recommend looking for a quiz maker that gives more creative freedom – and goes beyond just letting you upload images.

Buzzfeed vs. Riddle: customization and white labelling options

Another quick one – Riddle is a fully white-labelled quiz maker, and Buzzfeed is, well, not.

With Riddle you can hide our branding, add your logos, and change practically every aspect of your quiz with our custom fonts, CSS editor, and more.
By comparison, Buzzfeed gives you some basic control over colors and fonts when you make a quiz.

However, your quiz will be a 100% Buzzfeed-branded experience for your audience. Another key limitation – you won’t be able to embed your Buzzfeed quiz on your own website. Nope, it will be presented only on the Buzzfeed site – true, that would help with some organic discovery by casual quiz browsers.

But we think that almost every company will want their quiz to be on their site – in their own branding.

Buzzfeed vs Riddle – detailed overview

Riddle is the best alternative Buzzfeed – a summary

Every quiz maker is different – with their strengths and specialties, just like your business. You’ll want to evaluate Buzzfeed and Riddle – and decide which suits your needs best.

But our takeaway? Buzzfeed has justifiably made a name for itself as a rapid, easy-to-create quiz creator – designed for consumers. It hasn’t really evolved over the past few years – as Buzzfeed is now a news and media business.
As such, it lacks many of the critical features marketers require of a quiz maker – including white labelling, lead generation, and extensive customization options.

If you’re looking for a flexible, powerful lead generation and engagement plaform, you should check out Riddle. Free 28-day trial – with access to all of our features and technology (and no credit card required).

Want to create a quiz and collect leads? There are loads of online quiz maker options out there – but in this post, let’s take a look at Survey Anyplace vs Riddle.

Savvy marketers know that quizzes are awesome at engaging an audience and collecting zero party data. Instead of bombarding your visitors with ads, quizzes turn them into voluntary, active participants.

Did you know? Quiz takers spend between 3-5 minutes per quiz, and are up to 20X more likely to opt-in to a quiz lead generation form than ‘traditional’ online methods.

We’re big quiz geeks – so we’ll cover 40+ key features for any quiz creator. You’ll see how each quiz maker stacks up – from white labelling to customization, quiz types and lead generation data collection.

Sure, we have a soft spot for our quiz maker – but we know your business in unique. Our goal is to de-mystify the selection process, so you can choose the right quiz creator for your particular needs.

Quizzes – great for engagement & lead generation

Are you new to using quizzes for marketing? Let’s give some crucial back story before diving into a more detailed comparison of Survey Anyplace vs Riddle.

Marketers often turn to quizzes for two goals – boosting engagement and/or collecting more qualified leads. And each quiz maker has its own philosophy about what to focus on. To tackle engagement, the developers for each quiz builder create their own mix of quizzes and interactive formats. Some stay laser-focused around a few types – while others cast a wider net, and develop a broad range of content types for their community.

Catching your audience’s attention is one thing – but quizzes also excel at generating viral traffic. Each quiz maker also makes different calculations about how many social networks to support – from Facebook to WhatsApp, Linkedin to Twitter, Messenger, and beyond.

On the lead generation side, quizzes are a seamless fit – catching users’ interest and getting them clicking and interacting. You’ll see up to 40% of all users opting to give their email address and other information.
Most quiz creators will let you add an optional lead generation form – the perfect opportunity to present targeted offers, contest entries, or ask them to receive a free consultation, e-book, or other marketing campaigns.

Okay – with that out of the way, let’s start with a high level overview of each quiz creator.

Survey Anyplace – overview

Founded in 2012, Survey Anyplace is a Dutch company that has focused their development resources into a range of mobile-friendly surveys and quizzes. Their tagline is “Interactive questionnaires without the hassle of a custom-built solution”.

One their key USPs? Unlike some others in the market, Survey Anyplace has added a module with their top plans – allowing personalized downloadable PDF reports.
However this focus on surveys and the reporting side of things comes at a cost – limiting Survey Anyplace to basic customization and data collection.

Survey Anyplace integrations

Survey Anyplace has decided against building their own native integrations to popular marketing software – such as MailChimp, AWeber, or Google Sheets. Instead, they rely entirely on Zapier – which, while flexible, often requires an additional paid subscription from their customers.
This approach also means Survey Anyplace doesn’t offer the breadth in interactive formats as many other quiz makers. For example, comparing Survey Anyplace vs. Riddle, they offer only surveys, plus a basic quiz and personality test – Riddle offers 15.

Survey Anyplace pricing and limitations

Survey Anyplace has four plans, starting at $29 a month. The plus side is that their initial pricing seems competitive; however Survey Anyplace put caps on how many responses you can get – which means you might get charged more if your quiz goes viral.
They are also unclear about their top-tier pricing – generally, we’ve found ‘ask us’ pricing for subscription SaaS services = $500 a month and up.

By comparison – all of Riddle’s pricing plans are completely unlimited. You just pick the features you want – we don’t put limits on how many quizzes you create, quiz takers, or leads you collect. One simple price per plan – simple.

Survey Anyplace: NOT GDPR-compliant

Be very wary of using Survey Anyplace – sure, they say the right things about GDPR-compliance.
But take a look their cookie list, for example – it’s insane. All this data collection by Survey Anyplace does not provide a great deal of confidence that they’re a truly compliant quiz maker.

Riddle quizmaker – overview

At Riddle, we understand that lead generation and engagement are both critical for successful quiz marketing. Coming from a marketing and content background, our team knows that publishers and marketers want a comprehensive toolkit for their engagement and quiz lead generation needs.

Riddle quiztypes

Search & add 12 types of images, video, GIFs. And as you know: Variety keeps things fresh and interesting – with the ability to search and add video, GIFs, audio, and other media to your content for a wide range of campaigns.

We offer 15 online quiz and interactive formats – many that completely unique to Riddle. For example, you can create quizzes, polls, personality tests and other classic types. But we also have designed custom branching logic, our endlessly reshuffling Quiz Generator / Auto-Quiz (upload up to 10,000 questions by spreadsheet), plus our drag/drop Order It, image-search Tap and Find, and loads besides.
With so many choices, both your content teams and audience will never get burned out taking the same quiz type over and over again.

Riddle customization features

We give you virtually complete freedom to match your quiz to your site’s look and feel – including adding your logos for a 100% white labelled experience.
You can: Upload your own fonts, have full CSS control, and over 50 other options

Check out this example from Choice Hotels – they customized everything from borders to hover states. Simply gorgeous.
You can also view 23 of our favorite live online quiz examples – including Riddle content created by Red Bull, CNN, and the BBC.

Riddle lead generation features

On the lead generation side, Riddle has been built from the ground up to connect to any marketing software. Our drag and drop form builder includes 16 field types – so you can craft a compelling form with that converts. We see 35-45% lead generation conversion rates with our online quiz creator.
You can use our native integrations for AWeber, MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, Google Sheets, and more.
Alternatively you can easily connect to 3,000+ tools like Klaviyo, Hubspot, and SalesForce using our Zapier App.
And for the more geekily-inclined, we have both an API and webhook – if you’d prefer to connect to your software directly with a bit of coding.

The benefits for you? You have near-total flexibility to send all your quiz responses and leads to any software. And unlike Survey Anyplace, tracking who took the survey is a snap.

Riddle: cookies and data privacy

Riddle is based in Germany – and we’re a completely GDPR-compliant quiz maker. (We also comply with California’s CCPA, Canada’s PIPEDA, and other global privacy protection regulations.)

• Absolutely no personal data from your audience is collected by Riddle – not even IP addresses
• No US or cloud-based storage – everything runs on our own servers in Germany and Luxembourg.
• No cookies to collect personal data – we don’t add dodgy trackers to your quiz content on your website (read our cookie documentation here).
• No Google Analytics – we use a self-hosted tool instead.
• Heck, this passion for privacy extends to our fonts – even the Google fonts are loaded locally from our server (not Google).

Riddle pricing (unlimited)

Our plans range from $59 to $299 a month, and are unlimited – you can create as many quizzes as you like, show them to unlimited people, and collect unlimited leads.

Survey Anyplace vs Riddle – We compare over 60 features

Sure, there are dozens of quiz creator tools out there – to save you time, we created this in-depth review of Riddle and Outgrow. (Updated: we’ve gone back and re-analyzed both quiz maker platforms with their latest features, so this Outgrow review is nice and current.)

We’ll start with a high level overview, then dive in with a detailed feature by feature look at each quiz maker’s audience engagement and lead generation capabilities.

Right – let’s start with the fundamental question… why use quizzes for marketing and lead generation? Quizzes have increasingly been in the news the last couple of years. We bet you’ve already heard how quizzes can turn your passive audience into active participants. Why? People just can’t resist a good online quiz.

It’s hard-wired into us as humans; we love discovering new things about ourselves – then (most importantly) sharing our results with their friends. You can see this on your own Facebook feed – the marketing gurus at AdWeek found that quizzes are some of most posted/shared content online.

And quizzes don’t stop at engaging your audience. This is a difficult time for online marketers. Banner advertising is dying – with ad blockers up to 25% and banner blindness resulting in ever-decreasing clickthrough rates (from 44% back in 1996 to a measly 0.05% in 2018 – that’s 1 in 10,000 views!).

Native advertising is increasingly the way forward – engaging your readers and then asking for their email for follow up conversations. Marketing experts including Neil Patel and Larry Myler know that quizzes are an easy, scalable tool for online lead generation – you can create bespoke, compelling content around your marketing goals.

Lead generation and quizzes – the Grease connection

Let’s dive in a bit deeper about why quizzes and lead generation are such a natural combination. Being big fans of the movie Grease, we had to throw in a quote – “they go together – like *rama lama lama ka dinga da dinga dong*.” (And apologies if that very catchy song is now playing in your head.)
Right – effective lead generation is all about context and timing. For most online content, the audience is passively reading and absorbing information. Now add in a lead form – and it can feel abrupt, and ‘sales-y’.
It doesn’t fit the experience, which makes your audience defensive. Quizzes are different.
Each quiz taker will have already answered 6-10 questions before they are presented with your lead form. Psychologically-speaking, they’re in an ‘answer-ready’ state – predisposed to answer the next question, or in your case, your form.

Timing matters – showing your lead generation form between the last quiz question and each user’s results also boosts opt-in rates. Your audience is emotionally engaged with your quiz, and fired up to get their results. Placing a lead form here will see results of up to 40% – that’s almost 20X typical lead generation tools. (Note: this only works if your form is related to the quiz. Asking someone about, say, your financial planning consultancy in a Harry Potter quiz wouldn’t work nearly as well.)

Online quizzes – the data connection

Okay – so we’ve shown how quizzes can engage your audience and get excellent sign up rates.
But quizzes go beyond just a place to add a lead generation form. Nope – any good quiz maker should let you also collect and send the lead’s quiz responses to your marketing software such as HubSpot or MailChimp. Once there, your quiz leads and data can power your marketing funnel to send out the right message to the right lead, personalized and based around their quiz responses.
And there are a number of online quiz creators out there – you don’t just have to pick between just Outgrow and Riddle.

Online quiz maker use case

Let’s walk through a typical use case. Imagine you’re running a travel site – and you want to send the best offer to each lead around their interests.
You could whip up a personality test called ‘What’s your dream summer vacation?’ – with 6-10 questions such as “Do you prefer beaches or mountains?” or “All-inclusive or make your own way?”.
You could then send targeted discounts or offers to each lead – based on their vacation preferences. A beach lover would get your 7 days in Maui while the more independent leads could receive your self-guided ‘American road trip’ adventures.

Outgrow – review summary

The founders of Outgrow are a good start up story – two business grad school buddies who teamed up in 2016 to start their own lead generation/quiz maker company. They started out with customizable calculators as a lead generation tool – so leads could discover, say, how much of a mortgage they could afford with simple sliders or entering their incomes. Add in easily selected templates and you’ve got their “PowerPoint for interactive content” approach.
This information would then help marketers qualify each lead – so they can segment and follow up with the right messaging. It’s a good idea – and Outgrow does it well.

Outgrow formats and lead generation

However their initial focus on easily created calculators has come at a trade off. Looking at Outgrow vs Riddle, they have a much more limited range of quiz types (8 vs 13) – providing basic quizzes, polls, and personality tests, but not a wider or unique range of tools.
Their lead generation tool also lacks advanced fields that today’s marketers demand – including hidden text/URL to better track/tag where each lead comes from. For a sense of the flexibility offered – compare their six field types with Riddle’s 17.

Outgrow pricing and customer support

From a cost perspective, they’re also pricey – their plans top out at almost 3X Riddle ($720 vs $249), and even there, they cap how many leads you can collect each month.
The other key area comparing Outgrow vs Riddle quizmaker has to do with customer support. If you sign up for their $22 or $45 a month plans, you’re limited to their help FAQ section only. And even at their premier plan at $720 a month, you still have to wait up to 24 hours for a reply.

Outgrow quiz design and user interface

In terms of aesthetics – check out Outgrow’s quiz design. Outgrow has recently changed the layout of their online quiz builder – it’s an improvement but is a bit cluttered and takes some time to get to grips with.
We are big fans of their calculators though – these are powerful ways to get users to enter their own data, then suggest the appropriate products around that. Some sample use cases are mortgage calculators for real estate sites, tax planners for financial consultants… well, you get the idea.

Riddle quizmaker – review summary

At Riddle, we’ve adopted a different philosophy. Our team have been in the quiz creator business for a long time – with over 30 years combined experience (dating way back to Tickle.com – one of the web’s very first quiz sites).

We know that both lead generation and audience engagement are crucial parts of the quiz marketing equation.
You need the right quiz type to attract your audience’s interest AND the right lead generation set up to collect/process/send your lead data to your marketing software so you can convert them to happy customers.

Riddle offers 13 quiz types

Riddle offers 13 types of quiz types (and counting!) – including a wide variety of quiz, polls, surveys and personality quizzes.
And we don’t stop there. We’ve worked closely with our partners like the BBC to create quiz types unique to Riddle – such as our image-based ‘Order It’ ranker quiz (‘Arrange the Star Wars movies in chronological order’) to ‘Tap and Find’, where you place quiz answers directly in images.

This wider portfolio will give your marketing and editorial teams will have a much more diverse range of creative options – so they can build the right content for each of your campaigns.
Plus, you’ll avoid ‘quiz burnout’ – caused by showing the same type of quiz over and over again. Today’s audience is fickle – and respond best to a variety of content.

Riddle is great for lead generation

That brings us back to our engagement goals – to constantly provide the widest range of creative options for our clients. On the lead generation side, we have a similar approach – going beyond the basic name/email fields offered by many quiz makers. Nope, we offer 17 types of data fields – including dropdowns, radio buttons, date/time picker, and more.

And creating forms is a breeze – you simple drag/drop fields into the form and then style it to match your site’s branding.
You can also save forms as templates – for rapid reuse in future quizzes.

Now getting leads with quizzes is great – but it’s only as useful as your data connection with your email marketing tool.
Just like our quizzes, we designed made it easy and intuitive to send data to any of 3,000 email marketing tools (Salesforce, AWeber, Pardot, and more). With no coding required, you can be up and collecting leads in just minutes.

Riddle offers you full customization options

These first two areas – quiz creation and leads – are a great start. But we also know that each customer and website is different.
Instead of a ‘one design fits all approach’, we’re fired up about giving you complete control over almost every aspect of your quizzes.
The benefits to you? You’ll have a huge range of customization options in all our plans – from colors to styles, layouts, languages, and more.
And for publishers, brands and agencies, you can use things like our CSS editor and uploading your own fonts to create quizzes that blend organically into your website – matching its look and feel for maximum brand consistency.

Outgrow vs Riddle quizmaker – detailed feature list

Looking at Outgrow vs Riddle, they’re both highly capable quiz makers – and can deliver good results. But your use case is as specific as your business – so we also added this detailed comparison of Riddle and Outgrow across 40+ features:

We like being upfront and transparent – so let’s point out the elephant in the room (or blog). You’re reading this on Riddle’s blog, so it’s no surprise that we’re big advocates of Riddle. Now, we know that no one quiz maker works for every marketer. Outgrow and Riddle are both capable, powerful quiz maker platforms. However, you have your own unique requirements. To help save you time, we decided to compare Outgrow vs Riddle across the key features that might drive your decision-making process.

Riddle is the best alternative to Outgrow – Summary

You can probably tell how passionate (and long-winded) we are about quizzes! Comparing Outgrow vs Riddle, there’s no one ‘correct’ answer about which is the best quiz creator. Each platform has their own strengths – and it comes down to your product requirements while balancing cost and customer support.

• Choose Outgrow if you’re focused on calculator-based lead generation. They’ve made a very good business out based around interactive calculators to drive lead generation. This initial focus has limited their wider quiz portfolio though, and there might not be as much lead generation and overall quiz customization as you might expect at their price point.
• Pick Riddle if you need a broader range of quiz formats and customization options.
  We’re big believers that today’s marketers want a wide array of quiz tools with robust lead generation options – all easily customizable to match their site and brand.
  

(Oh, and we’re big/huge/massive customer service geeks – both our founders and our entire team race each other to answer customer questions first. Try us at hello@riddle.com or via support chat.)
A blog post like this is a great first step – but if you can’t decide, we recommend you try both quiz creators. Outgrow and Riddle both offer free trials – with no credit card required – so you can quickly get a sense of which might best your needs. Happy quizzing!
For today’s online quiz maker comparison, we’re going to take a look at Outgrow vs Riddle.
Sure, there are dozens of quiz makers out there – to save you time, we created this in-depth review of Riddle and Outgrow.

Want to have a review of Leadquizzes? Read our in-depth review below – we compare LeadQuizzes vs Riddle quiz maker across 65 core features, including quiz formats, customization, lead generation, collaboration features and much more.

Quiz marketing is big these days – really big. Savvy marketers today know that quizzes and other interactive content rock at lead generation. Instead of annoying pop ups, quizzes engage the user – and get them clicking.

Once taking the quiz, it’s a natural step to show a lead generation form before they receive their quiz answers. We’ve seen opt-in rates of up to 45% when you create a lead quiz – that’s light years beyond the 2% pop-ups and other forms achieve.

You then send all that quiz lead data to your favorite CRM or email tool – for a quiz-powered marketing funnel with personalized follow-up messages, triggered by each lead’s quiz results.

Leadquizzes vs Riddle: Which quiz maker is best?

Leadquizzes and Riddle are among the top online quiz builders today – they both provide marketers with strong quiz creation, customization, and lead generation capabilities.

There’s no one ‘right’ answer – it really depends on your particular requirements. (Right – to be transparent, as this review is on our blog, we should probably point out that we’re big fans of Riddle.)

However, there’s no bad choice between LeadQuizzes vs Riddle – they are both powerful quiz maker and lead generation platforms.

LeadQuizzes – designed for small businesses for basic quizzes

Our one sentence summary about LeadQuizzes? “Easy to use, but very basic features and customization”.
They’ve done a good job of targeting the lower end of the quiz marketing spectrum – with simple to get started quiz tools and good native integrations. For your mom and pop business, this is a good fit.

But they’re expensive for what you get – their lowest plan ($49/month) gives you just 750 leads. And their $99 option bumps that up to only 1,500 leads.
Plus, they support only limited image options – no video, audio, or GIF support, and there are some strong concerns about their data privacy policies and GDPR-compliance.

So, Leadquizzes summarized:

• Low monthly limits for leads
• Only 2 types of quizzes
• Not GDPR-compliant

Riddle – highly customizable, with unlimited usage

At Riddle, we’ve taken a different approach. We work with everyone from independent start ups like The Hair Fuel to best in class publishers like the BBC (see their example Riddle ‘journey’), CNN (sample Riddle quizzes), and Red Bull (Riddle quiz-powered contest).

Our online quiz maker give you much more creative freedom – with 13 different question blocks to choose from, including polls, surveys, and personality tests.
Once created, you’ll have completely control over everything from fonts to colors and branding. Want to go deeper? Our CSS editor lets you tweak and change virtually every element – from hover stats, button sizing, and layout.
And being based in Germany, we’ve made it our mission to be a completely GDPR-compliant quiz maker. The EU’s strong data privacy law has served as the basis for other global regulations California’s CCPA and Canada’s PIPEDA – we comply with all of them.

Riddle quizmaker in a summary:

• Unlimited quizzes, views and leads
• 13 different question blocks and 17 lead generation fields
• 100% GDPR and CCPA compliant

What do you need most – engagement or lead generation?

Right, before we start our in-depth look at LeadQuizzes vs Riddle – let’s take a step back for some context about how an online quiz creator can help marketers.
There are two broad business use cases – boosting site engagement and gathering more leads online. Balancing these two priorities is a big task for any quiz builder. You’ll see that both Leadquizzes and Riddle tackle this in different ways.

Quizzes for engagement

It’s hard to beat quizzes, polls, and other interactive content for pure engagement. People simply love learning and discovering new things about themselves. Quizzes are a time-honored way of turning passive visitors into active participants – clicking, thinking, and engaging with your site.

Quizzes for lead generation

Just like Starsky and Hutch (or peanut butter and jelly), lead generation and quizzes are a natural combination. People choose to engage with quizzes – and will spend 3-5 minutes answering an average of ten questions.
So placing a lead generation form here – between the last question and the user’s results – is a natural fit!

After your quiz questions, they’re psychologically primed for one more – and are far more inclined to opt-in to a lead form. This goes double if you go beyond the ‘sign up for our newsletter’ and include a compelling offer with a strong call to action, discount code, or contest entry.

Compare LeadQuizzes vs Riddle – 60+ features

Riddle is the best alternative to Leadquizzes – a summary

There’s no easy answer here. Your business is unique – and faces its own special set of challenges and opportunities.
Both LeadQuizzes and Riddle are really good quiz makers – you’ll need to decide which features best suit your needs.

Choose LeadQuizzes: if you’re 95% focused on simple, easy to use lead generation – and don’t need a lot quiz or customization options. (We’re big fans of their ‘embed in pop up’ option – triggered by visitor behavior.)

Pick Riddle: if you need a broader, more full-featured quiz builder. Agencies, brands, and publishers each have their own custom needs. We built creative flexibility and customization into all 14 of our quiz formats and lead generation technology.

Next up? Don’t take our word for it. Try them both!
LeadQuizzes and Riddle each offer free trials to kick the tires of each quiz maker. (28 days and no credit card required for Riddle – while LeadQuizzes gives you 14 days and needs you enter to a credit card.)

Let’s take an in-depth look at Involve.me vs Riddle. We compare each quiz maker with an in-depth feature comparison that covers everything from quiz-types, integrations, customization, embedding to collaborative features. After reading our comparison you will see why Riddle is the best alternative to involve.me!

(Now to be transparent – we’re fans of Riddle… you’re reading this on our blog after all. However, looking at Involve.me vs Riddle, they’re both excellent quiz makers. Each has their own focus and speciality – picking the ‘right one’ comes down to which will meet your marketing needs.)

First off – why use a quiz maker?

It’s a no-brainer, really – marketing experts know that quizzes excel at engaging site visitors, then converting casual browsers into potential customers.

Why? It’s human nature – we love asking and answering questions, especially if we get to discover something new about ourselves.

And once we’re clicking on a quiz – it’s the perfect chance to ask leads for their email address and other details. Your audience is no longer passive readers -they’re already actively engaged and answering questions. Psychologically, they’re now far more likely to respond to a well-timed lead generation form – especially if your offer is connected to their quiz results.

Riddle vs. Involve.me – Feature-by-feature comparison

Riddle is the best alternative to involve.me – a summary

At the end of the day, both Riddle and Involve.me let you create great interactive content such as quizzes,– but we hope this quiz maker comparison tempts you to give us a shot. Want to see Riddle quizzes in action? You can view our favorite live quiz examples from our top partners like the BBC, Red Bull, the Chicago Bulls, and CNN!

Want to get started on Riddle? Just click ‘Create a quiz‘ to give Riddle’s quiz maker a try.
We’ve got over 100 extra quiz maker features – from quiz timers, to Google Tag Manager, personalizing nearly every text string and supporting 67 languages. Check out the full feature list of Riddle quizmaker.

Ask us anything at hello@riddle.com– we’re big customer service geeks and super fast to respond!

Opinion Stage and Riddle are two of the most well-known quiz makers on the market today. Now your business is unique – so there’s no one ‘right’ answer about which platform you should choose. We compiled this quiz maker review to help you decide what are the most important features for your business.

(We’re big fans of being transparent – as founders of Riddle, we’re obviously proud of our quiz maker. But Opinion Stage is a solid option as well – we’ve kept this impartial to help guide you to the best decision for your business needs.)

Riddle vs. Opinion stage: Pricing model

Riddle and Opinion Stage are SaaS (software as a service) sites – offering four monthly and annual subscription options.

The main difference is that Riddle is an ‘unlimited’ service while Opinion Stage puts caps on how many people can take your quizzes or leads you can gather.

Riddle vs. Opinion stage: How many quiz types do they offer?

A good quiz creator is a flexible platform – offering a range of interactive content options to engage you audience. Opinion Stage and Riddle both go beyond the traditional right/wrong quiz.

Opinion Stage offers six types – while Riddle has 30+ distinct question block variants including:

• Ranked lists – make your list democratic and let you audience upvote their favorites.
• ‘Tap ‘n find’ and ‘Order it’ – touch focused quizzes designed to make your quizzes engaging for today’s increasingly smartphone-oriented audience.
• Interactive branching logic – unique to Riddle, you can use conditional logic to show each user different questions depending on their individual answers.
• Stand-alone lead form – Riddle’s quiz lead technology is so flexible, clients kept asking us to create a quiz-free option – so they can embed forms outside of quizzes on their sites.

Riddle quizmaker customization vs. Opinion stage

We totally get it – your site is your pride and joy. Your site is your business’ online face to the world – and you spent blood, sweat, and tears choosing the perfect colors, font, and design.

Any quiz that you embed needs to look just as polished and professional. Opinion Stage and Riddle tackle this in different ways.

Opinion Stage gives their lower two level uses access only to preset themes. Only users on their $99 and up plans get full access to hex-specific colors.

Riddle takes a different approach – we offer a full range of colors and fonts across our plans. Even our lowest plan tier gives full font and color choices.

Riddle quizmaker leadgeneration vs. Opinion stage

Savvy online marketers like Ryan Levesque know that quizzes and other interactive content are brilliant at powering your marketing funnel. Turning passive readers into active participants means they’re emotionally engaged with your site. It’s a great opportunity to present offers and collect email addresses.

Opinion Stage and Riddle both let you gather emails and user responses. The key differences?

• Pricing – Opinion Stage put caps on how many leads you can gather based on plans.
  Riddle is unlimited.
• Connectivity – Opinion Stage offers manual downloads of leads by CSV or XLS files.
  Riddle does as well – but also offers native integrations with your Aweber and MailChimp accounts and lets you connect your quiz to any data system with our Zapier and webhook options… no coding required.

Do both quizmakers offer a free trial?

Free trials are a key step for evaluating any quiz creator platform – you want to be sure that it will meet your unique needs.
Both Riddle and Opinion Stage offer free trials – but Opinion Stage adds some painful extra steps.

• Riddle: full featured 14 day trial with no credit card required.
• Opinion stage: 7 days only, and credit card required (We don’t agree with this philosophy – we know how easy it is to forget to cancel a trial and get charged.)

Riddle is the best alternative to Opinion stage – a summary

Sure – both Opinion stage and Riddle have some features that make them unique. But if you want an unlimited quiz maker with a broad range of features, you are better off with Riddle!

The BBC, Immediate Media, Tate Modern, and many other brands trust Riddle to create interactive content. Check out our case study library to see how Riddle helped them surpass their engagement objectives.

Want to get started on Riddle? Just click ‘Create a quiz‘ to give Riddle’s quiz maker a try. We’ve got over 250+ quiz maker features – from quiz timers, to Google Tag Manager, personalizing nearly every text string and supporting 67 languages. Check out the full list at www.riddle.com/pricing.

Ask us anything at hello@riddle.com– we’re passionate about customer support and can’t wait to help you out.